Aburaya Kumahachi

Aburaya Kumahachi made and lost a fortune in rice speculation, spent time in America, and arrived in Beppu at around fifty with a conviction that the town could be sold to the whole country.

What he actually did

He built an inn. Then he did something nobody in Japan was doing: he marketed a place. He organised the hells into a paid circuit with names and stories. He hired boats and then buses. He put women guides who sang on the buses — a format that became standard across Japan and lasted most of a century.

In 1916 he got Osaka Shosen to build a pier so steamers could dock, instead of landing passengers by barge. He advertised nationally, in an era when towns did not advertise.

He also put up signs saying "Kamenoi Hotel to be built here" in other cities, on sites where nothing was planned. He had studied American showmanship and was not embarrassed by it.

The signboard on Mt Fuji

In 1925 he put up a marker near the top of Mt Fuji: "Mountains: Fuji. Sea: the Seto Inland Sea. Hot springs: Beppu." Copies went up all over Japan. It was a slogan before the word existed.

Whether every story about him is exactly true is a separate question — he was a self-promoter and the stories are part of the promotion. But the shape of Japanese domestic tourism, the bus tour with commentary, the packaged circuit of named sights, the town that advertises itself, is substantially his.

What is left

The hells circuit is his. The bus tours are his. And Beppu's slightly unembarrassed, slightly kitsch confidence — the town has a monkey mountain, an aquarium, a tower and a hell called Blood Pond, and offers all of them without irony — is entirely his.