Rocky Mountain West Receiving Tourism Boost From Far East : Travel Industry: America’s Mountain states have benefited from a major push to attract Asian tourists to the region’s scenic views, forests and national parks.

In every way but one, the slick new magazine that just hit the stands looks like every other travel mag you’ve picked up on airplanes and in doctors’ offices. The articles consist of hyperbolic prose about “mountain splendor” and “natural wonders.” The lavish color pictures show off Colorado’s most scenic mountains, forests, rivers and national parks, and the advertisements promote hotels, restaurants, dude ranches and ski resorts.

But this new journal, Colorado Gaido, is written entirely in Japanese, and the only newsstands where you can buy it are in Tokyo, Nagoya, Fukuoka and other Japanese cities.

Colorado Gaido (“Colorado Guide”) and its sister publication, Oregon Treiru (“Oregon Trail”), both published by a Portland firm called Pacific Gateways, are key elements of a major new thrust across the Rocky Mountain West to attract tourists, and their money, from the nations of the Pacific Rim.

“American travel markets have started focusing on the Pacific Rim as the high-growth area . . . the first priority,” said Max Ollendorf, director of market development for the U.S. Travel and Tourism Administration. The strongest push, he added, comes from the Western states.

Manifestations of the new drive are evident throughout the region. On the ski slopes at big resorts like Deer Valley and Snowbird, you now see trail signs in Japanese as well as English. At the airport in Las Vegas, tour companies quote prices for their Grand Canyon sightseeing flights in yen as well as dollars.

In the casinos at Las Vegas, you can now play Asian games of chance like Pai Gow and Sic Bo. At the edge of a forest not far from downtown Portland sits a perfect Japanese tea house, complete with tatami floors and sliding shoji doors.

The effort to attract Asians is part of a larger pattern of change that is transforming the economic structure of the mountain West. With energy, mineral and timber markets in the doldrums, the Western states have been moving away from traditional extraction industries toward the attraction industry--tourism.

“People have discovered that you can make more from a forest by leaving it in place and charging visitors to ski through it than you can by cutting it down and selling the timber,” observed Sen. Timothy E. Wirth (D-Colo.).

Because tourism is one of the fastest-growing industries in every Western state, it was natural to look for new markets. And for the states on the Pacific side of America, a natural place to look was the booming economies on the other side of the Pacific.

A year ago, the travel councils of eight Western states pooled their money to fund a new promotional outfit called “Visit USA West,” which exists for one purpose: to sell Asians on the natural wonders of the Rocky Mountain and Pacific Coast states.

The sales effort seems to be scoring points. The number of Japanese tourists visiting Wyoming jumped this year to 8,000, double the figure for 1988, according to the state’s Travel Development Office. Japanese skiing at resorts in Utah increased from “essentially zero” two years ago to 3,000 last season, the state Travel Council reports.

The trend has been a boon in a part of the country that missed most of the 1980s expansion. And since the money that foreign tourists spend here is counted as “export revenue” in national trade accounts, every skier from Tokyo schussing down Ajax Mountain at Aspen helps offset the U.S. trade deficit with Japan.

“Tourism is second only to aircraft and space equipment in total export revenue,” said Jill Collins of the federal Travel and Tourism Administration. Foreign tourists spent an estimated $37.1 billion in the United States in 1988, a huge 25% increase over the year before. That means that foreign tourism is America’s fastest-growing export commodity. And the Pacific Rim is the fastest-growing market for this “export.”

Although state tourism officials here all talk hopefully about drawing visitors from Taiwan, South Korea and Australia, the Pacific Rim market today is, for all intents and purposes, the Japanese market.

For some states, this is nothing new. Hawaiian hotels have done a thriving trade in Japanese tour groups and honeymooners for two decades now. California has always been a big draw, and Alaska also has had a fairly large Japanese tourist trade.

But there was no such tradition for Oregon, a state whose name the Japanese have difficulty both pronouncing and spelling (a geography book used in Japanese schools shows a state called “Olegon”). And so Oregon’s Division of Tourism set out to create an instant tradition.

The state paid for the filming of a sentimental dramatic movie, “Oregon Nikki” (“Oregon Diary”), which tells the story of a young Japanese boy living in Oregon who falls in love with the state and its natural beauty. The two-hour film is shown annually on the national Fuji Television network.

The result? Recognition of the name “Oregon” among Japanese adults went from 23% in 1986 to 78% this year. And the state broke all records by drawing about 60,000 Asian tourists, mostly Japanese, in 1989.

For most Western states, however, appealing to Japanese tourists means breaking long-established routines. The standard route for Japanese travelers coming to Los Angeles has followed a path known in the Japanese travel trade as the “Golden Triangle.” It consists of various stops around Los Angeles--Disneyland, Universal Studios--followed by a trip to Las Vegas, with a side trek to the Grand Canyon, followed by a stop in San Francisco and then the long flight home.

To break that habit, the Western states are busily advertising such off-the-triangle wonders as Yellowstone and Glacier National Parks, Colorado dude ranches and Salt Lake City’s Temple Square. Much of this effort is aimed at tourists who have been to the United States once. “Many Japanese on their second visit don’t want to go back to the same places again,” explained Kasho Furuya, director of Pacific Rim sales for Las Vegas-based Scenic Airlines.

Perhaps the most successful campaign was the major promotion called “89 in ’89.” Created by Osamu “Sam” Hoshino of Utah’s travel division and adopted by six major tour packagers in Tokyo, it took Japanese tourists along U.S. Highway 89, the two-lane route sometimes called the most beautiful highway in America. The route starts at Glacier National Park on the Canadian border and winds south through Wyoming and Utah, passing near several other major parks before its terminus at the north rim of the Grand Canyon.

Skiing is one of the major tourist businesses of the mountain region, but this fact has been lost on the Japanese until recently. Japanese skiers traveling overseas have traditionally gone to Europe or the Canadian Rockies. That, too, is beginning to change, thanks to major sales efforts by the big Rocky Mountain resorts.

At Utah’s Deer Valley, for example, Japanese skiers are greeted by Japanese hosts when they arrive. The resort provides Japanese-speaking ski instructors and Japanese-language restaurant guides.

The number of Japanese skiers choosing Colorado seems almost certain to increase now that Japanese investors have purchased two of its biggest resorts, Breckenridge and Steamboat Springs.

To win the Japanese market, American travel destinations have to be creative. Dorothy Maitland, who owns a travel agency in Kalispell, Mont., has learned to be creative during the past five years while making Tokyo-to-Montana packages a key part of her business.

When Maitland first got the idea, she said, she was stymied by the fact that the Japanese like to see the sights from a train. “I said, ‘This is Montana. The only train we’ve got is Amtrak from Seattle to Chicago, and that goes through here in the middle of the night’.”

After stewing over this dilemma for a while, Maitland hit on the solution. She printed up a Japanese brochure promoting the midnight rail journey as a romantic adventure: “the Moonlight Express.”

And it worked. “We’re selling tours on that moonlight train almost every day of the summer,” she said. “And our Japanese customers are buying like mad.”

Researcher Karen Brown contributed to this story.