The World According to Japan : From a Faux Holland to Petite Pyramids, the Japanese Indulge in the Exotic--in the Safety of Their Own Back Yard

We--that is, a group of Japanese tourists and I--are huddled around a young Dutch couple clad in bright red smocks, checkered kerchiefs and clogs as they gamely churn cheese for us. Outside, a windmill turns slowly. Frisian horses, their liveried riders looking like discotheque soldiers, clomp along a cobblestone road to the nearby city of gothic towers and grand hotels. And in the distance stands Queen Beatrix’s royal palace, surrounded by enormous baroque gardens. “Ah, it’s all so real,” an enthusiastic young man on his honeymoon, minicam in hand, tells me. “It’s better than going to Holland. Here we can speak Japanese. Here we won’t get mugged.”

Here is Huis ten Bosch, a make-believe Dutch city rising from a bay near Nagasaki in southern Japan. We have shelled out 3,900 yen (about $37) for our faux passports; by decree of Huis ten Bosch’s foreign minister, we are granted citizenship and an invitation to participate in one of the most remarkable, and expensive, fantasies of the West to be found in the East. Playing on Nagasaki’s history as the only point of contact between Japan and the outside world for centuries, about $2 billion has been spent constructing not so much a transplanted version of Holland as a re-creation a la Japonaise. So real, as the young honeymooner says, it’s better than the real thing: The Dutch cheese churners, imported like the bricks, the horses and the riders, smile for the cameras, happy to be part of the scenery.

Perhaps the Japanese like the idea of going abroad more than they like the real thing. With the strong yen making foreign travel alluring, millions of Japanese, their numbers increasing every year, continue to flock to Hawaii and California and Europe. Yet they often stay in Japanese hotels, eat Japanese food and seem content to re-create a touch of Japan abroad. The reverse is also true: Despite a stiff recession at home, Japanese tourists flock to a growing roster of ersatz re-creations of places abroad. Huis ten Bosch, with its exquisitely rendered Dutch conceit, has attracted more than 4.2 million people since it opened more than a year ago. There is also a fake Canada, based on the novel “Anne of Green Gables,” adored by Japanese schoolgirls, where you amble through bucolic countryside and literally bump into characters from the book. A fake Germany--Glucks-Konigreich, or Happy Kingdom--comes complete with painstakingly accurate copies of castles and the birthplace of the Brothers Grimm.

There is Rainbow Village, a smorgasbord of European and Canadian country living, and, of course, Tokyo Disneyland, bigger than the sites in Anaheim and Orlando and an extravaganza of Americana. Or how about the architectural wonders of the world replicated at 1/25th their size? From the Pyramids of Egypt to St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome, you can see them at Tobu World Square. And the list goes on--fake oceans with waves big enough for surfing championships, a mini-Hawaii resort, indoor ski slopes and plans for a rough-and-tumble American town, to be called Cannonball City.

What they all share is a Japanese fantasy of the outside world: exotic yet safe, and completely Japanese. And what’s interesting is that Japan, the most modern, internationalized place in Asia, and perhaps the most insular, is littered with theme parks based on Western inventions. It is as if Huis ten Bosch or Disneyland or Tobu World Square are modern Japanese versions of 19th-Century European pleasure gardens. Those pavilions, devoted to exotica of the Orient and exhibitions of chinoiserie, drew Europeans to such places as the Tivoli Gardens in Copenhagen and to Victorian theme parks. Modern pleasure gardens of Europeanerie or Americanerie, you might call Japan’s theme parks.

The Japanese media love to measure time according to “booms.” The theme park boom, all agree, dates from those heady, flush days of the bubble economy and the extraordinary success of Tokyo Disneyland, which opened in 1984. And it is precisely Disneyland’s Americana that explains its success, writes anthropologist Mary Yoko Brannen in an essay on Tokyo Disneyland, part of the collection “Re-made in Japan.” When Walt Disney Co. planners wanted to include something like a Samurai Land at Tokyo Disneyland, the Japanese owners would have none of it. “We wanted Japanese visitors to feel they were taking a foreign vacation,” their spokesman told Brannen. Instead, the original Disneyland was duplicated and then transformed to fit the tastes of Japanese tourists.

Mickey Mouse and Snow White are there. And so are Americans wandering around in Civil War uniforms and other imported Westerners performing as Swiss clock makers or silversmiths. Frontierland in the original has become Westernland in the Japanese version. This is all part of what Brannen calls “keeping the exotic exotic”--continually reinforcing the distinction between Japan and the rest of the world. For Brannen, Disneyland shows how the Japanese “differentiate their identity from the West in a way that reinforces their sense of cultural uniqueness or superiority.”

With Disneyland showing the way, the theme of taking a foreign vacation without leaving home begat the fake Germany, fake Canada and so on. It’s intriguing to see their popularity as a new twist on the old saw of Western cultural imperialism: The invading, dominating West has been turned on its head as it is consumed for indigenous purposes. By the time the developers of Tobu World Square, one of the newest of the pleasure gardens, set to work, the idea of offering one ersatz destination must have seemed tame. Their sales pitch: Come and see the world in about three hours.

ONE RECENT AFTERNOON AT TOBU WORLD SQUARE, AN open-air architectural hall of fame spread over 20 acres of rolling hills north of Tokyo, Hiroshi Seito and his son, wearing a Mickey Mouse T-shirt, have made it as far as New York. They are standing in front of a miniature Manhattan street scene that somehow wraps Harlem, 42nd Street and Fifth Avenue into one. The walls of red-brick tenements are sprayed with graffiti (“Dope is death,” one says) and tiny, lifelike figures of young black hipsters blow on saxophones. On one roof are skateboarders; another has tiny figures sitting in a hot tub. “Do people in New York really live like this?” Seito’s son asks him. “Yes, I think so,” he responds.

“Somewhat interesting, mildly amusing” is Seito’s verdict on the Tobu tour. “It’s mostly for the kids. It’s fun and gives them a sense of the world,” the 33-year-old elementary school teacher says. In front of the Pyramids, another visitor says she made the two-hour train ride from Tokyo to see the assembled landmarks because, she explains, “I can’t afford to go to them all.”

At the Pyramids, I meet with Yukio Nemoto of the Tobu Railway Co., a huge conglomerate that includes the Toho Film Studios, which gave Japan its “Godzilla” movies and, now, Tobu World Square. Nemoto, a heavyset, jovial Tobu salaryman, is a fount of statistics. Tobu World Square opened in April and the 102 sites, dotted with 140,000 tiny figures of people, took five years to build, he says as we walk toward the little Europe. Teams from Toho Film Studios were dispatched around the world, collecting detailed plans of the sites in order to duplicate them. The miniature Parthenon proved tricky when the Greek government requested that marble be used for the facade. “They wanted to make sure it didn’t look cheap,” says Nemoto. “But we finally convinced them that our special plastic compound looks just like marble.”

Nemoto points to the Taj Mahal. “See, just like marble.” Groups of tourists circle the buildings, admiring the detail and posing for snapshots. “The best part is that all these famous places are small enough to fit in one picture. Japanese tourists like that. The real things are too big to take a picture of,” Nemoto says.

There is something simple and unabashedly commercial about Tobu World Square, as though it’s the one-line gag in the genre of theme parks. Huis ten Bosch represents the other extreme, one of self-conscious sophistication, a deliberate playing with the line between what’s real and what’s make-believe. Passing under the banners and turrets of Arrival Hall, the winding canals and European skyline stretching as far as the eye can see, it is hard not to be seduced by the sheer scope of the pretension.

That’s the idea, says Yoshikuni Kamichika, the prime mover behind this elaborate ersatz place. We are sitting on Queen Anne upholstered chairs, surrounded by European antiques, in his conference room. “We wanted to create a theme park, but we also wanted to create a real city,” says the 50-year-old Kamichika, sipping coffee as he talks of the nine years spent planning his Dutch city on 375 acres of what was mostly rice paddies on the shores of Omura Bay near Nagasaki.

Kamichika likes to think of himself as part of a long Japanese tradition of taking something foreign and turning it into something Japanese. For the maverick, rags-to-riches entrepreneur who grew up in a fishing village outside of Nagasaki, Holland was the natural choice. “No place in Japan has a history like Nagasaki’s,” he says. “We are the only place that had contact with the outside world. The most important, of course, was our 250 years of contact with Holland.”

It’s a romantic resonance that Kamichika is drawing on, for the elegant facades of Huis ten Bosch have little in common with the puny, hardly luxurious Dutch Island in Nagasaki Bay that adventurers, a few teachers and traders from the Dutch East India Company were consigned to in 1612 after Japan kicked out the Portuguese and Spanish for spreading Christianity along with trade. The Dutch stayed over the centuries, until Commodore Perry’s fleet broke through the seal around Japan, and Nagasaki became the most cosmopolitan of Japan’s cities.

But what has changed--and perhaps this is the real point about Japan’s modern pleasure gardens--is the country’s wealth relative to the rest of the world. Or, as Kamichika put it, “This will not always be a country of worker bees. What will be the main industry for the next 50 years? Leisure.” And Huis ten Bosch will be there to guide and cash in on it.

A blue-chip tally of bankers and corporate bigwigs--starting with the Industrial Bank of Japan and including Mitsubishi, Mitsui, Fujitsu and Nippon Steel--seems to be sold on Kamichika’s vision and now holds shares in the company he heads, Nagasaki Holland Village Co. IBJ has close to $1 billion tied up in Huis ten Bosch, and Kunio Seiki, a managing director of IBJ, calls Kamichika “a visionary who also has an abacus for a brain.”

With such financial backing, Kamichika set to work transforming those rice paddies into his idealized city, which took more than three years to build. He brought in a Dutch horticulturist, a city planner and historians who devised a town plan that brings together most of Holland’s noteworthy buildings and its namesake, the royal palace of Huis ten Bosch. Around this architectural wonder they planted 400,000 trees and 300,000 flowers. Those who come to Huis ten Bosch, armed with their make-believe passports, can visit 12 museums, eat in 58 restaurants, take canal cruises or ride in custom-made vintage taxis and double-decker buses. There are also five luxury hotels with prices to match; at Hotel Europe, for instance, rooms go from $300 to the royal suite’s $1,800 a night.

EVENTUALLY, KAMICHIKA SAYS, HE WANTS HUIS TEN Bosch to be about more than the allure of the exotic; he wants to make the exotic familiar. His idea is to have 100,000 people living along the canals by the sea. Already, a small settlement of 250 Dutch-style houses, with shuttered windows and steep alpine roofs, has gone up.

“We are selling life here--we are introducing Japanese to a new way of living,” he says. “Kyoto was modeled on a Chinese city 1,000 years ago. And now it is considered to be the most pure, most truly Japanese of all our cities. After 1,000 years, Huis ten Bosch is going to be just like Kyoto--the standard of a typical Japanese city.”

The look of Kyoto, home to ancient temples of Japan’s imperial past, was indeed greatly influenced by Chang’an, the capital of China in the Tang dynasty. But to compare it to Huis ten Bosch is a bit like saying Boston is a replica of London. And Kyoto, after all, was not built as a theme park. But Kamichika does have a point that taking from the outside has a long history in Japan. This was perhaps best described by the novelist turned conservative politician, Shintaro Ishihara, as the “Hunger Mentality.” The author of “The Japan That Can Say No!” once wrote that “the whole Japanese nation seems to have become one vast mirror receiving and reflecting the light from another civilization. The pattern shows a psychological tendency to grab for all possible information from the outside world and greedily absorb it.”

With all its studied opulence, Huis ten Bosch seems to fit Ishihara’s hunger mentality. “Our idea is to make resort life part of everyday life in Japan,” says Paul Takada, managing director of Huis ten Bosch. In his mint green linen jacket and soft Italian loafers, Takada looks like an image from one of the park’s brochures. He is sitting in the wood-paneled bar at the Huis ten Bosch Yacht Club. Coffee arrives in white-and-gold Wedgwood cups with sterling monogrammed spoons.

I ask him why he thinks the tourists come. “We can live on these islands and never leave and never have anything to do with the outside world,” he says. “We don’t have to learn foreign languages. In Europe, you can’t avoid it. In America, you can’t get away from issues like Bosnia. Or in L.A., what’s happening in Mexico or South America matters to you. For us, it’s still news from another planet. Huis ten Bosch is a midway point. It offers a way of feeling like you are somewhere else--but you can keep the good points of Japan.”