Japanese Sipping Their Tea in the Land of ‘Green Gables’ : Tourism: Visitors are drawn to the simpler life on Prince Edward Island depicted in L.M. Montgomery’s novels.

The guest book in the farmhouse lists hometowns far from Prince Edward Island: Kyoto, Yokohama, Osaka, Okinawa and Nagoya.

The names reflect a Japanese affection for Canada’s smallest province, which was the setting of L.M. Montgomery’s “Anne of Green Gables” novels. Packed tightly on their island nation, the Japanese are drawn to the simpler life by the sea depicted at the fictional red-haired character’s 19th-Century homestead.

“It’s right up there with the Rockies and Niagara Falls,” said Lori Lawless, sales director at the Prince Edward, a Canadian Pacific Hotel in the provincial capital of Charlottetown. Tourism, he said, “is a growth industry.”

The Japanese have become a key element in boosting tourism, which rivals the traditional potato crop as the island’s leading revenue earner, said Dave Bryanton of Enterprise PEI, a government development agency.

Since the mid-1980s, a concerted marketing campaign by Canadian Pacific Hotels, a unit of Canadian Pacific Ltd. of Montreal, Canadian Airlines Corp. and the provincial tourism authority has made Prince Edward Island a favorite Japanese destination.

Tourism brought in $157.2 million (Canadian, or $114.8 million U.S.) in 1994, up from $121.5 million (Canadian) the year earlier and “things are looking great this season,” which runs through Oct. 31, Bryanton said.

Japanese visitors pay $5,000 to $7,000 (Canadian) for tours to Canada to visit the rolling farmland, red-sand beaches--the green-gabled island home setting of the original 1908 book.

The Japanese account for one of every three non-North Americans visiting the island. In 1994, 7,500 Japanese visited, up 19% from 6,075 a year earlier, Bryanton said.

A total of 550,000 Japanese visit Canada annually and Prince Edward Island’s share is growing quickly, Lawless said.

“Ten years ago, virtually no Japanese tourists made their way here,” she said.

The Prince Edward, one of 25 hotels that Canadian Pacific runs nationwide, caters to their customs by offering miso soup breakfasts, Japanese-speaking staff and special “wedding packages” for those wanting to get married or renew marriage vows at Anne’s farmhouse on the northern shore.

Chris Diamond, a 19-year-old Parks Canada worker, said he guides as many as 4,000 visitors, many of them Japanese, through the two-floor farmhouse daily during tourist season.

The house is surrounded by a national park and is authentic to the 1890 period in which the books’ heroine lived. There are spindle beds in the upstairs bedrooms and windows overlook a creek and pastures near “Lovers’ Lane.”

“Anne is particularly popular with Japanese women and girls. They live in such an orderly society. I think they like to transpose themselves, to break out of society, to be a bit of a rebel,” Diamond said.

“She is sort of like a myth, a legend in Japan,” said Jeremy Melhuish, a spokesman for the Japanese Embassy in Ottawa. The book has sold more than 1 million copies in Japan and an Emmy-award winning North American television series was also translated and is shown in Japan to enthusiastic audiences.

In fact, the Japanese affection for Anne led to construction of a mock-up of Green Gables and the nearby train station at a Canada World theme park on Japan’s northern island of Hokkaido. It draws as many as 400,000 visitors a year.

“It seems humorous to Westerners, but there’s a pretty stable crop of tourists there,” Melhuish said. He said that successive generations of Japanese girls will become Anne devotees because the spirited redhead is “an icon as a result of her free spirit. At home, [Japanese girls] can’t act like that.”

One recent evening, two young Japanese women strolled through the sleepy provincial capital, looking as if they stepped out of the novels themselves. Wearing shawls, crinolines, high leather boots and wide-brimmed straw hats, they appeared lost in their own reverie as they ate ice cream and admired rose gardens.

Once the Japanese arrive on the island, “they hit anything related to Anne,” Bryanton said. That has led to a burgeoning crafts market of $400 (Canadian) porcelain-faced dolls, hand-made quilts, wigs of trademark braided red-hair and wildflower seeds.

And those wedding packages?

For $1,400 (Canadian), the Prince Edward Hotel will arrange a wedding service by a minister, a certificate “issued by one of Montgomery’s descendants,” flowers, a buggy ride and a tea reception at the Green Gables Museum.

An extra $400 (Canadian) buys a video of the event. For single women, there is a $28 (Canadian) Anne Tea Party, which includes cake, cookies and a visit by an actress dressed as the freckled-faced character.

Stephane Jobin, cultural attache at the Canadian Embassy in Tokyo, traced the popularity of Anne of Green Gables to 1952 when the first translation appeared in a nation still scarred by nuclear holocaust.

“It gave a very beautiful image of a country where there was no pollution, where there were nice colors and a life by the sea, an idyll many Japanese still try to identify with,” Jobin said.