THE JAPANESE WHO TRANSFORMED TOURISM IN NEPAL
In the chilly, pre-dawn darkness, a convoy of cars slowly ascends a winding road toward Sarangkot, a hamlet on the edge of Pokhara, Nepal’s second largest city.
Tourists wrapped in thick jackets and mufflers stumble out of the vehicles at this hilltop village to find the best spot to view the first rays of the sun as they hit the snowcapped peaks of the Annapurna range in the Himalayas. As the sun rises, it burnishes the tips of the skyline with a shimmering mix of gold and mauve. Some tourists gasp, others click their cameras, and a few pose for selfies with the rugged 8,000-metre-high peaks as a backdrop.
It is such settings that keep Takashi Miyahara, a still spry, 82-year-old tourism entrepreneur, engaged in his latest venture. He is currently building a 40-room hotel in Sarangkot, which will offer future guests magnificent views of the Annapurna range.
“The mountain views are the selling point in Nepal; they are unique,” said Miyahara as he checks bills and answers telephone inquiries in his cluttered office adjacent to the Pokhara airport. “You build a hotel with a view and the tourists will come.”
Miyahara first came to the Himalayan nation in 1962 as a young mountaineer. A decade later, after leaving his job as a mechanical engineer at a Japanese company to develop Nepali tourism, he built the Everest View, a hotel on a ridge 3,880 metres high in the Khumbu region.
In its 2004 edition, the Guinness Book of World Records called the Everest View the “highest placed hotel” in the world. Black and white photos capture the challenges that Miyahara overcame, with porters carrying construction materials through heavy snow. “At that time there was no transport, so we had to walk for two weeks,” he recalled.
“We don’t believe in observing from afar,” is how the Everest View describes the 12 rooms that offer guests panoramic views of Mount Everest. The hotel owes much to Miyahara’s native homeland. A Japanese architect, Yoshinobu Kumagaya, designed the hotel and construction was financed mainly by ¥100 million in contributions from the mountaineering clubs of 15 universities in Tokyo. “The Nepali government also gave me 500,000 Nepali rupees as a subsidy,” Miyahara noted.
Along with his investments in three hotels, including one in Kathmandu, and his tourism-related activities, Miyahara has helped shape Nepali tourism since the early 1970s.
HIGH-END TRADE
He spotted a market for high-end tourists in a trade that had been aimed since the 1950s at mountaineers and trekkers, and from the 1960s at hippie travellers.
“In the 1960s and ’70s, many tourists to Nepal were the budget type, but Miyahara-san went in the opposite direction,” said Lochan Gyawali, a veteran hotelier whose family has stakes in four hotels in Nepal. “[With his Everest View Hotel] he tried to get the best value for Nepal from this really unique gift of nature.”
Miyahara also pushed for government policies to promote tourist attractions which he said were “strongly competitive internationally”. Among those efforts was the drafting of a national tourism blueprint in 1994.
He also sought ways to overcome a series of political crises that affected Nepal over the last 20 years including a Marxist insurgency, a bloody palace massacre and subsequent violence which scared off tourists. According to the immigration department, 655,144 foreigners visited the country in the first 11 months of 2016, double the number a decade ago, when arrivals fell sharply.
Miyahara has also lent support to a growing community of Japanese entrepreneurs who are investing or operating small businesses. There are 1,088 Japanese nationals living in Nepal, according to the foreign ministry. Some worked for Miyahara before starting their own travel, trekking and restaurant businesses.
Miyahara’s pioneering role has made him “an icon” for his “unique way both in his thinking and acting”, said Hideaki Takada, an importer of sake and vice-president of the Japanese Association in Nepal. “He always speaks in Nepali to his colleagues, staff and stakeholders, and acts as a Nepali whenever he makes his decisions.”
POLITICAL AMBITIONS
Miyahara decided to give up his Japanese citizenship and become a Nepali national so that he could run in parliamentary elections in 2008. He hoped to win a seat so he could help write a new constitution for the country after years of civil war and the abolition of the monarchy.
That poll in one of South Asia’s poorest countries was billed as a watershed. “I had a plan to improve Nepal and realised I could pursue it through a political party than through an NGO,” said Miyahara, who created the Nepal National Development Party. Its 80-page manifesto had a full chapter on tourism, aimed at tapping Nepal’s “invaluable gifts of nature”.
Although he lost the election, his party’s anti-corruption stance has influenced other parties, including New Force, which is headed by former prime minister Baburam Bhattarai.
“I see the rise of new anti-corruption parties like Bibeksheel Nepali and Baburam Bhattarai’s New Force as being indirectly a result of Miyahara’s campaign,” said Kunda Dixit, editor of the Nepali Times. “He was trying to tap into the disenchantment of the people and so are Bibeksheel and New Force. In fact their manifestos are identical to Miyahara’s.”
Asked if he is done with politics, Miyahara sits back in his swivel chair and beams. He has no plans to give up his quest, his ripe age notwithstanding. A poster from his last political campaign features him wearing a traditional topi, a cloth hat, serves as a daily reminder of his unfinished business among his new compatriots: that “politics in Nepal has to change”.
But his local status transcends politics, at least among the tight community of longtime Japanese expatriates. Some refer to him affectionately as their oyabun (big boss), while others lightheartedly call him tenno (emperor).
“The mountain views are the selling point in Nepal; they are unique. You build a hotel with a view and the tourists will come” TAKASHI MIYAHARA