After saying goodbye to family and friends at Changi Airport, we got ready for the direct 6-hour flight to Fukuoka, our starting point in Kyushu.
A last photo before getting on the plane. One member missing.
We touched down in a wet, grey Fukuoka. A slight delay in landing caused us to miss our connecting train out of Hakata Station, so everyone had a bit more time to explore the bakeries and convenience stores of the main concourse.
Luckily, the rain cleared as we departed Fukuoka, traveling west and south to Huis ten bosch. The theme park celebrates its 20th anniversary this year. Its new owner, the major travel company HIS, has implemented a number of new strategies to try to lure guests, but the overall theme of the park cannot be altered. It is still unapologetically a Dutch theme park, modeled after a Dutch town of the 17th century. The additions found in the park these days are often incongruous, creating many moments of dissonance. It’s often a jumbled mess.
Our first encounter with the park was a visit to its power cogeneration and waste water treatment plants. In many ways the entire park revolves around these facilities, although they lie on its outskirts, and many guests may not even know (or care) that they exist.
Learning about Huis ten bosch from under its streets
Ms. Ueda led us around the facilities, explaining how power cogeneration works and taking us into the tunnels that house the water, electricity, waste, and all other cables and pipes. Guests may not realize that there are no power lines or electric poles throughout the park. Everything is underground instead, signaling a dual concern with both the visible landscape and the practical – cables last longer and are easier to repair if they are protected from the weather.
The tour continued above ground with a detailed explanation of the waste water treatment process, which goes two steps beyond what municipalities are legally required to do. The final filtered water is clean enough to drink, but it is used instead to water the flowers and trees of the park.
In all, Huis ten bosch was constructed with great care to ensure the sustainability of the environment. The park was built on land reclaimed years before and intended to be used for a factory. When the factory never materialized, the land was left scarred, a treeless desert on the edge of the sea. The planners and builders of Huis ten bosch created something from scratch that they claim is intended to last a thousand years. They planted over 300,000 trees and 100,000 flowers on a patch of ground that can hold 77 Tokyo Domes (land is often measured in # of domes in Japan). Now it contains over 200 unique species of birds, insects, and water creatures.
While all of the planning speaks to its environmental sustainability, there is already great doubt about its economic sustainability. It has already gone bankrupt and changed owners twice. It seems that despite all the careful planning ground up, the future remains unstable for Huis ten bosch. Part of the problem is the relatively mundane theme: the Netherlands. The theme is not a fantasy world, space, film sets, or colorful characters. The theme is a small European country; and not even a sexy one like Italy or France. Nothing against the Dutch, but there is not enough excitement in the architecture alone to draw people to walk along cobblestone streets past brick buildings. Another problem is the inherent need for destruction and rebuilding within capitalism. The fact that Huis ten bosch is intended to last for hundreds of years as is means that nothing ‘new’ is supposed to be created to reignite passion in potential consumers. Some places comfort people by never changing, but the number of those people are not sufficient to keep a place like Huis ten bosch afloat.
So, what were we doing there? Stay tuned to find out.
