The second is the number of guests from Europe and North America. The majority of foreign visitors to Shiraoi-cho are from Asian countries, but the people staying at haku are from countries such as Holland, Germany, Poland, and Canada, which had not been included in the town's statistics before.

Nearly 20 reviews on Booking.com, a lodging reservation website, have been written by guests from Europe and North America, who say that "the staff is friendly and great" and "the old and new are elegantly blended together.

Encounter with Booking brought him to the U.S.

Mr. Kikuchi was born in Chiba Prefecture in 1976. He has loved reading since he was a child, and in high school he read a book on "environmental issues," which greatly influenced his life.

In the 1990s, when the term "SDGs" did not even exist, high school students were interested in the environment ....... Many people may be surprised at the level of awareness. However, Mr. Kikuchi laughs as he says, "I still feel that way.

I still have a desire to do so, but I have a twisted sense of 'I don't want to attack the middle ground. When I went to a bookstore to choose a book, I would pick up a difficult book and read it, not the trendy novels that everyone else was reading (laughs).

(Laughs.) That was Henry David Thoreau's "Life in the Forest" and Ralph Waldo Emerson's "A Treatise on Nature. Mr. Kikuchi, who loved living things, felt an unfounded sense of justice at the unreasonableness of the extinction of living things due to man-made reasons, saying, "I have to do something about it.

It was right around that time that Kikuchi-san took an outlandish action. He applied for the school's "exchange student" program without telling his parents.

What are you going to do when you don't even have a room?

(Photo: Image)

At the time, Mr. Kikuchi was living in an ordinary apartment complex. Therefore, when his parents learned that a foreign exchange student from the U.S. would be coming to Japan in two days, they were in a state of confusion. However, the reason they did not tell her was because she was trusted by her parents, and they were almost uninhibited.

Thus, Mr. Kikuchi really went to the U.S. to study as an exchange student.

It was such a culture shock," she said. The house where I stayed with a host family was a huge mansion, and there was a video game arcade in the house. There was a yacht in the yard, and I could see the night view from the window. Even so, it is not a "super rich house" in that area. People say that Japan is an economic powerhouse, but it is not rich at all. America is an amazing country.

When deciding on a career path after graduating from high school, it was books that guided Kikuchi.

In a book he found in a bookstore, "America's Environmental Movement (Iwanami Shinsho)," it was written in detail that the United States had four-year universities where students could study environmental issues in depth and that the country was a mecca for environmental protection activities.

Kikuchi, who was good at English, immediately took the TOEFL test and scored at a level that would allow him to enter an American university without any problems. Three days after the graduation ceremony, he left for California, the United States.