The other is guests from Europe and North America. While most foreign visitors to Shiraoi have traditionally been from other parts of Asia, haku attracts people from countries not typically seen in the town's statistics, such as the Netherlands, Germany, Poland, and Canada.

On the booking site Booking.com, there are nearly 20 reviews from European and North American guests with comments like, "The staff are friendly and amazing," and "An elegant fusion of old and new."

A Book Leads to America

Mr. Kikuchi was born in Chiba Prefecture in 1976. He loved reading since he was a child, and a book about environmental issues he read in high school greatly influenced the rest of his life.

A high school student interested in the environment in the 1990s, before the term "SDGs" even existed? Many might be surprised by his advanced awareness. However, Mr. Kikuchi laughs and says,

"I still have this tendency, but I have a bit of a contrarian streak where I don't want to go down the middle. Even when choosing books at a bookstore, instead of picking popular novels that everyone was reading, I'd deliberately pick up and read difficult books (laughs)."

These books were Henry David Thoreau's "Walden; or, Life in the Woods" and Ralph Waldo Emerson's "Nature." As an animal lover, Mr. Kikuchi felt a sense of baseless righteousness, thinking, "I have to do something," about the injustice of species going extinct for man-made reasons.

Around that time, Mr. Kikuchi took a rather impulsive action. He applied for the school's exchange student program without telling his parents.

"We don't even have a room for an exchange student! What are we going to do?"

(Photo for illustrative purposes)

Mr. Kikuchi lived in a very ordinary apartment complex at the time. So, when his parents found out an American exchange student was arriving in two days, they were in a state of chaos. However, the reason he could apply in secret was that his parents trusted him and gave him a lot of freedom.

And so, Mr. Kikuchi really did go to America as an exchange student.

"It was a huge culture shock. The host family's house was a mansion with an arcade inside. They had a yacht in the yard, and you could see the city lights from the window... And yet, it seemed they weren't considered 'super-rich' in that area. Japan is called an economic superpower, but it's not truly affluent. I realized America is an amazing country."

When deciding his path after high school, it was again books that guided him.

A book he found at a bookstore, "The American Environmental Movement" (Iwanami Shinsho), detailed that there were four-year universities in the U.S. where one could study environmental issues in depth, and that there was a mecca for environmental activism.

Proficient in English, Mr. Kikuchi immediately took the TOEFL and scored high enough to get into an American university without any problems. Three days after his graduation ceremony, he flew to California.