In the city where the world's only "Banei Horse Racing" is held, you can ride around the city in a horse-drawn carriage driven by Banei horses. Such a wonderful way to spend an evening can be found in Obihiro. The horse-drawn carriage tour "Carriage BAR," departing from and arriving at HOTEL NUPKA, located in the center of the city, started in April 2019. As the name "BAR" suggests, the horse-drawn carriage rides include craft beer and delicious snacks made with local ingredients.

The program was conceived by Tsuyoshi Nagata. We interviewed Mr. Nagata, who gave shape to his wish to "bring people to Obihiro and, by extension, to Tokachi," about the process leading up to the realization of the horse-drawn carriage BAR and his dreams for the future.

How can we play and live like tourists?

Mr. Nagata was born in Kitakyushu City, grew up in Osaka, and moved to Tokyo after becoming a working adult. However, while living in Tokyo, he says that he had a dim feeling that "the countryside suits me better than the city.

I had a vague idea that it would be nice to move to Hokkaido, but unlike today, in the late 1990s, there were major hurdles to moving to the countryside. But when I landed at Obihiro Airport, I felt strongly that this was the place I wanted to move to.

I had a family, so there were a number of issues such as how to find a job and a place to live, but when I was reading a newspaper in Tokyo, I happened to see a job offer in the Tokachi Mainichi Shimbun newspaper. It was the early days of the Internet, and they were looking for people to create a digital department.

I guess they were looking for people in Tokyo because it was hard to find people in Obihiro. I was working on something related to the Internet at the time, so I thought this might be interesting and applied for the job. I was hired, and I was able to move there with my family in peace.

That was in the late 1990s. After working in the digital department of a newspaper company for several years, Mr. Nagata switched to a job related to motorsports events and became involved in world-class automobile competition races held in Obihiro. However, his work came to a halt as a result of the Lehman Shock. He then took another job, but he began to recall his original intention, saying, "This is not what I came to Tokachi to do.

I love this area and want to live and play here every day. Then I decided to work in tourism, to play and live like a tourist. My children are now independent, so it was just the right time for me to do something I love."

Creating the world's only program in which horses pull carriages

The idea was to create a program that would attract people from Japan and around the world to Obihiro and, by extension, to Tokachi. Obihiro's one and only tourist resource is the Banei horse racing held at the Obihiro Racecourse. In this competition, horses used for farming in the pioneer days of Hokkaido compete in terms of power and speed while pulling heavy sleds.

Musashikoma, who is currently running the horse-drawn bar, in his active days. He is very brave.

I came up with the idea of "Why don't the horses used in Banei Horse Racing pull the carriages so that tourists can ride them? It was eight or nine years ago that I came up with the idea. Just at that time, the mayor of Obihiro launched a study group called the "Tokachi Innovation Program," a program to develop human resources for regional development, and I joined the group because I wanted to do a tourism project in Tokachi using horse-drawn carriages. I learned how to take my own blueprint and put it into a business plan, and together with my colleagues, we worked out how we could attract customers."

That's when we came up with the idea of a "bar-style horse-drawn carriage where people can enjoy drinks while touring the city at night. We decided on the name "Carriage Bar," and from there we worked out the route, pricing, and other details.

Considering the speed of the horses, the best route would be a 2-km course that took less than an hour to complete. If the time is short, it is like amusement at an amusement park, and if it is long, you will get bored. Mr. Nagata, who actually experienced a horse-drawn carriage tour in Sapporo and Yufuin in Oita Prefecture, felt that "there is always time for the tour to stop and for the passengers to disembark, which accelerates the fun of the tour. From the very beginning, Mr. Nagata himself had the idea of "having time for customers to dismount and give carrots to the horses during the tour.

At the time, there were horse-drawn carriage tours of the city in Sapporo, but they were not held in conjunction with existing facilities, so there was no place for guests to wait. It was cold when the wind blew, and there were no restrooms. Furthermore, since the Basha BAR is a program that serves alcohol, we naturally had to think about how to serve food and beverages. Then we thought it would be a good idea to partner with some restaurant or café."

The restaurant that came to mind was HOTEL NUPKA, located in the center of Obihiro. Mr. Nagata has long been interested in NUPKA's craft beer business, short film productions, and other interesting activities in the city in addition to its hotel business.

NUPKA is a hotel that can cater alcohol, make snacks in the kitchen, have a waiting area and restrooms, and have a front desk that handles all inquiries. And to add to the excitement of the passengers, we wanted to pass by a northern food stall and the famous sweets shop Rokkatei, and NUPKA is located near the downtown area, so we can do that. And the road is wide enough not to interfere with traffic. All things considered, the NUPKA hotel was the miraculously best starting point for planning the horse-drawn carriage BAR."

We also passed in front of Obihiro's famous food stall village "Kita no Yatai".

There, Mr. Nagata took the business plan for the horse-drawn carriage BAR and presented it to Tetsuya Kashio and Kotomi Sakaguchi of Tokachi City Design, which operates NUPKA. The response was unexpectedly positive: "This is very interesting, let's make it happen.

Tokachi City Design had the vision that if various people in the region could create a town center called NUPKA, the encounters they would have with each other would lead to the next stage of regional revitalization. I, too, fell right into that scheme (laughs)."