【Introduction of True Japan Tour】
As for Sightseeing tours, conventional bus tours to Mt. Fuji, Hakone, Kyoto, and tourist spots in Tokyo have been very popular. But in order to answer diversified requirements of overseas tourists, it is getting more necessary to develop quality tours to satisfy those tourists who seek deeper understanding of Japanese cultures, traditions, and history.
IJCEE, which is the parent organization of True Japan Tours has been offering a variety of sightseeing service business to overseas tourists. IJCEE’s basic policy is to carry on, develop, and create Japanese culture. So far IJCEE has provided such Japanese culture experiencing courses as sushi making, tea ceremony, and kimono dressing and sightseeing tours in the Greater Tokyo Metropolitan area and Kansai districts.
Capitalizing on those achievements and furthering our potential, True Japan Tours with a motto of “Discover Japan’s Nature, Beauty & Spirit” took over IJCEE’s business. True Japan is offering a variety of tours for overseas tourists to more deeply understand and realize nature, beauty, and spirit of Japan.
① <Japan’s Rich Nature>
Japan has many mountains, rivers, seas, and islands. The changes of the four seasons are clear-cut. The changes make many tourist resources possible. Those attractions are blossoms of cherries, apricots, and peaches, the fresh green of spring, wetlands, lakes and ponds, alpine plants, autumn leaves, and fallen snow. In their rich nature, Japan is ranked among the best countries in the world in offering a great variety of food ingredients such as rice, wheat, buckwheat, vegetables, fruits, edible wild plants, seafood and seaweed.
We’ll keep on trying our best to explore and convey rich Japanese nature to the world.
② <Japan’s Beauty>
It is true that Japan’s beauty resides in nature itself but its beauty has been nurtured and developed by Japanese people as well. These are many things which were originally introduced from overseas but were developed to include Japan’s unique enhancements. Those examples are the traditional Japanese residential architecture called shoinzukuri, and the tea-ceremony style building called sukiyazukuri, a feudal lord or daimyo garden and bonsais. A delicate sense of Japanese beauty resides in Indian ink paintings, ukiyoe, woodblock prints, paintings on the walls, fine arts, kimonos, ceramics, fans, traditional craftworks, flower arrangement, and Japanese cuisines.
We’ll keep on trying to understand essential qualities of Japanese beauty and convey them explicitly to the world.
③ <Japan’s Heart>
Japanese polytheistic worldview has been nurtured under rich nature. Japanese mind accepts coexistence with different things. High technologies that built complicated architectures and craftworks are handed down to create industrial products like Toyota cars and software to produce animation. The basic way of Japanese thinking behind “To know one has enough”, “Treasure every meeting for it will never recur”, and “The code of the samurai” is to live within one’s means and to consider others and to offer hospitality.
Japanese handed-down technologies and spirit of acceptance of dissimilar things will be sure to contribute greatly to the world environment and peace in this day of global warming and religious and racial violence and disputes.
We’ll try to convey the Japan’s spirit to the world with pride.
*For more corporate information, please refer to the web link below (only in Japanese)
https://www.ijcee.jp/true-japan/
【Introduction of NPO IJCEE】
IJCEE (Institute for Japanese Culture Experience and Education) is a parent company of True Japan Tour Co. Ltd. It has more than 550 national certified guides who passed the most difficult language tests in Japan. It has a motto of succession, development, and creation of Japanese culture. Its services cover guide education, a preparatory school to guide candidates, international sightseeing services to local governments.
・Founded: August 6, 2008
・Total member: About 642 as of Jan. 1, 2015
Out of those, 544 are national certified guides in English, French, Spanish, Chinese, Korean, Italian, German, Portuguese, and others, 173 Japanese traditional bearers in flower arrangement, tear ceremony, calligraphy, Japanese cuisine, Japanese language, koto, samisen, shakuhachi, Japanese dancing, papermaking, IT, and researchers. There are many nationally certified guides who hold teachers or masters’ certificates in flower arrangement, tea ceremony and others.
・BBC and The Washington Post reported Tsukiji Tuna Auction Tour
【Message from CEO】
In eating Western food, several kinds of spoons, forks, and knives are required, but in eating Japanese food, only a pair of chopsticks suffice. Compared with Europe that has many thousand years old plus buildings, Tokyo doesn’t have so many historic buildings. However, Japanese culture that based upon tree and paper lives on technologies and daily living styles. Compared with purpose oriented Western rooms such as a bedroom, a living room, and a kitchen, one room can be used for multi-purposes with aid of a table and a futon. Such skills that created kabuki dramas, martial arts, and woodblock prints are handed down to the present time in the changed forms for dramas, sports, and animation. Japanese spirit of worshiping ancestors, the sun, the wind, the thunder and animals as God coexists with other people and nature.
I think that the succession, development, and creation of Japanese culture is necessary especially at the present time when the harmony with environment is required global wide.
True Japan Tour Co. Ltd.
Ryozo Yonehara CEO
