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December 5th, 2008
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Wanderlust

Okamura's travel-mindedness bridges cultures

By Michael Heitmann
Staff Writer, The Prague Post
April 16th, 2008 issue

VLADIMÍR WEISS/THE PRAGUE POST
Tomio Okamura is a TV personality through his role as spokesman for the Czech Republic's Association of Tour Operators and Travel Agents.
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VLADIMÍR WEISS/THE PRAGUE POST
Okamura's grocery store Japa offers an exotic taste of Japan.
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The Okamura File


Born: 1972 in Tokyo
Former positions: Popcorn seller, language teacher
Current: Czech-Japanese entrepreneur, businessman
Volunteer: "Ambassador" to the European Year of International Dialog
2008; spokesman for the Association of Czech Tour Operators and Travel
Agents (AČCKA)

For the 1,415 Japanese people living in Prague, Japa grocery store offers a taste of home.
Tarako spaghetti (made with salted cod roe), king crab from Kamchatka, Russia, and Oolong tea from China are just a few of the exotic items on the shelves at the Prague 6 store of Czech-Japanese businessman Tomio Okamura.
While the exotic grocery store also offers a sense of community to its Asian shoppers, it’s really just a side business for Okamura, who isn’t there much.
He’s too busy. As one of the central figures in the Japanese-Czech community, Okamura’s business activities range from representing Japan’s biggest travel agency Miki Travel in the Czech Republic, to owning the traditional Czech restaurant Staré časy in Old Town, where he takes Japanese tourists for meals. He even employs a Japanese coiffeur, for whom he rents a chair at local hair salon Franck Provost.
Okamura is a frequent guest on local TV and radio stations as the spokesman for the prominent Association of Tour Operators and Travel Agents of the Czech Republic (AČCKA), so most Czechs know him as well.
“He’s the right man in the right place. I appreciate his commitment to tourism marketing,” said Jan Koláčný, commercial director at Exim tours, the country’s biggest travel agency. “His appearances [on television] are to the point, professional and friendly.”
Okamura sends out press releases and fields phone calls around the clock to raise the profile of Czech tourism around the world.
“Okamura has given a new dimension to the AČCKA spokesperson’s work,” said Dan Plovajko, spokesman for Fischer Travel, another prominent travel agency. “The association’s agenda and tourism in general have become much more visible in the media thanks to his proactive, creative and extremely professional approach.”
That no-nonsense attitude might include answering a travel question about a dengue fever outbreak in Brazil or discussing bus drivers’ hours — a new European Union regulation calls for bus drivers to work just four hours before they take a rest, for example.
“There are an infinite number of topics,” Okamura said. “Where do Czechs travel? How many go to ski in the Czech mountains? How many travel to foreign countries? How much do they spend on average?”
But the volunteer job often puts him at odds with government officials, he says. The group keeps lobbying for multilingual tourist signs on Prague streets, for example, but so far, its pleas seem to be falling on deaf ears.
Tick disease
When Okamura set foot on the tarmac at Prague Ruzyně Airport May 20, 1994, at age 22, he had spent 12 years of his life in Japan and 10 in Bohemia. Having saved up money selling popcorn at a Tokyo cinema, he was determined to set up a viable business.
On his first trip outside of Prague, a tick bit him and he ended up in a hospital, however. Doctors diagnosed him with the life-threatening tick-borne disease encephalitis.
“I couldn’t even move. People around me of the same age ended up in a wheelchair. One girlfriend came to visit [another patient] and didn’t come back because she couldn’t bear to see it,” Okamura recalled.
Having that near-death experience changed Okamura’s life, and he decided he didn’t want to waste any time.
“Now I don’t sleep much because I’m busy. If I devoted my time only to work, I’d have a lot of free time. But we should always be aware that we should share at least 5 percent to 10 percent [of our time] with others,” he said.
Once he got out of the hospital, Okamura started giving Japanese lessons. He started a popular language school, where he was asked by a tour operator in Prague to fill in for a Japanese-speaking tour guide.
While working with the tour company, Okamura immediately saw an opportunity — his Japanese countrymen were perplexed by European customs, and local agencies were anything but receptive to their needs.
For example, tourists would forego delicious meat on their dishes because it had bones and needed to be cut into pieces, he said. Guides would embark on monologues about history, when Japanese tourists wanted to take in the urban scenery’s visual splendor.
Never one to miss a business opportunity, Okamura booked a tiny booth at the World Travel Market fair in London to explain how he could do it better. To his surprise, he sold his travel agency ideas to the biggest Japanese travel agency, Miki Travel.
With his help, Miki Travel Prague now provides native Japanese tour guides — mostly Okamura’s friends from Japan.
It also offers a Japanese-speaking telephone operator 24 hours a day to distressed tourists in Prague. On average, three tourists fall victim to pickpocket thieves every week, and one has his credit card stolen, said Okamura.
Two cultures
Paradoxically, Okamura’s Czech mother and Japanese father were not travelers who met on the road. Instead, the story of how they fell in love at the height of the Cold War is one of pure romance.
Okamura’s Czech grandfather, whom the communists singled out as a great landowner and sent to labor in the uranium mines, spoke a number of languages but was not allowed to travel. Passionate to use his language skills, he asked a pen-pal club for addresses and started to exchange letters with pen-pals all over the world.
When a young Japanese high school student contacted him, he handed the letter on to his daughter Helena, who reluctantly answered.
“My dad always put a nice card or a pretty ornament in the envelope the way the Japanese do,” Okamura said. “They wrote each other for seven or eight years, but never met.”
Love finally struck when Matsuo Okamura went on a tour through Europe shortly after finishing his doctorate thesis at the University of Heidelberg, Germany, stopping in Prague.
The two got married here, but moved to Tokyo after the first of three sons was born.
In 1978, when Okamura was 6, his mother returned home for therapy, since she had difficulties adjusting to life in Japan, where no one spoke Czech.
Okamura was temporarily sent to a children’s home, where other children laughed at him and called him names. It was a horrific experience for the young boy.
“There, I experienced harassment for the first time. Whenever I received a letter, other kids slapped me on the face before handing it over to me,” he said.
Things are coming full circle this year. Okamura has been named an ambassador to the European Union program “The Year of Intercultural Dialogue” to promote tolerance and recognize Europe’s great cultural diversity.
“In Japan they laughed at me for being white,” Okamura said. “No one would want to sit next to me during lunch break. When we went on a walk with the teacher, no one would want to walk hand-in-hand with me, because I did not look like a Japanese person.”  
Paradoxically, Okamura now touches the lives of 150,000 Japanese tourists who come to the Czech Republic every year, according to Chisa Sato, director of the Japanese Embassy’s information and culture center in Prague.
Because of his unique position as a Czech-Japanese businessman, Okamura is an important contributor to Czech-Japan relations and cultural exchanges, Sato said.

Michael Heitmann can be reached at mheitmann@praguepost.com


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