The 2002-’03 white season featured 4 volumes of the setting journals based around the analogy that opening, running and closing a full-sized snow based resort is similar to the process involving a commercial airliner taking off, flying and landing safely at the final destination. Volume 6 of the setting journals, “Why don’t we open early” was followed by volume 7, “What’s it like to be part of a resort in full flight?” and volume 8, “What about an employee and equipment appreciation day”. At the end of volume 9, “Is spring season the start or the end?”, I promised that I would be able to tell you more about the final part of the flight for the 2002-’03 white season in this volume of the setting journals.

Well, to say there was turbulence at the end of the flight would be an understatement. Though the season started off well, by the end current affairs of the time such as the Iraq War and SARS made it one of the worst quarters in the history of the travel industry. Under such circumstances, what is a resort supposed to do? Finish the season early? Remain open but cut back on operations? ARAI traditionally has one of the longest seasons in Japan, extending from mid-December through to mid-May. While some Japanese resorts were fortunate enough to finish scheduled operations at the end of March, ARAI decided to attempt to honor it’s scheduled close.
   

   
Some operations were scaled back, and winter workers that wanted to leave their jobs early were permitted to. Traditionally, ARAI hosts a BBQ for all of the winter workers following the end of each white season. It is a chance for the full time staff members to thank and send off their co-workers over the past six months. By the end of this white season just finished, quite a few of the winter workers had already departed, so ARAI made the unprecedented move of canceling the event. To be honest, I had mixed feelings about such a move.

Reflecting back to my life in Canada, I remember bumping into one of my former high school teachers (the high school I went to has on average only 100 students in each grade) in a pub one night during my university days. We got talking, and I was quite surprised to learn that the teacher could neither remember my name nor the year that I had graduated. He explained that with each successive year, as more students come and go, teachers tend to integrate memories of former students to a case such as mine. Though at the time I had difficulty understanding this, given my present situation at ARAI, the former teacher’s explanation makes more sense.

I’ve lived through the white season cycle enough times now to observe three main stages concerning winter workers:

1 - The Honeymoon Stage:
Winter workers arrive at the resort and everything is fresh and new. Like high school, all the respective social roles are quickly established and the group moves forward together.

2 - The Main Stage:
The snow peaks out and the winter workers get into the work, ski/board, socialize routine. Again like high school, this suits some fine while others can’t wait to return to a more “controllable” lifestyle.

3 - The Breakup Stage:
Some snow resorts (ARAI included), do offer winter workers the chance to continue working during the green season. As the industry is driven by snow however, most winter workers opt to move on. Such a decision means wrapping things up - within six months of starting them - at the dormitory, on the mountain and with other members of the group. When 200 or so other persons in the group are also looking for closure, it makes for interesting times - just like the end of high school.

From the perspective of a full-time staff member, I believe that I have become more like the former high school teacher I mentioned. Though I do get caught up in the Honeymoon Stage, I always need to remind myself that the breakup stage is not too far away and while the winter workers will go their own ways, the resort will enter the final stage (otherwise known as the green season) before once again repeating itself when next season’s snow arrives.
  

  
At ARAI, the snow lasted to the scheduled finish in the middle of May. So to complete the analogy over the past five volumes of the setting journals (including this one), I would say that although the flight was able to make a scheduled landing on time, there was no gas left in the tanks to tolerate any bad weather or further disturbances.

Following the end of the white season, most of the full-time workers took some time off to be with their families and the like. ARAI actually closed for six weeks. The peace and quiet was a perfect time to carry out disruptive maintenance on various parts of the resort. For me, it was also a time of closure as together with various people of great talent, I achieved a long-term goal. As this is also the tenth volume of the setting journals, it is a great chance to sum up the first nine volumes of this column by taking a closer look at it’s background while at the same time looking ahead to a new beginning.
  

This SnowJapan.Com column began during the white season of 2001-’02, and volume 1 of the setting journals, “Skiing out of bounds” introduced the beginnings of my continuing colorful relationship with ARAI dating back to 1992. I arrived in Japan in 1991, and at that time Niigata Prefecture like most of the rest of the world had not yet widely accepted the Internet. Until early 1995, my international correspondence consisted of snail mail and the occasional telephone call (one operator assisted call in 1992 during prime time from rural Japan to Canada and lasting an hour came to a whopping JPY 30,000). Needless to say, such charges reflected the fact that Japan was relatively late in offering competitive prices for international communications.

Following a backpacking adventure that took my wife and I around the world for a year and a half, we returned to Japan in 1996 and I once again became involved with ARAI. Believe it or not, the Internet was just beginning to take hold of Japan at that stage. Though Japanese resorts were waking up to the fact that having a Japanese website was becoming an integral part of doing business, the concept of having a bilingual site was not always considered.

Such lags as the one mentioned above spell opportunity. In 1998, while I was waiting to teach an English class at ARAI, I opened up my Japanese English language daily. In it, I came across an article about Andrew M Lea, who at that time was working as the International Marketing Manager for NASPA New Otani Resort. He had also entered the resort business in Niigata Prefecture as an English advisor, but as Andrew had a background and qualifications in business/marketing, the management of his resort quickly realized that he could add much more value to the business by marketing it externally to the international community rather than internally to fellow staff members. One of the first things Andrew did was to construct a website, arrange sales trips and produce English pamphlets - essentially taking up his challenge from scratch. The efforts were not in vain however, as NASPA is still benefiting today from Andrew’s work five years ago. His effect was that dramatic - to my knowledge it had never been done in Japan quite the way he did it.

Back at ARAI on that fateful day in 1998, I visualized that one day I too would attempt to do for ARAI what Andrew had done for NASPA, though the immediate steps to reach that goal were at the time very unclear. I was not a full-time employee of ARAI, did not have either an e-mail address or computer access, lacked basic knowledge concerning the Internet and spoke broken Japanese at best.  However, I learned a long time ago that if you really do believe in something and approach it in a truthful and sincere manner - eventually it will come to you. This is also true in Japan, though with the culture here so firmly established - goals, especially new unfamiliar ones to native Japanese - usually take that much longer to accomplish.

My English teaching at ARAI continued throughout the white season of 1998-’99, and I was offered a full-time position by the resort. My work began in the summer of 1999, with ARAI at that time being heavily involved with Mountain Biking. That summer, ARAI brought approximately 100 of the worlds best Mountain Bikers and their staff to Japan for a UCI event, all without the aid of a permanent English website! I recently asked the lady who helped to organize the event how everything was coordinated, and she said that ARAI sent a lot of faxes. ARAI did have a Japanese website by that point, though the fact that such a site came up like “spaghetti” on English operating systems was for the most part overlooked. Operations during such events were such that users based in New York looking for family members attending the event would eventually find the Japanese Web for ARAI online. Unfortunately, such users sometimes wound up phoning or faxing incorrect resort numbers.

Soon after that event, I remember approaching the gentleman responsible for the Japanese web at ARAI about possibly making English pages for the website, but he was not so keen about the idea. At the time, all I could do was continue to bite my lip and remember the old adage, “Truth and sincerity will prevail”. That white season of 1999-’00 was a long and lonely one, as I again and again tried to tell people about what Andrew was doing at NASPA. Now I realize that people were perhaps beginning to listen, but they were not willing to display their interest publicly. What would happen if such a proposed English Website failed? Who would take responsibility?
 

Winds of change began to blow through ARAI in 2001, and if anything these winds have been getting stronger with time instead of weaker. The first signs of such change at ARAI was the arrival of a former JAL executive with extensive experience working within English language environments both overseas as well as a number of similar contacts in his hometown of Tokyo. By 2001, Tokyo was positively embracing the technological change brought on by the Internet. It was not long before one of the Tokyo contacts was telling him to get in touch with Andrew, who had now moved on to found SnowJapan.Com (which was then known as Ski Japan Guide) and also was involved with web design as the Managing Director & CEO of Iponics Japan Limited. I still remember that day in November of 2001 when the former JAL executive called me over from my desk at ARAI to speak on the telephone with Andrew himself.

Things began to move at a more respectable pace for the white season of 2001-’02, with the Japanese Web at ARAI out of the blue coming up with a mirror version in English of the site. ARAI was also spotlighted on SnowJapan.Com for the first time. I also began to receive enquiries in English from guests and found myself becoming more involved with all matters concerning English at the resort. It got to the point where one Guest from Tokyo asked me why I kept on popping up throughout his visit. In fact, the former JAL executive, the General Manager & I spent that winter running around attending to international guests through supporting the regular staff in various roles such as waiter, lift attendant etc.

ARAI quickly found out though that having a mirror image in English of a Japanese website was not enough. The international community is well ahead of Japan when it comes to the Internet, and their tastes concerning websites are in general much more refined. Though the product may be the same, it is not so effective to present it from a Japanese perspective to the international market. The decision was made to separate the Japanese and English Web for ARAI completely, and host them under entirely different domains. ARAI realized that from a marketing perspective, it made sense to begin to incorporate international thinking into the design in order to more effectively reach the target audience. Andrew and Iponics Japan were a logical choice. This work was carried out during the fall of 2002 and in December of that year the website came to life on the opening day of the 2002-’03 white season.

ARAI went through the 2002-’03 white season with a basic independent website that offered some limited functionality for the first time. Unfortunately, the site was still based on dinosaur code and structure taken from the mirror image of the Japanese site. It did not accurately reflect the high values of the resort and was rather generic looking. ARAI wanted a site that appealed to users while at the same time respecting their time by making it easy for users to find out relevant & timely information.

In preliminary meetings, though some senior executives of the management at ARAI attended, they delegated a lot of autonomy concerning the project to Andrew’s team and I. All in all, Iponics came to ARAI three times for the project and further communications were carried out by colorful telephone calls and e-mail. Somehow, we were able to plow our way through a complete redesign of the site. The process was ARAI providing content for the site - with Iponics doing all the creative, programming & site construction work.  The new site was also integrated with a completely new and versatile customer database (also created by Iponics) before going online.
  

I’m still amazed that the site is now complete and functional. Needless to say, it will take me quite some time yet for my head to stop spinning and truly understand all of the hard work that the Iponics team put in on the site.

As always, looking forward to hearing from you all in the forums and am looking forward to having a bit more time to interact with you all.  Next time in The Setting Journals, I will reply to questions submitted by Snow Japan readers to be answered by the resort. As so many questions were forwarded, the next volume will be the first half of a two part series.

The new ARAI website is now online and you can take a look at it here (www.araimntspa.com).