下のスクリプトは事前提出されたものですので、ビデオの音声とは一部異なる場合があります。

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Oasis in a changing world

Kinki University Technical College

Hi Hitoshi, here's your souvenir.
Thank you, such beautiful white sand. How was your vacation?
Fantastic! I went to a beautiful crescent-shaped beach. It has clear blue water, plus beautiful mountains and nature surround it. You should go there sometime. It's somewhere in [beep].

Unlike other travellers who have seen beautiful places, we're not going to tell you how to get there. This presentation will explain why.
Tourism is a huge industry. Billions of people are travelling all over the world. As a result, many tourist sites have been advancing. However, our local beach hasn't changed much since the last tsunami sixty years ago. It is a beautiful beach, but many problems limit the number of tourists who visit. So, we decided to study ways to improve it. Our presentation tells the story about how our ideas evolved and changed.
On the Internet, I studied for good ways of tourism and I came across the term ecotourism.

What is Ecotourism?

There are many definitions of ecotourism. For some people, it means being a responsible tourist. For others, it means helping poor local communities and saving nature.

Can you give us some examples?

I found three main examples of ecotourism:
1. Instead of staying in big hotel complexes, if tourists stay in small local accommodation, buy local food and use local facilities then more money will go back into the poor community.
2. Tourists and locals only tend to meet when goods and services are exchanged. However, if tourists and locals can meet less formally, they can learn more about each other's cultures and ways of thinking. Maybe they can become friends and see each other again.
3. Cars, bullet trains and ferries are comfortable and fast, but the chemicals from these vehicles add to air pollution. On the other hand, walking not only helps our health and the environment, it also allows us to slow down and to learn more about nature.
After learning about the definitions and methods, we felt that we should turn "The Beach" into an ecotourism spot. But we needed to understand the area better. So we decided to get information from the council and interview locals, tourists and the beach manager.
We collected data from the local council to learn about the area's facilities and we discovered four main problems. Firstly the population is small (only 923 people) and about 64% of the people are over 60 years old. Secondly, there are very few facilities: three small grocery shops no hotels, and no children's play area. Thirdly, it is difficult to get there, because the nearest highway interchange is over an hour's drive away and there are very few buses and trains. Fourthly, it is expensive to park and camp at the beach. These obstacles had probably prevented an increase in tourism. In fact, during our study, we found that the number of tourists actually dropped by three-quarters compared to last year.
Although the beach manager “Eco-chan” explained that the tourists usually came in families to camp on the beach and their behaviour was generally good, he said that foreign tourists were often noisy at night. However, he found it difficult to communicate the rules to them.
When we interviewed the locals, we found that their opinions differed depending on their level of contact with the tourists. The locals who had a higher level of contact from working in shops and so on generally had a positive opinion towards them. However, the locals unconnected to tourism thought that the visitors had bad manners; in particular they left too much garbage on the beach.

Excuse me, would you mind us interviewing you?
No problem, please do.
How did you get to the beach?
I came here by my personal jet plane.
Really?
No, by car.
How did you learn about this place?
My colleague from work, Momotaro, was born here and he recommended this beach.
What do you like about this beach?
I can relax here, because it is surrounded by nature. I will definitely come here again.

Based on our interviews, we would like to suggest some minor ecotourism changes. Camping on the beach is one of the strong points, because the people are closer to nature; however, the noise and garbage are problems, which could be solved through better communication. Multilingual signs ought to be placed on the beach and there should be more garbage bins.
In reality, following this study, the biggest change has been in us. We changed our way of thinking, because we began to appreciate the simplicity of life and we also realised that not everything should change in our modern society. We set out to solve problems, but discovered that the lack of hotels and shopping centres, the remote location, and the expensive parking and camping fees have limited the number of tourists and therefore help the beach to stay a natural and peaceful ecotourist location. Even the tourists themselves told us “keep the beach as it is”. So in this case, our changes are aimed at developing the visitors' ecotourist behaviour and we are keeping the name of our little Oasis secret to protect its innocence.