Rotorua tiki-tour with the Japanese whanau

By GILBERT WONG

Sakura, the Japanese standard, sits in the same place as Pokarekare ana. It isn't the national anthem, but it is the song everyone knows the words to in public moments. And it cannot be sung without a certain wistfulness and easy sentimentality.

Toru, a wiry,73-year-old, retired, Japanese salaryman, slumped in his seat on the coach back to the hotel in Rotorua. It had been a long day and a longer night. However, when the request came, he hesitated only a moment before launching into song at the urging of our bus driver. After a beat the only other Japanese nationals on the bus - Toru's niece Naomi and her daughter Shima - joined in.

They finished the melancholy song about the brief beauty of the cherry blossom, and other nationalities began their thin, thready renditions of O Canada and The Star-spangled Banner, accompanying us back to the lights of Rotorua.

Fate has made Toru, Naomi and Shima part of my whanau. When they arrived for their first visit to New Zealand in January, almost instinctually we headed to Rotorua. If Rotorua did not exist, the country would have to invent it.

Where else would we find such a concentrated dose of New Zealandia - Maori culture, rural scenery, farmshows and hot pools? Whether we like the connotations or not, Rotorua's other name could easily be New Zealand - the theme park.

On this evening the whanau had attended a Maori concert and hangi dinner at the Tamaki Maori Village south of the city. My Japanese is as limited as their English, but management (the wife) is fluent. Luckily she could translate for the tourists because English was the main language on offer.

The village on State Highway 5 is flanked by teatree stockades and fortifications. Operator Tamaki Tours has won tourism awards for taking the tourist hangi concert experience out of the hotels into a more natural environment. We entered as if on a marae, to the roar of the te wero and karanga. Behind the stockades perhaps a dozen Maori in traditional costume waited in a series of tableaux - carving, practising poi and waiata, and martial arts. Video camera whirred, flashes snapped.

The tourists looked happy, though one surly American loudly remarked: "What a load of horse ... " It felt uncomfortably like visiting the zoo without cute animals.

The concert followed and the evening concluded with dinner, a hangi, though one that appeared to come from the kitchen rather than having been baked over hot volcanic rock in the earth. My whanau, like many Japanese people, would happily suffer having their teeth extracted without anaesthesia rather than be thought of as impolite. They enjoyed the concert, clicked through rolls of film in the recreated village, but were clearly nonplussed by the hangi dinner. Their usual diet does not feature huge slabs of meat and giant serving trays piled with spuds.

Considering the translation pitfalls and, despite the wife's efforts, I doubt that they flew home with an enduring impression of Maori spirituality or as converts to the indigenous cuisine.

The rural sector fared better, courtesy of the Agrodome. The 121ha complex was co-founded by the legendary shearer Godfrey Bowen and farmer George Harford in 1971. Its stock in trade is the sheep show which, when described baldly, hardly sounds a thrill a minute. During the one-hour show the audience is shown the range of New Zealand sheep breeds and what individual breeds are best for. A sheep is shorn, a cow is milked and a dog stares down sheep.

That said, the show is genuinely entertaining. Brendan Scoble, one of four showmen, is, like his colleagues, an experienced shearer who, when not putting on the show, oversees the working farm.

Dressed in iconic black singlet, shearer's jeans and shearer's moccasins, Scoble produced a stream of lively, informative chatter, helped by his own smattering of Japanese and the live translation service offered through headphones in Korean, German, Japanese and Mandarin. Our visitors were absorbed as Scoble demonstrated the way to shear a sheep and ventured into the intricacies of stock management.

Urban New Zealanders can feel a little wary when overseas visitors fixate on what built the country's economy. The Agrodome celebrates the living made off the sheep's back. We felt freer to acknowledge our inner sheep.

In Japan, onsen or hot springs are big and a long soak in the revamped Polynesian Spa next morning proved one thing: you cannot get into too much hot water with the Japanese whanau. Like many visitors they were comfortable with the familiar and polite at the strange. Rotorua delivered what we wanted, but I still cannot say if it did the same for the Japanese whanau.