Jack Danylchuk
Northern News Services
Yellowknife (Jan 19/01) - It was near midnight when the Japanese aurora watchers, drowsy with cold and jet lag, filed from the shelter of a frost-caked hut to view the spectacle that brought them halfway around the world to a frozen lake outside Yellowknife.
Flickering wisps of ethereal light gathered and swelled into an incandescent banner of green and pink that swirled and shimmered across the moonlit sky.
"Awesome," Mary Kumagi pronounced with an improbable southern drawl, a souvenir of Maryland where she once worked as an auditor with an international securities firm.
Armoured against the cold in red parka, black ski trousers and kamiks, she settled down in plastic lawn chairs with 17 identically-clad aurora watchers.
They posed for pictures with the aurora and the flashlight beam that lit their faces gave them an air of mystery, like acolytes in some arcane ritual.
"It is so unreal," said Hitomi Soma, a care-giver, and Kumagi's companion.
"Like an illusion or a mirage -- so beautiful," Kumagi affirmed.
Like most of the Japanese drawn to the spectacle, they are under 30. But it was just 48 hours since they left Tokyo and on their first day in Yellowknife they were up watching the aurora until 4.30 a.m.
Kumagi, Soma and their companions were guests of Canadian Ex., the smaller of two established Yellowknife companies that specialize in aurora tours.
Canadian Ex. is winter work for Sage Suzuki, a pilot with Great Slave Helicopters. He guides about 2,000 of the estimated 8,000 Japanese tourists drawn to Yellowknife for the aurora experience.
Japanese visitors spend about $1,000 each in four days and three nights in Yellowknife for lodging, meals, transport, entertainment and souvenirs, Suzuki estimates.
Dreamcatchers are popular. They buy T-shirts and bales of postcards. There is little interest in moose hair tuft work and they find the birch baskets over-priced, Suzuki said.
Bill Tait said that Yellowknife businesses must improve their skills as hosts if they want to retain a share of the competitive market.
Alaska, Sweden and Finland are also popular with the Japanese and "are beating us with better facilities and higher service levels," said Tait, president of Raven Tours, the largest Yellowknife aurora tour company.
"We're not meeting their expectations," he said.
"Japanese regard Yellowknife as an outpost. They don't see it as a major tourist destination, like Banff."
Although it's up against complete air and ski vacation packages to Whistler that sell for the incredible price of $600, Yellowknife remains attractive to young Japanese travellers who pay $800 for air fare.
The week-long excursion, remote location and exotic name fit with the demands of Japanese travellers with a taste for the unusual and their employers who prefer that workers take short, less disruptive, vacations.
Speculation that Japanese visitors are drawn to the aurora by the anticipation of religious or sexual ecstasy, is a myth, according to Suzuki. Titillating gossip, certainly -- but an absurd proposition for people dressed to ward off hypothermia. The reason is much less complicated, and a lot more like keeping up with the Joneses.
It's like this, Suzuki explained: A friend asks 'have you seen the elephant?' If you haven't and they have, of course you want to see it."
Call it keeping up with the Tanakas. Suzuki can handle 30 visitors at a time, and prefers the small, intimate groups that allow Canadian Ex. to deliver personal service through 10 Japanese guides.
After eight years in the business, he has scrapbooks filled with photos, post cards and letters of thanks from clients. Aurora watching occupies relatively few hours. Riding sleds pulled by barking dogs, ice fishing, and caribou viewing fill out the time.
They leave Yellowknife knowing more about aurora borealis than most Canadians -- or Northerners.
In the frost-caked Quonset hut lit by a hissing propane lantern, Murakai Loko, kneeled before a rapt audience. An aurora guide with a flair for the dramatic, Loko explained how the solar wind sweeps across the upper atmosphere, generating a powerful electrical charge that suspends a shimmering curtain around the earth's geomagnetic pole.
The light is emitted by atoms and molecules. Atomic oxygen produces greenish-white and dark red; molecular nitrogen glows bluish purple and pink.
It's like a neon sign in the sky, Loko said.
