England in Awajishima - Follow the Yellow Brick Road...
by R. Sanborn Brown
The
town of Tsuna (population 17,000) on Awajishima Island, Japan, is hoping
to cash in again on a gold bar it bought in 1989 when Noboru Takeshita
was Prime Minister. The gold bar was bought with the one hundred million
yen (US $786,000) the village received from Tokyo as part of an economic
stimulus package during the bubble economy. At the time, Tsuna Mayor Wasaburo
Kashiwagi ventured: "If we used the money to buy a gold bar, I wonder
just how big it would be. I'd like to show the people of the town
how much gold you can actually get with that kind of money."
The answer to that question was a 32 centimeter long, 10 centimeter high, and 13 centimeter wide bar that weighs in at sixty-three kilograms and is 99.99% pure gold.
Originally, according to the Asahi Shinbun, the town intended to sell
the bar after keeping it on display at a local museum for one year. However,
voices within the town argued that it would be wiser to keep it on display,
and plans to sell it faded.
Until 1996.
During the Hanshin Earthquake of 17 January 1995, which nearby Kobe bore the brunt of, nearly 1,500 homes in Tsuna were destroyed. Half of the expense of leveling and clearing away debris of what remained of the homes was to be left to the homeowners themselves. Officials calculated that if they sold the gold bar, however, the town would be able to cover the entire amount and were set to do so. Soon thereafter, though, the national government came through with sufficient funds for the clean-up; and once again plans to sell the bar were shelved.
With
the completion in 1998 of the Akaishi Kaikyo Bridge, which links Kobe
and Awajishima, 390,000 tourists poured in to see the rebuilt town. Of
these, 340,000 visited the local museum to see the gold bar. "Officials
estimated that the total economic effect was $39.3 million, which ain't
peanuts," in the words of the local business redevelopment association.
Mayor Kashiwagi thought the chance to host England during this summer's World Cup would rank, after the "hit" that the gold has proved to be, as "the second stroke of good fortune" for the town. The local government however has recently been saddled with more than $786,000 in security expenses--"Hooligan Countermeasures"--as one price to pay for the right to having the English. This is well above the $314,000 the town had estimated.
And, once again, Mayor Kashiwagi is entertaining the idea of selling:
"We can always sell the bar of gold. The way we have made use of
it for these thirteen years has been for the best." Possibly alluding
to future plans, though, the Mayor continued: "The possibility of
selling is on the table. Still, I want the townspeople to realize just
how epoch-making the hosting of the England team will be for us."
Already requests from school teams and corporate teams have been flooding
in to rent out the ground after the World Cup is over. Ever the optimist,
town officials are already pondering a new use for the gold bar: melting
it down and making a pure gold sign that reads "Training Camp of
the 2002 World Cup Champions."
