"Common goals and common friends inspire and unite", say Kaunas and Vilnius tourism specialists in chorus. A double-sided map presenting both major cities of Lithuania in Japanese has just been published - the best proof of this statement.
8000 km apart, Lithuania and Japan have many more points of contact than one could imagine. Lithuanian tourism experts, who have been noticing the increasing flow of tourists from the Land of the Rising Sun for some time, are of course reacting to this.
For example, the former Japanese consulate Beautiful, which houses the Sugihara House museum and cultural center, is visited by over 16 people a year. Japanese. In 2016, the map presenting the history and traces of consul Chiune Sugihara in Kaunas, who saved thousands of Jewish lives during World War II, was dedicated to them. published in September by the Kaunas Tourism Information Center, which recently turned into the city's marketing and tourism agency "Kaunas IN".
The stylish, illustrated map offering unexpected routes around Kaunas, which received great success and applause both in Lithuania and Japan, was soon published in English, and this year, on the occasion of the first Sugihara week, in Lithuanian.
When the "Sugihara Route" came into the hands of the "Go Vilnius" team of the capital's international tourism and business promotion agency, it became obvious that there was no need to rebuild the bicycle. So, after some discussion, colleagues from Kaunas and Vilnius published a common map of both cities, emphasizing what is most interesting about them, specifically for the Japanese. These are the already mentioned traces of Sugihara, and highlights of the friendship between Japan and Lithuania, and places offering unique Lithuanian souvenirs or dishes, oases of contemporary art, etc.
"We wanted people who came from Japan to discover as much connection between Lithuania and Japan as possible, visit the objects of the route and spend more time in our cities, so the objects selected for the route have one or another connection with the Land of the Rising Sun or its people," he said. Inga Pažereckaitė-Kalėdienė, head of the Tourism Department of "Kaunas IN".
Both the first and the latest map of the two cities were created by an independent team of text authors, illustrators, and designers who oversee the "It's Kaunastic" project, which aims to spread interesting, unexpected and relevant stories about Kaunas to English-speaking travelers. Previously published "It's Kaunastic" maps presenting Litvak culture and heritage in Kaunas, the gastronomic route, the best panoramic places of Kaunas, the city's Christmas legend, etc. It's Kaunastic also writes a blog of the same name.
