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seminar rooms, 16 conference rooms, and other unique spaces can accommodate a wide variety ofmeetings. From ACROS Fukuoka we drove along the main artery of
Tai Haku Dori (“dori” means “street”) to inspect the Fukuoka Convention Center(www.marinemesse.or.jp/eng), a tripartite facility consisting of the Fukuoka International Congress Cen- ter; Marinemesse Fukuoka, an exhibition center; and the Fukuoka Kokusai Center, with a capacity of 10,000 people, whichmost often hosts sporting events, including sumomatches. The five-floor International Congress Center has a 1,000-seat
DELICIOUS BUILDING BLOCKS: Sushi, as we learned from the Tokyo-based cultural-experience companyWAKJAPAN, isn’t as complex as it might seem. To make sushi rolls, all you have to do is take sushi rice and roll it with any combination of ingredients you prefer. Above, we used egg, seaweed, crab, shrimp, cucumber, and more to make our rolls.
since 2000, was originally built the same year that the Ryukyus ascended to power—butwas destroyed in 1945 during theBat- tle ofOkinawa. The current structure was rebuilt in 1992. Our second and final night in Okinawa, we stayed at Oki-
nawa Harborview Crowne Plaza (www.crowneplaza-har- borview.jp/en), a 352-roombusiness hotel in the heart ofNaha City. The property has sevenmeeting rooms, the largest ofwhich is Saikai, a 7,944-square-foot space that can accommodate up to 1,000 people. The property is just 10 minutes by car from Naha Airport.
Wednesday In the morning we flew north to Fukuoka, the home- town of our guide, Chihiro Doi. Although Fukuoka
is the eighth-most populous city in Japan, it is the third-most popular destination for international conferences, after Tokyo and Yokohama. This is due in part to its being the closest big city to the Asian continent; Fukuoka is just 130 miles— a one-hour flight or a three-hour ferry ride—across the Korea Strait from Busan, South Korea. But that’s not the only reason it occupies the No. 3 spot.
Fukuoka is an attractive, clean, stylish, and walkable city of1.4 million people—a great place for an international conference of moderate size that might otherwise by swallowed up (or alien- ated) by a larger, more spread-out, or less hospitable metropolis. After checking in to our homebase hotel, the Grand Hyatt
Fukuoka, we visited ACROS Fukuoka (www.acros.or.jp /english), a spacious, modern cultural and events venue next to CityHall.ACROSFukuoka sports a soaring glass-and-concrete atrium and, covering its exterior, a ziggurat-like “vertical gar- den,” rich with 110 different varieties of plants and thousands oftrees. Inside, the venue’s Symphony Hall, one ofJapan’s top three music venues, has 1,871 seats.Three other large halls, two
Main Hall on its third floor—which, when combined with the adjacent 14,208-square-foot Multi-Purpose Hall, can seat up to 3,000 people. The center has five smaller meeting rooms on its fourth floor and a 4,520-square-foot International Confer- ence Zone, with six simultaneous-translation booths, on top. Nearby, Marinemesse Fukuoka has 86,111 square feet of exhi- bition space in its main hall, with an additional 11,840 square feet available for exhibits on its second floor. The rest of the afternoon was occupied by lunch at an elegant
French establishment, Restaurant Hiramatsu Hakata (www .hiramatsu.jp/eng/hakata), which can accommodate a banquet for up to 120 people; a half-hour drive to visit MarineWorld Umino-Nakamichi (www.marine-world.co.jp/english),where we viewed a smart, playful pair of dolphins performing tricks during a training session; and a trip to the nearby, three-year- old The Luigans Spa & Resort (www.luigans.com/en), a 98- room luxury resort hotel on the other side of Hakata Bay from the city. The Luigans has two banquet rooms, the larger ofwhich canseat 400 people theater-style, aswell as a big green lawnthat’s great for outdoor barbecues. Before an intimate dinner at Hakata Ishikura Brewery
(www.ishikura-shuzou.co.jp), a historic sake-brewery-turned- restaurant,wherewesampled strawberry sake,among other vari- eties ofthe rice wine, we toured our hotel. The Grand Hyatt Fukuoka (http://fukuoka.grand.hyatt.com) is a polished, 370- roomproperty attached to the shopping and entertainment cen- ter Canal City Hakata. The hotel has eight meeting rooms on two floors, the two largest ofwhich are the Grand Ballroom (maximum capacity: 1,000) and the Junior Ballroom (maximum capacity: 600).
Thursday Our second day in Fukuoka, and the final full day ofour whirlwind tour ofJapan, began with an inspec-
tion of the 1,052-room Hilton Fukuoka Sea Hawk (http:// bit.ly/bnBVi8), which features 64,583 square feet of meeting space. The hotel is located right next door to the Fukuoka Yahoo! JAPAN Dome, the retractable-roof, 35,695-seat sta- dium that’s home to the Fukuoka SoftBank Hawks baseball team, which won Japan’s Pacific League championship in 2010. The hotel is defined by its massive, bright atrium space, which reminded me of America’s Gaylord Hotels. Next we wandered out oftown to a place that couldn’t be
more different: the quaint Daimaru Besso (www.futsukaichi- onsen.com), a traditional Japanese-style inn called a ryokan— similar to a bed-and-breakfast. Daimaru Besso’s original build- ing is more than 150 years old, and visitors can feel the history with every touch ofaworn-smooth sliding door and every stroll
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