From visitors
ーThank you for your kind and hearty impressionsー

Dear Tom,

Also in the name of Ellen I want to thank you for a truely wonderful day.

You are our Olympic gold medallist of all guides.

You have a great knowledge of the history of Japan. You explain extremely well, your english is excellent, you speak clearly and your articulation is formidable. Your love of Japan and the Japanese Culture make us more hungry to understand and love your country more than we already did.

I saw the peace white pigeon on your green guide’s vest and I believe that your goodwill organization does very good work in showing people the very best side of Japan!

We will remember you very well!

Thank you once again and I wish you a long healthy and happy life in the third “age” together with your wife.Your friends

Thank you very much for the fun and informative tour last week. We hope to visit our friends Yasu Hata and Bill Winslow again next fall in Ikaruga-cho. Maybe we will you see you again then as well.

I wanted to thank your guide Masaru Ogawa for our fantastic tour of Horyuji Temple in April. Mr. Ogawa was a marvelous guide and told us an incredible amount of information and kept us smiling the entire time. We are from Italy and were very happy to have an excellent English speaking guide!

 Thank you again, our visit to Horyuji was one of the highlights of our visit to Japan!

I just wanted to write my appreciation of the services of Mac. H. Matsumoto and his colleague at Horyuji on Wednesday. He was informative, good-humoured and enabled us to learn a great deal. Without him, we would have wondered at the buildings but understood little of their purpose; now we know a little more about Buddhism in Japan and the history of Horyuji. どうもありがとうございました!

I must express my heartfelt thank you for your truly amazing and inspiring guide tour of Horyuji temple last week.

I and my wife Angela enjoy so much of your professional explanation throughout the two hour touring. Without your devoted and passionate accompany, we will certainly miss a lot of interesting points and historical significance of Horyuji temple. Your well preparation of information, equipment like torch and leaflet really impress me a lot and I absolute believe you  enjoy your guide tour work in the bottom of your heart.

Please accept my belated reply as we just back to Hong Kong yesterday after visiting lot of temples and Buddha/Bodhisattva sculptures in Nara and Kyoto. Attached please find the photo we taking together in Horyuji temple and I believe, to both of us, this is certainly a good memory to remember.

 We would like to thank again and hope to visit Horyuji temple and meet with you again.

Greeting from Beijing!

I am Mr. Cheng’s secretary. He texted me yesterday evening that he and his friend have a very good time with you at Nara Horyu Ji yesterday. As Mr. Cheng is very interested about Japanese culture and architect, he is much appreciated that you introduce the culture of Horyu Ji in Chinese for two hours very professionally. He let me write a letter to you to thank for your kindly hospitality and profound knowledge.

If he visits Nara again, he looks forward to talking with you next time. And we hope that more and more people can learn Japanese culture from you.

Enjoy your time every day!

This is my greeting from Thailand to you. I am very sorry that I write e-mail to you quite late. It is because I am very busy with my job after I came back from japan. And I just found you e-mail to send photo to you. 

 Importantly, I would like to say Thank you very much for your kindness during we travel together. I have a lot of fun with you and my Japanese family.  I am looking forward to hearing back from you. Please write me back to confirm that you receive my e-mail.

I am the lawyer from Switzerland who visited Horyuji last week. 

Thank you so much for taking me around in English in Horyuji, it was very interesting. I managed also to see the other temples in Nara the same day before they were closed and I was very impressed and happy that you adviced me to go there as well. 

 I send you my contact details below, so if it happens that you visit Switzerland, I could show you around a bit as well. 

 In any case I will give my friends your contact as discussed, if they are visiting Nara. 

Thank you so very much for your delightful and informative tour yesterday. It was so enjoyable and extremely informative.

Horyuji is such a wonderful evidence of mankind's need for a good spiritual life..  a quest towards harmony. I loved being there and learning about the pagoda　 and seeing so many beautiful Buddhas.You have given me the best tour in Japan....  I will tell my friends about you.

. I came back with a good feeling from our time in Horyuji. It was a very impressive temple and a very insightful tour. And in addition, I found it very interesting to hear about Japan's attitude towards deceased persons and the end of their personal 'guilt'. This explains a lot to me and brings Japan more close to me. Japan is a very interesting country with a deep culture and long history to explore. I definitely have to come back!

I attached to this mail the picture of us taken at Horyuji.

This is to express our sincere appreciation for the time and impressive knowledge you shared during our tour this afternoon.

We were not expecting this level of personalized service and enjoyment when we decided to visit Horyuji today.Your sensitivity to Ian's health needs all afternoon added to making the tour even more memorable.

We hope that you continue to stay healthy and that your wife will recover very soon.

Thank you so much for giving us a tour of the temple. Your tour was very

interesting and informative, and made all the difference.

We (me and Antonio) were visiting Nara just for the day, our one free day

during the 12-day business tour we conducted in Japan. We were so lucky to

be able to meet you. After the temple, we went to Todai-ji Temple, and we

wished you were there as well. Please take care. I hope to see you again!

We would like to thank you again for your most interesting guidance through Horyu-ji Temple that you gave us last week. We were very happy to learn so many things about Horyu-ji, we really enjoyed your great explanations and your nice company very much!My Japanese husband told me that at least this one time it was an advantage for him to have a foreign wife (me). Isn't that a nice husband :-) Please find attached the picture that we took together.

H and I wanted to email to say thank you very very much for giving us such an interesting and enjoyable tour of the beautiful Horyu-ji. We learned a great amount and you made it a very special visit for us on our honeymoon

We were able to use the information you gave us for the rest of our trip on visits to Koyasan and in Kyoto and Osaka to understand more about the temples. I think Horyu-ji was our favourite of all the temples!We really enjoyed our visit to Japan, it is a beautiful country with very friendly and welcoming people, I hope we can return again!

I have attached a photo of us outside the temple.

I am a chinese tourist from Shanghai, we have visited Nara a month ago. I want to thank you for the great tour guide of the 法隆寺. We learned a lot from your introduction. Here is the picture we took at the end of the tour. 

Thank you so much for a really inspiring tour of Horyuji temple. I had never experienced a historical guide before and I'm very glad I did as it enhanced the experience so much.

From now on, when I visit an interesting historical place, I will try to get a guide whenever possible. I seriously doubt that any of my future guides will be as brilliant as you though!

I love learning about the world, and you and Takyoka San filled in a few more pieces of the puzzle for me.

When I return to Japan I will let you know. Hopefully, we can meet up again and go for a drink together

Feel free to write to me any time, and if you are ever in London, let me know and I'll do my best to show you some interesting places.

  Thank you very much again for your wonderful tour yesterday.  It truly was a pleasure to visit the grounds and appreciate the treasures of Horyuji while listening to your detailed historic and artistic analysis.  I may have mentioned it yesterday but your presentation reminded me of my college Art History courses.  Thank you once again for bringing those memories back to me. 

I want to thank you again for the wonderful tour of Horyu-ji you gave me, my husband, brother and sister-in-law a few weeks ago.  It was one of the highlights of our trip to Japan.  Please contact me if you ever have a chance to visit Boston.  I would love to provide you a tour in return, although it would be very poor in comparison to the tour you gave us.

We have now arrived safely home and should like to thank you once more for the fantastic guided tour you gave us last Thursday at the Horyuji temple. You were not only a very knowledgeable guide, but also a very pleasant and humoristic guide to us. Your guide tour was certainly one of the highlights of our two week trip to Japan and to which we have the very best reminiscences.

Please find attached some photos taken last Thursday as a token of our appreciation. Maybe you can even use them in your splendid organisation of volunteers giving such wonderful guided tours. We can only congratulate the Horyuji i-center with such a greta and efficient organisation. You must know that after your tour we were approached a couple of times by very enthusiastic colleagues of yours to have another tour and it was disappointing to them when we explained that we just had had a great tour of more than two hours.

If I know of people going to Japan and Nara I will certainly recommend your organisation and yourself as the very best way to learn almost everything of temples in general and of the Horyuji temple in particular.

We wish that Japan will be able to bring under control the fukushima daiichi nuclear power station, and to fight successfully against radioactive pollution.

Thank you very much for the attention you gave us during our visit to Horyuji. Your guidance brought us to appreciate even more the vast Japanese history and culture. You’ve also opened our eyes to see beautiful things that we wouldn’t have noticed, like the color of the beetle on that shrine. We will certainly keep you and Horyuji between the nice memories we cherish about Japan.

We wish to tell you our deep sorrow for the terrible suffering of the Japanese People.

Last year, when we came to Japan for the first time, we had the opportunity to know your marvelous Country and its extraordinary People.And we simply love both the country and the people.Now, as everybody in the world, we hope – and are sure – that the outstanding courage and moral strength of the Japanese People will help it once more to overcome this disaster.

With all our sympathy to you, your family, relatives, friends and all the Japanese People.

We would like to tell you how delighted we were to be able to visit Horyuji and Nara with Ms H. She is so knowledgeable, so kind so exquisitely dynamic!  Ms Hattori really made our day a perfect day.

Thank you again and, again, all our congratulations for giving visitors such excellent opportunities.

It was a pleasure meeting you today.

Joannie and I felt that your guiding us was the height of our trip.

I’m attaching a copy of our photo and a shot from the Katsura Imperial Villa yesterday.