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The story
JR Tokai has opened registration for its “Ise Full-Enjoyment Monitor Tour” featuring Hello! Project idol Ise Suzuran as guide, and the ¥33,000 price tag sparked debate on 5ch’s Hello! Project thread.
Opinions split over whether the fee is justified: the tour is meet-up-on-site, which all but requires arriving the night before, and it includes no two-shot photo session, no live show, and no handshake event. Some call it overpriced; others say that’s just normal for a meet-on-site tour.
What people said
Notice: Registration Now Open for "JR Tokai's 'Come On Over to Ise' Campaign Presents: Ise Suzuran Guides You! Sacred Site Pilgrimage — Ise Full-Enjoyment Monitor Tour" (the campaign name plays on Ise-dialect phrasing that reads like "don't come" in standard Japanese but actually means "come here" — a pun the thread riffs on throughout)
Tour fee (per person): ¥33,000 (tax included)
*No child discount — same price applies to children.
Though if I weren't already going to be in Ise myself, I'd have wanted to join
Come on over, Ise (the dialect pun again — reads like "don't come" but means the opposite)
And on top of that, every single stop has free admission anyway
Sounds good, come to Ise (same dialect pun)
Guess arriving the day before is basically mandatory then
Everyone's already at the live show [the night before], obviously
Not that I'll win the lottery for it anyway
Guess that's from the Wolf board (a Hello! Project fan forum)
Of course not
It just means more Ise-oshi who lose the lottery
At this price they'd better bring another member along
so one of them's always on board
Let's all apply
But factoring in there's no two-shot, no live show, and no handshake event, it does feel pricey
Nope, not coming — Goto (playing off the tour's Ise-dialect catchphrase)
Background and Key Points
Ise Grand Shrine—split into the outer Gekū and inner Naikū and rebuilt every 20 years in a Shinto rite called shikinen sengu—is one of Japan’s holiest sites and costs nothing to enter, as do the other stops on this itinerary: Futamiura’s wedded rocks, the Chokokan history museum, and the Okage Yokocho shopping street outside the shrine. JR Tokai, the railway that runs the Tokyo–Nagoya–Osaka bullet line, periodically pairs these regional promotions with Hello! Project idols to drive tourism traffic, and it’s using Ise Suzuran, a member of Hello! Project whose stage name literally puns on the city’s name, to front this one. The tour is billed as a “monitor tour,” a discounted-fare format where a company gathers consumer feedback in exchange for a lower price, which is part of why fans expected it to be cheap.
The thread’s disagreement wasn’t over whether ¥33,000 is a lot of money in the abstract — it’s over what that price is supposed to buy. Posters who called it fair were pricing it as a normal bus-tour day trip; posters who called it a “shakedown” were pricing it against fan-event norms (two-shot photos, handshake lines, a live set), none of which this tour includes, and against the fact that every listed stop is free to the public anyway. A third group just noted the meeting point effectively forces an overnight stay near Ise, since no same-day train from Tokyo arrives in time — making the real cost of attending considerably higher than the sticker price once travel and lodging are added in, a point the thread raised but never priced out.
*This article is an excerpt and summary compiled from the 5ch (Hello! Project) thread “Notice: Registration Open for “JR Tokai’s ‘Come On Over to Ise’ Campaign Presents: Ise Suzuran Guides You! Sacred Site Pilgrimage — Ise Full-Enjoyment Monitor Tour”.”
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