My (Ghostwritten) Summer Vacation

By DAVID ELLIS/

The Japan Travel Bureau, the country's largest tourist agency, thinks of everything -- including an excuse for customers to make a trip. No one appreciates that more than legislators from Saitama Prefecture, who take annual "fact finding" trips to Europe. Besides arranging every aspect of those luxurious boondoggles, the bureau provides junketeers with a detailed memorandum to submit along with their expense accounts. It drones on for 60 eye-glazing pages and is numbingly titled A Report on European Urban Policy and the State of Local Administrative Affairs. To give the journal a thin veneer of originality, names and dates are changed each year. Yet every report begins "It is impossible to find the right words to describe such a priceless experience . . ." and concludes, "Seeing is believing."

With reporting by Sidney Urquhart