Pacific Magazine > Magazine > January 1, 2008

From The Publisher

Who Would Have Thought?

A Fijian Teaches Japanese About Hospitality

By FLOYD K.TAKEUCHI

Sharp-eyed readers will have had a déjà-vu moment when they saw the cover of this issue. Our subject, Ruby Ah Yuk of Suva, Fiji, is making her second appearance on the cover of Pacific Magazine in less than two years.

Ah Yuk first graced our cover in September 2005, when Editor in Chief Samantha Magick and I did a major overview of Japan’s role in the Pacific Islands. We felt then, and feel even more strongly today, that Tokyo, Taipei and Beijing are where much of the Pacific Islands’ future lies.
 
In 2005, when we first met her, Ah Yuk was on the Food and Beverage staff of The Four Seasons Hotel at Chinzan-so, one of Tokyo’s finest hotels. Her fluency in Japanese and English, and her island charm and strong people skills, marked her as a promising young staffer at the white-glove hotel. We felt that Ah Yuk was headed for bigger and better things, and believed she represented a growing tie between the islands and Japan.

We were right, but even in our most optimistic moments in 2005 we couldn’t have guessed how far the young Fijian would go at The Four Seasons. Today, she’s in charge of training all new staff at that hotel (most of whom are Japanese) in The Four Seasons’ standards of hospitality.  Those are among the highest hotelier standards in the world. Couple that with the Japanese insistence on quality and obsessive-compulsive standards of service, and you get a sense of the tremendously important role Ruby Ah Yuk plays at The Four Seasons Hotel at Chinzan-so.

We caught up with Ah Yuk a few months ago in Tokyo. I was mentor-trainer to three senior regional journalists who were in Japan as Sasakawa Pacific Islands Journalism Fellows. Pacific Magazine and the Sasakawa Pacific Island Nations Fund are partners in the Fellowship. It brings promising island journalists to Japan to broaden their understanding of Japan-related issues, and sharpen their professional skills.

This year’s Fellows—Moffat Mamu from the Solomon Star, Suzanne Chutaro from the Marshall Islands Journal, and Agnes Donato of the Saipan Tribune—met Ah Yuk at the hotel. They were stunned, both by her quiet charm as well as the realization of the role she plays in upholding the hotel’s industry-leading standards of hospitality.

We are featuring in this issue some of their stories about the visitor industry and Japan, a subject of considerable interest to any Pacific Island that is trying to be a player in regional tourism.

While I find all of their stories interesting and important, I am drawn back to the tale of Ruby Ah Yuk’s rise from a college student in Japan struggling to learn Japanese to a manager at a top-tier hotel. Imagine, a Pacific Islander teaching Japanese about hospitality at one of Tokyo’s finest hotels. Who would have thought that it could be possible?

At a time when the Pacific Islands seem to be pressed on all sides by problems and crises, it is good to remember that we have locally-grown talent such as Ruby Ah Yuk. She’s blending the best of the Pacific Islands with Japan. The result is world-class standards of hospitality in the highly competitive business of international tourism. She gives me hope that our future in the Pacific can be bright, indeed.