English villages in the British Hills

Although native and highly proficient speakers of English can be found all over Asia, many Asians seek to learn the language by immersing themselves in a ‘native-speaking’ culture. Where better than Britain, the small island where a minor Germanic tongue was gradually transformed by absorbing huge amounts of French and Latin vocabulary and then spread around the globe by commercial and naval power? But Britain is too expensive and distant for most Asians. Never mind. For Anglophile Japanese, a three-hour journey into the mountains north of Tokyo brings them to British Hills.

This impressive collection of houses, built painstakingly in various historical styles with imported materials, boasts a medieval-style hall, bedrooms where modern royalty have slept and a pub where you might run into the British ambassador. Its Latin motto is Pax per Linguam (Peace through Language).

Built in the early 1990s by the Sano Foundation (which owns several educational institutes including Kanda Foreign Languages University), the venture underwent many years of financial difficulty. But its fortunes were turned around by an American tragedy: after the 9.11 attacks many Japanese got nervous about going overseas, and flocked to a “Britain that anyone can visit without a passport.”

Despite the unintended gift from the US, John Renaldy, who runs British Hills with a discipline acquired in the army, never employs Americans. Ideally, cultural instructors, receptionists, cooks and waiters come from the UK. If there is a shortage, Australians, New Zealanders and Canadians will do. But no Americans, with their “lazy English”.

The main weekday visitors are high school students taking English courses while studying British history and customs. Weekend activities there might include anything from seminars for businessmen to calligraphy classes for housewives. Or even weddings.

Over in Korea, another cultural transplant is facing its own decisions about how to make a profit. English Village is less than an hour north of Seoul, close to the DMZ. It too has gone for a British theme, with a model of Stonehenge outside its castle-like gates. But here you do need a ‘passport’. Built by Gyeongi province for local schoolchildren, but now looking to broaden its income base, English Village encourages visitors to use English by creating the illusion that they really are going abroad, with a ‘check-in counter’ at the entrance, coffee shops staffed by Romanians (well, they probably speak better English than most visitors) and even a branch of a Korean bank with English signs and English-speaking counter clerks. The typical visitors are high school students on ten-day courses taught by foreigners. There are also day-trippers seeking an educational theme park.

Just as the creators of English Village made countless trips to British Hills to get ideas (“They still come,” sighs John), educators from around Korea turn up in Gyeongi to see what they might learn. When he was president, Roh Moo-hyun announced plans for a huge English village on Jeju Island as a “substitute for overseas English study trips.” Internationally famous Koreans such as Manchester United’s Park Ji Sung were employed to publicise the project.

Behind these attempts to recreate ‘English culture’ is a genuine belief that Asians should not have to cross the globe, often at considerable financial hardship, to immerse themselves in English. But some believe they will never provide more than superficial cultural experiences, much like Thames Town, a pastiche of an English village being built near Shanghai for very rich Chinese wanting an ‘English lifestyle’ without any intention of speaking English. Meanwhile poor but studious Chinese continue to practise their English with each other at the ‘English corners’ which spring up in large parks everywhere at weekends.