Henn-na Hotel: Kawaii Robots and “the Ultimate in Efficiency”

By Teresa Heffernan

The bus ride from Nagasaki airport to the Henn-na Hotel in Huis Ten Bosch is lovely–we pass rice fields and orange trees laden with fruit, the hills are densely forested, lush and green, and the magnificent Omura Bay is calm and sparkling. Huis Ten Bosch Co., in Sasebo city, opened in 1992 as an “eco-friendly future city” with a seventeenth-century Dutch-themed resort town and amusement park. It covers 375 acres, cost $3bn and is described by Richard Hendy in his wonderful blog as “the greatest artifact by far of those crazy eighties years.”

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