Mayor Mufi Hannemann is scheduled to leave today for a weeklong trip to Japan designed to attract Japanese visitors and business to O'ahu.

"We want to tell the leaders in our most important foreign market that there are many new reasons to visit Honolulu, to hold conventions here and to do business here," Hannemann said.

The trip will include presentations to Japanese travel industry firms by the mayor, the O'ahu Visitors Bureau, the Hawai'i Convention Center, and the Honolulu Film Office and Hawaii International Film Association. He said the trip will cost taxpayers $8,000 for his and an aide's travel expenses.

Hannemann also is scheduled to visit three state-of-the-art rail transit sites, see presentations on waste-energy conversion and recycling, and meet with some of Japan's top business leaders as well as Shintaro Ishihara, the governor of Tokyo.

The mayor returns next Saturday. Three members of the City Council are using their travel budgets to visit Japan for part of the trip. According to Hannemann, Rod Tam is going for the whole trip and council chairman Donovan Dela Cruz and Todd Apo will join part of the trip on their way back from a conference in Singapore.