Contents tourism: background, context, and future

ABSTRACT

This introductory essay shows a brief overview of issues discussed by previous contents tourism studies to provide the basic theoretical framework on analyzing contents tourism phenomena in the age of transmedia, multi-use of contents. Contents Tourism is a Japanese word designating tourism which is stimulated by Popular Culture. Under the present circumstances, fan tourists, as well as contents businesses and local authorities/communities, are all expressing their creativity in the context of tourism and delivering their contents through a variety of media. These creative activities by each actor increasingly blur their previous relationships, resulting in the formation of relatively loosely-bound communities transcending affiliations and nationalities, sharing contents as a communication tool. In other words, the relationships between the host and guests are blurred and a community connected by contents and transcending previous differences has been formed. From this point of view, in this special issue, we will explore the development of contents tourism in Japan and its trans-cultural global influences, as well as comparable developments in other countries, focusing especially on the creativity of contents tourism and the growth of ‘tribes’ of fans.

KEYWORDS:

• Contents tourism
• performance
• pilgrimage
• narrative world
• media
• mediatization
• creative fandom
• popular culture

Introduction

Contents Tourism is a Japanese word [コンテンツツーリズム] designating tourism which is stimulated by Popular Culture (Seaton, Yamamura, Sugawa-Shimada, & Jang, 2017), including aspects of religion, mythology, folklore, popular literature especially manga and anime, TV and internet drama, and creative beliefs – broadcast often on electronic media and on the internet, originally for Japanese youth culture. It is now found in all societies but the concept and practice was invented, developed and primarily researched in Japan. Our volume will explore developments in Japan and trans-cultural influences, and comparable developments in other countries. The creativity of contents tourism culture crosses media (e.g. Banana Yoshimoto's ‘youth novels’ of the 1980s-90s) but often segments age groups, gender and sex preferences; and its creativity stems from audiences (fans, participants, cosplay) as much as creators (e.g. Comiket exchanges). This creativity is enhanced by commercial and governmental stakeholders. Contents tourism may bring foreigners to Japan (or Korea) for their unique and welcoming rituals, performances and pilgrimages, or start within other countries by direct imitation and stimulation of Japanese forms and actions (e.g. SNH48 in China, or Love Live! In China and Korea). These creative East Asian centers have become destinations for ardent young ‘fans’ from Europe (Sabre, 2016) and the USA (Clyde, Lee, this volume). Independent cases of contents tourism emerge in multi-media celebrations of e.g. minority ethnic cultures such as the San Yi ‘Ashima’ in Yunnan (Ge & Swain, 2017) or the Acadian ‘Evangeline’ of Nova Scotia and Louisiana (Ross, 2016). Comparative analyses over space and time reveal what forms of contents, creativity and media structures are culturally specific or generalizable and what sociocultural and technological contexts produce changes over time.

The focus of this special issue is contemporary contents tourism, based mainly on the stories and characters of manga, anime, the Internet, and young peoples’ ‘virtual world,’ rather than being commercially or geopolitically driven cases. The issue's components are as follows: the artists/creators who may or may not be professionals, distribution media which may be broadcast programs or interactive media, the fans who admire and attribute special qualities to the fictional beings and places, the tour, the (self) organized travel, and the ritualized performances, often considered pilgrimages (Jang, 2015) at the chosen destinations. These performances usually involve cosplay [costume play], that is, fans dressing up as or for the fictional characters.

These forms of contents tourism differ according to age groups, especially as a kind of rebellion or detachment of the (unmarried, underemployed) youth from older people. There is also a strong gender component with different personages and ‘cults’ appealing to different genders. One prime icon is the proto-adolescent female figure engendering moe [burning, attraction] among young people of both genders but tending towards pseudo-romantic attraction for ‘middle-aged and older males’ (Yamamura, 2008). There are more specialized programs, ‘cults,’ and events appealing to narrower gender audiences. For instance, Yaoi-con features homo-erotic male figures which are designed to [and] in fact attract and fascinate – and arouse female ‘fans’ (Uzama, 2011) and this concept has become popular abroad, especially in the United States, where an annual convention has usually been held in California since 2007 (Stevenson, 2008).

In this special issue, we will explore the development of contents tourism in Japan and its trans-cultural global influences, as well as comparable developments in other countries, focusing especially on the creativity of contents tourism and the growth of ‘tribes’ of fans. There is increasing interest in this topic. For instance, in 2015, an English scientific journal Japan Forum put together special articles concerning contents tourism in the Special Edition 27(1). Additionally, there are several major English language publications such as Beeton, Yamamura, and Seaton (2013), Seaton et al. (2017), and Yamamura and Seaton (2020 forthcoming) on this topic.

Definition of contents tourism

The term ‘contents tourism’ is a Japanese-English term that was first defined by the Japanese government in 2005 [many Japanese words are borrowed from foreign languages] for a tourism development policy (Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, Transport; Ministry of Economy, Trade, and Industry; Agency for Cultural Affairs, 2005). Since then, the term has been broadly used in tourism and media studies in Japan, and today, contents tourism is an important topic in the economic, sociological, geographical, and cultural sectors of Japan.

Many researchers, such as Masubuchi (2010), Yamamura (2011), Okamoto (2013), Beeton et al. (2013), and Seaton et al. (2017), have attempted to define the term ‘contents tourism.’ For example, Seaton et al. (2017, p.3) defined contents tourism as ‘travel behavior motivated fully or partially by narratives, characters, locations, and other creative elements of popular culture forms, including film, television dramas, manga, anime, novels, and computer games.’ Basically, it is tourism that is founded on popular culture, not only among young people in Japan but among older tourists too who continually demonstrate ‘fascination with their own (and others’) versions of popular culture’ and the different meanings attached to them (Beeton et al., 2013, p. 151).

The term ‘contents’ used in the field of contents tourism studies, has been popularized since around the 1990s among Japanese contents industries. Therefore, the term ‘contents’ is generally understood as ‘information that has been produced and edited in some form’, is distributed via media, and ‘brings enjoyment when it is consumed’ (Okamoto, 2013, pp. 40–41). In particular, it usually refers to film, music, drama, literary art, photography, manga, anime, and videogames and so on.

Previous contents tourism research studies have focused on broad aspects of religion, mythology, folklore, popular literature especially manga and anime, TV and internet drama, and creative beliefs. On the surface, these studies appear to be almost the same as previous media-format oriented tourism research studies such as literature tourism, film tourism, or TV drama tourism, which focus on a specific single medium that induces tourism.

However, unlike previous research studies, contents tourism itself focuses ‘on contents rather than media formats’ (Seaton et al., 2017, p. 265) and regards ‘the site as a form of media’ (Seaton et al., 2017, p. 267). This approach is more suitable for analyzing trans- or cross media experiences of tourists in the mixed media age, for example, tourists’ practice of cross-referencing among the location sites of anime, anime contents, and the original manga.

Cross-cultural and trans-national perspective of contents tourism

As mentioned above, because the concept has been invented, highly developed, and primarily researched in Japan (see Seaton et al., 2017), previous studies on contents tourism have mainly focused on Japanese youth culture, especially aspects of the so- called otaku (Japanese for ‘nerd’ or ‘geek’) culture (e.g. Okamoto, 2015; Yamamura, 2008). In addition, these studies have very limited information on the trans-cultural influences of Japanese pop culture and contents tourism culture on other countries, and comparable developments in these countries.

However, technically, the contents tourism phenomenon or practice may be present in all societies and cultures. Therefore, as Beeton et al. (2013) mentioned, by ‘looking at popular cultural tourism in terms of its content and meaning, we can take the notion of “contents tourism” beyond Japan, using it as a framework’ in identifying ‘the relationship between tourism and the culture of the day in other cultures and parts of the world’ (Beeton et al., 2013, p. 151).

The creativity of a contents tourism culture crosses media, but often segments age groups, gender and sex preferences; and its creativity stems from audiences (fans, participants, cosplayers, etc.) as much as creators (e.g. Comiket exchanges in Yamamura's article in this issue). This innovation is enhanced by commercial and governmental stakeholders. As contributors mentioned in the articles in this issue, contents tourism may bring foreigners to the contents tourism destinations, such as Japan, Korea, and Taiwan for their unique and affable rituals, performances, and pilgrimages, or start within other countries by direct imitation and stimulation of Japanese forms and actions (e.g. SNH48 in China, or Love Live! in China and Korea and Korea in Jang's article in this issue).

These creative East Asian centers have become destinations for ardent young ‘fans’ from Europe (Sabre, 2016) and the USA (Clyde, Lee, in this volume). Independent cases of contents tourism emerge in multi-media celebrations of minority ethnic cultures such as the San Yi ‘Ashima’ in Yunnan (Ge & Swain, 2017) and the Acadian ‘Evangeline’ of Nova Scotia and Louisiana (Ross, 2016). Comparative analyses over time will reveal the forms of contents, creativity, and media structures that are culturally specific, or generalizable, and the sociocultural and technological contexts that cause changes over time.

Not all contents tourism is esoteric or limited to Japanese fans. ‘Power Spot’ tourism is a Japanese spiritual craze practiced in certain locations and spiritual destinations engendering pilgrims or worshipers in places that are not necessarily celebrated by Japanese traditional religions (Suga, 2010). While this relates culturally to and overlaps with Japan's animistic Shinto (the religion of 8 million kami [gods]), it has attracted its own fan groups, and promoted visual consumption lifestyles such as Yama girls. It also bears resemblance to the European-derived Geo-caching (Gillin & Gillin, 2010) which is also practiced in Japan by tourists and Japanese alike.

Above all, anecdotal evidence and preliminary research suggest that similar contents tourism phenomena are growing in East Asia (McCarthy, 2016), the USA, and Europe. Contents Tourism, as we are treating it, is another manifestation of Soft Power and Globalization, alongside Japanese films, manga comics and anime, and J-Pop music, as well as Hanryu [Hallyu ‘Korean Wave’] which includes Korean creative productions such as K-Drama (first on TV, then on the Internet), K-Pop music and Manhwa (Korean cartoons, like manga and anime). These in turn followed decades of Western (usually American or English) pop music which is often multi-media, including live performances (tours) and recordings of many kinds, TV shows, movies, records (discs) and sheet music.

New forms of technically enabled cross-cultural communications in multiple channels of electronic media (and travel) impel and attract audiences, often designated as ‘Fans’ when their interests are persistent and shared with like-minded peer groups. These recent phenomena have come to resemble older forms of sociality, such as cults, pilgrims and religions, as recognized by the fans and the media.

While these new media have sharply curtailed the former dominance of face to face (and later written) communications, by providing substitutes and simulacra, they have also brought people together celebrating their common presence as fans and audiences, and in many cases bringing people from distant cultures into personal contact and relationships (papers by Clyde, Min and Sabre 2016). [So] In this way the media and globalization have stretched the anthropological concept of ‘contact zones’ (Pratt, 1991, p. 34) defined as ‘… social spaces where cultures meet, clash and grapple with each other, often in contexts of highly asymmetrical relations of power, such as colonialism, slavery, or their aftermaths as they lived out in many parts of the world today.’ Contents Tourism, along with other creative projects, sees the whole interconnected world as a new series of contact zones, where former relations of inequality and domination are replaced by enthusiastic acceptance and mutual enjoyment.

Potential of the contents tourism approach

An essential difference of the contents tourism approach from previous closely related fields of tourism studies such as film tourism studies is its acknowledgment of the current situation, or its stance, that contents are not only connected to a specific media format but also ordinarily to multi-media used simultaneously in the information society or highly mediatized society today.

One of the features of the contents tourism approach is focusing on contents (narrative worlds) that are multi-used by various media. Previous related research fields such as film-induced tourism and literature tourism focus on specific media formats, for example, film-induced tourism studies focus on film, and literature tourism studies focus on literature.

However, there is an increasing number of cases, that cannot easily be analyzed by the previous approaches, because it is very common for content to be multi-used by several media simultaneously. Media and information today is diverse and highly developed. Tourism and tourist practice/behavior has also changed dramatically. The contents tourism approach has huge potential to analyze and understand these new phenomena/issues of modern tourism (Seaton et al., 2017).

However, certain narratives, styles or contents are more or less well broadcast by different media – e.g. visual, sound, 3-D, etc. [Yet to be analyzed]. For instance, the same narrative may appeal to different audiences depending on how it is mediatized.

In this sense, contents tourism studies as a tool for understanding emerging tourism issues in the information society has been dealing with two specific mediatization phenomena as Beeton et al. (2013, p. 150) pointed out. They have observed two main phenomena that had become obvious in tourism as specific cases of the above-mentioned diversification of media and multi-use of contents: mediatization of tourist sites and mediatization of experiences or creation of tourists/fans.

Mediatization of tourist sites

According to this phenomenon, physical sites derive meaning from contents and they become media sites in which contents are distributed and consumed. In other words, it clarifies the formation process of mediascape (Appadurai, 1996), imaginary places (Reijnders, 2011, p. 17), tourist imaginaries (Gravari-Barbas & Graburn, 2012), and tourism imaginaries (Gravari-Barbas & Graburn, 2016) in previous studies, by analyzing the multi-use process of contents among media including physical sites.

Regarding the multi-use process of contents, as they (narrative worlds) are reinterpreted, reconstructed, and reedited every time they are multi-used in other media, fans and tourists should try to confirm correspondence and dissonance by cross-referencing contents between media. This is the same point of view that Gravari-Barbas and Graburn (2012) mentioned in regard to ‘tourist imaginaries,’ ‘Images and imaginaries shift continuously between correspondence and dissonance which either confirm by the closeness or illustrate the gap between the “real” and its representation. These correspondences or dissonances can provoke feelings of discomfort or pleasure, attraction or repulsion’ (Gravari-Barbas & Graburn, 2012, pp. 2–3). Today, as media are diversified and orientation toward information progresses, these ‘correspondences’ and ‘dissonances’ are also taking on a more complicated aspect. It also can be said that contents tourism studies are challenges to understanding structures of these cross-references, by focusing on contents per se rather than media formats, and observing the process of multi-use of contents (the transmedia process of reinterpretation, reediting, and recreation of contents).

Based on the above point of view, many cases of location tourism behavior, such as film-induced tourism, or ‘anime tourism’ (Yamamura, 2011) can be explained in the context of contents tourism as cross-referencing behavior between narrative worlds depicted in film or anime as media and also narrative worlds expressed in the locations (physical sites) as media.

Mediatization of experiences and creation of tourists/fans

This phenomenon means that tourists create content based on their tourist experience, or fans reinterpret original contents to create fanfiction, and they exhibit them in a variety of media, with the rise of the ‘prosumer’ (Toffler, 1980) as a backdrop. Today their creative activities cannot be overlooked and they play a huge and important role in constructing images of tourist destinations. Contents tourism studies have also been observing these processes of realization of fans’ creativity and of mediatization of tourist experience and fans’ creative elements.

Jenkins (2006), Lyman, Mizuko, Thorne, and Carter (2009), and Steinberg (2012) among others have discussed the aspect of creating a fan culture or fan community, focusing on fanfictions, collaborative problem solving, circulation of content, and so on. However, they basically analyzed them from a media study perspective and offered very few descriptions of tourism phenomena.

Based on previous media studies related to fan creativity, Norris (2012) presented a noteworthy research article on the expression of fans’ creativity in tourist sites. Norris referred to tourism related media works such as film as ‘media tourism’ and discussed the creativity of media tourists as fans. While he used the term ‘media tourism’ in his article, it is possible and reasonable to categorize it as one of the contents tourism studies, because he discussed the process of understanding and editing narrative worlds by fan tourists focusing on several media formats including physical tourist sites.

On the other hand, Ishimori and Yamamura (2009) and Okamoto (2013), who provided early representative works among contents tourism studies in Japan, mentioned the mediatization process of tourist experiences and fans’ creative elements focusing on the expression of fans’ creativity. Ishimori and Yamamura (2009) pointed out that prosumers are emerging in the tourism sphere and becoming actively involved in the development process of images of tourist destinations and regional economy from the perspective of civilization studies, applying the discussion on ‘prosumer’ by Toffler (1980). They dubbed this tourism involving tourist creativity as ‘the next generation tourism’ (Ishimori & Yamamura, 2009). Okamoto (2013) picked up a case where fans of an anime were involved in the local traditional festival and community development activities of the tourist destination, and pointed out that their driving force to join the local community activities could be the creativity of fan culture to create fanfictions, to name those fan culture based tourism as ‘n-th creation tourism’ (Okamoto, 2013).

Limitation of previous studies on contents tourism: the necessity of a creative fandom perspective

From the above, contents tourism studies can be defined as the analysis of the process of construction/reconstruction of mediascape or tourism imaginaries through understanding the changes of tourism sphere, tourism space, tourism system, tourist practice, and ethnographic experience, focusing on two typical phenomena in the age of transmedia, multi-use of contents: mediatization of tourist sites and mediatization of experiences or creation of tourists/fans. The series of previous contents tourism studies tried to deal with these issues and attained some progress in clarifying a true picture of tourism in the information age.

However, previous studies have overlooked an important point in grasping and analyzing tourism phenomena. In other words, we should add one more important issue to the above-mentioned framework of contents tourism studies. This issue increasingly blurs the lines between the main actors of contents tourism (tourists = fans, contents businesses, local authorities) (Seaton et al., 2017, p. 39).

As mentioned above, previous contents tourism studies often discussed the creative behavior of fan tourists, the mediatization of their experience, or creative elements (e.g. Norris, 2012, 2013; Okamoto, 2013, 2015, etc.). However, as the case studies of this special issue show, under the present circumstances fan tourists, as well as contents businesses and local authorities/communities, are all expressing their creativity in the context of tourism and delivering their contents through a variety of media. These creative activities by each actor increasingly blur their previous relationships, resulting in the formation of relatively loosely-bound communities transcending affiliations and nationalities, sharing contents as a communication tool. In other words, the relationships between the host and guests in current tourist sites, or between the three main players of contents tourism, are blurred and a community connected by contents and transcending previous differences has been formed.

At the moment, there are a few studies discussing this issue. For example, Ishimori and Yamamura (2009) pointed out that the relationships between producers and consumers of tourist products or information, and that between hosts and guests, are becoming blurred based on the concept of Toffler's ‘prosumer’ (Toffler, 1980). However, there is no theoretical progress on this point of view in contents tourism studies beyond this.

Today, anybody can create images and information related to tourist destinations and release them through a variety of media, especially social media. In other words, anybody can be a creator of mediascape and tourist/tourism imaginaries. This situation cannot be analyzed and sufficiently understood using previous approaches of tourism studies such as ‘hosts and guests’ in tourism anthropology or the three players of contents tourism in contents tourism studies. Therefore, it is necessary to construct a new framework of approach. In this sense, it is important to focus on the formation process of a new community through communication that utilizes contents beyond position and nationalities. In this special issue, we will focus on the formation process of these communities, just as Yamamura's paper hypothetically refers to these communities as ‘creative fandom.’

Meanwhile, examining fields other than contents tourism, such as transdisciplinary studies in sociology, anthropology, and media/tourism, reveals several important ideas and concepts that are closely related to issues pertaining to contents tourism. We should refer to these and integrate them into a contents tourism framework to develop a generalizable model. For example, concepts such as ‘mediatized rituals’ by Cottle (2006), ‘performative authenticity’ by Knudsen and Waade (2010), and ‘performance turn’ by Larsen (2010) highlight the key issues of contents tourism phenomena. We can apply Cottle's idea of mediatized rituals¹ and Knudsen and Waade's performative authenticity² to analyze the relationship between media and the narrative world, and contents tourist behavior. Furthermore, the shift from ‘the “tourist gaze” approach to other representative approaches implies that ‘tourism demands new metaphors based more on being, doing, touching and seeing rather than just “seeing”’ (Larsen, 2010, p. 319). This is consistent with the media mix or transmedia approach of contents tourism that embraces various types of media including a ‘site’ or ‘event’ other than visual media such as film.

In our which focus in part on the internationalization of contents tourism, we note the different kinds and degrees of participation in our studies of different nations. For instance, Nishijima's Taiwanese fans visit and enjoy an almost total immersion in the Japanese contents tourism scene almost as though they were not in a ‘foreign country’, whereas Ge and Swain's Chinese domestic fans practice imitation at a distance [e.g. cosplay, dressing up] with little perceived creative input as fans, almost as though they really did not know the Japanese ‘prosumer’ model. Jang's study of Korean fans illustrates another case where the tourists do perform junrei (pilgrimage rituals) but distance restricts their creative input. Thus further research is needed on ‘digital acculturation³’ or diffusion between (sub-)cultures of participants, focusing on such factors as geopolitical distance, cultural compatibility and aptitude for innovative uptake, perhaps related to educational systems or cosmopolitan opportunities.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Nelson Graburn was educated in the classics and natural sciences at the King's School, Canterbury, and he earned his BA in Social Anthropology at Cambridge (1958). He attended McGill (MA 1960) and the University of Chicago (PhD 1963) in Cultural Anthropology. After Postdoc at Northwestern University, doing research on Inuit-Naskapi/Cree interethnic relations (1963-64), he was hired at U C Berkeley where he has taught Anthropology for 54 years. He served as Curator of North America in the Hearst Museum since 1972 and co-chair of Canadian Studies since 1976. He has held visiting positions in Canada, France, UK, Japan, and Brazil and has lectured at more than forty universities in China. He has lived in twenty-two Inuit communities (1959–2014) in the Canadian Arctic (and Greenland and Alaska) doing research on kinship, cultural change, art and identity, and has carried out research on domestic tourism, multiculturalism and heritage in Japan (since 1974) and China (since 1991). His books and edited volumes include Ethnic and Tourist Arts (1976); Japanese Domestic Tourism (1983); The Anthropology of Tourism (1983); Tourism Social Sciences [with Jafar Jafari] (1991); Multiculturalism in the New Japan (2008); 旅游人类学论文集 [Anthropology in the Age of Tourism] (2009); Tourism and Glocalization: Perspectives in East Asian Studies [with Han Min] (2010); Tourism Imaginaries: Anthropological Approaches [with Noel Salazar] (2014), Tourism Imaginaries at the Disciplinary Crossroads [with Maria Gravari-Barbas] (2016), Tourism in (Post)Socialist Eastern Europe [with Magdalena Banaszkiewicz and Sabina Owsianowska] (2017), and Cultural Tourism Movements (2018) [with Alexis Bunten].

Takayoshi Yamamura is a professor of the Center for Advanced Tourism Studies, Hokkaido University, Japan, and he holds a PhD in urban engineering from the University of Tokyo. He is one of the pioneers of ‘Contents Tourism’ and ‘Anime Induced Tourism’ studies in Japan and he has served the Chair of several governmental advisory boards such as the Meeting of International Tourism Promotion through Animation Contents of The Japan Tourism Agency, ANIME-Tourism Committee of Saitama Prefecture, etc. His main English work includes Contents Tourism and Pop Culture Fandom: Mediatized Culture, Fandoms and the International Tourist Experience (co-edited with P. Seaton, 2020), Contents Tourism in Japan: Pilgrimages to ‘Sacred Sites’ of Popular Culture (with Seaton et al., 2017), ‘Pop culture contents and historical heritage’ Contemporary Japan (30.2), ‘Contents Tourism and Local Community Response’, Japan Forum Special Edition (27.1). Moreover, he also has important track record on Indigenous Heritage Tourism Studies, that receives international acclaim, such as: ‘Authenticity, ethnicity and social transformation at World Heritage Sites’ In D. R. Hall (ed.) Tourism and Transition (2004), ‘Dongba Art in Lijiang, China’ In C. Ryan and M. Aicken (Eds.) Indigenous Tourism (2005). http://yamamuratakayoshi.com/en/

Notes

1 Cottle (2006, p. 415) mentioned ‘mediatized rituals are those exceptional and performative media phenomena that serve to sustain and/or mobilize collective sentiments and solidarities on the basis of symbolization and a subjunctive orientation to what should or ought to be’. phenomena that serve to sustain and/or mobilize collective sentiments and solidarities on the basis of symbolization and a subjunctive orientation to what should or ought to be’.

2 Knudsen and Waade (2010,15) mentioned ‘all kinds of tourism and experiential designs that offer the possibility to live, enact, or re-enact the experience and living conditions of others are, potentially at least, offering the possibility to understand the other through the body’.

3 Digital acculturation is a marketing term indicating how quickly a new employee or a customer becomes competent at the digital or internet system required for successful transactions.