Tourism Research on Japan—Overview on Major Trends: Japanese and English-language Materials

ABSTRACT

Research articles and books on tourism and Japan published in both Japanese and English are reviewed based on online databases. In Japanese, 2,463 books and 727 government publications (1940–2016), and 471 articles published in two journals (1961–2015) are identified, and in English, 21 books and 7 book chapters (1983–2013), and 224 articles in 97 journal titles (1975–2016) are examined. The review had two aims: to identify main research trends in Japan and globally, and to examine how the overall theme of this special issue—regions, communities and places in Japan—are portrayed (or not) in the existing studies within the materials located with the keyword tourism or kankō (in Japanese). General trends and specific aspects are identified and explored independently as well as comparatively between Japanese and English-language publications, providing an overview of and potential future directions in this field of study.

KEYWORDS:

• Japan
• tourism
• English
• Japanese
• trends
• online database

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCID

Kumi Kato http://orcid.org/0000-0002-1783-8155

Notes

1 English-language articles published in Japanese journals and books translated into Japanese from other languages are not included in this review.

2 Although the term tsūrizumu is used often interchangeably with kankō in Japanese, and the result included some publications with this term, this review only used kankō as the search word.

3 NDL catalogue retrieved from http://iss.ndl.go.jp/ (9 August 2016).

4 The Journal of Tourism Research has 350 articles published between volume 1 in 1961 and volume 56, number 1 in 2015. The total number of JAST excludes articles written by foreign language, equivalent to essay and research note. As for The Tourism Studies, 140 articles published between volume 1 in 1987 and volume 27, number one in 2015 are targeted. The numbers of article might have been counted twice or thrice if the article title has plural words listed in the table.

5 Affiliation does not indicate the author’s home country or nationality, and in many cases, the affiliation was during a study or fellowship period.