Are We Teaching Enough? A Literature Review on Sustainable Tourism Events and the Implications for Japanese Higher Education

ABSTRACT

This paper examines whether the tourism programs offered by the higher education institutions in Japan address the aspect of sustainability and corresponding concerns and challenges faced in the tourism industry. This study identifies the main issues based on thematic analysis from 62 sustainable tourism event publications identified based on key search terms and relevance. The findings highlight a major shortage in addressing the concerns found in the analysis which, shows that there is a need for the higher education institutions in Japan to revamp their existing curricula. There are strong critical voices that call for necessary reforms in management practices to include collaboration with residents. Given the importance the Japanese government has placed on the role of tourism for invigorating the economy and revitalizing rural communities, a lot must be done in higher education for tourism to be successfully, and sustainably managed.

KEYWORDS:

• Sustainable tourism event
• higher education
• tourism programs
• Japan
• thematic analysis

Data Availablity Statement

The data that support the findings of this study are openly available at the university websites, but to make it easy, the more than one hundred links have been summarized in this Excel file, which also contains details of each course (in Japanese). In addition, details on the database searches as well as included and excluded papers for the thematic analysis are displayed: https://www.dropbox.com/s/ooyx5vxa5mvqaab/university%20data%20public.xlsx?dl=0