‘Cool Japan’ – a hot research topic: tourism geography in Japan

How do changes in the ‘real’ world of tourism affect the academic world? Will an increase in international tourism open up an inward-looking research community? Do more tourists lead to more tourism research? Japan offers interesting insight into these questions. The country's mainly domestic tourism market that has recently been flooded by international tourists, thus positioning tourism as a major growth sector and challenging a rather fledgling discipline dominated by consulting, travel agency think tanks and a tradition of detailed case studies.

Although Japanese tourism has been the subject of cultural, historical and anthropological studies by non-Japanese authors, in the Japanese literature, tourism has received less attention than expected, apart from waves of interest during a leisure boom in the 1970s and a period of heavy investment in tourism facilities during the so-called bubble economy of the late 1980s (Funck & Cooper, 2013, p. 6). As late as 2011, Kureha pointed out that research in tourism geography in Japan has concentrated on individual destinations and neglected tourism behavior due to dearth of available data (Kureha, 2011, pp. 18–19). In higher education, some universities offer schools or courses in tourism in general. Tourism geography, however, is hardly visible and concentrated in a few graduate schools in the capital city area. Several academic societies focus on tourism, but they consist of a mixture of academic researchers, consultants, think tanks of travel agencies and members of the tourism industry. The biggest society, the Japan Institute of Tourism Research, increased its membership from 209 in 1989 to 526 in 2000 and to 1006 in 2017; of these, only 7.9% gave geography as one of their research fields.

However, recent years have seen an increase in presentations on tourism at geography conferences, a diversification of papers published, the foundation of new academic societies for tourism with a theoretical or specialized approach, the creation of new courses and an increase in faculty members across the country. In 2016, the number of international tourists had more than doubled from 10 million in 2013 to 24 million; inbound visitors outnumbered Japanese travelers going abroad for the first time in 2015. Although this increase seems to be the most obvious reason for the heightened academic interest in tourism, the annual review of articles in all disciplines of geography published by the Japanese Journal of Human Geography offers hints for the manifold factors behind this development.

The first factor could be categorized as cultural. While media have always played a strong role in domestic Japanese tourism, the spread of manga, anime and video games and their intimate connections have created new social phenomena summarized under the Japanese term of ‘contents tourism’. Obviously, this subject proves attractive for students, an age group that enjoys popular culture. As the Japanese government actively promotes such ‘contents’ abroad under the catchphrase of ‘Cool Japan’, they are shared among Asian youths and around the world. For example, in 2016, 17.7% of French visitors had visited sites of films, anime or manga while in Japan (Japan Tourism Agency, 2017). Destinations are eager to attract this new clientele that promises a diversification from the ageing domestic tourism market. According to Yamamura (2009), Internet and social media have transformed tourism in a way that destinations and tourists can create and spread their own contents independently and even transgress borders between hosts and guests, insiders and outsiders through their common interest in certain elements of popular culture. Because there exists no tourism without contents, Suzuki (2015, p. 55) rightly points out that the term ‘contents tourism’ is a typical phenomenon of a meaningless term used exclusively in the Japanese context. However, it has effectively raised the profile of domestic tourism research and proven useful as a framework to analyze the qualitative changes induced in tourism by new media development, as seen in Seaton, Yamamura, Suzuki-Shimada, and Jang (2017).

The second factor that affected tourism development and research equally was the triple-disaster of earthquake, tsunami and nuclear catastrophe in March 2011. While dampening travel to and within Japan and maybe even research on tourism that year (Amano, 2012, p. 52), in the long run, it revived expectations for the role of tourism in regional development (Kureha, 2014, p. 79) – in this case, reconstruction – and ignited a heated discussion on ‘Dark Tourism’. Questions whether tourism to the affected areas should be promoted or not, whether landmarks of disaster should be preserved to help future tourists and residents to understand the scale of the disaster or destroyed to delete the many sad memories and whether this kind of tourism should be classified as ‘dark’ were argued in the media as well as in academic presentations. Geographers argued – unsuccessfully – for the conservation of a ship that was lifted by the tsunami on top of a building; academics have pointed out the ‘dark’ aspects of natural disasters that often affect the weaker parts of society (Funck, 2014). These discussions crossed the border between academia and the media realm.

A third factor that ignited interest in tourism among geographers was the introduction of Geoparks to Japan. The concept of Geoparks is endorsed by UNESCO but their promotion and recognition is conducted by the Global Geoparks Network since 2004. In Japan, a first networking organization was set up by geologists in 2007, followed by the establishment of the Japanese Geopark Committee and Japanese Geopark Network in 2008 (Watanabe, 2014). Since then, each year special sessions on Geoparks have been included in the program of the Japanese Geographers Association (Mokudai, 2014). From the beginning, the network emphasized the active engagement of local administrations and local researchers, with the consequence that Geoparks were mainly promoted as a tool for regional development rather than for conservation and sustainable management of geological heritage (Watanabe, 2014, p. 7). For geographers, they offer a unique chance to apply their knowledge in the evaluation of geodiversity and in education for sustainable development, including educational tourism. As interest in Geoparks started from physical geography (Amano, 2012, p. 53), this theme also creates a bridge between human and physical geographers.

The fourth factor to make research on tourism more attractive for Japanese geographers is the availability of robust data and the improvement in analytical tools, i.e. GIS. Japanese geography favors quantitative methods over qualitative, and the lack in reliable data has been a severe handicap for the spread of tourism geography. This changed with the gradual improvement of tourism statistics since 2003, when the promotion of international tourism became official government policy (Funck & Cooper, 2013, p. 75). While problems of comparability among regions persist, data on overnight stays and travel consumption are now easily available as government statistics. However, it is the Big Data of traveler movements caught through GPS functions on mobile phones and car navigation systems or through the use of railway cards that make geographers’ hearts beat faster. Data made available – although at quite a price – by Japan's major mobile phone carriers or transport companies will finally offer geographers the possibility to track tourists’ movement in detail. This is especially important for international tourism, as Japanese destinations have yet to establish proper survey systems. Unfortunately, with these possibilities for new analysis, privacy issues take a backseat in the discussion of Big Data in tourism.

The rising interest in tourism in the academic and public realm and the establishment of tourism as an accepted subject of geographical research has been fueled by these factors as well as the soaring international tourism. However, exactly because there are so many new developments in tourism within Japan, Japanese tourism researchers still focus mainly on Japan. Also, due to the boom atmosphere in tourism and cooperation of researchers with local and regional governments, critical approaches are often neglected. Although tourism geographers increasingly participate in IGU and other international conferences, the internationalization of Japanese tourism is yet to be followed by a real internationalization of tourism research.