*Includes 100 color images.
Japanese manga, anime, music, cinema, television dramas, and computer games have gained many international fans. Recognizing the global appeal of Japanese popular culture, since the early 2000s the Japanese government has promoted popular culture exports and developed a national branding strategy using the slogan "Cool Japan." In 2004, the large numbers of Japanese people who visited South Korea after watching the Korean television drama Winter Sonata caught the Japanese government's attention. In 2005, the Japanese government officially recognized that Japanese popular culture had another potential: to increase international visitor numbers to Japan and energize the domestic tourism industry.
The term used in Japan to describe this form of tourism induced by popular culture is kontentsu tsurizumu, "contents tourism"--defined 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.
This book presents a comprehensive theoretical and historical overview of the phenomenon of contents tourism in Japan. Government, mass media, and scholarly interest in contents tourism is relatively new, and in its modern guise contents tourism behavior is closely associated with digital technology, the Internet, and social media.
The rich history of derivative works, parodies, and multiuse of the same contents in a media mix enriched by the highly popular formats of anime and manga led Japanese scholars to seek a different approach to analyzing the links between popular culture and tourism.
Scholars and those working in creative industries settled on the concept of "contents," and focused on asking how and why particular creative elements resonated with fans and how fans' interests in a "narrative world"--whether fantasy, fictional, or even largely non-fictional--could inspire travel to actual places, which came to be referred to as "sacred sites" by fans.
This book presents a vast range of works, artists and contents that have generated "sacred sites" across the length and breadth of Japan. Some sets of contents trigger tourism over only a short time period, while others have been inducing tourism for decades or even centuries.
Contents Tourism in Japan is a groundbreaking book in an important and rapidly emerging area of scholarly, media, political and business interest. It will be of interest primarily to scholars and practitioners with a specialization in tourism and media, but also to those studying contemporary popular culture in Japan and East Asia.
Author Biography:
Philip Seaton is a professor in the Research Faculty of Media and Communication, Hokkaido University, where he is the convenor of the Modern Japanese Studies Program. He holds a DPhil and MA from the University of Sussex and a BA from the University of Cambridge. Dr. Seaton's previous publications include Japan's Contested War Memories, Voices from the Shifting Russo-Japanese Border: Karafuto/Sakhalin, and Local History and War Memories in Hokkaido. He coedited a special issue of Japan Forum in 2015 "Japanese Popular Culture and Contents Tourism" and is editor-in-chief (along with Takayoshi Yamamura) of the International Journal of Contents Tourism. His website is www.philipseaton.net. Takayoshi Yamamura is a professor in the Center for Advanced Tourism Studies, Hokkaido University and holds a PhD in urban engineering from the University of Tokyo. He is one of the pioneering researchers of 'contents tourism' and 'anime induced tourism' studies in Japan. He has served as the Chair of several governmental advisory boards, such as the Meeting of International Tourism Promotion through Animation Contents of The Japan Tourism Agency and the ANIME-Tourism Committee of Saitama Prefecture. In addition to numerous publications in Japanese on contents tourism, Dr. Yamamura's English publications include "Contents Tourism and Local Community Response," Japan Forum (2015), and "The Mediatisation of Culture: Japanese contents tourism and popular culture" (with Sue Beeton and Philip Seaton) in Mediating the Tourist Experience: From Brochures to Virtual Encounters. His website is http: //yamamuratakayoshi.com/en/ Akiko Sugawa-Shimada is an associate professor in the Graduate School of Urban Innovation at Yokohama National University. She holds a PhD from University of Warwick and an MA from the University of Chicago. Dr. Sugawa-Shimada is the author of a number of books and articles on anime, manga, and cultural studies, including Girls and Magic: How Have Girl Heroes Been Accepted?, chapters in Japanese Animation: East Asian Perspectives and Teaching Japanese Popular Culture, and "Rekijo, Pilgrimage and 'Pop-Spiritualism': Pop-culture-induced Heritage Tourism of/for Young Women" in Japan Forum and "Interplay with Fantasy: 2.5-dimensional Culture as Performance, and Imagination" in Eureka. Her website is www.akikosugawa.2-d.jp.
