Japanese Popular Culture and Contents Tourism

Philip Seaton, Takayoshi Yamamura, Philip A. Seaton, Takayoshi Yamamura, Philip Seaton, Philip A. Seaton, Takayoshi Yamamura

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN:
  9780367029401
• eBook ISBN:
  9781315528670
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Asian Art

Contents tourism is tourism induced by the contents (narratives, characters, locations and other creative elements) of films, novels, games, manga, anime, television dramas and other forms of popular culture. Amidst the boom in global interest in Japanese popular culture, the utilization of popular culture to induce tourism domestically and internationally has been central to the "Cool Japan" strategy and, since 2005, government policy for local community revitalization. This book presents four main case studies of contents tourism: the phenomenon of "anime pilgrimage" to sites appearing in animated film; the travel behaviours and "pop-spiritualism" of female history fans to heritage sites; the collaboration between local community, fans and copyright holders that underpinned an anime-induced tourism boom in a small town north of Tokyo; and the large-scale economic impacts of tourism induced by NHK's annual samurai period drama (Taiga Drama). It is the first major collection of articles published in English about media-induced tourism in Japan using the "contents tourism" approach. This book will be of particular interest to students and researchers of media and tourism studies in Asia. This book was previously published as a special issue of Japan Forum.

Japanese Popular Culture and Contents Tourism – Introduction

PHILIP SEATON AND TAKAYOSHI YAMAMURA

Abstract: This introduction to the special issue on ‘Japanese Popular Culture and Contents Tourism’ places the four articles in theoretical and contextual perspective. Contents tourism is a theoretical concept that originated in Japan. Its closest counterpart in the English-language literature at present is film-induced tourism or media-induced tourism. Contents tourism is placed within the theoretical context of cultural tourism and the rationale for its focus on narratives, characters and other creative elements over media format (for example, cinema) is explained. The article then gives a brief chronological overview of how contents tourism has worked its way into the official language of government economic and tourism policy up to and including 2013.

This special edition brings together four articles on the topic of Japanese popular culture and contents tourism. Worldwide there is growing interest in the ways that films, novels, comics, games and other forms of popular culture act as tourism drivers, for example, when fans go to the locations of favourite television dramas, take studio tours in Hollywood, visit museums in the hometowns of famous authors or have their picture taken with Mickey Mouse at Disneyland. This special edition not only brings together some important case studies from Japan, but also highlights the theoretical contributions that those Japanese case studies and the Japanese scholarly literature on contents tourism have made.

In the English-language literature, the study of tourism induced by popular culture has often been broken down by media format, so there is film-induced tourism, TV tourism, literature tourism and so on (Beeton, Yamamura and Seaton 2013, p. 142). The field is also relatively young. The first major example of a film significantly affecting tourist behaviour is believed to have been the 1935 film The mutiny on the Bounty, which sparked an influx of tourists to Tahiti (Roesch 2009, p. 9). But it was not until 1996 that the then British Tourism Association ‘was the first tourism organization that tried to capitalize on film tourism through the publication of a movie map featuring locations from various films shot in Great Britain’ (ibid., p. 3). Beeton’s Film-induced tourism (2005) is broadly acknowledged as the ‘first definitive work about film-induced tourism’,¹ and her book was notable not only for bringing together the variety of different themes within the field hitherto presented in many separate papers and case studies, but also for expanding the previous focus on movie-induced tourism (mainly Hollywood movies) ‘to include television, video and DVD’ (Beeton 2005, p. 9).

Within Japan, however, the buzzword in the Japanese academy, and the term adopted by the Japanese government in its official promotional strategies regarding film-induced tourism, is kontentsu tsūrizumu (contents tourism).² Contents tourism focuses not on the media format but primarily on the contents, namely the narratives, characters and locations. This concept is of particular use in an age of ‘multi-use’ or the ‘media mix’ (Yamamura 2011, p. 50), when the same characters and narratives may be sold as novels, films, games, toys and cartoons simultaneously, with sequels and prequels added to expand the franchise even further. Steinberg (2012, p. viii) identifies incidences of the media mix, also known as convergence in the English-language literature, back to the 1960s in the context of the anime media mix generated by Astro boy. For Yamamura, however, multi-use and the media mix really took off in the 1990s. He identifies three key periods: the 1990s, when multi-use between manga, anime and games mushroomed; the early 2000s, when the internet made digital production and sharing of contents accessible to the masses; and from the 2000s onwards when local communities can be thought of as ‘media’ because they became increasingly involved in the production and marketing of contents, and their spaces are increasingly mediatized (via museums, monuments and websites). This third stage, when geographical place and contents get linked together in a commercial partnership, is when the economic potential for contents tourism really emerges.

However, just as examples of the media mix can be found, with hindsight, considerably further back into history than the existence of the term that has come to describe the contemporary phenomenon, so too has contents tourism come to be seen as a new term that describes essentially a very old phenomenon. Masubuchi (2010, p. 29), for example, has argued that the visits by Japanese people in the Edo period to places made famous by the poetry of Bashō Matsuo may be considered an early form of contents tourism. Furthermore, as the articles in this special edition indicate (particularly those by Akiko Sugawa-Shimada and Philip Seaton), contents tourism in Japan has had a vibrant history since at least the 1970s.

In the remainder of this short introduction, we place contents tourism within the broader context of tourism studies and highlight the Japanese government policy context before describing the particular contributions of the four articles to this emerging field of scholarship.

Film-induced tourism and/or contents tourism

Film-induced tourism and contents tourism are forms of cultural tourism, which is ‘an umbrella term for a wide range of related activities, including historical tourism, ethnic tourism, arts tourism, museum tourism, and others’ (McKercher and du Cros 2009, p. 6). McKercher and du Cros present a typology of cultural tourists according to motivation (the importance of cultural tourism in the decision to visit a destination) and experience sought (from deep to shallow). This provides a useful framework within which to see the complex variations within the categories of film-induced and contents tourism. It is shown in Table 1 along with representative examples from the film-induced tourism literature.

As Table 1 indicates, cultural tourism encompasses a wide range of touristic experiences, which makes it very hard to generalize about the motivations and experiences of film tourists. As the articles in this series will demonstrate, the behaviours of contents tourists in Japan are equally complex. Some are fans who have repeatedly visited a community where their favourite anime was set, almost becoming part of the community in the process. Others, meanwhile, simply ride a temporary wave of popularity which quickly disappears once attention on the film, anime or television drama has passed.

Table 1 Cultural tourist typology and its relation to film-induced tourism. Columns 1–3 adapted from McKercher and du Cros (2009, pp. 140, 144). Column 4 completed using ideas and examples from Beeton (2005) and Roesch (2009).

...

Cultural tourist type	Motivation	Experience	Example from film-induced tourism
	Cultural tourism is…	The tourist…
Purposeful cultural tourist	…the primary motivation for visiting a destination.	…has a deep cultural experience.	A fan visiting film location sites on a ‘pilgrimage’, e.g. travelling to Tunisia specifically to visit Star Wars locations.
Sightseeing cultural tourist	…a primary or major reason for visiting a destination.	…has a shallower experience.	Visiting film-related sites is part of a broader holiday, e.g. visiting Lord of the Rings sites during a holiday to New Zealand.
Serendipitous cultural tourist	…not a reason for the tourist’s travel.	…ends up having a deep cultural tourism experience.	A chance encounter with a film-related site or tour taken on a whim stimulates a deep interest in the film, e.g. doing the Sound of Music tour in Salzburg.
Casual cultural tourist	…a weak motive for visiting a destination.	…has a shallow experience.	A visit to Universal Studios is just one activity on a ‘sun, sand and sea’ holiday in California.
Incidental cultural tourist	…not a reason for the tourist’s travel.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Citation Information
• 1. Japanese Popular Culture and Contents Tourism – Introduction
• 2. Otaku tourism and the anime pilgrimage phenomenon in Japan
• 3. Rekijo, pilgrimage and ‘pop-spiritualism’: pop-culture-induced heritage tourism of/for young women
• 4. Contents tourism and local community response: Lucky star and collaborative anime-induced tourism in Washimiya
• 5. Taiga dramas and tourism: historical contents as sustainable tourist resources
• Index