Contents Tourism in Japan : Pilgrimages to "Sacred Sites" of Popular Culture

In recent years, 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.” The term used in Japan to describe this form of tourism induced by popular culture is kontentsu tsurizumu, “contents tourism.” Contents tourism is 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.

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.