Staging mediatized tourism places as imagined playscapes: The crucial role of a tour designer

Highlights

Introduction

As the spread of the entertainment industry continues unabated across the globe, as entire regions are being turned into giant theme parks, as the world becomes a complex web of intertexts and hypertexts, reality, media and tourism are more and more closely intertwined. (Davin, 2005, p. 178)

Media-based imagined landscape, especially locations associated with movies and TV series, so-called film tourism destinations (Beeton, 2016; Kim & Reijnders, 2018), transform mundane places into special ones in mediatized worlds. Tourists as audiences initially consume media imageries and mediatized representations of other lands (Crouch et al., 2005; Jansson, 2002; Kim, 2012; Knudsen & Waade, 2010), intensifying their emotional immersion and affective and symbolic experiences of the landscape that cross beyond the obvious cognitive dimension of the locations (Couldry, 1998).

This is why Couldry (2003) describes film tourism or mediatized tourism locations as “ritual sites” and specific or purposeful film tourists or media tourists as “media pilgrims.” The latter are also labelled “film tourist tribes” as a distinctive segment of film tourists (Croy et al., 2021) which share similar characteristics with fan tourists (Thelen & Kim, 2021). These types of niche—and highly specific—tourists in the realm of media and tourism seek embodied performance such as in situ re-enactments, while visiting a mediatized place (Jang, 2021; Kim, 2010, 2012). In their performance at mediatized tourist sites, these tourists are conceptualized as embodied actors temporally and spatially (Light, 2009). In this regard, the physical sites become not only the symbolic stage for tourists’ performances (Jang, 2020) but also the corporeal and inter-related space of their imagined landscapes (Knudsen & Waade, 2010).

The subject of embodied performance has drawn on significant tourist behavior (Edensor, 1998, 2000, 2001; Haldrup & Larsen, 2010; Larsen & Urry, 2011) and is informed by the dramaturgical sociology of Goffman (1959). Also, the discourse of performance, called “performance turn,” reformulated the tourist from simply being “the gazer” to being more active, and made it possible to understand tourism as an embodied action and exchange between tourists and destinations.

Despite this knowledge acquisition, previous studies on tourist performance tend to set tourists as spectators of performance rather than as actors or co-creators, based on a host and guest dichotomy. That said, performance is basically executed by the host, and the tourist undertakes the performance of gazing (Edensor, 1998; Haldrup & Larsen, 2010; Larsen & Urry, 2011). However, in fan behavior of mediatized tourism or fan tourism, the traditional dichotomy of host and guest is blurred, and it is evident that tourists are generally active co-creators, proactively making emotional and symbolic meanings of the places visited, which cannot be overlooked in this academic domain (Reijnders, 2013; Thelen & Kim, 2021). Additionally, existing studies on the performance of mediatized tourism predominantly discuss tourist behaviors and the mediatization of their experiences (Graburn & Yamamura, 2020); there are as yet few studies from the perspective of tour designers or producers.

To address these critical gaps, this study invokes the concept of “playscapes” to investigate how tour designers of mediatized tourism programs create a symbolic stage on which tourists are invited to create their embodied performance. Tour designers are the ones who create a space—so-called playscapes—in order to enhance the emotional immersion of tourists and facilitate their experiences of a newly created “mediatized place.” From this particular yet significant perspective, the study aims to address the limitations of existing studies on the subject.

The concept of playscapes was coined by Junemo (2004) and is mainly used for the analysis of the playfulness of tourist destinations combined with media products (Adams, 2018; Light, 2009). Junemo suggests playscapes as an additional scape for the existing five “scapes of global cultural flow” suggested by Appadurai (1990) and defines it as the interface in the urban landscape in which “aesthetics merges with technical infrastructure in order to create certain relational windows or gateways that enable mobility and connectivity by providing spaces where people meet” (Junemo, 2004, p. 187). Junemo highlights technical infrastructure as a precondition for establishing playscapes, that is, tangible elements. When considering mediatized tourism, however, intangible infrastructure such as the fictional world of media products or media representations can be combined with places to create distinctive playscapes.

As such, tourism mobility in this context is a complex combination of realities and fantasies (Sheller & Urry, 2004). Combined with intangible infrastructure, playscapes (re)shape mediatized tourists as hyper-tourists who are keen to proactively explore the imagined landscape within their own performances.

Research Context and Methods

Detective Conan (or Case Closed) is the most famous mystery Japanese manga and started serializing in the manga magazine Shonen Sunday in 1994. As of 2021, 100 comic books of Detective Conan have been released, and 230 million copies have been sold in Japan and overseas. A variety of media franchises of this most successful Japanese manga are in operation. Weekly TV animations produced by Yomiuri TV and broadcast on the NTV network, and annual animated films are noteworthy.

From a tourism perspective, the Detective Conan Mystery Tour (hereafter, DCMT), has been a popular tour package promoted and sold through the Japanese railway company JR West, which has its headquarters in Osaka and has been operating as a rail transportation business in the western Japan area since 2001 (Jang, 2021). The DCMTs take place once a year, in collaboration with different prefectures as selected destinations each year. For example, in 2020, the tour was conducted in three cities in Ishikawa Prefecture.

It is reported that around 10,000 to 15,000 fans of Detective Conan from Japan, Korea, Hong Kong, and Taiwan participate in the DCMTs each year (personal communication, JR West personnel, 9 February 2015). The focal point of each DCMT is to provide tourists with an incomplete narrative and invite them to solve the mystery cases at real locations through their performance. After the tour, the complete narrative is broadcast as a TV animation, which, in turn, results in the participants reminiscing over their prior touristic experiences.

Semi-structured qualitative expert interviews with four professional DCMTs program designers/providers were conducted between February and March 2015 in Japan. The interviewees were personnel in charge of the JR West Sales Headquarters and the Tourism Division of the Hiroshima Prefectural Government (that is, two male and two female professionals from each unit, respectively). Each participant had been directly and substantially involved in designing and producing the DCMTs, and the information provided by them was invaluable for the study, considering their position, influence, knowledge, and first-hand experience. Each interview lasted between 60 and 80 minutes.

Findings

The DCMTs are sold and organized by JR West railway companies in partnership with local participatory governments at tour destinations and animation production companies in Tokyo. Each stakeholder takes a different role, for example, JR West handles planning and operation and is responsible for coordinating the directions and nature of the entire tour programs. This ensures that the formats and nature of the tour programs are consistent at different geographical locations, although the destinations of DCMTs change every year. The participating local governments provide financial investment and operational support, while the animation production companies bring “imagination” to the places through fictive narrative.

JR West first selects a participatory region or prefecture and then receives a confirmation of whether the tour is in progress. Once the region is determined, it commissions an animation production company to create a fictional narrative that reflects the geographical locations and the landscapes of the participatory region or prefecture, while not compromising the legacy and values of the Detective Conan brand. All costs related to the copyright are borne by JR West, which is about 20% of the total cost, and each participative local government pays for the logistics and publicity costs of making the actual tour program. This is a publicity expense borne by the destinations, and revenue does not return to the regions or prefectures (personal communication, Hiroshima Prefecture, 10 February 2015).

Creating fictive narratives for the DCMTs and TV animation episodes in which Detective Conan as the protagonist travels to a destination is independent of the tour operations. The TV episode is a special edition inserted in the form of a travel mystery in the middle of the weekly TV series. It takes the form of sponsored work to be additionally created upon the request of JR West. Generally speaking, JR West has little or no intention of interfering with the animation creator’s work relating to the fictional narrative. This is a mutually accepted protocol between the parties. A typical scene in the Detective Conan TV animation is a murder case that appears consistently in every episode. In contrast, in the fictional narrative of DCMTs, no murder case arises. Each destination uses and promotes the DCMTs for regional tourism to attract prospective tourists, such as Detective Conan tourists, regardless of sex and age. For example, according to Hiroshima Prefecture, which conducted an overseas version of DCMT in 2015,

The Prefecture wants to invite new tourists to Hiroshima. Hiroshima is not very popular with young people. They go to Tokyo, Osaka and Okinawa. Also, until now, bus tours for 20 to 30 people have been the main focus for Hiroshima tourism. With the recent boom of LCCs [low-cost carriers], individual travel mushrooms, and Hiroshima Prefecture feels the need to respond to it, so the Prefecture decided to take a JR West’s proposal that uses the famous Conan [for a new tourism initiative]. (Personal communication with Hiroshima Prefecture, 10 February 2015)

Through this process, the DCMT becomes a new tourism product of the region or prefecture, that can inherit the existing popularity of the Detective Conan universe, which, in turn, becomes a driving force in (re)creating a new place where participants of DCMTs, as fans of Detective Conan, experience the tour and feel that they have entered into the narrative world of Detective Conan.

In the production of DCMTs, various signs and symbols are purposely designed to symbolically, emotionally, and imaginatively connect the Detective Conan universe with the place where the newly created fictional narrative unfolds. This then induces and invites tourist performances in situ. Thus, whenever there is a discrepancy in the signs and/or symbols between media representations and the actual places from a tourist perspective, countless negotiations take place in the minds of tourists to reconcile the two (Mansson, 2010), which, as commented by the interviewees, plays an important role in the tourist embodied performance as a metaphor for an utterly authentic experience.

In the case of the DCMTs, the intention of the signs and symbols created by the designers of the tour program is to explain visual check points which assist tourists in progressing in their tours. These act as playscapes that invite each tourist’s own embodied performance while on tour. The props include the tour guidebook handed out at the start of the tour, the signs created at each visited site, and quiz boards that must be answered to solve the mystery cases in each narrative, each of which requires a series of performances, such as tourists opening doors themselves. The signs indeed act as tangible clues and become “technical infrastructure” (Junemo, 2004) for establishing playscapes, making the Detective Conan universe and its physical locations or sites interconnected between tourists and tour designers.

However, designing and placing the signs requires negotiations with the participatory destinations, because not all tourism operators accept DCMTs positively due to the nature of its one-off event, and also because of the need to consider the actual landscapes of the destinations, as mentioned earlier. In this study, it was explained that JR West was responsible for creating the signs and carrying out necessary negotiations with the participating prefectural officials, if required.

The DCMTs provide tourists with a unique experience that reminds them of touristic experiences of entering into and exiting from the mediatized world of the Detective Conan universe, making it a once off, exhausting, but utterly authentic experience. The usual experience of film tourism or media tourism appears as a process of pre-experiencing fiction and re-enacting it in an associated place (Kim, 2012; Reijnders, 2013; Thelen & Kim, 2021). In comparison, what makes the DCMTs distinctive in this context is that tourists first enact a place based on the mediatized Detective Conan universe and then re-enact the past touristic experience of the place through the final media product—the TV animation episodes broadcast after each DCMT campaign. This leads to the doubling of the fantasized realism in which the prior touristic experience is (re)justified through reflexive fiction and visual confirmation (Haldrup & Larsen, 2010), juxtaposing the reality and the imagined playscapes of the mediatized spaces. As such, it also enables the complex yet dynamic process of acquiring the authenticity of the touristic performance in situ.

While each DCMT creates a strong destination image for participants, each DCMT is a transient playscape. This is because, due to the nature of the crime fiction genre, the resolution of a mystery case means that there is no longer a cognitive incentive to visit the crime scene, although there is still a likelihood that some visitors who formed personalized memories and emotional attachments to the locations may return in the near future (Kim, 2012). However, the participative prefectures understand this limitation and do not expect any of the tour participants to revisit the areas associated with Detective Conan, but instead hope that the participants will return to discover other worthwhile local attractions and tourism amenities which they may have missed during the tours.

In this regard, the interview comments suggest that the DCMTs were used as a one off, short-term publicity strategy for local tourism promotion. Also, it is noteworthy that the DCMTs often targeted less developed tourist destinations, such as newly designated World Heritage sites. An example is the Meiji industrial tour of DCMT held in 2018 in Yamaghchi, which after 3 years was designated as a World Heritage site.

Conclusion

Performance and places for play, so-called playscapes, appear in various forms in contemporary tourism including mediatized tourism, film tourism, and even fan tourism. Drawing on emotion, imagination, and subjectivity, tourists compare the imagined landscapes initially created by media representation with the actual places and consume those places through the countless, yet meaningful, negotiation processes that accompany them (Bærenholdt et al., 2004; Edensor, 1998; Reijnders, 2013; Thelen & Kim, 2021). The place here is (spi)ritually consumed not as a space of gaze, but as a symbolic stage that becomes a playscape through which tourists (co)create their own embodied performance, weaving in and out of the reality and the mediatized spaces created by the tour designers through their fictional narrative.

However, in previous studies, (re)staging in the context of tourism has been discussed as an expanded discourse of staged authenticity or dramaturgy (Lundberg et al., 2018). The analysis of mediatized tourism and film tourism through dramaturgy is, however, mainly concerned with the argument that the mediatized experience on (big or small) screen reinforces the existing symbolism of the destination (e.g., heritage and culture) and enriches the touristic experiences. Additionally, performance by tourists is often viewed as indirect or passive image production and consumption (Edensor, 1998; Haldrup & Larsen, 2010; Larsen & Urry, 2011). In mediatized tourism, where fantasy and imagination are often combined and collectively embodied, there is, rather, a reversal of the relationship where place serves as a context for the performance (Light, 2009). In other words, despite the need for a more active discussion of performance and imagined landscapes, this kind of research still remains underdeveloped.

Therefore, this study goes beyond these preconceived limitations and provides an alternative theoretical lens to examine and understand the possibility of tourist performance being performed through an experience of playscapes in the mediatized tourism from a tour designer perspective. The study revealed that the imagined landscapes coupled with media ensure the performance and playability through meticulous design. In doing so, it provides new perspectives for future research on tourists’ affective and symbolic experiences of the landscape at mediatized tourist sites. In their performances, tourists’ authentic experiences go beyond the obvious cognitive dimension of the locations as their fictive. These tourists are (re)conceptualized as embodied actors, responding to the tour program provided by the designer as a symbolic platform for performance-based tourism experiences.

In the DCMTs’ case, the tour designers are deemed to connect the mediatized worlds with the actual physicality of locations and negotiate to make the locations more playable and performative. Despite its significance, the tour designer’s perspective of mediatized tourism and its experiences has been understudied, and thus the current study is a timely response to this critical gap. The findings show that the mystery tour designers coordinate with multiple stakeholders to create a tour program that is locally sensitive and reflective and provides a realistic, authentic experience for the participants, while maintaining the originality and fantasy of the mediatized worlds. In particular, the DCMTs are created by interlocking the mutual interests of three key actors: a railway company, a prefecture, and an animation production company. Their cooperation is aimed at maintaining the Detective Conan’s existing brand values, while ensuring the mutual interests of all stakeholders in the tour design to foster new business opportunities like the DCMTs. Within this framework, mutual respect amongst the stakeholders is essential. As such, JR West does not interfere with the fictional narrative by respecting the role the animation production company plays in designing the mystery tour narrative, and the destinations receive the opinions and recommendations of the stakeholders and coordinate the designated places to be used as geographical stages for the fictional narrative of DCMTs.

Furthermore, the case of DCMTs provides a new, alternative perspective of mediatized tourism that has not been examined previously. If the tourist gaze of existing mediatized tourism is to experience the world depicted in the media, participants in the DCMTs must perform and interact with the places in order to proceed to the next “page” of the media. Thus, it is evident that the existence and importance of intertextual discourses between previously watched Detective Conan episodes, DCMTs as a touristic experience, and follow-up episodes broadcast after each DCMT tour program, should be further examined to expand our limited understanding of this ever-growing mediatized tourism from a multiple stakeholder perspective.

Consideration needs to be taken of the following limitations. The study’s small sample size reflects the fact that a very small sampling pool of professionals is currently operating in the field of tourism and creative industries (Kvale, 1996). This meant that a degree of mutual trust and the existence of strong prior relationships was required to prevent difficulties in seeking respondents’ participation. However, Saunders and Townsend (2016) support that the limited sample size is still valid, appropriate, and invaluable for such a study, given the limited number of stakeholders corresponding to tour designers in the study context.

A limitation of this study, however, relates to the lack of sample tour destinations, which meant it was not feasible to fully reveal any differences in the perceptions or production processes of designed tour products in other regions. The position of the core producer, JR West, remains unchallenged; through this, it was possible to explore generally accepted processes of the design of mediatized mystery tour programs.

For future studies, with the prolonged COVID-19 pandemic, fans’ desire for travel and performance is expected to increase in the sphere of mediatized tourism, and it is evident that many destinations are already devoted to supplementing this through metaverse such as augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) experiences (e.g., the VR Takayama experience in Japan). As such, there will be opportunities for future studies to examine how and to what extent this concept acts as a meaningful tool to understand touristic performance as a metaphor of authentic experience in relation to the worlds of AR and VR. Such concepts will doubtless become an extension of mediatized tourism, given that the likelihood of wider applications of playscapes as a theoretical approach to this type of mediatized tourism, including film tourism and fan tourism, is largely expected.