Abstract
Imagine: you are standing in Zuisenji Temple in Nanto City, your smartphone tightly in hand. You turn around and extend your arm to look through your phone camera and – thanks to the augmented reality app Koitabi Camera – take a photo of an anime girl framed by the historic temple. She is a character from an anime produced in collaboration with the Nanto city government, and you can’t see her just anywhere. You can only see her using Koitabi Camera. But you can only use Koitabi Camera once you have watched the anime – and you can only watch the anime here in this temple, once your smartphone has verified your location by GPS. In this process, you have become a content tourist, travelling to experience the connection between a story – which you may have initially encountered half a world away – and the place where it was set or filmed.
Content tourism, kontentsu tsūrizumu, is a portmanteau term that describes tourism induced by popular culture, and is recognised by the Japanese government in its Cool Japan policies, introduced in the early 2000s to promote popular culture exports and Japan’s soft power. The authors use the concept of content tourism to extend the disciplines of film and literature-induced tourism to emphasise the connection between story and place, contributing not only to the literature on tourism studies but also to that of international relations and film and television (particularly fan) studies. The authors argue that although much has been written on Japan as a soft power and as a tourism destination, little has been written on it as a content destination. This book aims to fill this gap – and to a very great extent, it delivers on this promise.
The authors see content tourism as a long-standing phenomenon, not simply limited to anime tourism, but with roots in religious pilgrimage. Thus, in this book, content tourism is any tourism induced by popular culture in any period of history and includes tourism to heritage sites prompted by their representation in pop culture. Reflecting this, the book’s analytical approach has two dimensions: the first sets out the relationships between the three key players in content tourism – the fans, the content businesses and local authorities – while the second is time. It is this second dimension that provides the book with much of its texture, encompassing three chapters that cover 13 centuries up to 1945, 55 years up to 2000 and 15 years up to 2015.
The book ends with a discussion of the increasing sophistication of contents tourism since the early 2000s. As the Internet, digital technology and social media have become central to Japanese pop culture fandom, so they are now also central to content tourism as tourists seek information about destinations from both other travellers and official destination sites. In the 2000s, anime fans began to travel to the historical sites that were increasingly realistically depicted in their favourite series, triggering even broader interest as they shared their travel experiences via social media. In response, producers collaborated with local authorities to promote their content and the locations featured in it, developing a range of different tie-up methods involving local communities and anime production companies. One such is the Koitabi Camera, others include new-traditional events that might appear to mimic traditional ceremonies but are really re-creations of iconic scenes from films, and cosplay events. The journeys content tourists take might follow official itineraries, where a local community and its authorities provide promotional literature to guide tourists between related sites, or unofficial, with guides provided by fans or content businesses but without the approval of the local community. Interestingly, the authors explain that package tours revolving around a particular work are not common as volatile demand for pop culture makes them a risky proposition for tour companies.
This is rich analysis. It not only proposes an approach for analysing how people and places benefit from content tourism, it convincingly applies its framework to provide valuable insights for those interested in Japanese history and culture, and for modern and international media and tourism scholars. The authors draw on an extremely wide range of sources to develop their method, and to illustrate content tourism in Japan using their own research, including many illustrative photographs of people, derivative content and places. In all, Contents Tourism provides a new understanding of how people in Japan have used the popular culture of their day as inspiration to travel, enhancing their enjoyment of their favourite content and transferring economic benefits upon the producers of the content and the places associated with it.