Contemporary Japan : Tourism and Travel in Japan

Ubiquitous images of Japanese tourists venturing abroad on well-organized package tours for short-term trips have been substituted by younger Japanese individuals who seek out various urban as well as rural destinations in search of ‘real life’ experience. More senior travellers prefer ‘free style tours’. Similarly, Japanese domestic tourism has come a long way from the ‘Discover Japan’ campaign in the 1970s and the ‘Exotic Japan’ campaign in the 1980s that strove to promote the furusato imaginary rural landscape as attraction to Disneyland-styled theme parks in the 1980s and recent attempts to introduce tourism-based community development and sustainable ecotourism. Tourism development, the evolution of images used in recent promotion campaigns and the structures that shape post-tourist behaviour are indicative of contemporary social change in general and thus merit further examination.