Paper short abstract:

This presentation will compare Akihabara (Tokyo) and Hokkaido as tourist destinations, in order to question the influence of media contents on tourism careers of foreign travelers in Japan. The notion of 'contents tourism' will be introduce and question to understand tourism development in Japan.

Paper long abstract:

Since the launch of the cool Japan campaign in 2002, Japanese pop culture has been officially promoted internationally and considered as a way to attract foreign visitors. The campaign and the related policies have been analyzed and criticized but the appeal to some foreign visitors can't be denied and the field of media contents related tourism is now investigated through local cases studies (see Seaton, Yamamura 2015).

Taking the perspective of the anthropology of tourism, I will use this idea of contents tourism to question the way foreign visitors are attracted to Japan, develop an imaginary filled with contents related images, and select sites as tourist destination. The current trend in Japan to promote sites insisting on their connection to pop culture provides pertinent examples. Moreover, fieldwork focusing on Western tourists show that a large part of them repeat the stays and consequently enlarge and enrich their imaginary of Japan and its culture. As they repeat their trips, they also choose various sites that are not often included in the indispensable visited places for a first trip, like Hokkaido.

Questioning the role played by pop culture in that process is a way to understand how tourism imaginary and local promotion influences the 'career' (Becker 1963) of tourists in Japan. To do so, I will compare two sites: Akihabara (Tokyo) and the island of Hokkaido. Akihabara is famous for its connection with pop culture and, in the last ten years, it has become the showcase of cool Japan promotion. So it is quite a must-see for those who are interested in Japanese contents. On the opposite, Hokkaido is associated to beautiful landscape and gorgeous nature. However, lately the cool Hokkaido project has been launched to develop contents related promotion and we can raise the question of the influence of this campaign on foreign tourists' representations of the island. Using data from ethnographic fieldwork (observations, interviews, questionnaires), I will compare the tourist promotion and the visitors' reactions to these two different destinations, in order to analyze the influence and impact of contents tourism.