Paper short abstract:

With focussing on players of Touken Ranbu ONLINE, a digital game which has 103 characters (tokendanshi/sword-men) created as personifications of actual swords, the paper explores how their perception of characters has led them to travelling to the places associated with the swords.

Paper long abstract:

In recent years, the Japanese media has created several anthropomorphic characters representing objects such as swords and fleets which attract fans to the places associated with these artefacts. While this phenomenon has been noticed by the tourism business sector, it has yet to be academically explored. Therefore, this paper focuses on players of Touken Ranbu ONLINE, a digital game produced by DMM Games (renamed EXNOA) and NITRO PLUS in 2015. The game has 103 male characters called tokendanshi (sword-men) created as personifications of actual swords. Generally, places associated with swords, such as museums exhibiting swords, and temples or shrines displaying votive swords, have gained an increasing number of female visitors because of the popularity of the game. The paper discusses; 1) how the fans perceived the characters of this game; and 2) how their perception of characters has led them to travelling to the places associated with the swords. The data were collected in August 2022 with a questionnaire survey using Google Forms among 1,593 participants. The results suggest that many players identified the game’s characters with swords and that the peculiar emotional ties to the swords via the characters motivated them to travel to actually see the swords. In response to the questions about ‘seeing’ the swords, most respondents used the Japanese word au that is only used when referring to people, instead of using the common word miru, which is generally used with both, persons as well as inanimate objects. The results also suggest that in the fan’s perception, the objects representing the characters are not mere materials but the respective spirits of each character in material form and therefore worth travelling for.