2016 Volume 62 Issue 3 Pages 240-256
Tourism has become to be considered as important for regional development policy in Japan since the 1990s. Prefectural governments is one of important actors for tourism policy. But a tourism area is often wider than a prefectural territory. Kyushu is remarkable for development of tourism policy, because seven prefectures arrived at a consensus about its integrated strategy for promotion of tourism in 2004. The purpose of this paper is to clarify why and how the prefectures could arrive at the consensus, using not only official documents but also memorandum of participants in various meetings for developing strategies.
In order to develop an integrated strategy for Kyushu's economy, “the Kyushu Area Strategy Council” was established in October, 2003. This council was composed of nine prefectural governors and representatives of the four major economic associations in Kyushu. Under this council, Kyushu Tourism Strategy Committee was established in January, 2004. This committee devised strategies and proposed a suitable organization to pursue them, including the budget. The committee worked out the plan on paper “Kyushu Tourism Strategies” and reported it to the council in October 2004. And “Kyushu Tourism Promotion Organization” was launched in April, 2005. Its task is to implement the strategies.
The conclusion of this paper is to be summarized as follows:
1. The committee accepted a minority's opinion which focused on strategy of improving human and material resources for tourism, so that this strategy was dealt as the first among four pillars of the strategies. But the committee did not change the actual priority of budget allocation to support business organizations to plan and implement tourism marketing, and to send information on Kyushu to the three largest metropolitan areas in Japan as well as abroad.
2. Because of requests by the Committee members, the number of activities to be implemented for the strategies increased. However, it was impossible to implement all the planned activities because of the budgetary restraints.
3. It was the predecessor of the Kyushu Tourism Promotion Organization that played a core role for the implementation of the strategy. It was a small organization that had have only two employees as permanent assignment staff and one part timer.
4. Committee's chairman and the Council played an important role to arrive at the final decision on how to share the expenses for the implementation of the strategy.
These four points suggest three following points:
First, it is neither feasibility nor effectiveness to get an agreement among various members with different interests. It is, rather, important to adopt as many various opinions as possible. Then it can lead to satisfaction of various members. Second, a new organization for a new strategy can be smoothly established, if there has existed an organization as a predecessor, even if this is small. Third, in order to formulate an agreement, a person with authority exercises strong leadership. A more authoritative organization plays the role as well.
