In the last few years, the concern on industrial heritage have been increasing domestically and internationally. There are a large number of mining sites in Japan in which some of them are utilized as tourism resources. However, it is difficult to understand the value of mining sites at the first glance. Therefore, in order to utilize the sites for tourism and regional activation, it is necessary to investigate the utilization methods. This study aims to: 1) identify the characteristics of the mining sites in Japan; 2) identify the issues and current status of the mining sites; 3) consider more effective methods to improve its attractiveness as tourism sites. To sum up, this study has found that: 1) each mining site has various characteristics in terms of size area and remaining functions, yet none of it only end up for production activities, which the common characteristic of the entire mining sites in Japan is that it has various functions around the production area; 2) at the current situation, each mining site has difficulties to transmit the residual mining products due to the poor mechanism, which makes it difficult to understand the real figure of the mining sites; 3) the most important things to make it easier to understand the whole figure of the mining site are considering and implementing the combination of effective methods according to the characteristics of each mining site.
