Abstract
Amami Islands are not only remote islands from the economic center, but also has been placed on socially and economically difficult conditions. Therefore, in June of 1954, six months after Amami Islands were returned to the mainland, the ‘Act on Special Measures for the Reconstruction of Amami Islands was enacted and reconstruction project were started. Since 1974, this Act was updated to “Special Measures for the Promotion and Development of Amami Islands” and it began to support tourism industry which was one of the important sources of income in Amami Islands. Tourism Industry of the Amami Islands has had high proportion of marine tourism such as fishing and diving since the demand occurred. However, the tourism based on the resources of terrestrial environment such as ‘biodiversity’ has been gradually increasing recently. In May 2003, the Ryukyu islands (Amami-Ryukyu) was selected as one of the World Natural Heritage candidate sites by Ministry of Environment, and this has affected “the Promotion and Development” projects as mentioned earlier, and has also advanced a new tourism policy. This paper explains the background of ecotourism in Amami Oshima by focusing on the administrative policies. And then, it focuses on the actions of the people who started the nature guide industry of terrestrial environment from the mid-1990s. Based on the above explanations, it clarifies the process of how the administration and guides in Amami Oshima came to accept ecotourism. The Administration of Kagoshima Prefecture has introduced the ecotourism for the registration of World Natural Heritage of the Amami Islands. In other words, the recognition and acceptance of ecotourism by Kagoshima Prefecture has been a top-down “ecotourism as a national policy”. On the other hand, the guides who started professional companies in the 1990s had already established their own tour formats such as “outdoor experience” or “nature experience tour”. Furthermore, they learned the concept of ecotourism through a private organization such as Japan Ecotourism Society. Nevertheless, they just realized that the concept was not much different from what they had been practicing. For this reason, they didn’t actively claim that their guide industry could be defined as “ecotourism”. That is, for those guides, the acceptance of ‘ecotourism’ in 1990s meant nothing but the ‘acceptance of the word’.
