抄録
Tourists visit destinations which have been well-known through various kinds of media. The purpose of this paper is to identify changes of values embedded in tourism discourses through analyzing guidebooks, travel magazines, and travel articles in newspapers, hi this study, I analyze tourism discourses on Kumano area in Wakayama Prefecture based on 'social constructionist' approach. Kumano area was designated as a national park in 1936, and was recently designated as a UNESCO World Heritage site in 2004. The result of the analysis is that, although Kumano Pilgrimage Routes is now attracting a lot of people, Doro valley, which had been estimated geologically, had been the most valuable place in Kumano from 1955 to 1970 (or 1990 in guidebook). These changes have occurred in connection with growing social attention to national history and tradition.
