2017 Volume 69 Issue 1 Pages 50-65
The Japanese government plans to encourage inbound tourism as an important political agenda, but very little headway has been made in local regions. This paper presents a desirable perspective of inbound tourism in local regions, using Kaminoyama City in Yamagata Prefecture as an example. This study is summarized as follows:
A combination project of hot springs and high altitude therapy was established in Kaminoyama in 2013. Although this project contains tourism promotion, it does not include inbound tourism. The targets of the project are residents and domestic tourists.
Hotel managers, the core of the tourism industry, feel a sense of crisis in the current situation and feel the necessity of cooperating with other professions;there is a growing momentum for changing their conservative attitude. With respect to inbound tourism, however, few managers plan to change.
According to a behavior analysis of foreign students as well as of facilities and events, inbound tourists are interested in conversing with residents and observing their lifestyle. Foreign students tend to observe regional resources against a large-scale framework such as Japanese culture and history rather than understand location-specific features. In Kaminoyama, apart from the hot springs, the city has no outstanding resource. The tourism proposal to promote not only Kaminoyama but also Japan by combining small regional resources will be effective for inbound tourism.
Taking into account the application of regional resources, the main actors in the civic collaboration are the residents. Their understanding and participation will affect the future of tourism in Kaminoyama. There is no precedent to the administrative correspondence to inbound tourism. Though the growing sense of crisis towards decreasing tourist numbers may change tourist agent awareness in the city, in the current situation, few agents are working actively to increase inbound tourists. Local universities should ease the way of the civic collaboration movement by regional reduction of research and education.
