From Promenade Littéraire and Textualism of Urban Spaces to Content Tourism Studies

Abstract

From the early modern Travelogues and guidebooks to those produced during the Meiji era, Literature served as the primary medium through which tourism was experienced and mediated. In the Taishō era, Japanese novelists extended this literary tourism to foreign lands under Imperial Japan, framing travel as an exotic encounter. After World War II, Promenade Littéraire was initiated by Utaro Noda amidst the burnt-out ruins of postwar Japan. This project compiled an exhaustive collection of archaeological sites and historical remains, and since the 2010s, it has been revitalised as an essential component of municipal town planning. Thirty years after Noda’s Promenade Littéraire, the concept of the textualism of urban spaces emerged during the period of rapid economic growth. Ai Maeda, for instance, described literary analysis. Another 30 years later, at the beginning of the 21st century, the rise of content tourism, originating in pilgrimages to sacred sites depicted in anime, laid the foundation for a new field within Tourism Studies. Drawing on these developments, we propose a cross-disciplinary framework that brings together Literary and Tourism Studies through the lens of Literary Tourism Studies, offering an integrated approach to understanding the cultural and spatial dynamics of tourism.