Abstract
On disaster reconstruction - currently an urgent research issue worldwide - an accumulation of good practices and know-hows regarding the support for it is strongly required. Among those, as observed in the April 2015 Nepal Earthquake, there are many cases that demand a knowledge and understanding of the disaster reconstruction through tourism. This paper therefore first analyzed some of the recent cases and the studies of tourism in disaster-affected areas, with a focus on the 2004 Indian Ocean Tsunami and the 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake. A discussion on their potential and problems followed it.
As a result, it was found that in the existing literature, tourism studies generally situate tourism in disaster areas as a part of “dark tourism” and analyze the cases within its framework. However, this framework innately includes its limitation as pointed out in this research; in order to cover it and analyze beyond, there needs a new framework. For this purpose, this paper proposed to refer the concept of resilience to fill this position. While resilience is often used in the realm of psychology and materials, here referred is closer to that of systems, defined as “the ability of a system to reorganize itself so as to retain its function, structure and feedback in the face of the social disturbance”.
