The Japanese government has promoted many policies for overcoming impoverishment of local areas in Japan and relieving the excessive concentration of population in Tokyo. Those situations, however, haven't been improved dramatically yet. So, the Japanese government came up with a new policy which aims to create new local organizations. It is what is called a Japanese type of DMO, or Destination Marketing Organization. The new plan was announced in 2015. The government focused on the tourism industry to revive local areas, while most of the local governments carried out age-old traditional tourism policies with the regular stakeholders. DMOs were developed mainly in European countries and the U.S. An outstanding feature of the DMO is the marketing and managing of a destination that activates a region. The successful establishment of new organizations by many local governments means the beginning of a new tourism policy in Japan.

This paper introduces the Organization for Urban-Rural Interchange Revitalization and its core business since its inception, green tourism. We will reflect on the history of green tourism, touch upon farm stays, which are currently being promoted by the Japanese government and discuss the difference between green tourism and farm stays. We will clarify the significance and issues of green tourism. While considering green tourism from the perspective of sustainability based on the current situation and various issues, we will consider the direction which we should aim for in the future.

In recent years, the subject of economic development of tourism industries has been a hot topic, in particular, the concentration of labor populations, the decline in agriculture, and the development of international tourism destinations in developing countries. For this study, I surveyed to find out what kinds of occupations local residents prefer. This study analyzed the way of thinking about career choices of the younger generation, mainly to agriculture and tourism industry. This questionnaire was conducted among local undergraduate and high school students. The questions were classified into 5 categories, with over 50 questions in total. All questions, except for those on the Face Sheet, were answered using a Likert scale of eight levels. This survey revealed differences in a way of thinking between undergraduate and high school students. This paper discusses this finding, as well as introduce experiments concerning a rural tourism business model.

The aim of this paper is to consider what issues our society faces on the regional level due to the increase of inbound, or overseas, visitors in Japan and to suggest inclusive governance for sustainable tourism based on a multicultural society. Inbound visitors tend to trigger a negative influence on regional societies in Japan, although there are also benefits from the influx. The Japanese government and regional societies try to meet the needs of international travelers while sustaining regional resources, local communities and landscapes. However, in this process, we shouldn't allow ourselves to display negative attitudes toward inbound growth based on biases stemming from nationalism or regionalism. In addition, since inbound growth is expected to be associated with the increase of foreign workers in Japan, we need to develop a positive perspective for living and working together with those who have a different culture, religion, or values. Therefore, to achieve sustainable inbound development, we should design inclusive governance based on a multicultural society.

Given the global economic stagnation in recent years, attention has been focused on tourism development and its economic effects, and not only on tourism that flows from developed to developing countries but also that which flows from urban to rural areas. Lively debates on activation are taking place everywhere. In either case, income transfer through tourism expenditure will increase regional and national tourism demands, construction of tourism facilities to accommodate more tourism needs, and public investment for infrastructure development. The multiplier effect of tourism is expected to increase employment and income in target destinations and enhance the welfare of local residents. This paper focuses on the “shadow” of tourism development, warns against old-fashioned tourism development, and examines what factors and what types of tourism planning are necessary for sustainable tourism development. Chapter 2 examines whether the measures are desirable, and Chapter 3 clarifies the current state of tourism development and unreasonable expectations. In particular, we discuss what sustainable tourism development is under the SDGs. Chapter 4 discusses the development of various problems brought about by the development of tourism due to “market failure” and considers the framework for a solution. From the tourism market perspective, we provide an empirical analysis and examine tourist behavior based on the “shadow” of tourism. Finally, we discuss the ideal tourism policy for promoting sustainable tourism.

In this paper, we attempt to verify the effectiveness of administrative reform of municipalities based on the degree of satisfaction with administrative services, focusing on New Public Management (NPM). Since the 1980s, several countries started to introduce the concept of NPM into their administrative services to improve quality. There is no consistent evidence to support the effectiveness of NPM to date. Therefore, we applied the probit model, and our results show that several items in NPM have positive effects on the degree of satisfaction with administrative services, such as the reliability of NPM and customer-oriented NPM. However, the introduction of a privatization method seems to have no effect on the quality of administrative services.

The Soil Contamination Countermeasures Act (SCCA) was enacted in 2003, establishing investigations on soil contamination and countermeasures in Japan. This paper estimates the impact of the existence of a contaminated area, designated according to the SCCA, on nearby land prices using the hedonic approach. Our results show negative externality was found to reduce the nearby land prices by 9 percentage points due to the existence of soil contamination within 1 km. However, the impact of a contaminated area varies depending on the difference in designated areas classified according to the possibility of health damage. We also find that the effect of decreasing land prices in commercial areas is larger than that of residential areas and industrial areas. These results indicate that the SCCA has a certain effect on countermeasures against soil contamination, however, they also raise questions about the method of policy intervention, such as risk management and information provision.