Japan has a good relationship with the European Union trough many channels. The EU donates two times more for ODA than what the USA does. Regarding the GNP, the EU’s GNP is almost as big as the USA. The EU is representative almost as an additional member at the G7. It has proven that even small and middle-sized countries, when united, can play an impressive role for international politics. Flow of refugees and migrants into the EU makes the political situation in the EU unstable. Brexit will weaken further the EU. That has a negative impact on Japan. If Japan cooperates with the EU, Japan can contribute much more for peace and security for the world. This is possible because Japan and the EU with soft power have won trust and respect in the world community. To make this world more peaceful is the best way to curve nationalism and populism at home. For better understanding the important role of the Japan and the EU relationship, one needs only to imagine how this world would be if there is neither Japan nor the EU and if only America, China and Russia determine everything.

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The purpose of this research is to show how tourism can be promoted with advanced technology: virtual reality, augmented reality and mixed reality. Such a series of technological application to tourism promotion is said to be attributed to William Gibson, acclaimed as a pioneer of cyberpunk, a subgenre of S.F. First, this research introduces the intriguing idea of locative art described in Gibson’s work, Spook Country (2007). Locative art is art virtually created on the street or in a room, by accessing the GPA coordinates. Then, the focus is upon on how such an idea is being used to open a new era in the form of virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR). Some cities, such as Bibai City, Hokkaido, and Sekigahara Town, Gifu, have already created their own contents in the form of VR and AR with the aim of their tourism promotion. Finally, through showing that mixed reality (MR) enables you to work with your co-workers who join you in a holographic representation, this research highlights MR has a great potential to promote tourism: MR, along with AI technologies, will make the conversation between a tourist and a holographic historical figure possible.

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With the fast spreading of mobile devices, especially smartphones, they are usually brought and used during going out because they are very useful. However, they cause some problems such as texting while walking(TWW). For example, when visiting a place for the first time by walking, some navigations, such like the Google Map are needed. Then, it is necessary to keep looking at the mobile device when walking to the target place. Nowadays, the TWW problem has become worldwide. According to this problem, many persons crash or fall down, even fatal-accidents occur in some cases. In this paper, it is attempted to develop an information transmission system. The system transmits information by stimulating the user’s foot soles. Therefore, users can obtain simple information without looking at the monitor of a mobile device during walking or operating. Therefore, it is considered that this system is able to be used for navigation without TWW. A prototype system was constructed and an experiment to transmit literal information by this system was conducted. The speed of transmission and the accuracy of the system is not high, however, it was confirmed that information can be transmitted by this system.

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A strong earthquake occurred on the coast of Noto Peninsula in Japan on Mar. 25, 2007. It registered 6.9 on the Richter scale, and the seismometer recorded the utmost tremor of a little over the 6th degree on the seismic scale at Wajima City, Nanao City and Anamizu-machi. This quake was named “The Noto Hanto Earthquake in 2007” by the Japan Meteorological Agency. It caused serious damage to the Noto area. These serious states have been reported not only in Japanese newspapers but also in English newspapers. In this study, English articles were investigated to extract linguistic characteristics. Besides, articles on “The Mid Niigata Prefecture Earthquake in 2004” which occurred on Oct. 23, 2004 were analyzed for comparison. Frequency characteristics of character- and word-appearance were investigated using a program written in C++. These characteristics were approximated by an exponential function. Furthermore, the percentage of Japanese junior high school required vocabulary and American basic vocabulary were calculated to obtain the difficulty-level as well as the K-characteristic of each material. As a result, it was clearly shown that English articles on the Noto Hanto Earthquake came to have a similar tendency to English journalisms in the characteristics of character-appearance as the days passed. Besides, the values of K-characteristic for the articles tended to increase, and the difficulty-level tended to decrease. In addition, as for the frequency of some words, while the frequency of “earthquake”-related words gradually decreased, that of “cancel” increased. This seems to be because the harmful rumor had spread and cancellation of lodgings had increased.

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People think deeply about what they are and what their identities are through various experiences during their university days, and it is essential to feel adapted to and content with university life to make the university days meaningful. This study examines the effects of leisure time, how much time is spent on leisure, and life adaptability or satisfaction regarding university. The first purpose is to clarify how much time is spent and on what during the Golden Week, which is a Japanese term for several holidays between the end of April and early May. Second, this study examines the relationship between leisure time and life adaptability or satisfaction regarding university. The survey was conducted among 98 university students (48 male and 50 female) in mid-May of 2016. The results show that about one-third of the participants had only one or no free day during the Golden Week in 2016 and that there are no relationships between leisure activities and the number of free days. Additionally, The number of free days and leisure activities did not affect life adaptability or satisfaction, against the prediction.

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This study aims to examine the origins and the change of creative tourism concept through reviewing mainly previous studies. Creative tourism is new types of tourism, evolved as a new form of cultural tourism in the beginning of the 21th century, including the intention to make the negative impacts from cultural tourism as a new form of mass tourism diminish. In recent years, the focuses of creative tourism have changed from tourist behavior to the relationships between the tourist and the destinations. Recent concepts of creative tourism have been applied to a growing range of tourism, including tourism activities, the impacts of creative tourism for tourist destination and creative industries, planning and policy-making to improve tourist destination. Therefore, the framework for accelerating the practice of creative tourism is proposed by focusing on the relationship between tourism and creative industries, in reference to Landry’s model ‘the cycle of urban creativity’.

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In anticipation of the Tokyo Olympics, Japan is attaching importance to create an attractive sightseeing region. As one method to activate sightseeing by utilizing local regional resources, open data promotion is currently paid attention. However, there are many local governments that have not started to open data promotion because they are concerned that their work load will be increased and they have no idea about its needs since there are still few utilization cases of open data. The purpose of this study is to open data promotion at autonomous works, and an open data promotion of sightseeing event information by co-operating with local government was conducted. Regarding open data promotion that was conducted, this study worked on converting information that local government has kept so far, to open data, developing event guide application by utilizing it, and revealing its usefulness by a demonstration experiment.

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In this study, I attempted to demonstrate the factors that affect travelers’ intentions to visit tourist destinations. Based on the results of a questionnaire administered to university students, I examined the factors through a correlation analysis. As a result, it was determined that being familiar with the tourist destination and its tourism resources does not necessarily affect the visit intention. In this survey, the highest correlation to visit intention was to the average value of the degree of interest in nature, tourism, history, local food, and hot springs.

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This research evaluates a travel journal regarding as data source potential for discovering tourism resources. Text data mining analysis is applied for discovering common and distinctive features from the travel journal, and locational analysis is implemented to specify the areas where the common and distinctive features appeared. As a result, the distribution of extracted landscape terms is differently appeared in each district by cross tabulation analysis. The distribution suggests that each district has distinctively different characteristics. Moreover, the result indicates that cluster analysis can reveal the relationship among extracted landscape terms and help to understand the characteristics in districts.

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Effective measures for increasing visitors from China are expected with the globalization in Japan. However, the economic and political exchanges between the both countries had been temporarily on pause after the issue of Senkakus. The possibility of export expansion of Japanese traditional craft goods and food culture is investigated in this study. China is considered as a main exporting country of Japan. The increasing measure of visitors from China is primarily important. The purpose of this study is to vitalize Japanese tourism industry according to tourism exchange with China, especially in the countryside. It is thought that the omotenashi (Japanese traditional hospitality) plays an important role for the measure. The experiences of purchasing souvenir and a kaiseki meal were carried out for Chinese students and questionnaire study (including hearing investigation) was implemented in Kanazawa area of Hokuriku District in Japan. As a result, they showed a strong interest in the experience and indicated the high possibility for distribution and branch shop in China. They experienced craft-goods using gold leaf and kaiseki meal as traditional Japanese culture at a city hotel in the area. Subjects are thirteen Chinese students living in Kanazawa City. There is an opinion that the price is high for the souvenirs and the meal. As for the result, it is necessary to construct a strategy focusing on a target customer. In this study, only the Chinese students were adopted as subjects. It is, however, mainly influenced by Chinese economic conditions.

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Various forms of omotenashi (the Japanese spirit of hospitality) directed toward customers in the tourism industry have been presented in previous studies. In previous studies on omotenashi, there have been numerous discussions on the methods for responding to and welcoming customers. However, there has been limited research on how service management fosters omotenashi in an organization. Therefore, this study examines one case: Kurokawa Onsen, a renowned hot springs town in Kyushu, known for its ryokans (Japanese traditional-style inns) and their superior level of omotenashi. In addition, through interviews and field research, it focuses on the fostering of this superior level of omotenashi by the service management in the case. The result shows that all the Ryokans in Kurokawa Onsen provides omotenashi knowledge, and the business so well in the environment that each ryokan cooperates with the others by sharing the knowledge and skills of omotenashi, despite being competitors in the same environment. Finally, this study proposes a model that ryokans can utilize in their omotenashi management.

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