COVID-19 has created a crisis for the entire world. Since it began, so many things have happened. The pandemic is a great challenge to humanity. It highlights the vulnerability of humanity, inequality in the society, politicians’ incompetence and power structure in the distribution of corona vaccine. It shows the vulnerability of the service industry like tourism, transportation, bars and restaurants. Financial compensation for workers whose wages are not fully paid are the policies of many countries which are not sustainable. Many workers have lost their jobs, and no nation can compensate for the economic loss in the long term. We will not find a cure for the disease any time soon. We must live with COVID-19 and its variants. The global economic situation will be shrinking. Unemployment rate is growing and poverty for those at the bottom is severe. We need to make structural changes of political and economic systems for better and secure lives. We should seriously aim to be a social animal to bear the burden commonly and globally. The popular words like “Homo Deus” and “Anthropocene” are nothing than the hubris of human beings. Solidarity with entire humanity and ecology should be a common good for us all.

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Ryokans (Japanese inns) that have been having difficulty attracting guests will improve their management by accepting foreign visitors to Japan after the end of COVID-19 pandemic. This study finds the attractiveness of Japanese inns to foreign visitors of Japan by analyzing and comparing reviews posted in the Japanese and English language by guests of the top 20 “Japanese inns popular among foreigners” on Tripadvisor (2020). As the result, the attractiveness of Japanese inns to foreign visitors to Japan are Japanese-style rooms, Japanese food, tatami mats, yukata (Japanese summer kimono), gardens, and open-air hot spring baths, which are not special to Japanese people. Based on these findings, I proposed ways for inns under severe business situation to satisfy foreign visitors, drawing on the other successful cases of accepting foreign visitors to Japan.

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This study is a precursor to the study on service-oriented organizational citizenship behavior (SOCB) among the frontline staff of Japanese hospitality companies. It aims to create a Japanese version of the SOCB scale and verify it as a research tool. First, we reviewed previous SOCB studies and organized their definitions of SOCB. Next, we created a Japanese translation of the SOCB scale. We surveyed the frontline staff of Japanese hospitality companies and verified the validity and reliability of the Japanese scale. An exploratory factor analysis was conducted to extract the factors based on the survey data. Subsequently, the confirmatory factor analysis confirmed the validity of the model of factor structure resulting from exploratory factor analysis. We confirmed that the same three-factor model of the original scale establishes the structure of the Japanese SOCB scale. Therefore, quantitative research using the Japanese SOCB scale would help obtain concrete suggestions in hospitality companies’ human resources management as much of their value is derived from human factors.

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This study aims to identify the characteristics of effective human resource training programs in the field of tourism, which are implemented in collaboration with universities and government organizations, such as the local federation. In Japan, approximately 70 % of hospitality companies are small and medium sized enterprises without large labor budgets. Therefore, the scope of on-the-job and off-the-job training implemented by each company is limited, making human resource training programs provided in collaboration with local governments and tourism education essential. In this study, we analyzed the case of the Ishikawa Tourism Creation School managed by the Ishikawa Prefecture Tourism Federation. Qualitative data was gathered via semi-structured interviews. The characteristics of an effective program are that it stimulates participants’ willingness to contribute to the community, participants gain familiarity with the relationship with the government officials, participants can benefit from interaction with others and enhance their career awareness through cross-boundary learning, and they can gain knowledge about tourism and the hospitality industry through the university’s tourism department. The program could be positioned as an additional education to complement human resource development training within companies and education provided by higher institutions such as universities.

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This study is to verify whether there are any differences of risk perception in event tourism among Japanese, Chinese, Taiwanese, and South Korean people as an international comparison. International tourists drastically decreased due to the Covid-19 pandemic. The total consumption expenditure of the events industry in 2020 decreased by almost 50 %, compared to that in the same time duration in the preceding year. In the future, the possibility of risks such as a pandemic cannot be denied. A questionnaire survey was conducted to examine risk perception when people participate in event tourism. As a method, a link to an online survey written in Japanese, Chinese, and Korean languages was sent to respondents. The authors collected 504 questionnaires from August to September 2020. The results show that there are significant differences in risk perception between countries and region. Therefore, it is necessary to have a risk management plan which considers the characteristics of the people of a specific country or region.

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This study uses “Mobile Kukan Toukei™” (Mobile Spatial Statistics) to examine the impact of COVID-19 on the transitions and characteristics of population in Nagoya City. Mobile Kukan Toukei comprises statistical population data created using the operational data from mobile phone networks. Comparison of the data before and after the COVID-19 outbreak showed that the impact was remarkable in many areas in April 2020. Notably, urban areas such as Nagoya Station and Sakae showed relatively more robust recovery both on weekdays and holidays. However, several tourist areas did not bounce back on holidays, despite the Japanese government’s “GoTo” campaign. More visitors are perhaps coming from closer regions than distant ones as people’s attempt to minimize the risk of being infected.

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This study clarified the impact of subsidy from the Japanese government to revitalize the tourism industry, which has been negatively affected by COVID-19. Unlike previous studies, this analysis was performed on an accommodation basis rather than on a regional basis. We quantified the reservation status of each accommodation in Japan using the number of reservationable plans at the Online Travel Agency, finding that the number of reservations for many accommodations in 2020 decreased significantly from the previous year due to the influence of COVID-19. On the other hand, the number of accommodations with decreased numbers of reservations was limited during the period when all travels were covered by the subsidy. Moreover, binomial logistic regression analysis with reduced reservations as the dependent variable showed that consumers tended to select higher-priced accommodations during the COVID-19 pandemic with or without subsidy. In addition, it was suggested that during the period covered by the subsidy, consumers select accommodations to maximize both the discount amount and the discount rate.

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Japan has the lowest growth rate of GDP out of the seven developed countries. The main reason is as follows, namely many kinds of resources are concentrated in the urban areas such as Tokyo and Osaka. On the other hand, rural resources are scarce and the consumption effect by foreign visitors to Japan is expected in the areas. The visitor numbers from mainland China, South Korea, and Taiwan to Japan account for more than half of the total number of foreign tourists. This paper describes the relationship between the percentage of a good impression of Japan (or percentage of people who like Japan the most) and the tourism-purpose ratio of the visitors from these three areas. The coefficient of determination (cd) is introduced in the relationship between those ratios. As a result, large coefficients are obtained in the cases of South Korea and Taiwan, and the tourism purpose ratio could be predictable with high reliability using a regression equation by examining the good impression ratio in those two areas. The cd for China is small and it is difficult to predict the ratio using a regression equation. It is effective to adopt other methods such as artificial intelligence (AI) to predict the tourism purpose ratio because there are many factors between Japan and China.

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Tourism, which is ranked as an important policy pillar in Japan, is changing. For instance, attention is paid to “not famous” sightseeing spots, or demand for work vacation is expanding. It is essential to accurately grasp and respond to these changes. Information and communication technology (ICT) utilization, especially big data utilization, is an important area of focus. However, tourism is a field where ICT or big data utilization has not been fully employed. According to a survey, the reasons for this are: personnel do not have concrete content, and lack of human resource and technical expertise. Therefore, in this study, we analyze the traffic tracking data collected and propose ways to utilize it to show what kind of data can be used, its effects and merits, and create concrete examples of big data utilization. The analysis ensured prevailing situations are understood to be utilized for evaluating the effects of measures in the future and for countermeasures against traffic congestion. We also showed a merit of big data utilization by discovering present situations which were different from the perceptions of the locals.

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