Japan is facing an extremely low birthrate and aging population, which is giving rise to a variety of issues. The population in rural areas is particularly declining rapidly, and Japan’s primary industries of agriculture, fishing, and forestry are in decline as a result. In this study, an overview of the current state of agriculture is described and the connected people (kankei-jinko in Japanese) are also described. And, the impact of the increase in foreign visitors to Japan is discussed. The connected people means a kind of hometown resident (furusato-jumin in Japanese) system. As Japan aims to continuously increase the number of foreign visitors, it is essential that it provides food that they find satisfying. Food and beverage expenses account for approximately 21 % of travel consumption. This paper describes the trends in foreign visitors to Japan and the current state of agriculture in Japan. Japan’s food self-sufficiency rate is declining. The reasons for this include not only a decrease in the number of people working in agriculture but also the aging population. Agricultural workers have long and tough working hours. Agricultural mechanization has hardly progressed, and delays in the introduction of smart agriculture have been pointed out. The Engel coefficient is also the highest among the G7 countries. The coefficient is strongly dependent on the food self-sufficiency rate and aging rate. This study discusses the current situation in Japan, which is facing an aging society, and the importance of agriculture in terms of policies to attract an increasing number of foreign visitors to Japan.

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In recent years, “film tourism,” which is triggered by films, animations, and other creative works, has been attracting increasing attention in Japan’s tourism sector. Looking specifically at Japanese films, box office revenues have been on the rise. In terms of audience demographics, the movie-viewing rate among young women in their twenties has also been increasing. Consequently, many of the top-grossing films in recent years have been romance films. Based on these trends, this study focuses on Japanese romance films as the subject of analysis. The aim of this paper is to investigate the relationship between the “basic information” of Japanese romance films and the “number of tourists” visiting the filming locations. The data used for analysis consist of 34 romance films released between 2000 and 2019. Variables such as the presence or absence of an original work, running time, protagonist age, and history of film awards are used as basic information. This study seeks to clarify how these factors influence changes in the number of overnight visitors in the year following a film’s release. Specifically, films were classified into two categories—those associated with an increase in the number of overnight visitors and those associated with a decrease. The analysis revealed that factors such as whether the film is based on a comic, running time, and the protagonist’s age have a significant impact on tourist numbers.

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Mental health encompasses emotional, psychological, and social well-being that impacts how we think, feel, and act. Rural tourism is often considered a stress-relieving leisure activity, but insufficient scientific evidence supports this claim. Thus, a multidisciplinary research team investigated the psychological effects of participating in a rice harvest operation in Japan. The 19 effective participants, primarily IT company employees, along with their families and friends from the Metropolitan area, volunteered to assist in the farm operation. The researchers employed various tools, including the ordered logit model, POMS 2, SD method, and “Jikaku-sho shirabe,” to administer questionnaires that assessed psychological effects. The findings indicated a significant positive correlation between job satisfaction and life satisfaction, while a significant negative correlation between life satisfaction and job stress. Further, the statistical analysis revealed that participants in the high-anxiety group reported lower life satisfaction and higher job stress than those in the low-anxiety group. The study provides evidence that the rice harvest experience reduced mental stress and improved psychological well-being, particularly in the high-anxiety group, indicating a differential effect based on individual anxiety levels. Consequently, volunteer tourism initiatives focused on rice related operations could be actively promoted, offering mutual benefits to both rural and urban communities.

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This study classified walking environments (hallway, grass, sandy beach, uphill slope, downhill slope) using an insole-type gait sensor and conducted a fundamental investigation of walking environment estimation technology with an eye toward applications in the tourism sector. Diverse walking environments exist in tourist destinations, parks, and historic streetscapes, where mobility load and safety directly impact the comfort and accessibility of the tourist experience. This study constructed walking environment classification models using five methods: Random Forest, SVM, XGBoost, 1D-CNN, and Transformer Encoder, and evaluated them via cross-validation among subjects. The results showed that the deep learning models 1D-CNN and Transformer Encoder demonstrated relatively high classification accuracy, maintaining strong generalization performance even for unseen subjects. Furthermore, through misclassification tendency analysis and visualization using t-SNE, we clarified differences in feature distributions and challenges in environmental identification. These findings suggest potential applications in barrier-free evaluations of tourist destinations, fatigue risk estimation, and route recommendation/mobility support within smart tourism.

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This study proposes an AI-based license plate recognition system deployed at parking areas in Shirakawa-go, a UNESCO World Heritage site, to analyse and visualize tourist dynamics. The system automatically detects and recognizes vehicle license plates from camera footage, enabling large-scale and continuous monitoring of tourist traffic patterns. The extracted data provide insights into visitor origins, stay durations, visit frequencies, and rental car usage, offering valuable indicators for regional tourism management. Compared with conventional manual counting and questionnaire surveys, the proposed approach enables efficient, automated, and continuous data collection suitable for small-scale destinations with limited resources. The empirical operation in Shirakawa-go demonstrated that the system can identify temporal peaks in parking demand and support cloud-based data aggregation for real-time analysis. These findings highlight the system’s potential for overtourism mitigation, parking congestion alleviation, and data-driven resource optimization, thereby contributing to sustainable and responsible tourism management in culturally significant rural areas.

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This study empirically investigates the discursive chain in Japan in which social friction arising from overtourism—particularly “tourist phobia”—transforms into exclusionary discourse (xenophobia) directed toward long-term foreign residents and functions as a key political resource for neo-nationalism. Employing a mixed methods approach that combines quantitative analysis of newspaper coverage and qualitative analysis of election pledges and outcomes, the paper demonstrates the three-stage process by which localized social discontent is politically abstracted through the ambiguous category of “foreigners.” This process constructs an exclusionary circuit of political affect, a structure in which exclusionary sentiments are translated into political support and policy preferences, that ultimately influences central government decision-making, most notably during the LDP presidential election. The analysis reveals that the Japanese government’s continued reliance on the policy fiction that “immigrants do not exist”—maintained through the framework of “foreign nationals policy”—deliberately sustains category confusion between tourists (short-term visitors) and migrants (long-term residents). This ambiguity provides fertile ground for exclusionary populism. Micro-level emotions of nuisance or fatigue toward tourists are absorbed into macro-level national narratives of “cultural defense” and “public safety deterioration,” thereby functioning as a powerful political apparatus to legitimize neo-nationalistic and exclusionary policies. Theoretically, this study bridges conventional overtourism research and migration studies under the shared conceptual frameworks of “mobility” and “othering,” positioning tourism as a socio-political phenomenon deeply tied to the reconstruction of national identity. Furthermore, it advances xenophobia studies by empirically demonstrating how everyday affective responses (tourist phobia) are transformed into political mobilization through discursive mechanisms. The findings underscore the importance of enhancing discursive transparency in policymaking by clearly distinguishing among categories of foreign nationals, and of integrating a multicultural coexistence perspective into overtourism countermeasures to prevent the political instrumentalization of local grievances.

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To promote tourism among the elderly, this study attempted to derive the tourism activity ability of 10 elderly individuals using a previously developed virtual sightseeing tour system. The recruited subjects were self-reported as frail or pre-frail. A course with an elevation change of 2 km was prepared, lasting up to 90 minutes, and subjects walked until fatigued. Seven subjects were able to complete the tour at the set pace. Fatigue from tour participation was measured using objective indicators: heart rate, number of steps, and amount of activity. Subjective indicators were assessed using the Japanese version of the Multidimensional Fatigue Inventory and the Visual-analog Scale. Principal component analysis was performed on these five variables (three objective and two subjective). Tourism activity ability was derived from the principal component scores and tour observations. Ultimately, enabling elderly individuals to objectively assess their own tourism activity ability and to formulate realistic travel plans based on this assessment is expected to enhance their willingness to participate in tourism and contribute to tourism promotion. As a foundational stage toward this objective, this study enabled the derivation of tourism activity ability among frail and pre-frail elderly individuals, for whom outdoor experiments are difficult, by employing a virtual sightseeing tour system.

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This study aims to identify issues related to tourist behaviour and manners based on data, focusing on the impacts of overtourism emerging in the World Heritage Site of Shirakawa-go. In September 2025, a multilingual questionnaire survey was conducted in both paper and online formats on-site, providing questionnaires in seven languages (Japanese, English, Spanish, Korean, Thai, Traditional Chinese, and Simplified Chinese), and 116 valid responses were collected. The analysis revealed that many tourists rely primarily on social media—especially Instagram—as their main source of information, whereas official communication in Shirakawa-go mainly depends on its website. This discrepancy indicates that accurate information is not sufficiently reaching visitors. This study presents foundational data on tourists’ behavior and attitudes, highlighting the need for future initiatives that promote proper manners and deeper local understanding through multilingual social media communication. Going forward, the project aims to collaborate with local governments to refine survey design and methodology, enabling municipalities themselves to collect, analyze, and utilize data for effective tourism management.

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Japan is facing the challenges of population decline and aging, and particularly the excessive concentration of people in the Tokyo metropolitan area, which has led to depopulation and economic stagnation in surrounding towns. To revitalize local economies, tourism has become an important strategy, especially with the recent rise of nostalgia tourism. For example, Bungotakada City has successfully attracted visitors through projects such as the “Showa Town.” This study examines how the increasingly widespread use of virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) technology can more effectively promote nostalgia tourism destinations to enhance tourists’ travel intentions. Before travel, tourists can use VR headsets to preview the scenery and culture of nostalgic travel destinations, sparking their interest and boosting their willingness to visit. During the travel, AR technology can enrich the travel experience, accompanying visitors throughout their nostalgic travel and providing detailed insights into the destination’s historical context. After travel, implementing membership programs can encourage repeat visits. These promotional measures for the three stages of nostalgia tourism aim to enhance the willingness of domestic and international visitors to experience nostalgic travel in Japan, disseminate traditional Japanese culture, and revitalize regional tourism. In this paper, we proposed a conceptual framework to conduct empirical research through reviews of previous research and interviews with local tourism bureaus.

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This study aims to clarify the factors that drive people to engage in virtual travel and the structure of memorable experiences within virtual travel, by examining findings from prior research on the TAM model and Presence. Qualitative analysis of interview data extracted key dimensions of virtual experiences. Results revealed two underlying aspects: “External Factors” and “Internal Factors,” which align with the push and pull factor framework in tourism psychology. Furthermore, the process of the experience comprised three stages: “perception of virtual travel,” “quality of the experience,” and “psychological change.” This suggests that the experience during virtual travel constitutes a psychological process progressing from perceptual understanding to emotional transformation. The novelty and significance of this study lie in its reinterpretation, through qualitative analysis, of the structure of the virtual travel experience as a psychological process.

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Traditional crafts must evolve by generating emotional and experiential value in addition to cultural and historical significance. Echizen “washi,” a 1,500-year-old Japanese handmade paper, presents strong potential for wellbeing-oriented tourism through sensory design, experiential learning, and evidence-based functional value. This study examines two complementary pathways—cultural-experiential value and wellbeing-functional value—through case studies of Yanase Washi and Igarashi Paper Co., combined with a visitor perception survey and neurophysiological evaluation. Fieldwork at Yanase Washi revealed increasing participation by international visitors, strong interest in hands-on papermaking, and emerging challenges related to multilingual cultural interpretation. The studio also collaborates with designers to create three-dimensional washi artworks, demonstrating how traditional materials can be transformed into contemporary cultural assets. To assess public perception of these new forms, a survey was conducted. Respondents described three-dimensional washi as beautiful, innovative, and artistically valuable, and most viewed it as a promising tourism resource. To evaluate emotional responses to washi-based environments, an EEG experiment compared standard and functional washi-covered lighting. Nine young adults (19-22 years), a sample size aligned with exploratory EEG research standards, participated to ensure age-homogeneous neural responses. Results indicated increased alpha power and reduced beta activity under washi lighting, demonstrating relaxation and tension reduction. These findings support the interpretation that washi contributes to psychological comfort and wellbeing. Integrating field observations, survey data, and neurophysiological evidence, this study proposes a wellbeing-based framework for revitalizing traditional crafts through tourism. By combining heritage transmission, contemporary design, and scientific validation, Echizen washi demonstrates how traditional industries can generate new forms of cultural, emotional, and functional value. This model contributes to sustainable regional revitalization and offers a viable approach for elevating traditional crafts within global tourism and wellbeing markets.

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