The growing importance of rural tourism requires proper understanding of its characteristics and how they connect with the effects of the rural infrastructure, such as rural roads. To this end, firstly, this paper characterized briefly conceptual features of rural tourism goods and explored how to recognize the impact of rural roads on this activity in comparison with traditional farm products. Secondly, from the perspective of farm diversification through tourism activity this paper empirically evaluated the impact of rural roads built, focusing on pick your-own farms in Japan with statistical tests of the data obtained by a survey of the operators of these farms. It was found that building roads generated benefits for producers of rural tourism in terms of causing an upward shift of the demand curve in comparison with that of ordinary farming activity. However, the benefits of rural road building were limited spatially. Consequently, it should be recognized that rural roads are an effective infrastructure for developing rural tourism and for transforming ordinary farming activity into diversified farm activity based on rural tourism as long as the upward demand shift effects are appropriately taken into account. Otherwise, the actual beneficial effects of rural road building will be underestimated.

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Toward the general study of touristic activities of disabled people in Japan, we think it is necessary to give an overview of this new discipline, proposing four parts which are essential. First, this area is composed by touristic activities of disabled people which are also managed and practiced by disable people or are sometimes helped by volunteers. Second, we must study the demands issued from the disabled people or their groups. In third, we can consider ”hospitality business” as being part of this area. Last but not least, welfare to help increase their tourist activities. These four parts will contribute as a whole to further studies of their area, and as a result of these studies, we hope of becoming a ”barrier-free” society where disabled or not we could enjoy the touristic activities.

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The purpose of this study is to form a hypothesis of differentiation in Kushiro tourist destination. Hokkaido is a tourist resort which has beautiful scenery. But it seems that the beautiful scenery of Hokkaido differs with regions. Sixty percent of wetland area in Japan exits in Kushiro region. What characteristic does it have? What benefit does it give to tourists? What psychological and emotional benefits do they get? As the result, it is the destination which makes ”the regression to the nature” possible to tourists.

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Since travel visas can be issued in any region of China now, it is expected that there will be a large increase in the number of Chinese tourists who visit Japan from now on. However, with deeply rooted political and social problems existing between the two countries, the author is concerned that these problems could stem the flow of Chinese tourists visiting Japan and Japanese tourists visiting China, even if only for a brief period of time. With this in mind, the author visited Shanghai for three weeks, from 31st July to 20th August, 2005, and conducted further background research into the Japanese travel market. In this essay, taking into account the aforementioned background of group tourist visas for visiting Japan being issued throughout China now, as well as clarifying the present background of the market for Chinese visitors to Japan and the present situation and problems facing. Chinese visitors to Japan, this paper will attempt to investigate possible strategies for solving these problems.

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The purpose of this paper is to clarify features of tourism community planning in Ajimu town on Oita prefecture, and to find out the factor of the green tourism popularization in the area. We point out the following three points as the factor in which the green tourism spreads through the Ajimu town. They are private initiative and cooperation of the administration, independence of the inhabitant and developing the love for one's homeland, reports of the mass communication and evaluation of the outside. The significant points for the sustainability of community planning are the succession of practice person's idea, various activities by the cooperation of the inhabitant group, and the improvement in the satisfaction of the visitor.

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The 21st Century is called a ”Century of Tourism” worldwide. National development through tourism is also intended in Japan. Tourism development attracts attention all over the country, and becomes one of the main means of regional promotion in many municipalities. This study describes the importance of rediscovery and recognition of regional resources from the viewpoint of endogenous development theory. It suggests that tourism development, which is based on the maximal utilization of regional resources, can become a great opportunity to improve local residents' endogenous and autonomous intention and promote regional endogenous development.

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Although the hotel industry has witnessed the widespread acceptance of chain operations, the extant research on the relationship between the chain operations and the financial performance has provided mixed results. The main reason for the contradictory findings can be attributed to the subject variability. In fact, existing studies focused primarily on an individual chain property and its financial performance. Addressing such methodological shortcoming of the previous research, this study targeted the hotel chain companies and assessed their performances from the perspective of operational efficiency using the Data Envelopment Analysis. The results indicated that the hotel chain companies, particularly large scale hotel companies, shows better performance than the independent hotel companies in terms of technical efficiency, pure technical efficiency, and scale efficiency.

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