Tourism Studies Review
Online ISSN : 2434-0154
Print ISSN : 2187-6649
Volume 4, Issue 1
Displaying 1-6 of 6 articles from this issue
  • Theoretical Perspective of "Performer-Tourists"
    Kazuya HASHIMOTO
    2016Volume 4Issue 1 Pages 3-17
    Published: 2016
    Released on J-STAGE: January 13, 2020
    JOURNAL FREE ACCESS
    This paper attempts to develop a theoretical perspective in sports tourism by focusing on performance. In the revised edition of The Tourist Gaze 3.0 Urry and Larsen addressed a performative turn in the tourist gaze by introducing E. Goffman’s dramaturgical performance theory on ‘presentation of self in everyday life’. However their performative turn cannot explain the motivations and experiences, nor the social practices and performative acts of authentication of sports tourists who, for example, compete in full marathon races as runners. For this reason, ‘a turn to performance’ in research for sports tourism and a new concept of ‘performer-tourists’ are proposed here, which involves distance runners, cyclists, or ‘YOSAKOI dancers’ as contestants. For Tour de France fans, the cycling excursions in the French Alps authenticate “Tour space” and their status as cyclists. Their collective, participatory roadside practices constitute performative acts of authentication of the Tour de France. Promoting the tour members’ exploits to broader social networks facilitates dissemination and perpetuation of the authentic status of the tour sites and provides them with a valued social identity and ‘subcultural capital’ in their (cyclists’) community. These acts of ‘performer-tourists’ reflexively authenticate the tour spaces. In this domain of tourism research, ‘existential authenticity’ and ‘hot authentication’ are examined for the performer-tourists themselves, not for the mass-tourists, nor for the alternative tourists. The meaning of tourism is quite different for these three categories of tourists, and therefore, ‘sports tourism’ and ‘performer-tourist’ that provide a new theoretical perspective for understanding ‘performance’ in tourism studies should be advocated.
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  • Limitation of Dark Tourism and Suggestions taken from the Resilience Theory
    Hikaru KENCHU
    2016Volume 4Issue 1 Pages 19-32
    Published: 2016
    Released on J-STAGE: January 13, 2020
    JOURNAL FREE ACCESS
    On disaster reconstruction - currently an urgent research issue worldwide - an accumulation of good practices and know-hows regarding the support for it is strongly required. Among those, as observed in the April 2015 Nepal Earthquake, there are many cases that demand a knowledge and understanding of the disaster reconstruction through tourism. This paper therefore first analyzed some of the recent cases and the studies of tourism in disaster-affected areas, with a focus on the 2004 Indian Ocean Tsunami and the 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake. A discussion on their potential and problems followed it.
    As a result, it was found that in the existing literature, tourism studies generally situate tourism in disaster areas as a part of “dark tourism” and analyze the cases within its framework. However, this framework innately includes its limitation as pointed out in this research; in order to cover it and analyze beyond, there needs a new framework. For this purpose, this paper proposed to refer the concept of resilience to fill this position. While resilience is often used in the realm of psychology and materials, here referred is closer to that of systems, defined as “the ability of a system to reorganize itself so as to retain its function, structure and feedback in the face of the social disturbance”.
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  • Jun’ichiro ABE
    2016Volume 4Issue 1 Pages 33-42
    Published: 2016
    Released on J-STAGE: January 13, 2020
    JOURNAL FREE ACCESS
    The purpose of this paper is to understand The Tourist Gaze 3.0 (Urry & Larsen, 2011) in relation to the "mobility turn" proposed by Urry (2000, 2007) and to evaluate its theoretical contribution to tourism studies.
    First, I examine how Urry responds to those who criticized the "tourist gaze" thesis (Urry, 1990) by focusing on his view of "agency". In The Tourist Gaze 3.0, Urry recognizes that tourists or local residents can violate or resist the "tourist gaze" produced by the tourism industry and media organizations. More importantly, he uses Gibson’s concept of "affordance" and recognizes not only human beings but also impersonal-objects (technology, texts, and physical environments) as "agency" that makes performances happen.
    Second, I discuss how new technologies canalized our styles of perception, performance, and social relation in history by focusing on railway and automobile transportation each of which was a typical transportation system in "early modern" and "late modern" era (Urry, 2007). Thereby, I will indicate that performances, which seem to be autonomous, are not independent from any physical systems, but are actually afforded by some other systems.
    Lastly, I argue that Urry’s theoretical standpoint reflected his severe criticism for the existing sociological analyses that have ignored the "hybridization" of human-object in the modern era and re-produced the false dichotomy of the natural/social or human/object.
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  • Shisei KIMURA
    2016Volume 4Issue 1 Pages 43-55
    Published: 2016
    Released on J-STAGE: January 13, 2020
    JOURNAL FREE ACCESS
    This paper aims to examine the application range and problems of J. Urry’ s The Tourist Gaze 3.0 in the context of today’s Japanese industrial heritage tourism.
    Firstly, the decline of secondary industries and the rise of tertiary industries in Britain are the background of Urry’s research. For that reason, the first edition of The Tourist Gaze analyzed many cases of industrial remains redesigned as heritage sites. However, as 20 years have passed since the appearance of the first edition, the situation around the industrial heritage sites has changed completely. In spite of the introduction of new ideas such as ‘tourism reflexivity’, it is hard to say the case studies are updated sufficiently.
    Thus, this study examines the possibility and problems of new ideas in The Tourist Gaze 3.0 by analyzing the case study of Gunkan-jima, which was granted World Heritage Site status in 2015.
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  • A Case Study of the Kamagasaki Study Tour in Osaka
    Kazuhiro SUNAGA
    2016Volume 4Issue 1 Pages 57-69
    Published: 2016
    Released on J-STAGE: January 13, 2020
    JOURNAL FREE ACCESS
    Publication of John Urry’s The Tourist Gaze in 1990 made an enormous impact on tourism studies. Since then, demonstrating the way in which the tourist gaze is socially constructed has been one of the major fields of sociological study on tourism. While Urry’s work has been received favorably in the academic world in general, there have been several critical reviews of his argument. For example, a prominent tourism scholar, Dean MacCannell, made the criticism that Urry’s model proffered by Michael Foucault was too deterministic, and assumed tourists to be too passive without agency (MacCannell 2001). Instead, MacCannell advocated the second gaze, shedding light on tourists’ agency to question the tourist gaze installed by the institutions and practices of the commercialized tourism industry, and to gain awareness that something is being concealed from the institutionalized and stereotyped gaze.
    Urry has responded to such criticism in The Tourist Gaze 3.0, co-written with Jonas Larsen, in 2011. His response to various critical comments on the previous edition and his suggestion for a revised model of the tourist gaze are some of the features of this recent edition. In his work, he also agrees that tourists have agency and they do not accept the tourist gaze produced by the mass media and tourist industry, but interpret, negotiate, and question the institutionalized tourist gaze. Therefore, he acknowledges the importance of examining the way in which the tourist gaze can be transformed through performance and accidental experience of actual tourism practices.
    This paper intends to apply his argument on the interface between the gaze and performance, and examines a case study of slum tourism in Kamagasaki, Osaka. Kamagasaki is known to have the largest concentration of day laborers in Japan, and is in a slum-like condition. Therefore, the mass media such as newspapers and popular magazines have frequently described Kamagasaki and its dwellers as dangerous, criminal, and dirt, (re)producing negative stereotyped images of them. Against these false images of a slum, the Kamagasaki Community Regeneration forum, a network organization of academics, activists, and local people supporting this area’s anti-poverty movement, has been conducting study tours there since 2004. Some local residents with extensive experience as day laborers have also been involved in this tour program as local guides.
    In this paper, I examine how these tour experiences enable tourists to transform and deconstruct the essentialized and negative images of this area. Furthermore, it will be argued that these transformative processes enable tourists to view the slum residents as less ‘Othered’, but more ‘Same-d’.
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  • Some Critical Practices of the Travels and Thoughts in the "Post-War” Japan: Kazuko, Shunsuke, Yoshiyuki Tsurumi, and their lives Post-War
    Yoshihiro TANIGAWA
    2016Volume 4Issue 1 Pages 71-73
    Published: 2016
    Released on J-STAGE: January 13, 2020
    JOURNAL FREE ACCESS
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