Recreating the Place: Video-Sharing Websites and the Promotion of Domestic Tourism in the Concurrent Trend of Popular Media-Induced Tourism and Local Mascots in Japan

Anime Tourism

Although anime tourism has grown in popularity in recent years, its history can be traced to earlier decades. Anime tourism begins with potential tourists’ experiences of watching anime, reading manga (Japanese term for comic books), or playing video games. The streets, buildings, and landscapes shown in the above-mentioned media inspire some of the audience willing to travel to the place, thus turning these consumers of anime-related contents into tourists. The late 1980s saw, for example, stores using cartoonists of local origin as a selling point and also for town revitalization. Physical models of characters from certain manga written and drawn by those cartoonists were put on streets, trains and buses were decorated with images of manga characters, and events related to either those cartoonists or characters of their creation were held. For some thirty recorded instances of anime tourism in Japan, most took place at places where certain cartoonists were born or where stories unfolded (Yamamura, 2011, p. 25).