ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the recent internationalization of Japanese domestic tourism, a powerful trend alongside the growth of Japanese international tourism. This phenomenon has added to but not replaced the two previous forms of domestic tourism, namely, modern religious and secular tourism at urban and historical sites and, second, tourism that has recently expanded to cultural and natural hinterlands. In the ‘consumption of foreignness,’ a basic theme in the internationalization of domestic tourism, sites of foreignness within Japan are being discovered and/or constructed, and these are providing arenas in which the tourist population can experiment, play and learn about foreignness in a safe environment. It is argued that this consumption of foreignness is producing a cosmopolitan middle-class population in Japan, and their ability to consume foreign cultures within a safe domestic environment helps in stimulating creative cultural growth, thereby allowing for the expansion of what being ‘Japanese’ means today.
