ABSTRACT
This chapter traces key tourism trends in Japan from tourism’s origins in religious pilgrimage through to contemporary issues. Changes in postwar domestic travel behaviour are outlined from mass tourism to ‘next-generation’ tourism in the Internet age. Since 2003, policies aimed at increasing inbound tourism have resulted in the number of inbound tourists increasing from 5.2 million to over 31 million between 2003 and 2018. Such campaigns have increasingly overlapped with the ‘Cool Japan’ strategy focusing on the export of Japanese cultural products. The chapter ends with discussion of the emerging phenomenon of contents tourism induced by pop culture products such as anime.
