ABSTRACT
The 1609 Satsuma invasion of the Ryukyu Kingdom has featured only rarely in Japanese historical dramas. The main drama depicting the Satsuma invasion is Ryukyu no Kaze: Dragon Spirit, which was NHK’s Taiga drama in 1993. This chapter discusses how the drama generated a contents tourism boom shortly after the drama, although it was not able to generate a decisive shift in public consciousness about the invasion. Furthermore, the financial troubles of the shooting set, which opened as a theme park after the drama was made, epitomizes the problems that even major historical dramas have in sustaining long-term contents tourism.
