ABSTRACT
Matsuo Basho is one of Japan’s most famous poets. By writing poems about ancient wars while visiting related sites, he was both a seventeenth century war-related contents tourist and an inducer of contents tourism in the present day. This chapter demonstrates how the conditions for contents tourism flourished during the Edo period both in terms of popular culture and tourism development. The military epics that had probably inspired Basho’s own travel have also spawned legends relating to the twelfth century warlord Minamoto no Yoshitsune that influence tourism even in Hokkaido, well to the north of where Yoshitsune is believed to have ever ventured.
