Understanding Tourism Mobilities in Japan

The total number of foreign tourists received in countries throughout the world was 530 million in 1995. That number broke through the 1 billion mark for the first time in 2012, at 1,035,000,000. In 2015, it reached 1,180,000,000. According to Anthony Elliott and John Urry, modern society has been characterized as being ＂mobile＂, and within that we are also living ＂mobile lives＂.

In modern society, flows of people, things, capital, information, ideas and technologies are constantly occurring, and as they are merging like a violently rushing stream, what could be termed a landscape of mobilities has appeared. Social realities are in flux and are transforming to become different than they were before. This volume will expand the inquiry of tourism mobilities comprehensively and clearly from the fields of humanities and social sciences. In particular, tourism mobilities has been actively investigated up to now in the UK, US, Europe and Australia, but even though the Japanese body of literature contains a great many excellent studies of Japanese examples, there are almost no English-language articles presenting their results.

Publishing examples of Japanese tourism mobilities will not only foster new and exciting lines of inquiry for existing and future research on tourism mobilities, but will also have implications for humanities and social sciences throughout the world.

Hideki Endo is a Professor in Tourism Research in the Faculty of Letters and Executive Director of the Institute of Humanities, Human and Social Sciences at Ritsumeikan University, Japan. He has studied the sociology of tourism, especially the social transformation that mobility and tourism bring. Among his publications are Tourism Mobilities (2017), Media and Culture (2017), Space and Media (2015), Tourism and Media (2014), Contemporary Cultural Studies (2011) and Actualities in Sociology of Tourism (2010).