ASIAN YOUTHS PAYING CULTURAL TRIBUTE TO JAPAN:THE USE OF JAPANESE POPULAR CUL TURE IN ASIAN TOURISM

摘要

Popular culture has played an increasingly important role in attracting Asian tourists to visit Japan. Unlike their parents who liked to join package guided tours to visit Mt. Fuji, Buddhist temples and historical sites and to enjoy hot-spring and Japanese cuisine, Asian youths go to Japan by themselves to pay tribute to famous shooting locations of Japanese TV dramas in Odaba and Roppogi, to buy latest fashion in Daikanyama and Uraharajuku, to have good time at Hello Kitty Land, and to go for live concert of their favorite Japanese idol singers. Likewise, Japanese fans of Korean TV dramas, Taiwanese dramas and Hong Kong movies go to visit their dreamlands. Transnational tourist flows jump-started by popular culture, a relatively new and powerful trend in Asian tourism, deserves empirical and theoretical investigation in the lens of globalization. Using Hong Kong as a main reference, this study examines the rise of popular-culture tourism in an Asian context and identifies the changing pattern of outbound tourism to Japan in the past years from package guided tours to self-guided tours. It aims to deepen understanding of the importance of popular culture in tourism and will have important implications for new business strategies in Asian tourism.