Contents Tourism and Pop Culture Fandom

In this volume, an international group of scholars rewrites the old canon of ‘contents tourism’ with impressive cultural sensitivity. Across several chapters exploring aspects of Japanese popular culture’s adherence to performance and visuality, native phenomena are examined as instances of transnational hybridisation and global cultural connectivity. An essential read for students of international popular culture, tourism and the moving image.

* Rodanthi Tzanelli, University of Leeds, UK *

This book reconceptualises the largely compartmentalised views of media-tourism relationships, such as film and literary tourism, advancing and encapsulating them within the socialising frame of contents tourism. The authors provide engaging insights into the formation, curation and (re)crafting of media-related narratives, variously bonding communities, media, tourists and places across the different contexts. These insights provoke new interpretations and considerations, which will benefit anyone studying contents tourism (or any tourism-media relationship).

* Glen Croy, Monash University, Australia *

This important book expands the concept of contents tourism, which has so far been limited mainly to the Japanese context, and shows its transnational and transmedial potential. Case studies from different cultural contexts, which refer to enthusiasm for literature, theatre, folklore or anime, illustrate the variety of paths the imagination can take – and how imaginary journeys become real tourism.

* Elisabeth Scherer, University of Düsseldorf, Germany *

Contents tourism is among the very few productive new ideas that has emerged in tourism studies in the past several decades. The authors in this important volume capture the dynamics of the emotional and symbolic connection of tourists to the places they visit. The chapters prove the promise of contents tourism beyond studies of the mise en scene of Japanese anime where it originated.

* Dean MacCannell, Emeritus Professor, University of California, Davis, USA *

This book further contributes to academia as it clarifies the term ‘contents tourism’, broadens this term from the Japanese context to a global context, links literature and tourism from a ‘contentsization’ point of view, and focuses on mediarelated narratives in tourism. From a qualitative-research point of view, the authors have contributed to this growing field of contents tourism by building their argumentation on different qualitative methods, as the following analysis illustrates.

-- Zafer Öter, İzmir Katip Çelebi University, Turkey * Journal of Qualitative Research in Tourism, Vol. 2, No. 1, 2021 *

This book contributes greatly to our understanding of the role of popular culture and its contents for the contemporary global tourism landscape [and] provides a fresh perspective that will hopefully decrease the fragmentation of existing related research while making especially Japanese research in this area more accessible to English-speaking academia.

-- Ina Reichenberger, Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand * Journal of Tourism Futures, Vol. 7 No. 1, 2021 *

This collection of essays examines the phenomenon of "contents tourism" within a global context [...] In all cases, content is the unifying element of analysis rather than the platform. This interesting construct utilizes the content itself as the focus/motivator of tourism rather than the individual modality of presentation (e.g., film, theater). This is a readable, interesting, and informative study.

-- S. A. Schulman, CUNY Baruch College, USA * CHOICE, Vol. 58 No. 4, Dec 20