Tourism in the rural periphery: Revitalization and community resilience in Japan

For rural and peripheral communities with long-established or growing links to tourism, the sector provides a vital fillip to more traditional economic activities, particularly primary production including agriculture, aquaculture, forestry, mining and allied extractive industries. As such, tourism often helps shift path dependencies of destination areas from reliance on longstanding traditional industries to more contemporary activities predicated on aiding revitalization and regeneration. In contextualizing three field sites in Japan, and ongoing engagement there, we assess the impacts of tourism on local communities in such cases. While on the one hand tourism can offer opportunities for economic diversification and regeneration, repopulation and infrastructure development, on the other hand, it can also have inadvertent impacts, driving seasonal overcrowding, inflationary pressures and detracting from the rural idyll. The nub of this chapter is the reporting of medium-term impacts of tourism and the implications for revitalization and resilience building contextualized amidst the coronavirus pandemic.