Assessing the role of social media in tourism recovery in tsunami-hit coastal areas in Tohoku, Japan

Abstract

Social media have become increasingly popular. However, there has been little investigation on how to effectively mobilize this newly emerging tool to promote tourism in rural areas. The aims of this article are twofold. First, among social media, we explore the role of Twitter for tourism promotion, especially by focusing on the recovery process of tourism in a rural area affected by the huge earthquake and tsunami, Magnitude 9.0, which hit eastern Japan in March 2011. Second, to approach the first purpose, we compare two types of tourism: ordinary tourism and ‘volunteer tourism’. As to the latter, a massive number of volunteers came to these areas to help in the recovery work from the devastation such as removing debris and helping evacuees rehabilitate their lives in Iwate prefecture. We employed a text-mining method to find keywords used in the official Twitter account issued by the Iwate Prefectural government and time-series regression models to identify factors that promote the two types of tourism. Data were collected using official statistics on incoming numbers of ordinary tourists and volunteer tourists. Tweeted information was provided by Iwate Prefecture. The results revealed that, first, tweeted information on cultural and natural heritage had a positive relationship with the number of incoming tourists while information on disaster-related words had negative effects. In contrast, second, tweeted information on tourism resources worked negatively toward the number of volunteer tourists while that on rehabilitation/reconstruction and on volunteers worked positively. Consequently, it is important to design support measures that enable the local tourism sector to attract incoming tourists after a drop-in volunteer tourism as reconstruction of the disaster area progresses. In this context, our results suggest how to effectively utilize Twitter for this purpose.