Landscape as Theme Park: Demographic Change, Tourism, Urbanization, and the Fate of Communities in 21st Century Japan

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In this article the authors address a simple question: What will the already observable demographic changes mean for tourism in Japan, apart from the presence of older people? Indeed, if the population will be nearly halved in the next 50 years, one must actually address the question of whether many of the more peripheral communities in Japan will survive at all, or whether they resemble the ghost villages in Shiga prefecture to the east of Lake Biwa. Some pointers to the fate of these communities can already be discerned in a series of studies carried out in the last 20 years. On the basis of selected case studies this article projects this process over the next 50 years to see what the impact will be on the Japanese rural periphery and on patterns of tourism. Japan as a whole has an extraordinary concentration of theme parks and other tourist facilities based on notions of identity and heritage. The title of this article refers to the fact that many communities in Japan are already turning their landscapes into quasi, if not actual, theme parks in order to attract tourists, capital and, especially, more residents. Over the next 50 years this process of conversion could become a Darwinian struggle for survival as the population diminishes outside Japan's major cities.