 Ddiolch yn fawr, i gyfnod i'n ddweud. Felly, rydyn ni'n fawr i chi. Dyma'r cyfnod i'r fawr yn gweithio i'r fawr i'r fawr, i gyd y 6 wrth anul WG Beasley yn y Llyfrgell. Felly, rydyn ni'n fawr yn ymweli, rydyn ni'n Helin MacNaughton, i'r llai'r Llyfrgell Yn Ym Mhelyn. Felly, ei ddigon i'r fawr i'r llai'r llai'r llai'r cyfnod. This was established in memory of Professor William Gerald Beasley. He was a leading academic in the field of Japanese Studies and History. He taught here at SOS from 1947 until his retirement in 1983. And as many of you know his research remains a benchmark in the field of Japanese history even today. And Beasley was also the founding member of the Japan Research Center in back in 1978. As many of you know, we celebrated 40 years last year in 2018. At that 40th celebration, I announced that we were going to launch a new funding initiative called the 4040 Fuwaku Fund. Fuwaku in Japanese means it's a bit difficult to translate but following the right course past 40. I'm pleased to announce that the Fuwaku Fund has now officially gone live this month. You can see these little coloured brochures here by the doorway. Please do take one as you go out. It gives you a snapshot of the 4040 Fuwaku Fund and how you might get involved. The goal of the fund is to sustain the JRC through its next 40 years. With a minimum target of 40 companies over 40 years, it can be companies, institutions or individuals supporting at least one JRC activity a year and there is no donation too small, I can assure you. I'm pleased to announce that in this first academic year of 2018-19, we've already had three donations including one which we've put as a contribution towards tonight's Beasley lecture. The Beasley lecture has been very kindly funded for the last five years by Toshiba International Foundation and Noguchi-san is here tonight. I didn't know he was coming but thank you very much to the Toshiba Foundation. With this year we've also had a contribution towards the Beasley going forward from our very own Stephen Macinnelli who's here. Many of you will know he's a very long time supporter of Japanese studies and last year was awarded the Order of the Rising Sun by the Japanese government. So thank you Stephen. So if any of you would like more information on how to get involved, grab the brochure but also don't hesitate to get in touch with me ever about getting involved. So now on to introducing tonight's Beasley guest speaker. I'm delighted to welcome Philip Seaton who is professor in the Institute of Japan Studies at Tokyo University of Foreign Studies. His main research areas are Japanese war memories and contents tourism relating to historical narratives and heritage sites and he's published very widely on these topics. I think it's an interesting and timely topic as tourism in general as you know is something that's high on the agenda as part of Japan's imminent hosting of Rugby World Cup 2019 in Tokyo Olympics 2020 as well as of course the launch of the UK Japan season of culture. So I think it's a great topic. I'm pleased to welcome Phil, not least because he's a long standing colleague through his dedication to badges, the British Association for Japanese Studies and it's always a pleasure to hear him speak and afterwards share a glass of wine with him or indeed when he's hosted me in supper at all far too many beers actually. So please join me in welcoming Phil to the stage. Well it's a great honour to be here tonight and thank you very much to Helen for your kind invitation and to Charles and Jane for all of the arrangements that you've made to get me here. And also to everyone at SOAS for extending the invitation and for the financial support getting here. Thank you very much. It's a double honour tonight in that I remember reading Professor Beasley's work when I was an undergraduate student studying history back in the early 1990s. To be doing this lecture is a little bit daunting, nerve wracking but I hope my topic would have struck a real chord. I'll be discussing tourism relating to the Russia-Japanese War and what this might tell us about tourism opportunities in the United Kingdom. I'll be focusing on two novelists, Shiba Ryotaro and Jane Austen. Now they might seem like a bit of a strange combination but please bear with me, I hope all will make sense in due course. But Shiba is one of Japan's most prolific respected writers. He was born in Osaka, served in a tank unit during the Second World War and after the war he became a journalist. He left journalism to become a full-time novelist. During his career he published over 600 books selling over 180 million copies. A number have been translated into English including the one that I will be focusing on tonight. It's called Clouds Above the Hill about the Russia-Japanese War. Jane Austen meanwhile is one of Britain's best-loved authors. She wrote only six complete novels but in her relatively short life but since the 1830s her books have never been out of print. In the 1990s screen adaptations of her books spawned Austen mania and she became a pop culture phenomenon. Unlike Shiba whose novels are basically historical narrative on a grand scale featuring many actual historical figures Austen wrote romance and intimate character studies. For our purposes tonight however they are joined by the three elements mentioned in my talk subtitle. First they are novelists whose works have triggered numerous screen adaptations. Second they are both firmly established in the national literary heritages of their respective nations. Finally their works have generated significant contents tourism particularly since their deaths. I suspect that the term contents tourism is not familiar to many of you so I'd like to spend the next ten minutes or so explaining the concept and the research project that I've been involved in for the past ten years or so. Let's begin with the basic definition on the slide. Content tourism is travel behaviour motivated fully or partially by narratives, characters, locations and other creative elements of popular culture forms including film, television dramas, manga, anime, novels and computer games. The concept of contents emerged in Japan's creative industries in the 1990s. It referred to narratives, characters, locations and other creative elements such as music which were used in works of popular culture entertainment across various media platforms. So a manga might spawn an anime series, a computer game, a live action film and light novels. These were all marketed simultaneously to fans of the contents. For an English language example think of a franchise like Star Wars. This collection of media products created a narrative world that fans could visit virtually via media-tized consumption watching a film, reading manga, listening to a soundtrack. However fans also enjoy bodily visitation to sites in the real world that are related to the narrative world. These could include actual places that appear in the story, filming locations or sites related to the author such as a birthplace museum. When fans travel in this way motivated by an interest in the contents of a narrative world they engage in contents tourism. In practical terms what this means is that we analyse the relationships between three sets of actors. Fans, contents businesses and local authorities. All are joined via their relationship with the contents. Fans consume the works produced by contents businesses which we define as professional contents producers ranging from an individual author up to a multinational corporation. Fans also engage with local authorities namely the communities and destinations that they visit. Those local authorities regulate or manage the various tourism businesses catering to contents tourists. Finally contents businesses and local authorities have a collaborative relationship either at the production stage such as in providing help with location scouting or post release of a work when copyright holders allow communities to use logos, trademarks and character images in tourist sites or in merchandise. The phenomenon is usually referred to in English language scholarship on tourism, literary tourism and other such terms. Look at this screenshot from the website of Visit England. It refers to places linked to literature, film and television. However most of the major examples including the two on the screenshot Harry Potter and DH Lawrence involve both novels and screen adaptations and perhaps stage and other adaptations too. The advantage of the term contents tourism is that it recognises that most famous stories inducing our travel now are primarily multimedia in nature. This is not to say that the English speaking world has missed the boat on these issues of multimedia dissemination. In English language scholarship a parallel discussion to contents emerged with Henry Jenkins' identification of convergence culture. Jenkins writes on his website, By convergence I mean the flow of content across multiple media platforms, the cooperation between multiple media industries and the migratory behaviour of media audiences who would go almost anywhere in search of the kinds of entertainment experiences they wanted. Note his use of the word content. Japanese scholars just went straight to the heart of the matter by adopting the English word content into Japanese as the lone word contents. Note also how Jenkins' analysis is rooted in media and cultural studies and not tourism studies. Tourism scholars writing in English have discussed convergence but they've not incorporated this term into their taxonomies of tourism. Convergence tourism to my knowledge has not been used as specialised terminology. The closest we have in English the moment is media tourism but this is very broad indeed and also covers things like advertising, television news, documentaries and other media products. In our contents tourism project we're focusing on creative works of popular culture and entertainment which do not set out to induce tourism but do so nevertheless. In their 2017 book Sheila Agawal and Gareth Shaw recognised the limitations of single category terms like film tourism and literary tourism and partially resolved the issue by joining them together. They analyse examples like Harry Potter under the category heritage screen and literary tourism but even this is restrictive particularly if we work in a Japanese context where anime, manga, light novels and games are all part of the media mix too. And while Harry Potter fans visit various heritage sites we would not count visiting a theme park such as Universal Studios Japan as heritage tourism. In our contents tourism project therefore we've made the case that whenever convergence is involved we should be focusing on the contents of the narrative world rather than the media formats in analysing what, how and why tourism occurs, hence contents tourism. And there is another issue. It's not only major media producers who contribute to the creation of the narrative world via multiple works across multiple platforms. Fans create YouTube videos, share information via social media, write spin-off novels, meet at conventions and engage in all sorts of other behaviours that expand the narrative world. I confess to being something of a Harry Potter fan and if you go online you'll find many songs inspired by the Harry Potter series that have nothing to do with the official Harry Potter world controlled by JK Rowling and Warner Brothers. Fans are not passive consumers but active producers of content or prosumers. Within tourism studies too there's increasing attention on the role of travellers. It used to be the case that tour operators simply advertised a tour and the various tourism products that they offered. Traditional tourism advertising is being rapidly displaced by traveller voices on sites like TripAdvisor. In the case of contents tourism in many instances the fans themselves are blogging and twittering the recommended itineraries and bypassing the tourism companies entirely. This all adds up to a revolution in the way that we think about travel in the digital and internet age. Contents tourism is very much an internet age phenomenon. However if we go back to the original definition of contents tourism that I gave there's no reason why contents tourism cannot be a very old phenomenon. Indeed in Japan some contents tourism researchers like Masabuchi Toshiyuki have made the case that Edo period poetry and literature should fall within the boundaries of contemporary contents tourism studies. On a strictly definitional level this is correct. There was much travel in Tokugawa era Japan mainly for religious pilgrimage to places such as Iseshrine. But around this travel culture grew a popular culture of travel writing and novels which themselves inspired further travel. Furthermore there are examples of convergence from a very early period. By the 16th century there were parodies, digest versions, illustrated versions of the tale of Genji and this was the precursor to the contemporary tourism phenomenon related to Japan's oldest novel. Media technology may have advanced since then but the basic principles remain the same. When a set of characters, narratives and locations captures the public imagination we tend to disseminate them across various media platforms. The invention of photography and the moving image was the first major technological revolution expanding the possibilities for contents dissemination. The second major technological revolution was the digital and internet age. And so in our latest iteration of our definition of contents tourism we've reached the following. Content tourism is a dynamic series of tourism experiences motivated by contents. Content tourism is undertaken by tourists in order to access and embody narrative worlds that are continually expanding through contentization and very often involves the participation of tourists or consumers themselves in the process of the re-contentization of the narrative world. This is the definition crafted by Yamamura Takayoshi my main research partner over the past decade and one of the true pioneers in this research field. It's a definition fit for the digital age and encapsulates the understanding of tourism dynamics behind my two case studies, Shibori Otaro and Jane Austen. It's been a whistle-stop tour through the key theoretical work of the project that people interested in reading more can access the publications on the slide which are the key ones from the project thus far with hopefully another book to come later this year. But more details are available via my website. So without any further ado let's move to the first case study Clouds Above the Hill. As I've already mentioned Shibori Otaro was a historical novelist. He based his writings on actual historical events but he filled in the details of each scene with his own dialogue and interpretation. He was known for his exhaustive research into a topic before he started writing and is credited with making history accessible and interesting to millions. Clouds Above the Hill is one of his most famous novels and tells the story of three main protagonists before and during the Russia-Japanese War of 1945. Given that the story is based on the historical record it might seem a little strange to be talking of it as a contents tourism case study. However seeing history as contents is a vital part of our project. Historical characters, narratives and locations are depicted in numerous works of popular culture entertainment in Japan and also in the UK as well. Historical novels, dramas and films become potent drivers of tourism to heritage sites. Clouds Above the Hill also demonstrates that historical novels may even create new heritage sites. Let's set the scene by looking at the opening sequence of the 2009 NHK drama based on Shiba's novel. Please excuse my wobbly camera work and I'll provide a very rough translation of the subtitles. A truly small country is opening up to the world. In Matsuyama and Shikoku there were three men. Akiyama Saneyuki was born in this old castle town. It was said that if Japan went to war with Russia victory would be almost impossible. But in coming up with a plan that beat the Baltic feet Saneyuki made it possible. His elder brother Yoshifuru trained the Japanese cavalry. He said he would beat the Cossacks, the strongest cavalry in the world and pulled off a miracle. The third man is the poet Masaoka Shiki who breathed new life into Haiku and Tanka poetry and revived the genre. They embodied the spirit of the Meiji era walking forward into the future. They climbed and in the blue skies at the top of the hill even if there were clouds there they only looked up at them and kept climbing. So this opening sequence identifies the three protagonists. Prior to Shiba's novel the main people associated with the war in popular culture were General Nogi Maryske, leader of the land forces, and Admiral Togo Heihachiro, leader of the naval forces and the Meiji Emperor who agonised about taking his people to war against such a formidable foe as Russia. These are the three people who have featured in cinematic depictions of the Russia-Japanese War such as the 1957 film The Meiji Emperor and the Great Russia-Japanese War. Put simply, clouds above the hill placed three new characters and a new location, Matsuyama, into the middle of collective memory of the Russia-Japanese War. Put differently, it expanded and popularised the historical contents. But the main thrust of my argument tonight is really about the contrasting roles of the novels and the drama in creating both a set of contents and a content tourism phenomenon. In the abstract for this talk I said, the talk will discuss how and why, despite the technological wizardry of the modern film industry, it is still the written word that underpins these and many of the other most successful examples of tourism induced by works of popular culture. Clouds above the hill is a representative example of why I feel novels are the key to sustainable content tourism phenomena. Here's a brief contrast of Shiba's novel and NHK's drama adaptation. The original Japanese novel was published in 1,296 instalments in the Sanke newspaper between 1968 and 1972. The English translation is in four volumes to well over a thousand pages. In terms of scale, it's perhaps good to think of clouds above the hill as Japan's equivalent of Tolstoy's War and Peace. The drama is 13 episodes, which were broadcast in 2009, 2010 and 2011. Each episode is about 90 minutes. In terms of narrative content, the three major differences between the novel and drama are as follows. First, whereas both drama and novel focus particularly on the three main protagonists, the drama elevates a number of minor characters in the novels to much greater importance. In particular, Shiki's sister Ritsu and Hirose Takeo, a naval expert who spent six years in Russia. Second, while the drama has some short periods of narration akin to a documentary, there are long sections, even chapters of the novel which are effectively history lessons. However, in both versions, a positive interpretation of the era comes through. This vision of bright magie is considered a key characteristic of the so-called Shiba view of history. Third, in temple terms, the focus of the novel and drama are quite different. The first half of the drama covers the same period as the first quarter of the novel. This is the period to 1902, namely the death of Masaoka Shiki. For the period after Shiki's death, the novel goes into considerably greater detail about military developments during the Russia-Japanese War than the drama. All three of these differences can be attributed to the drama being more of a character study of the three main protagonists and the novel being more of a dramatised history of the Russia-Japanese War. However, the combination of novel and drama creates a set of contents. With a considerable time gap between the novel and drama, we can split the tourism phenomenon in Matsuyama into three distinct stages. Before the novel, between the novel and drama, and after the drama. Before the novel, the main sites in Matsuyama were not so much tourist sites as memorial sites. For example, there was the Russian cemetery for 98 prisoners of war who died of their wounds or illness while in captivity. To this day, the cemetery is beautifully maintained and it forms part of the standard itinerary around Russia-Japanese war-related sites in Matsuyama. However, while this site existed before Shiba's novel, its touristification was very much a result of Shiba's novel. The same can be said for these two statues. They were additionally local memorials to the Akyama brothers, but they were melted down in 1943 for the war effort. They were recast and moved to this location in 1968, the year the novel began to be serialised. As the billboard in the middle indicates, they are now part of the clouds above the hill tourist trail. The novel is not the only place of literary interest in Matsuyama. The city is also famous for its Natsume Soseki connections. Natsume's novel Botchan was inspired by his time spent living in Matsuyama as a teacher. Matsuyama also has other historical assets, such as Dogo Hotspring Resort, a reputedly Japan's oldest, and the castle. And while Masaoka Shiki was already honoured in various ways locally, Shiba's novel greatly increased the prominence of sites related to Shiki in Matsuyama. And then came the drama in 2009. This added a new range of sites to the tourism itinerary. The use of the castle as a backdrop for the opening sequence I showed you before turned the castle into an important site of film location tourism, even though the castle barely appears in Shiba's novel. A characteristic of film location tourism behaviour is the recreation of key scenes in the film by posing in the same way for photographs at shooting locations. Alas, I cannot show you the exact location for the opening sequence, because the wall of protagonist Satom was under renovation when I visited Matsuyama in May 2017. But for fans of the drama, the castle is now a significant destination for location hunters. So these phases that I've talked about show how the contents, and thereby contents tourism, have evolved over time. Before Clouds Above the Hill, it was possible to do tourism relating to the Russia-Japanese War at the battle sites in China and Tsushima Straits. There were also sites relating to Admiral Togo, General Nogi in Kagoshima and Tokyo. So, for example, this memorial marks the spot where Togo was born in Kagoshima. This is the battleship Mikasa, which was Togo's flagship at the battle of Tsushima Straits. It's now a museum in a dry dock in Yokosuka. This is the Nogi Shrine in Tokyo. It's also possible to see various exhibitions about the Russia-Japanese War. Indeed, all of Japan's wars between the major restoration and World War II at Yushigun, which is the history museum in the grounds of Yasukuni Shrine. And there are also exhibits at the Museum of Naval History, the Naval Academy in Etogema. So these are the main sites related to the Russia-Japanese War although anybody can visit without particular reference to Clouds Above the Hill. But Clouds Above the Hill created a few more specific locations in addition to these general war-related sites. The story starts in Matsuyama. So this is where the protagonists grew up. And then, as the story develops, they all move to Tokyo. Saneyuki, who is in the Navy, undergoes naval training at the Academy in Etogema. Also in the drama and the novel, there are important overseas locations that you might not necessarily immediately associate with the Russia-Japanese War. The main ones are Paris, where Yoshifuru goes for cavalry training. St Petersburg, where the subplot about Hirose Takeo and his romance with the Russian woman unfolds. And London is also an important location. There are scenes of Finance Minister Takahashi Korakio trying to drum up financial support from Britain that were shot right in this spot here by the Bank of England in central London. And also there were scenes shot inside the old Royal Naval College in Greenwich. So Saneyuki had come over for naval training. These sites appear in the novel and were also used as shooting locations for the drama and also places where events actually took place. And here's another one back in Japan. This is a corridor at the Etogema Naval Academy. And when I took the guided tour there, the guide specifically pointed this spot out as a shooting location for clouds above the hill. And given that Saneyuki also had his military training here, you can see the multiple meanings that this site now has. The final category of potential tourism destination created by the drama only is the shooting locations. These are sites unrelated to actual history or to the novel. But they have become significant sites of film tourism. For example, the battle scenes were mainly shot in northern Hokkaido in the wide open spaces up there. And that stood in for the battlefields marked where it says Liaoning on the map there. And here's another shooting location. The bridge on the left was an iconic location of the protagonist's childhood in the drama. Now, while it's very evocative of the period of the drama, actually it's in Uchikotown, and it's about 30 kilometres south of Matsuyama. And this is quite a long way away from where the protagonists would have been. The photo on the right, meanwhile, is the actual location of a very significant scene in the books and in the drama. This is the jetty where Yoshifuru, Sanayuki and Shiki start on their big adventures by taking the boat to Tokyo. However, the modern port facilities make it obviously unsuitable for filming a period drama. So the drama producers went to Utskushima in Hiroshima prefecture, and that stood in for Matsuyama for those particular scenes. So you can see how we're sort of blending myth and reality and these sites are taking on all sorts of different meanings. As I hope I've shown, actual history, Shiba's novel and NHK's drama all have their own distinctive roles in building up the historical contents. Contents tourists may visit any of them as a means of pursuing their interest in clouds above the hill. The phenomenon created by Shiba's novel has been so marked that Matsuyama City now has a machizukuri or community building project dedicated to clouds above the hill. In this picture, the slogan Matsuyama, the town of clouds above the hill, can be seen on the bank in the centre of the city. So the novel has become part of the city's identity itself. Accordingly, the novel has transformed the way that tourism is promoted and managed in Matsuyama. So this is the Shiki Museum. Now, while Masaoka Shiki's major contribution to Japanese poetry means that he would highly likely have had a museum built in his honour even without clouds above the hill, nevertheless, this museum has become an important part of the clouds above the hill itinerary in addition to its role as an important site of poetry tourism for people who appreciate his poetry. However, perhaps the key change is what happened to the Akiyama brothers. The novels turned the Akiyama brothers from footnotes of military history into popular culture and heritage icons. The house where they were born was destroyed in air raids during World War II and a judo hall was built on the site after the war. Initial plans to create a tourist site to the brothers were floated in 1998 but faced opposition from users of the judo hall. But then in 1999, the city embarked on its clouds above the hill community building project. Permission was eventually gained to build the Akiyama brothers birthplace museum which is a reconstruction of the house containing memorabilia about both them and the drama. Next to a new smaller judo practice hall and this museum opened in 2005. However, the centerpiece of the strategy was the clouds above the hill museum. This opened in 2007 in a purpose-built structure designed by world-famous architect Andor Tadol. So when a guidebook titled Walking the Matsuyama of Clouds Above the Hill was published in 2009, it listed no fewer than 43 related sites including museums, Yoshi Food is Grave, monuments inscribed with Shiki's poems, the Russian cemetery and many other sites linked to the Russia-Japanese War or the three main protagonists. And the city is now divided into tourism zones. The strategy is managed from a dedicated office with full-time staff in the Matsuyama City Hall. When it was launched in 1999, it had a budget of over $100 million. It divides its activities into what they call hard and soft. Hard refers to the physical infrastructure, ranging from road signs to pavement repairs to museum construction. Soft refers to cultivating appreciation for the contents that drive tourism to the hard sites. In short, the city actively embraces and promotes Shiba's narrative world as a proud part of city heritage and as a means of inducing tourism. This policy is not uncontroversial, however. Many people have criticised the so-called Shiba view of history, epitomised by its exposition in clouds above the hill. Shiba has been accused of glossing over unsavory aspects of Japan's wars to create his image of Bright Meiji. The book on the slide, for example, criticises the emission of the Port Arthur Massacre of 1894 from the novel's depiction of the first Sino-Japanese War. And it roundly criticises NHK as insensitive for producing a drama celebrating the Russia-Japanese War, which paved the way for the 1910 annexation of the Korean Peninsula, and criticised NHK for producing this drama around the time of the centenary of the annexation in 2010. However, whatever criticisms may be made about Shiba's or NHK's historical interpretations, there's no denying that his novel and the subsequent drama adaptation underpin a significant tourism phenomenon. I agree that visitor numbers to Matsuyama had been stable at about 5 million people per year from 2000 to 2008. The boom in 1999 was caused by the opening of the Shimannamikaido Bridge, connecting Ehime Prefecture across the Seto in Lansi to Hiroshima Prefecture on Honshu. The key period is 2009 onwards, namely the year that the drama was broadcast. In the 2010s, aggregate numbers fluctuated around the 5.6 million people per year mark. In other words, the clouds above the hill effect might be as much as 10% of tourism numbers in Matsuyama, thoroughly vindicating the tourism planners who decided to utilise the contents and rebrand the city as clouds above the hill city Matsuyama. This slide shows the number of visitors at the clouds above the hill museum. All visitors to this museum are basically contents tourists because they are visiting a museum linked in its title, in its name, to the title of a novel. Visitor numbers at this museum demonstrate one of the classic patterns of contents tourism, namely the spike in visitation that occurs during and immediately after the broadcast of a popular drama, so that big spike in the middle coincides with the broadcast on television of the drama. At the Shiki Museum too, there is evidence of a spike in visitor numbers, so where the blue double arrows are at the right, that's the period of the drama. It's not nearly so obvious in these numbers, but that spike in 2009-10 is most likely attributable to the drama. To conclude this section on clouds above the hill, let me return to my main assertion. What Shiba's novel did was to create the narrative underpinnings of a Russo-Japanese war tourism phenomenon in Matsuyama. The drama had its own clear short-term effects, namely the spikes in visitation at the museums I've just shown, and ultimately it all begins with the novel. There was no significant tourism or touristification related to the Russo-Japanese war in Matsuyama prior to Shiba's novel. There were only localised memorials. Shiba's novel turned three people from Matsuyama into central characters and crafted an uplifting, heroic narrative of Japan's major military victory of the modern era. In doing so, it expanded the historical content relating to the Russo-Japanese war and enabled Matsuyama to embrace these contents as a key part of municipal identity and heritage. At this point, the contents became eminently usable by the tourism sector. Indeed, Matsuyama was not the only place where Shiba's novels had this type of effect. His novel, Lyomoga y Ywku, rehabilitated the Bakomatsu period visionary Sakamoto Lyoma, and now Sakamoto is central to the tourism industry in Kochi City, and the novel, Moe y Oken, underpins much of the contemporary fascination with Hijikata Toshizo of the Shinsengumi. It's for all of these reasons that I consider Shiba Ryotaro to be not simply one of Japan's most important novelists, but also one of the fathers of Japan's contemporary heritage tourism industry. And so to my second case study, Jane Austen. Jane Austen tourism is simply one of the best examples of content tourism that I've found. In Japanese studies, we get very used to applying theoretical concepts developed in the West to Japanese case studies. There is a widely recognized power imbalance issue in our field where the West is seen as a source of theory and the rest are seen as sources of data. What I'm going to do now is to turn this on its head. Actually tourism theory developed in Japan offers the best explanation of what is going on in various parts of rural England these days. This is the Jane Austen Festival in Bath. Dozens of cosplayers are getting ready to take part in a parade through the streets of the town. Or at least they don't call it cosplay, but a costumed promenade. However, having attended many Japanese pop culture events, I can tell you these people are behaving in virtually the same way. They're dressed up in costumes related to favourite works of popular culture and many have made the costumes themselves. They're taking selfies and group photos on their cell phones, preferably against authentic looking backdrops like the Royal Crescent, and presumably they're sharing some of these photographs on social media. And they're travelling from far and wide to make or meet up again with friends who share the same passion. Apart from the average age of participants and arbitrary distinctions between highbrow literature and pop culture, this is exactly what happens at cosplay events in Japan. So, from the outset, we can jetson the idea that Jane Austen tourism is just literary tourism, as most English-speaking academics refer to it. Jane Austen tourism has become contents tourism. But this was not always the case. Jane Austen tourism used to be a clear example of literary tourism. People who appreciated her novels visited her grave in Winchester Cathedral or identifiable locations in her novels. Lord Tennyson, for example, is known to have visited Lyme Regis in 1867 after reading Persuasion. Then people could also go and visit Jane Austen's house museum after it opened in Chawton in 1949. This is the literary tourism phase. But it all changed in 1995. The BBC's adaptation of Pride and Prejudice ignited Austen Mania. It was only one of a number of Austen screen adaptations that came out in the mid-1990s. But Colin Firth, as Mr Darcy, captured the imagination of Austen fans. At the beginning of the talk, I mentioned content-sisation as a key characteristic. Austen Mania is a perfect example of this process. To begin with, there were only Austen's novels. Prior to 1995, there were just a few screen and radio adaptations. Soon after the screen adaptations of the mid-1990s came the flow. There came spin-offs, mash-ups, Pride, Prejudice and Zombies, and so on. Away from major Hollywood or BBC productions, there was also fan fiction, blogging, and all sorts of other fan activities. As interests in media ties products skyrocketed, tourism increased quickly, too. The Pride and Prejudice effect was huge. Visitors to Jane Austen's house museum rose from around 20,000 a year before the drama to 55,000. They fell back again to 40,000, but even so the drama had doubled the museum's base-level visitor numbers. At Lime Park, the shooting location for Pemberley, visitors were around 30,000 a year before the drama. They were around 90,000 in the year after the drama, and by 2015 had reached 150,000. Another major impact was in Bath. The Jane Austen Centre opened there in 1999. It had around 40,000 visitors by 2007, and these days it receives close to 150,000 visitors a year. As you can see from the picture on the right, the exhibitions relate not only to Austen the author and her novels, but also to the screen adaptations. It's a site of content tourism. And then this is the costume promenade at the Jane Austen Festival. That festival started in 2001. And from a content tourism perspective, I found this work particularly interesting, Austen land. It's a book and a film about a woman who travels to an Austen themed resort. In other words, it's contents about a contents tourist, which spawned a sequel, i.e. more contents. You can also visit the shooting locations yourself as a contents tourist. This is contentisation. Nowadays, Austen-related tourism is both big business and incredibly diverse. It spans a whole range of sites which are visited by hundreds of thousands of people. There are sites related to Austen the author, sites associated with George and England, sites depicted in her novels, locations used for screen adaptations, sites related to spin-off works, monuments, exhibitions and the regular conventions held by Austen fans. They are all generating travel related to Austen's world that defies simple categorisation as literary tourism, film tourism or heritage tourism. It's best to just call it contents tourism, to Austen-related sites by Austen fans. However, as with the tourism relating to clouds above the hill, I believe the novels are the key. They underpin the entire narrative world, which is then expanded by professional media companies and amateur fans producing adaptations and spin-offs. The key methodological characteristic of my Jane Austen tourism research project has been my focus on the experiences of tourists, something I did not touch upon in my discussion of Shibariotaro. To hear the voices of Jane Austen fans, I asked Phil Howe of Hidden Britain Tours for help in distributing questionnaires to his clients. I took his tour around Jane Austen sites near Basingstoke in September 2016, and he kindly agreed to help me. I received back 13 very detailed responses, all from women, who told me about their interest in and travel experiences relating to Jane Austen. I only have a little time to give a few small samples of their voices, but what comes through to me clearly is their expressions that they're undertaking contents tourism rather than simply literary tourism. Some, of course, like Respondent L in her 70s at the top there, were primarily fans of the novels and fit closely the profile of a literary tourist. But others, such as Respondent J in her 50s, rediscovered Austen's novels via spin-off works. She has a wide range of interests within Austen's world and fits closely the profile of a content tourist. She has engaged with multiple works across various media formats and then travelled to pursue that interest. But one response that particularly resonated with me was from Respondent E in her 20s, who described her double pilgrimage to the UK, so she's American. She combined visits to both multiple sites relating to Jane Austen with multiple sites relating to Harry Potter, another excellent case study of content tourism. In her response, I saw a lot of myself. The content tourist is not a one-dimensional person who develops a deep interest only in a single work. The content tourist has a much deeper and broader interest, perhaps in multiple narrative worlds. And this is where her motivations and mine seem so congruent. I've described clouds above the hill and Jane Austen tonight, but I've also done projects about Harry Potter, The Last Samurai, Kamikaze films, Japanese historical dramas, and many others. In many ways, it's not the characteristics of the narrative world per se that are attractive. It is the fact that when I travel, I'm not simply going somewhere for its physical or experiential quality. It's narrative quality that I seek. I will keep my concluding remarks fairly short because I hope we can develop the discussion more via some questions in just a few minutes. But I will end by reiterating probably the key conclusion from my eight years researching contents tourism. The enduring examples of contents tourism usually revolve around a significant process of contentisation, involving both copyright holders and fans. And the initial narrative world is usually established by successful novels, and in the Japanese case, manga too. So in the Japanese case, it's very often the manga becomes the enemy, which then becomes the live action. It's that procedure, but the dynamics are basically the same for novels. I think this is because the written word leaves most to the imagination, and ultimately our imaginations have to be engaged in order for us to want to explore more via travel. Furthermore, while symptomatic technology quickly ages, the written word is never technologically obsolete. It gets automatically updated by our imaginations. Films, games and so on are much more of a particular technological moment. Novels at the heart of a contents tourism phenomenon, therefore, are the key to sustainable tourism induced by works of popular culture. Of course, there are plenty of examples that are primarily screen based, but for sustainable contents tourism, I think the written word is key. I've given two of the clearest examples of this tonight. The two case studies show that both fictional and non-fictional narrative worlds can generate tourism, especially when that tourism involves visitation at heritage sites. And in these conclusions, I find a broader message for our lives in a rapidly evolving technological world. Yes, we can enjoy the technological wizardry of the film industry that gives us amazing levels of realism in worlds where animated, real or fantasy. However, what really moves us and what moves us to travel to sites related to the stories we consume is ultimately the skill of the writer who's putting pen to paper in attempting to trigger our curiosity and our imagination in novels. Thank you very much.