Daisaku Yamamoto

Emerging Trends in Japanese Package Tourism

Using large-scale market survey data from 1989 and 1995, the authors examine the distinguishing characteristics of Japanese package tourists in comparison to nonpackage tourists. While there is a decline in package tourism for Japanese overseas tourists, there are many attributes of the package tourist that suggest the continuing demand for this form of travel.

Gauging Metropolitan “High-Tech” and “I-Tech” Activity

In the past few years, a number of new studies have published high-tech rankings of American metropolitan areas that are used by many business consultants and local economic development organizations to advise firms on location strategies. In this article, the authors generate their own rankings based on an occupational definition of “high techness” and compare them with those of four other studies. The results rank larger and older industrial cities, such as Chicago, New York, and even Detroit, higher than many of the smaller places celebrated as high tech, such as Austin. The work demonstrates that the methodology underlying rankings is crucially important to the outcome. By abandoning narrow notions of high tech restricted to maturing technologies in computers, electronics, and telecommunications and instead using science and technology (S&T) occupations as a marker for high tech, it may be possible to tag the innovative potential of emerging sectors, including high-tech services.

Issues of Globalization and Reflexivity in the Japanese Tourism Production System: The Case of Whistler, British Columbia

This article examines contemporary Japanese overseas tourism from a supplier-side perspective using the concept of production systems. We first outline characteristics of the evolving structure of Japanese overseas tourism, with an emphasis on the global spread of Japanese travel companies. This provides a frame for presenting an empirical account of the transactional relationships in the Japanese package tour production system in Whistler, British Columbia, where Japanese tour operators play a pivotal role. We conclude that the recent expansion of Japanese travel companies is fostering the functional integration of the global tourism production system and exhibits increasing reflexivity.

World Wide Opportunities on Organic Farms (WWOOF) in the United States: locations and motivations of volunteer tourism host farms

This paper examines the WWOOF (World Wide Opportunities on Organic Farms) in the United States as a type of agri-tourism and volunteer tourism. WWOOF is an international movement in which host farms provide room and board in exchange for labor by tourist-volunteers. The study examines the supplier side of this phenomenon, investigating the locational characteristics and motivations of WWOOF host farms in the USA. A statistical analysis of WWOOF host locations is complemented by a survey and interviews of WWOOF host farms in upstate New York. The study finds that, of the 1232 WWOOF hosts with available zip codes, WWOOF host distributions are highly skewed spatially, with none in 2533 of continental USAs 3108 counties, but concentrations along the west coast and across Appalachia, plus outlying clusters. It suggests that lifestyle considerations are important factors, with WWOOF host locations in high environmental/scenic quality locations and “bohemian” cultural settings, but few in conventional farm regions, especially those with large farms and dominant “modern” agricultural practices. Potential conflicts between the motivations of WWOOF hosts and guests are revealed. For many hosts, cheap/flexible labor is an undeniable attraction, while WWOOFers may have potentially unrealistic expectations about their stays.

Rejoinder: High-Tech Rankings, Specialization, and Relationship to Growth

Our respondents—Cortright and Mayer (2004 [this issue]), Gottlieb (2004 [this issue]), and Mathur (2004 [this issue])—greatly enrich the debate over high-tech rankings, relationship to growth, and specialization. We are grateful to them both for the questions they raise about our work and for the depth of critique they bring to thediscussion. All three responses, in particular Gottlieb’s, continue our methodological debate, providing valuable insights for both theory and practice. Mathur inspires us to look more deeply at the relationship between high tech and job growth as well as our definition of human capital. We find Cortright and Mayer’s views on specialization particularly provocative and Gottlieb’s framing of that issue in terms of urbanization and localization economies very useful. The following response takes up these three issues in turn.

Community resilience to a developmental shock: a case study of a rural village in Nagano, Japan

This paper offers a historical case study of rural community response to a ‘developmental shock’, by focusing on the controversy over a golf resort project in the forested alluvial fan area of a rural agrarian village in Japan during the 1970s. At a glance, the controversy seems to represent a story of well-coordinated local social/resident movements, led by a local leader with foresight and connections to non-local resources, which successfully countered the externally imposed project. Our study reveals that behind the overt form of resistance, critical agency to facilitate both the resistance and resilience of the community arose from ‘local outsiders’ (i.e. new settlers to the village) whose voice was legitimised through traditional local institutions of communal decision-making. The case study also highlights a subtle, but critical role of embodied cultural capital of local actors that kept the community from serious social divides through the controversy, further contributing to high community resilience.

Recasting the agglomeration benefits for innovation in a hits-based cultural industry: evidence from the Japanese console videogame industry

ABSTRACT Literature on the videogame industry has to date revealed the importance of pre-existing cultural and technological foundations, firm-level innovation management strategies, interactive innovation with end-users, and uniqueness of national production/innovation systems. There are few theoretically informed empirical studies, however, that investigate geographical dimensions of innovation dynamics, particularly the role of spatial agglomerations, in this ‘hits-based’ cultural industry. This paper focuses on the console videogame industry in Japan, drawing on the extensive research on secondary data, corporate questionnaire surveys and semi-structured interviews with representatives from videogame firms and organizations in the country. Our premise is that redundancy – a diverse range of often indistinguishably similar outputs, most of which end up as commercial failures – is critically important for innovation in industries that are characterized by fundamental demand uncertainties. We then argue that agglomeration (in the sense of both industrial and urban agglomerations) can play a vital role in accommodating, or ‘tolerating’, such redundancy by allowing constituent firms, whose practice may seem inefficient in the short run, to remain in business. The findings of our study lead us to be cautious about policy initiatives to identify and implement ‘best practices’ for innovation, which may end up replacing critical redundancy with increasing efficiency.