Anime and Tourism: Successes and Failures
 

I just read an article in ANN which talks about how the Hanasaku Iroha anime series was able to revitalize the business of the real-life Yuwaku Hot Springs (depicted in the anime series as the Kissui Inn). It felt really good seeing how an anime series was able to help out in real-life businesses like this, especially since it was among the many establishments whose businesses were affected by the March 2011 earthquake.

However, it doesn't work that way all the time.

One noticeable failure of using an anime series to bring in tourists is Rinne no Lagrange, where promotion caused adverse effects to the model city of Kamogawa.

What were the mistakes committed by the people who were given the responsibility of promoting Kamogawa through Rinne no Lagrange, and what have been the right actions done instead? I'm also interested to find out about how anime tourism successes have change those model cities and towns throughout Japan.

Lagrange simply overdid it.

In the anime, Kamogawa became insanely important, like it was New York City, Washington DC, and Tokyo, all rolled into one. :heh:

Even I, a Canadian, was starting to roll my eyes at some of it near the end of Lagrange. Some of the Japanese themselves probably thought it was flat-out ridiculous.


To promote real places in anime shows just look at how KyoAni and P.A. Works does it. They make those places look beautiful, charming, detailed, and having a distinctive character of their own. But that's it - They don't put the setting on steroids and act like its more important than what it is.

Just as a note Natsume Yuujinchou has also successfully promoted tourism in Kumamoto prefecture. This is apparently where the anime is based and the manga-ka's home town.

http://www.crunchyroll.com/anime-new...sm-in-kumamoto

I don't like kitschy tourist things when I travel but I admit this type of thing totally gets me and I love to visit locations seen in anime.

If a show like Lucky Star gets real popular and its setting is based on a real-life location, it becomes a tourism windfall by word of mouth and 2ch (with some denizens suddenly going off matching screenshots with actual photo snaps).

But it's sort of a risky thing to create a show simply to promote a town for tourism, because such promotion depends on the show's success.

This isn't new either, as I once read (if I could remember correctly, way back late 80s) about Japanese tourists coming into a mid-Western town where a baseball movie was filmed on location.

I think the word here is "subtlety". By analogy, it is more stimulating to see a scantily-clad girl or a girl who is wearing a uniform similar to that in Kyoukai Senjou no Horizon that to see a completely naked one. ;)