This book focuses on cultures that shape contemporary Asian tourist experiences. The book consists of 10 chapters, which are organised into two themes: Collectivist Culture and Wellbeing. The chapters cover emerging forms of tourism (e.g., wedding and bridal photography tourism, roots/affinity tourism and shamanic tourism), investigate a wide range of topics (e.g., tourist motivation, tourist anxiety and decision making) and consider Asian perspectives from diverse backgrounds (e.g., China, Hong Kong, Singapore, Taiwan, South Korea, Japan, Philippines, Malaysia, Indonesia, India, Bangladesh, and Nepal). The book provides tourism researchers, students and practitioners a consolidated, comprehensive and updated reference for the understanding of Asian tourists.

This book gives a brief introduction to the several aspects of diverse Asian cultures coupled with a brief history of Asia. It talks about the growth and changes in Asian tourism over the years with special emphasis on cultural and contemporary tourism, food tourism and development in Asia. It sheds light on the impact of culture on tourism, cultural potential and challenges facing Asia, and the future of Asian contemporary tourism.

The Asia Pacific region’s enormous diversity of living cultures and preserved heritage sites has significant appeal to many tourists. However tourism has grown so rapidly that many issues associated with the incorporation of cultural and heritage experiences in tourist itineraries (such as authenticity verses commodification, exploitation of national cultures, impacts on local communities, and the management of heritage resources) have not been adequately addressed and must be debated. This revealing book reviews recent developments in cultural and heritage tourism in the Asia Pacific region and provides a discussion on how communities have faced and overcome significant challenges to develop and market their culture and heritage resources. A range of models and case studies are used to deepen the reader’s understanding of heritage and cultural issues, to illustrate many of the more controversial issues, and to examine new evaluative, and planning tools. This book is a special issue of the Asia Pacific Journal of Tourism Research.

This book explores the relationship between tourism/tourists and expressions of contemporary Asian art (for example, artists, objects, intangible artistic productions, digital manifestations, etc) in Asian and non-Asian tourist spaces/experiences. Although the nexus between art and tourism has not been neglected in the literature, work on contemporary art and tourism is lacking, and this is particularly true within the context of non-Western societies. This volume creates a timely counterpoint to the existing dominance of a Western-centric body of knowledge in the area. The book considers how encounters between tourists and expressions of Asian contemporary art may produce possibilities for challenging, re-evaluating or reasserting crystallized frames of understanding and, as such, is of value to a multi-disciplinary audience.

This book offers a bird’s-eye view of the current trends, opportunities, and challenges related to Asian youth travellers, and it also presents a holistic framework for future research to build upon. Managerial and policy implications are provided for the tourism and hospitality industry and government agencies to better accommodate the needs of Asian youth travellers – a unique and diverse market that is yet to be fully unveiled to the world. The book investigates the key characteristics that define contemporary Asian youth travellers, adopting a broad definition of Asia. While it includes relatively mature markets, it also features emerging markets in Southeast Asia, South Asia, and West Asia. The book looks at different forms of tourism undertaken by Asian travellers, encompassing educational tourism, adventure tourism, working holiday, self-driving tourism, dark tourism, volunteer tourism, and cultural tourism. A wide range of topics are discussed, from history to current trends, from motivations to constraints, from the influence of culture and religion on travel behaviour to the search of social freedom through travel, and from destination choice to destination avoidance. The findings and interpretations are drawn from diverse and novel research methods, such as netnography, visual anthropology, historiography, interview, focus group, survey, and document analysis.

This book examines Japanese tourism and travel, both today and in the past, showing how over hundreds of years a distinct culture of travel developed, and exploring how this has permeated the perceptions and traditions of Japanese society. It considers the diverse dimensions of modern tourism including appropriation and consumption of history, nostalgia, identity, domesticated foreignness, and the search for authenticity and invention of tradition. Japanese people are one of the most widely travelling peoples in the world both historically and in contemporary times. What may be understood as incipient mass tourism started around the 17th century in various forms (including religious pilgrimages) long before it became a prevalent cultural phenomenon in the West. Within Asia, Japan has long remained the main tourist sending society since the beginning of the 20th century when it started colonising Asian countries. In 2005, some 17.8 million Japanese travelled overseas across Europe, Asia, the South Pacific and America. In recent times, however, tourist demands are fast growing in other Asian countries such as Korea and China. Japan is not only consuming other Asian societies and cultures, it is also being consumed by them in tourist contexts. This book considers the patterns of travelling of the Japanese, examining travel inside and outside the Japanese archipelago and how tourist demands inside influence and shape patterns of travel outside the country. Overall, this book draws important insights for understanding the phenomenon of tourism on the one hand and the nature of Japanese society and culture on the other.

This book draws together empirical research across a range of contemporary examples of food tourism phenomenon in Asia to provide a holistic picture of their role and influence. It encompasses case studies from around the pan-Asian region, including China, Japan, South Korea, Thailand, Singapore, Vietnam, and India. The book specifically focuses on and explicitly includes a variety of perspectives of non-Western and Asian research contexts of food tourism by bringing multidisciplinary approaches to food tourism research and wider evidence of food and tourism in Asia.