"Border Tourism: Efforts in Kyushu-Okinawa and Hokkaido" Symposium held in Fukuoka May 30, 2015
The first Border Studies-Kyushu University Center for Asia Pacific Studies (CAFS) symposium titled, "Border Tourism: Efforts in Kyushu-Okinawa and Hokkaido" at the IP City Hotel in Fukuoka on May 30th, 2015.
Yasunori Hanamatsu from Kyushu University presented on the monitored tours from Tsushima to Busan and that he led in March of this year. One of the main highlights of the presentation was the analysis from the questionnaire he had asked the people on the tour to fill out after the trip which many stated that they were able to "experience the border" through the tour. He will be leading the next monitored tour in August targeting families with small children.
Akihiro Iwashita from the Slavic Research Center at Hokkaido University presented on the monitored tour from Wakkanai to Sakhalin that he will be leading in September. He presented about the possibilities of border tourism in Japan and how he expects that efforts to expand border tourism is on the horizon.
One of the discussants, Ted Boyle from CAFS at Kyushu University posed a question on the possibility of connecting Japan's border tourism to theories of border studies while the second discussant, Ryu Shimada from Kyushu Economic Research Center presented on their new venture of border tourism from Okinawa to Taiwan.
Eurasia Unit for Border Research (Japan)
