[re]Japan. The conception of tourism space: from territory to architecture

Abstract

The upward trend of international tourists visiting Japan is currently an ongoing development field of significant potentiality, supported by a national strategic plan in order to multiply its statistics in the coming years. This initiative is a challenge facing the current trend of demand and international competitiveness.

Japan, involved in an economic recession since the early nineties which peaked in 1995 with the economy bubble burst, the Kobe earthquake and the terrorist attacks of the Aum sect, turned again to face a tragic triple scenario that tested the country resistance capacity towards the great Tohoku earthquake, the tsunami and the Fukushima nuclear plant disasters in 11th of March. Facing the urgent need for the material and social reconstruction of the country, Japan has met an unexpected positive economical vector as an international tourism attractor center.

To address this new scenario, Japan must restructure its territory in order to contain the expected influx from the point of view of sustainable mobility; the conception of thematic networks; the creation, improvement and/ or maintenance of attraction nodes; the innovation of typological models of tourist accommodation to suit consumers’ demands; and above all, giving response to the necessary sustainability of an economical model that should be structured across a multi-scalar approach of great flexibility, in a call that incorporates its inhabitants in a more open and ambitious, if possible, commitment to hospitality (omotenashi).