Post-disaster tourism: building resilience through community-led approaches in the aftermath of the 2011 disasters in Japan (original) (raw)
Journal of Sustainable Tourism
Post-disaster tourism is often perceived as a form of Dark Tourism associated with death, loss and destruction. In Japan, the term Dark Tourism has gained significant prominence following the 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake and Tsunami. This paper focuses on a bottom-up community-led approach to post-disaster tourism development, located in the coastal area of Minamisanriku and labelled by the locals Blue Tourism. From its inception Blue Tourism incorporated non-dark activities which concentrated on the beauty of nature, social, environmental sustainability and the development of an enriched tourist experience. Its co-creational ethos helped transform some of the negative narratives of loss associated with Dark Tourism into positive accounts of communal renewal and hope. The paper highlight the limitations and appropriateness of Dark Tourism to post-disaster recovery and contributes new insights to the Community-based Tourism literature. We argue that this community-led approach is not Dark Tourism but a form of resilience which builds around local place-based practices and traditional community knowledge and, in so doing, it is capable of achieving sustainable disaster recovery and tourist satisfaction simultaneously.
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