Tourism is the world's foremost industry, one that Japan, until very recently, has been rather slow to take advantage of. Sophisticated travel writing has never been a significant component of Japanese literature, the country failing to produce writers of the caliber of Norman Lewis, Colin Thubron, or Bruce Chatwin.
Nor has it succeeded in generating much more than the functional, commercial travel guide, where in other countries, the search for original formats in the genre has resulted in some innovative publications, such as the Insight, Eyewitness and Bradt guides.
The new Travel Guide To Aid Japan has the Tohoku calamity as its reason for being, an effort to revive the flagging tourism industry as its purpose, so addresses a rather different potential readership. An attempt to lure back foreign visitors, it faces a daunting challenge.
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