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Japan
Organized Panel Session
This paper draws on attempts to establish the Kofu Basin (Yamanashi Prefecture) as a wine tourism site to analyze how current initiatives for “regional revitalization” in Japan are shaped – and obstructed – by sub-local socio-economic and organizational divisions. The Kofu Basin has a distinct and long-standing local tradition of horticulture and alcohol production. Building on this tradition, a number of private and public initiatives have been aiming to promote “wine tourism” as a means to revive the region socially and economically. The initiatives reflect the current Japanese government’s approach to “regional revitalization”, which emphasizes the commodification of local resources in general and the link between agricultural as well as artisanal local products and tourism in particular to “revitalize” Japan's economically feeble and rapidly aging regions.
Yet, the case of the Kofu Basin also illustrates that the distribution of the potential benefits of state-sponsored “regional revitalization” – and the boundaries of the region to be revitalized – are highly contested. Evidence from interviews and participatory participation shows that the promotion of wine tourism in the basin is crucially shaped by a complex and often conflicting patchwork of sub-local social and organizational patterns that govern wine and grape production, as well as the relations between farmers, wine-makers, entrepreneurs, and local administrations – all of which has been further complicated by the redrawing of cooperative and municipal boundaries. Beyond (sub-)local divisions, local actors and publicly sponsored projects also display conflicting approaches to the promotion of wine tourism in the basin.
Hanno Jentzsch
German Institute for Japanese Studies, Japan