A study on the tourism destination image of Japan in the Chinese market

This study is aimed at revealing the tourism destination image (TDI) of Japan as represented on Chinese websites. Three Internet-based information resources were used to collect the text database: travel advertisements, travel guides, and travel blogs. The TDI of Japan represented on each information source was studied by counting word frequencies in each text database. Correspondence analysis was utilized to reveal the associations of these TDIs. The results show that travel advertisements and guides project quite different images of Japan to those presented in travel blogs. Usually, Chinese tourists tend to be impressed by traditional cities with long histories, such as Nara and Kyoto. They are more impressed by historic landscapes than by natural landscapes or the traditional culture of Japan. These results imply that future tourism promotion efforts should focus on finding connections with the cultural background of tourists, in this case, those coming from China