Tourism Review International, Vol. 11, pp. 9–18 1544-2721/07 $60.00 + .00 Printed in the USA. All rights reserved. Copyright © 2007 Cognizant Comm. Corp. www.cognizantcommunication.com 9 Address correspondence to Professor Jerry Eades, College of Asia Pacific Studies, Ritsumeikan Asia Pacific University, Beppu, Oita- ken 874-8577, Japan. Tel: +81-977-78-1049; Fax: +81-977 78-1123; E-mail: jse@apu.ac.jp LANDSCAPE AS THEME PARK: DEMOGRAPHIC CHANGE, TOURISM, URBANIZATION, AND THE FATE OF COMMUNITIES IN 21ST CENTURY JAPAN JERRY EADES and MALCOLM COOPER Graduate School of Asia Pacific Studies, Ritsumeikan Asia Pacific University, Japan Abstract: In this article the authors address a simple question: What will the already observable demographic changes mean for tourism in Japan, apart from the presence of older people? Indeed, if the population will be nearly halved in the next 50 years, one must actually address the question of whether many of the more peripheral communities in Japan will survive at all, or whether they re- semble the ghost villages in Shiga prefecture to the east of Lake Biwa. Some pointers to the fate of these communities can already be discerned in a series of studies carried out in the last 20 years. On the basis of selected case studies this article projects this process over the next 50 years to see what the impact will be on the Japanese rural periphery and on patterns of tourism. Japan as a whole has an extraordinary concentration of theme parks and other tourist facilities based on notions of identity and heritage. The title of this article refers to the fact that many communities in Japan are already turning their landscapes into quasi, if not actual, theme parks in order to attract tourists, capital and, especially, more residents. Over the next 50 years this process of conversion could become a Darwin- ian struggle for survival as the population diminishes outside Japan’s major cities. Key words: Theme park; Identity; Heritage; Population change; Depopulation; Japan local cultures going. How these different threads may relate to each other will be shown later, but first the article takes a closer look at a series of population pyramids recently published on the BBC World web site (Buckley, 2004) (Fig. 1)—the purpose being to demonstrate that Japan will need large supplies of immigrant labor for the foreseeable future, if the eco- nomic effects of the korei shakai or aging society are to be warded off. Introduction This article is speculative, bringing together a rather disparate group of themes the authors have been engaged with over the past few years: processes of tourism and migration, university change in Ja- pan, the results of globalization, the strategies of pe- ripheral regions and communities in the face of de- mographic decline, and attempts in Japan to keep