被爆体験継承における「平和観光」の可能性 : 「参加型継承」の視点から

Hiroshima’s two world heritage sites, the Atomic-bomb Dome and Miyajima Island, are both major Japanese tourist destinations. A recent dramatic increase of visitors to the former was partially boosted by the 2016 visit of former US President, Barack Obama, and by the 2017 Nobel Peace Prize award to ICAN. This trend may prove to be an opportunity to provide peace-education for the visitors, while taking into account concerns about the commodification of the memorial sites of human catastrophe. Hiroshima now has a double task: catering for the needs of the tourists and supporting the local community’s mission to pass on the memory of the Atomic-bomb experience. This empirical study explores the possibility of conveying the memory of the Atomic-bombing of Hiroshima through “peace tourism”. The historical relation between the concepts of “peace” and “tourism” in Hiroshima is reviewed and both the conflicting and converging viewpoints (i.e. “gaze”) of the tourists and the local community are discussed, leading to the question of whether the city’s “Peace Principle” is shared with the tourists or not. To explore this question further, tourists’ reviews in Japanese from 2009 to 2017 published on TripAdvisor, an international ‘word-of-mouth’ travel information website, were analyzed using an interdisciplinary methodology, utilizing descriptive and explorative statistics combined with historical and critical discourse analysis to ensure triangulation. The results suggest a potential to transmit the “participatory heritage of the Atomic-bomb experience” through “peace tourism”.