Category: Research

The introduction to our latest edited volume (New Frontiers in Japanese Studies) is now available open access on the Routledge website:

Akihiro Ogawa and Philip Seaton, “Introduction: envisioning new frontiers in Japanese Studies”.

The edited volume that I have been working on this year with Professor Akihiro Ogawa (University of Melbourne) is now in press. We expect it to be published in the spring/summer of 2020. Details are already available at the Routledge website.

My latest book is scheduled to be published on 31 January 2020. It is now available for pre-order on the Channel View Publications Website. There is also a pre-order offer of 50% off (see this flyer: Yamamura & Seaton discount flyer). Contents Tourism and Pop Culture Fandom: Transnational Tourist Experiences is a collection of essays that examines the phenomenon of contents tourism in an international perspective. My own contributions are the chapter “The Contents Tourism of Jane Austen’s American Fans” and the conclusions, “Sustainable Contents Tourism in the 21st Century”. I co-edited the book with my long-time research partner, Takayoshi Yamamura.

I have an academic conference “double header” in June. On 15 June I presented my research on tourism relating to Clouds Above the Hill at the Showa Literature Society. On 26 June I present on War-related Contents Tourism at the Travel and Tourism Research Association conference in Melbourne. Both are part of our new contents tourism focusing on war-related entertainment products and tourism.

My main research partner of the past decade, Dr Takayoshi Yamamura, has secured a new grant to continue the work of our contents tourism project (2014-2019). The three-year Kakenhi B Grant (5-20 million yen category, 2019-2022) project is called 「コンテンツツーリズムにおける「戦争」の消費と歴史理解に関する国際比較研究」, which translates as “The consumption of ‘war’ in contents tourism and comparative international research on the historical understanding”. With this project, my contents tourism work has come full circle to link up with my war memories work …

My article “Islands of ‘Dark’ and ‘Light/Lite’ Tourism: War-related contents tourism around the Seto Inland Sea” has been published as part of the special edition “War, Tourism, and Modern Japan” in the journal Japan Review. It is open access and can be viewed here.

As my contents tourism grant wraps up, I have published three research notes on the International Journal of Contents Tourism about my research into tourism relating to The Last Samurai.

On the trail of The Last Samurai (I): Taranaki

On the trail of The Last Samurai (II): Hobbiton vs Uruti Valley

On the trail of The Last Samurai (III): Himeji and Kagoshima

My review of Hiro Saito’s book The History Problem: The Politics of War Commemoration in East Asia (University of Hawai‘i Press, 2017) has been published in Monumenta Nipponica 73.2 (2018), pp. 320-324.

It is a great honour to have been asked to give the WG Beasley Memorial Lecture at SOAS on 13 March 2019. The title of my talk is “On the Trail of Shiba Ryotaro and Jane Austen: Novels, Heritage, and Contents Tourism in Japan and the UK”. For further details and information on how to register for the event, please see the SOAS event page.

My review of Marc Steinberg and Alexander Zahlten, Media Theory in Japan (Duke University Press, 2017), has just been published in Asian Studies Review (online 16 September 2018).