Thinking from the field and creating time for the future
A writer Shuji Terayama once proclaimed, "Throw away your books and go out to the streets". It was the title of a revolutionary book cutting sharply into the transformation of the time, raising problems to the youth and students immersed in cramming education based solely on textbooks when the soaring economic growth was sure to happen and advanced consumer society was celebrated, where people were always in pursuit of material possession symbolized by "the three consumer treasures". Incidentally, published half a century ago in the same year, 1967, as the launch of the legendary theater company "Tenjo Sajiki", the book begins with an intensely pleasurable and ironic agitation "Boys, embrace big buttocks" parodied from a famous phrase left by Dr Clark of Sapporo Agricultural College.
Where has the era reached now? Of course, looking only at Japan is too narrow. We have to take a wide and distant perspective, jump over space and time, and approach the phenomenon from a compound eyed standpoint and flexibly adopting both microscopic and macroscopic manners. In such attempts, "going out to the streets" will still be effective. "The streets" is not limited to the city. In rural areas as well, it is important to grasp corporeally the reality of the fields where people live. There exists a Chinese saying, "read thousands of books and travel thousands of miles to become fully grown" (a quote from Dong Qichang, a calligrapher in the late period of the Ming dynasty). The tourism creation course is waiting for like-minded students who are provided with practical knowledge and are willing to open up an unprecedented future.
Kenichiro Shimizu, Director of Course in Tourism Creation Studies
Aims of education and research
Training of professionals and researchers who open up tourism for the future
Tourism studies is not an established discipline. In reality it has been so far attempted to elucidate phenomena of tourism by mobilizing all academic fields such as economics, business administration, political science, law, sociology, history, cultural anthropology, folklore, agriculture, engineering, medicine, etc. However, it is certain that education related with tourism has gradually achieved progress. It can be said that it is one of the missions for the university in the future to train human resources who will be the forerunners of innovation and create new phenomena in the changing society.
This research course is a successor to the Tourism Creation Major, which was established in 2007 with the aim of conducting such creation-oriented research and education. Students participating in this course do not engage in their research in line with a single discipline, but find their own research subject, keeping their eyes on its true aspects, select an adequate research methodology, and aim to solve the problems, accumulating necessary knowledge. By following this route, students will surely be able to develop creative work related to tourism on their own stage of profession and research in the future.
Specialized subjects
The specialized subjects of the Course in Tourism Creation Studies consist of four categories: Culture and Tourism; Communication and Co-creation; Regional Tourism Management; and International Tourism Development.
Classes are provided not only by the main teaching staff comprising educational units corresponding to each subject category (the culture and tourism unit, the communication and co-creation unit, the regional tourism management unit, and the international tourism development unit) in addition to another unit of contemporary Japanese studies, but by members of other graduate faculties of Hokkaido University and external teachers from other educational and research institutes and private organizations, forming an organic cooperative system while utilizing most effectively their diversified specialties, social and cultural backgrounds and careers.
In addition to the specialized subjects described above, various course-merging specialized subjects that bridge tourism and the media are offered, and students can adopt an effective strategy in their choice of the classes according to their own interests and awareness of the issues, methodologies, and approaches to be needed.
In addition to various academic-career-oriented seminars, provision of practical classes offered by practitioner instructors outside the university is also a feature of this school, and in the Course in Tourism Creation Studies, "Tourism Destination Business and Marketing" is offered by a visiting professor from JTB. Furthermore, in collaboration with the Hotel and Tourism Management School of the University of Barcelona, there are opportunities for the students to participate in lectures by invited researchers and in summer schools opened in Barcelona.