Hyogo Prefecture and Hard times: Making Strategies and Changing Tourism Policies, 1990–2017

Japan's national tourism policy retaining outworn strategies while implementing new ones at the national and prefectural levels but were tested especially in the Great Hanshin Earthquake of 1995. Difficult to implement in this period due to project carry-over (an early indicator of economic problems nationally), Hyogo's complex tourism policy was made more so by the demands placed on the systems for regional development. Various tourism and coastal development projects crossed between departments and authorities, resulting in overlays of responsibility, possible exclusions or repetitions in and of projects, while dealing with inherited projects and strategies for growth from previous policies. Competing demands in the private, administrative, and public sectors, and inequitable distribution of funds and other resources had compounded issues. This chapter extricates tourism's roles and at the two government levels highlighting not only repetition played across these levels but also the role of construction roleplayers and their influence in tourism strategies for unfettered development at the munipality level.