Japanese Students on Educational Tourism: Current Trends and Challenges

Abstract

Educational tourism has been adopted by many Japanese schools as part of their curriculum or as extracurricular learning programmes for many years. Although the number of school-aged children in Japan has been decreasing as the country’s overall population has grown older, the number of schools, especially high schools, engaging in overseas school trips has increased in the past two decades. Educational tourism is an important segment of Japan’s domestic tourism in particular, and it also has a large economic impact on global tourism. However, although educational tourism in Western countries has been previously discussed in the English tourism literature, educational tourism in Japan, especially overseas school trips, has received limited attention. Thus, this type of travel is not well represented in the growing body of literature on educational tourism. In order to fill this gap, this chapter first discusses the concept of educational tourism and provides an overview of educational tourism programmes in Japanese schools. The chapter then explores current trends and unique features of these programmes by consulting available secondary data. Finally, challenges related to educational tourism in Japan are discussed to gain a better understanding of this unique segment of the international tourism market.