Impacts of Outbound Tourism on National Tourism Image: A Case Study of Chinese Mainland's Tourists Travelling to Japan

With the rapid development of the Chinese economy, Chinese residents' willingness to travel has been rising. In 2012, China became the biggest tourist source country for outbound tourism in the world. In 2019, 9.594 million mainland Chinese tourists visited Japan, ranking Japan as the second most popular tourist destination country for this group, after Thailand. Despite the complicated relations between China and Japan and the low level of mutual goodwill between the two nations, the number of mainland Chinese tourists visiting Japan has been continuously increasing in recent years, which makes this a geopolitical tourism phenomenon worth exploring. Through online text analysis, the research first explored how mainland Chinese tourists reconstruct the national tourism image perceptions of Japan before and after their visits to Japan, answering the question of how tourism activities affect the subject's (tourists') tourism image perceptions of the object (tourist destination). Second, just as tourism activities can have an impact on the socio-economy of a destination, they can simultaneously affect the destination's residents' perceptions of the source country. This study attempts to answer the question of how tourism activities affect these perceptions by evaluating the socioeconomic impact of mainland Chinese tourists' activities in Japan through literature and press materials. The study determines that mainland Chinese tourists approach and understand Japanese society based on their own travel activities in Japan, forming and changing their perceptions of Japan's tourism image in three stages; cognitive acquisition, cognitive processing, and cognitive change. The changes are mainly reflected in the strengthening of their perceptions of Japanese food and urban infrastructure, adjusting their perceptions of Sino-Japanese relations, and creating new perceptions of Japan's tourist attractions, humane atmosphere, and cultural history. The direct contact between China and Japan through tourism has helped mainland Chinese tourists break the media-constructed image of Japan and form a more positive perception of Japan, mainly because of Japan's proactive geostrategy of inbound tourism and its policy of "tourism diplomacy" with China. The study further determines that, although "tourism to Japan" has benefited Japan's economy, the social problems brought by it have reduced Japanese nationals' favorable feelings toward China, implying that China's outbound tourism has not yet become a strategic tool for exporting Chinese values and national culture. In conclusion, the study suggests that globalization and tourism have made tourism an important part of geopolitics and that it is necessary to focus on tourism-related geopolitical strategies to enhance the positive role of Chinese outbound tourism in improving how other countries form their perceptions about China