ancient cities

818 Tourism
Further Readings
Fujita, Kuniko. 2003. “Neoindustrial Tokyo: Urban
Development and Globalization in Japan’s State-
Centered Developmental Capitalism.” Urban Studies
40(2):249–81.
Fujita, Kuniko and Richard Child Hill. 2005. “Innovative
Tokyo.” Policy Research Working Paper WPS 3507,
World Bank. Retrieved April 25, 2008 (http://econ
.worldbank.org/files/41296_wps3507.pdf).
———. 2007. “Zero Waste City: Tokyo’s Quest for a
Sustainable Environment.” The Journal of
Comparative Policy Analysis 9(4):405–25.
Johnson, Chalmers. 1999. “The Developmental State:
Odyssey of a Concept.” Pp. 32–60 in The
Developmental State, edited by M. Woo-Cumings.
Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
Samuels, Richard J. 2008. Securing Japan: Tokyo’s
Grand Strategy and the Future of East Asia. Ithaca,
NY: Cornell University Press.
Sassen, Saskia. 2001. The Global City: New York, London,
Tokyo. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Sidensticker, Edward. 1991. Low City, High City: Tokyo
from Edo to the earthquake: How the Shogun’s
Ancient Capital Became a Great Modern City, 1867–
1923. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Tokyo Metropolitan Government. 2004. Planning of
Tokyo. Tokyo: TMG.
To u r i s m
Over the past half-century, tourism has become one
of the world’s most important economic sectors. It
is one of the leading industries in the world. In
2003, $525 billion in international tourism receipts
accounted for 6 percent of world exports and 30
percent of service exports. With an annual growth
rate of 4.6 percent, for decades, tourism has grown
faster than world trade as a whole. Combined international
and domestic travel contributes about $1.5
trillion to the world economy annually.
Since World War II, rising affluence and the
growth of a middle class with leisure time vastly
expanded the market for travel. For millions of
people, advertising, public relations, television,
and the Internet have made travel as important to
the quality of life as the goods they consume, such
as cars, clothes, and household appliances. The
importance of travel is reflected in the rapidly rising
volume of international arrivals over the past
half-century. In 1950, only 25 million international
arrivals were recorded, but by 2004, this
number had increased to 763 million—an annual
growth rate of 6.5 percent. These figures greatly
underestimate tourism flows, however, because
domestic tourism trips outnumber international
trips by a factor of 10. No longer considered a
luxury, travel has become a necessity, both for
work and for personal fulfillment.
Tourism is often statistically invisible because it
has been defined by specialists as a consumption
activity; thus, tourism spending is calculated by
estimating the amount that tourists spend on travel
services, hotels, recreational facilities, tourist
attractions, restaurants and shops, and a variety of
local services. But despite the inherent difficulties
of precisely estimating its economic contributions,
tourism has clearly become essential to the economies
of nations, regions, and localities everywhere.
Many places rely solely on tourists and the money
they spend, but even in locations with complex
economies, tourism is nearly always an important
economic sector. Tourism exerts an enormous cultural
impact as well; it changes the places where it
occurs, often substantially.
A Brief History
Cities have long held a special status as travel destinations.
In the fifteenth through the eighteenth centuries,
young men of the British upper class were
expected to make a grand tour of ancient cities,
mainly Paris, Geneva, Rome, Florence, Venice, and
Naples, as part of the rites of coming of age. Travelers
were willing to endure weeks of discomfort to negotiate
rutted roads and nearly impassable mountains, if
necessary, to get to the grand-tour cities.
The hazards and inconvenience of travel helped
shape a widely shared disdain for nature and the
natural. Mountains were considered ugly and
forbidding, seacoasts generally inaccessible and
dangerous. By the mid-eighteenth century, however,
such attitudes began to change. Nature was
discovered as a vast repository of sublime views
and vistas. The Romantic poets reinterpreted
nature as a tamed backdrop of formal gardens,
stately trees, and placid lakes. With the rise of the
industrial cities of the nineteenth century, nature,
as interpreted through Thoreau, Wordsworth, and
their contemporaries, was the repository of the