Thanks kbarch and Zippy
Originally Posted by
kbarch
I suppose what makes a GREAT cycle-tourism destination - one worth flying across an ocean - is an abundance and wide variety of outstanding routes.
Yamaguchi has quite a few routes in varying scenery,
Biggest bridge in Japan,
Sea of Japan with nice shrine,
Welsh x the moon, but not enough to get people to come across oceans for.
Originally Posted by
ZippyThePinhead
There's got to be some spectacular draw in order to motivate that kind of sacrifice to get there.
I don't think that there is, alas, but Yamaguchi prefecture is I think only aiming to draw people from Kyoto and Tokyo. Most travellers to Japan, of which
there are now nearly 30 million, mostly from East Asia, only go to Tokyo, Kyoto, and Fukuoka. Yamaguchi is hoping some might consider a bit of cycling as well. Caucasian tourists stand out and have a tendency to create further tourism via the "Well if it is interesting to (white?) tourists, it must be good" effect. There are going to be a lot more tourists coming to Tokyo for the Olympics in 2020. I am wondering if some of them can be enticed. It takes about 5 hours to Yamaguchi on the bullet train from Tokyo, so it is still a long way.
The other thing that I thought I would concentrate on is dark tourism. There is quite a lot of it, such as POW camps, and Christian martyr sites (c.f the Scorsese film) but the Japanese tend to keep it a secret. I wonder how that merges with cyclo tourism.