World heritage and dark
tourism: A case study of “hidden Christian sites
in the Nagasaki region”, Japan
Accepted 18th
January, 2018
Fukami Satoshi1 and Sim
Ji-Hyun2
1Department of Environmental Science, Nagasaki University, Japan. 2Department of International Communication, Nagasaki University of
Foreign Studies, Japan.
The present research aimed
to examine the sustainability of the constituent
properties of the candidate sites where hidden
Christians have lived for world heritage in
Nagasaki and clarified the concept of “dark
tourism” that is applicable to the
sustainability. In this study, the methodologies
of “dark tourism” was applied to discuss the
sustainability based on the results from the
hearing surveys on qualitative changes in these
properties that the author conducted at the
sites. Consequently, the research revealed the
following two points: 1) the methodologies of
“dark tourism” are necessarily adopted to the
sustainability; and 2) challenges still remain
with respect to the local parties’ review of the
properties and to the reconstruction of the
candidate world heritage’s stories that tourists
will trace.
Key words:
World heritage tourism, dark tourism, negative
legacy, hidden Christian sites, sustainability.
This is an open access article
published under the terms of the
Creative Commons Attribution
License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and
reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is
properly cited.
Cite this article as:
Satoshi F, Ji-Hyun S (2018). World heritage and dark tourism: A case study of
“hidden Christian sites in the Nagasaki region”, Japan. Acad. J. Environ. Sci.
6(1): 011-019.
