A STUDY ON THE PSYCHOLOGICAL EVALUATION OF TOURIST SPOTS IN HIROSHIMA: Comparison of the results of image-based evaluation and onsite evaluation between Japanese and Chinese students

1. Introduction In recent years, the tourism industry is important for revitalizing local cities and improving the quality of life. In Tourism-Based Community, it is required to investigate tourism resources that will be attractive for nonresidents. Meanwhile, globalization is progressing now, and foreign tourists visiting Japan are also increasing. Therefore, in order to discover attractive tourism resources for nonresidents, it is necessary to investigate the needs of foreign tourists as nonresidents for Japanese tourist spots. In addition, tourism behavior is generally carried out in the process of actually visiting after obtaining prior information to determine the destination. Therefore, it’s necessary to investigate changes in the impression of tourists to tourist spots before and after visiting. In this study, to get a thorough understanding of attractive tourism resources for foreign tourists as nonresidents, we compared the results of psychological evaluation of tourist spots in Hiroshima obtained by the image-based and onsite experiments using Chinese and Japanese students as nonresidents and residents. 2. Outline of the experiment In this study, image-based evaluation experiment by Photo Scenes (PS) and onsite evaluation experiment were conducted. In the former experiment, we presented landscape photos of 32 tourist spots in Hiroshima and the explanatory texts about them, and then asked subjects to evaluate each tourist spots. The latter experiment contained two parts: the caption evaluation experiment and the Actual Scene evaluation experiment (AS), which asked subjects to view the same scene as the photo of each tourist spot, and to evaluate in the same way as PS. To figure out the difference between the impression from the photo and the explanatory texts and that from the actual space, we discussed the results of PS and AS out of the three experiments. 3. Subject recognition As a result of the recognition and experience of the tourist spot, it turned out that there is a big difference in knowledge and experience to the target tourist spot between the Japanese and Chinese subjects. Therefore, the validity of the Chinese and Japanese students as nonresident and resident subjects was confirmed. 4. Evaluation result of the tourist spots According to the average evaluation score profiles, in case of the Chinese, “willingness to visit” was highly evaluated for famous tourist spots in PS, because they expected more based on a lot of information abou