Promoting Yokosuka via Video Game Tourism: The Case of the Shenmue Sacred Spot Guide Map

This paper examines how the video game Shenmue (SEGA-AM2, 2000) has generated tourism to Yokosuka, Japan, and how the city's Yokosuka Action Committee for the Promotion responded by releasing the "Shenmue Sacred Spot Guide Map" in 2017. The author frames the phenomenon as a form of "secular pilgrimage" and "video game-induced tourism," an area that remains under-studied compared with film and anime tourism. The central argument is that fan pilgrimages to locations recreated in the game have drawn media attention to a small city of roughly 400,000 people, and that the municipality has shifted from passively benefiting from this activity to deliberately capturing its economic value through a promotional leaflet modeled on film "movie maps."

The study is explicitly preliminary. Its evidence rests largely on secondary sources, including an interview with a Yokosuka City tourism official reporting strong demand for the guide from both Japanese and foreign fans, many of whom were residents of Japan. The author notes that the guide is currently available only domestically, which suggests it has drawn a substantial number of collectors, though no quantitative measurement of visitor numbers is provided. No primary data such as tourism statistics, visitor surveys, or interviews with officials and tourists has yet been collected.

The paper's scope is limited to a single case, a single game, and a single promotional product, with the city's "non-touristy" character making any measurable impact difficult to isolate. The author identifies several open questions for future work, including whether playing a game changes a player's image of a destination, which in-game features motivate travel, and how culture shapes these responses. Those questions are presented as the agenda for more extensive research rather than as findings of the present study.