For both undergraduate and graduate levels, we refer to the Department of Tourism Science as the Tourism Science Class. The Tourism Science Class originated in a specialized course for tourism science in the Graduate School of Urban Environmental Sciences in April 2007, and admitted the first master's degree students in April 2008. In the following year, the graduate course was reorganized as the Department of Tourism Science (graduate); the Natural and Cultural Tourism Course was created in the Faculty of Urban Environmental Sciences (undergraduate). In April 2010, the Department of Tourism Science (graduate) began admitting doctoral students, and the Natural and Cultural Tourism Course of the Faculty of the Urban Environment Sciences admitted its first undergraduate students, juniors who had transferred from other undergraduate courses of the same or other Faculties. In April 2018, with the organizational reform of the Tokyo Metropolitan University, the Nature and Culture Tourism Course was reorganized as the Department of Tourism Science (undergraduate), and we finally began admitting undergraduate students (freshmen who had passed the undergraduate-level entrance examination that was conducted for the first time) to the department.
Scientific viewpoints are indispensable for the future development of many tourism areas in Japan, which have limited environmental resources. Such scientific viewpoints include ecology/geology, necessary for preserving regional resources, transportation planning/urban planning, necessary for infrastructure development, and information science/psychology, necessary for understanding tourism behaviors.
The "tourism science" you will study at the Tourism Science Department of the Tokyo Metropolitan University (TMU) is a new academic discipline with which we try to elucidate every phenomenon related to tourism from the viewpoint of science. Our mission in the Tourism Science Department is to nurture specialists in the field who can contribute to the development of tourism areas through tourism science. We also aim to develop professionals, such as engineers, consultants, or rangers, who are responsible for understanding phenomena and planning and implementing tourism promotion, and practical generalists, who perform comprehensive management of tourism.
Academic fields and Research Units of Tourism Science
In this unit, our aim is to contribute to the sustainable utilization and management of the natural environment by finding optimal solutions for the balance between conservation and the development of ecosystems in relation to activities involving agriculture, forestry and fisheries, regional participation, environmental education, and environmental conservation in the human/biological/physical environments within the phenomena of tourism that make use of the natural environment. Tourism is approached through the lens of biological resource studies, regional environmental studies, and ecological environment studies.
This unit's aim is to study tourism utilizing, as tourism resources, the space and buildings of cities and village areas where people live and work, and the tangible and intangible cultures being generated there, and to research practical planning and implementation methods to improve the local environment and to enhance appeal through such tourism activities. Tourism town planning, tourism infrastructure planning, tourism policy, history of tourism area are utilized to approach tourism.
The aim of this unit is to scientifically study the psychology and behavior of various actors involved in tourism, such as tourists, as well as their employees, and to establish methods for tourism-related companies/organizations to provide information and services that match tourists' actual/potential needs.
Tourism is approached from the perspective of tourism psychology/behavioral science, tourism information studies, and tourism management science.
