In 2009, Hokkaido University’s Imai Nobuharu wrote a detailed paper discussing the ins and outs of anime tourism and how it might be tied in with traditional cultural events. It’s a good paper, near as I can tell, and it goes in some interesting directions, breaking out statistics, comparing and contrasting the Washinomiya shrine and Disneyland, and exploring the terminology which has developed around anime tourism.

The whole paper is extremely long and translating all of it would take a good chunk of time, but my eyes were drawn to a particular footnote on page 14, which discusses 1990s examples of pre-modern anime-driven tourism and the etymology of the term 聖地巡礼 (Seichi Jyunrei, or Holy Land Pilgrimage in English) which has come to refer to otaku tourism.

Source Paper: http://eprints.lib.hokudai.ac.jp/dspace/handle/2115/35681

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