## Maintaining an Environment to Accelerate Sightseeing Tours

## (1) Promoting the tourism based on the universal design concept

To consolidate and promote the widespread acceptance of the concept of universal tourism, which makes tourism safely available to anybody, including aged and physically handicapped people, host environments have been refurbished and ways to promote partnerships, etc. among stakeholders, such as regional support bodies and travel agencies.

## (2) Promoting new tourism

New breeds of tourism (eco-tourism, green tourism, cultural sightseeing, industrial sightseeing, healthy tourism, sport tourism and more) are being brewed to fulfill diversified traveler needs while taking advantage of regional characteristics. As for sport tourism, the Japan Sport Tourism Alliance (JSTA) was founded in April 2012 as a core body to help inaugurate regional sport commissions, attract and sponsor international sport events and more.

## 8 Maintaining Tourism Statistics

The maintenance and utilization of various kinds of tourism statistics is being stepped up to aid in the strategic planning of tourism policy and verification of its results.

Since FY2012, full-scale tourist resort economic surveys have been conducted on about 100,000 business establishments across the nation in conjunction with an economic census to elucidate the basic structure of the tourist industry (number of business operators, sales volume, employment and working conditions) and advantageous effects of tourism that may stimulate regional economies. Efforts are also being directed at trimming the time spent on the publication of other areas of tourism statistics and introducing the methods of analyzing such statistics actively to offer data that useful to the administrative authorities and industries as they plan their own policies on a timely basis.

## Section 3 Building a Beautiful Country, as by Forming a Good Landscape

## 1 Forming a Good Landscape

## (1) Promoting activities pursuant to the three landscape laws

Activities aimed at forming good landscapes are being promoted as the number of landscape administrative organizations $ ^{Note} $ operating under the Landscape Act increased to 568 as of January 1, 2013, with landscape plans having been formulated by 360 of them. The “Outdoor Advertisement Act” has also been amended to enforce a system of registration for outdoor advertising agencies. Further, the enactment of outdoor advertisement ordinances by municipalities which are landscape administrative organizations is in progress (by April 1, 2012, ordinances had been worked by 50 bodies). The Greening Area System based on the “Urban Green Space Conservation Act” has also penetrated Nagoya City, Yokohama City, Setagaya-ward, Tokyo, and Toyota City, Aichi Prefecture to propel good landscape formation and easy-to-live-in town development.

## (2) Working on landscape reviews in refurbishing social infrastructures

Diverse opinions collected from among local residents, academic experts and so on and post-project landscape prediction and assessments are factored into projects on the drawing board to proceed with the tasks of refurbishing landscape-conscious social infrastructures.