Earthquake's influence on inbound tourism: Voices from the travel blogs

Since the 2011 off the Pacific coast of Tohoku Earthquake damaged the major area of eastern Japan on March 11, 2011, the number of foreign visitors has drastically decreased. Japanese government tried to take urgent countermeasures against the loss. They spread the true information that Japan is safe by using media and Word-of-Mouth (WOM) such as influential bloggers. In this study, we investigate what WOM can be found regarding the earthquake through the blogs posted after the disaster. The blogs including earthquake-related words were collected and analyzed. Extracting the target data from the large number of data allows us to qualitatively examine the data. The text mining approach we used in this study includes morphological analysis and topic words analysis with term frequency-inverse document frequency weight. After that, the topic words and the words with high document frequency were used to find collocation of those topic words. As a result, the topic words "safe" and "normal" were found in the March 2011 blogs while they contained many other topic words about earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear crises. Moreover, gradually the number of earthquake-related words disappeared in the blogs and travel-related words appeared as time went by. In addition, we used concordance software to see the context where the topic words are used and found that the blogs written by the foreign visitors could convey true information about the disaster.