Anime tourism has been a thing in Japan for decades now, and historically took the form of people visiting spots that had been featured in anime series. The tourist industry took note, and soon enough anime started to deliberately include certain locations, and eventually towns and districts even began funding their own anime for tourist reasons.
After Fukushima in 2011, a tourist group decided to help revitalize tourism in Japan via the creation of Onsenmusume, or ‘hot spring girls’. This combined anime girls, idol bands and tourism. They created characters based on certain locations in Japan, and used them for promotions and to attract tourists. This became a success and the number of characters increased to exceed 100 today. Most of the hot springs I’ve visited have had their ‘own’ hot spring girl, but Arima takes it to a new level since it seems to be not only the hot spring girl characters but also ones from the game/anime Love Live all around the town.
Life-sized standees in particular are common, and we’ve seen dozens of different ones in hotels, shops and shrines.
I’m not familiar enough with these characters to know if they’re from Love Live or not (but I suspect they are), but some standees seem hotel-specific which is to say the character seems to be assigned to a hotel. Here’s ours for instance:
The circular sign on the left shows the pin badge for this hotel, which features this character standing in front of the entrance. I’m sure many hotels here in Arima have their own custom badges with different girls.
I was reading that the use of anime girls to promote onsen tourism has been quite successful, and there are rules in place – such as no online sales of merchandise – that have helped. As a visitor it’s an unusual sight, since this town is very much about tradition and yet there’s anime girl standees all over the place!
One store has a little ‘shrine’ set up showing a vast range of keychains and character merchandise. None of it is for sale, but it’s a glimpse into the extent of this branding for almost 15 years now.
Apparently there are hot spring girls now in every prefecture and district in Japan. We’re going to another onsen in a few days. I wonder if they’ll have their own?