Recent Research Trends in Intercultural Contacts and Entertainment at Expositions

The aim of this paper is to review the recent research trends in intercultural contacts at international expositions and how they were associated with entertainment and tourism. There is no previous work on expositions that reviews the evolution on exposition tourism focusing on intercultural contacts from the modern to the contemporary era. In fact, the majority of works on expositions are either period-specific, exposition-specific, discipline-specific, or broad-based studies of the history of expositions as a whole. In this paper, therefore, books and papers on expositions from the second half of the nineteenth century onwards, from modern expositions with ethnological displays to the transformation to more contemporary one at the Expo 1970 Osaka, which gave more focus to tourism with intercultural contacts and interactions in the exposition setting, are reviewed. This will be followed by a review of some notable historical accounts, books and papers from the beginning of Meiji period onwards as an exposition research in Japan.