Methods
The benefit of conducting a systematic review is that the current state of knowledge in a particular area can be articulated (Ito et al., 2014). More specifically, our systematic review presented in this chapter attempts to clarify ‘what we know’, ‘what we do not know’ and ‘what we need to know’ (Weed, 2014: 1) in terms of the literature on sustainable sport tourism development in Japan. In our systematic review, we reviewed sport tourism articles published in Japanese journals up to May 2016. The two major academic search engines, CiNii (Articles) and J-Stage, were used to identify relevant sport tourism research articles published in Japanese journals. In order to ensure a comprehensive search of published articles within this domain, the following two combinations of keywords were used: (a) ‘sport (X -T« — 7)’ and ‘tourism (7 — J X A)' and (b) ‘sport (X i? — 7 )’ and ‘kankou (W )t: a Japanese indigenous word for tourism)’. The CiNii search located 108 articles for the former and 244 articles for the latter terms, whereas the J-Stage search located 96 articles for the former and 1,117 articles for the latter. Further criteria for inclusion of an article in this systematic review were that it contained ‘sport’ and ‘tourism (or kankou)' in its title, keyword, abstract or journal name. The abstracts for these articles as well as the article itself were then reviewed to confirm whether it addressed sport tourism in a substantive way. Articles in which sport tourism was a peripheral topic were dropped from the review. Because we searched for the articles by using an online database, this review did not include unpublished works (grey literature). A decision was also made not to include columns/commentaries and conference proceedings and abstracts.
As a result, 52 articles met the criteria for inclusion in the comprehensive review. As per Hinch et al. (2014), the analysis focused on the following characteristics: (a) the number of articles; (b) the year of publication; (c) journal fields; (d) types of sport tourism; (e) geographical focus; (f) methodological approaches; (g) empirical methods; and (h) research themes. In addition, the articles were categorized according to their focus on the three dimensions of the triple bottom line of sustainable development (social/ cultural, economic and environmental) (Hall & Lew, 2009) as Higham and Hinch (2018) argue that all three of these aspects need to be considered to achieve sustainable sport tourism. The social and cultural dimension included various characteristics of sport tourism destinations including participation, planning, education, health and visitor satisfaction, whilst the economic dimension involved characteristics of sport and tourism industries, such as financial viability and economic impact. The environmental aspect related to natural resources including environmental impacts, resource degradation, resource values and the balance between natural and built facilities. These three dimensions tend to be inseparable and integrated (e.g., the economic and environmental aspects), so it was sometimes challenging to categorize a publication as having a primary focus in one dimension or another (Higham
& Hinch, 2018). To ensure the reliability of the categories, the first author and a Japanese sport tourism researcher who did not know about the research purposes coded the articles individually using the same criteria. Inter-rater agreements (Tinsley & Weiss, 1975) or Cohen’s kappa was 0.69 in this study. A kappa coefficient of 0.61 to 0.80 is considered to be indicative of ‘substantial agreement’ (Landis & Koch, 1977); therefore, it is reasonable to state that the first author and the Japanese research assistant were substantially consistent with their coding results. Any remaining rater disagreements were then resolved through discussion between them.
