Cultural differences of spatial descriptions in tourist guidebooks

This paper examined spatial descriptions for guiding Japanese and American tourists from cross-cultural and geographic perspectives, based on a content analysis of 24 guidebooks to four cities in Japan and USA. Quantitative analysis of pictorial and linguistic information in guidebooks revealed that Japanese guidebooks use predominately pictorial information, whereas American guidebooks mainly depend on the linguistic one. In addition, we found a complementary relationship between the two modes of information. The contents of linguistic information were entirely influenced by socio-cultural factors rather than environmental conditions such as the street pattern regularity. In particular, difference in address systems between two countries affected the way of sorting the sites, style of maps, and the use frequency of linguistic information.