While project management has been effectively applied to many fields and sectors, disaster management has yet to see its full benefits. This inductive study generates insights about the nature and role of 'active leadership' (LaBrosse, 2007) in the context of a community led recovery project in Minami-sanriku, Japan, an area affected by the 2011 tsunami. Community leaders displayed 'active leadership' evidenced in 1) the effective identification of project objectives and relevant stakeholders, 2) the efficient management of stakeholder engagement and 3) the robust understanding of the socio-cultural context in which the Nagasuka Beach Recovery Project took place. This multidisciplinary and inductive study highlights the need to train project managers (be they community leaders or otherwise) in both technical and soft leadership skills: the former ensure that Project Management methodologies are clearly understood and applied; the latter facilitate the adaptation of these methodologies to the specific socio-cultural locales in which recovery projects take place.

Post-disaster tourism is often perceived as a form of Dark Tourism associated with death, loss and destruction. In Japan, the term Dark Tourism has gained prominence following the 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake and Tsunami. This paper focuses on a community-led approach to post-disaster tourism development, initiated in the coastal area of Minamisanriku and labelled by the locals Blue Tourism. From its inception Blue Tourism incorporated non-dark activities which concentrated on the beauty of nature, social and environmental sustainability and the development of an enriched tourist experience. Its co-creational ethos helped transform some of the negative narratives of loss associated with Dark Tourism into positive accounts of communal renewal and hope. The paper highlights the limitations of Dark Tourism to post-disaster recovery and contributes new insights to the communitybased tourism literature. We argue that Blue Tourism is not a type of Dark Tourism but a form of resilience which builds around local place-based practices and traditional community knowledge. Consequently, it is capable of achieving sustainable disaster recovery and tourist satisfaction simultaneously.AQ4

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Post-disaster tourism is an important reconstruction strategy for communities affected by natural disasters. In shrinking rural communities that also experience depopulation and aging as general trends, the need to develop proactive resilient practices for disaster management and sustainable development is a pressing requirement. Our longitudinal, multi-method study carried out in a Japanese rural coastal town affected by the 2011 Tsunami sheds light on the attributes and mechanisms by which a post-disaster education tourism initiative which was led and codelivered by the community in collaboration with a variety of stakeholders enhanced community resilience and led to sustainable practices of post-disaster reconstruction. We provide empirical insights into how community resilience and sustainable tourism development were achieved through the careful development and balancing of economic, social and environmental capital. Our study contributes to existing debates regarding the relationship between community resilience and sustainability in the tourism field by illustrating how community resilience and sustainability are mutually re-enforcing dimensions which can be achieved via post-disaster education tourism.

The purpose of this article is to explore the influence of friendship and medical advice networks on customers’ intention to undergo cosmetic procedures and its relationship to the role of professional and interpersonal trust in seeking cosmetic information. We propose that both interpersonal and professional trust play a mediating role in medical cosmetic information-seeking behaviors. In doing so, a purposive sampling of 289 customers from 21 cosmetic clinics was surveyed while all these customers received medical cosmetics treatment. The empirical analysis has shown that customers who are central to the friendship network have a high level of interpersonal trust, which positively mediates the relationship between friendship networks and their decisions to adopt cosmetic procedures. Our findings suggest that the understanding of friendship and advice networks enables us to explore the explicit details of how customers exchange information related to cosmetic surgery. Finally, our findings also made practical contributions, while the counseling service of medical clinic is required to take not only professional but also interpersonal trust into consideration.