The Airport That Makes a Town Talk

What Yonago's "Story Gateway" Can Teach Korea's Small Cities About Tourism

You can tell, within minutes, whether a small city (소도시) understands tourism (관광) as advertising or as design.

At Yonago Kitarō Airport (요나고 키타로 공항), the story begins before you've even found your luggage. The building itself behaves like a prologue. Characters appear where you expect wayfinding. Photo spots are placed where airports usually keep dead space. And the city's most important promise is delivered not in a slogan, but in a feeling: you've entered a world (세계관), not just a region.

This is not a metaphor. In July 2010, the airport formally adopted the nickname "Yonago Kitarō Airport" (米子鬼太郎空港), tying its identity to GeGeGe no Kitarō (게게게의 키타로), the long-running manga world created by Shigeru Mizuki (미즈키 시게루).

And that single choice reveals a lesson Korean local governments keep relearning the hard way: a small city doesn't win by being "known." It wins by being "sayable" (말하게 하는 힘).

A City That Refuses to "Explain Itself"

Most place marketing (장소 브랜딩) starts with explanation: history, food, "hidden gems," five things to do. But explanation is rarely what makes people travel. What makes people travel is a sentence they can repeat without effort.

Yonago's approach is closer to behavioral design (행동 설계). It does not beg for attention. It scripts attention.

From the airport you can reach Kaike Onsen (가이케 온천), a seaside hot spring area known for ocean views and thalassotherapy-like seaside bathing culture; Mt. Daisen (다이센) looms as a recognizable natural icon; and Sakaiminato (사카이미나토), where the story tightens into something closer to an "open-air museum."

But the city's real trick isn't the list. It's the continuity. Arrival (도착), movement (이동), and stay (체류) are stitched into one linked IP system (연결형 IP 시스템). You are not "visiting attractions." You are progressing through chapters.

The Train Line That Turned Transit Into Content

In many Korean regions, the ride from station to destination is treated as downtime. In Yonago, transit is content (콘텐츠) by default.

Take the JR Sakai Line (JR 사카이선). Its stations have yokai-themed nicknames (요괴 역명 별칭) tied to the Kitarō universe—Yonago Station as "Nezumi Otoko Station" (네즈미오토코 역), Sakaiminato Station as "Kitaro Station" (키타로 역). Even the train designs lean into the narrative.

That matters because tourism today is mediated by user-generated content (사용자 생성 콘텐츠, UGC). People don't just travel; they document, share, and translate trips into posts. A themed station name is not merely signage. It is a caption generator.

Korean small cities often pour budgets into campaigns (캠페인) that assume attention is scarce. But attention is not scarce; motivation is. If your place doesn't offer a clean "explainable moment" (설명 가능한 순간), it will evaporate in the content market.

Yonago keeps producing those moments—without forcing them—because the system is built for repetition and sharing.

The Street That Works Like a Social Machine

Then comes Mizuki Shigeru Road (미즈키 시게루 로드), an 800-meter arcade-like street that stretches from Sakaiminato Station toward the Mizuki Shigeru Museum, lined with well over a hundred bronze yokai statues—sources describe counts in the roughly 150–180 range, suggesting the installation has expanded over time.

Here the city is doing something subtly radical: it's outsourcing promotion to visitors, but not by asking them to "share." It shares for them.

The statues are spaced like prompts. The lighting creates night-time reruns of the same scene. Shops, mailboxes, and even small civic touches become themed surfaces. The street functions as a distributed studio: every few meters, another chance to make the city legible in a photo.

This is what many Korean place projects miss: "branding" is not what you say; it's what people can do with your place.

Why This Matters Now for Korea

In 2024, domestic travel participation in Korea reached 95.4%, totaling about 291.8 million trips and 36.8 trillion won in spending—numbers that tell us Koreans are moving, but also that regions are competing inside an already-saturated travel habit.

At the same time, the policy conversation increasingly frames tourism as a response to regional decline (지역 소멸) and demographic imbalance—down to initiatives like expanded "tourist resident card" discounts aimed at struggling areas.

So the challenge is no longer "How do we get people to come once?" It is: How do we design a reason to return—and a reason to recommend?

Yonago's answer, stripped of the cute monsters, is a governance model of attention:

A city chooses a narrative world (세계관) that can be expressed instantly, then makes the gateway (관문)—airport, station, terminal—do the heavy lifting, then turns movement into a storyboard, and finally builds an environment where sharing feels like an inevitable side effect of being there.

Video: Urban Communication in 30 Seconds

Reframing Yonago for Korean Small Cities

Korean local governments don't need to import Japanese manga. The transferable asset is the system logic.

If I were advising a Korean small city (소도시) on "learning from Yonago," I would translate it like this:

First, treat the gateway (관문) as the first media channel. In many cities, the KTX station, intercity bus terminal, or even a parking lot is where impressions are lost. Yonago makes the first three minutes a narrative handshake.

Second, turn mobility (이동) into meaning. Route design is not logistics; it is plot. When a train line becomes a named experience, even the commute becomes content.

Third, build a linked ecosystem (연결 생태계), not a single "spot." The failure mode in Korea is the one-off sculpture street, the one-off festival, the one-off photo zone—each fighting alone for attention. Yonago's installations work because they are chapters in the same book.

And finally, prepare for the downside of success. Korea already knows what happens when destinations become too popular—resident backlash, governance tension, and "overtourism" debates. A city that designs shareability (공유 가능성) must also design boundaries and resident dignity.

The Real Lesson: Make the Visitor Your Narrator

Yonago is not "quiet." It is precise. It doesn't market the town (도시 홍보) so much as it designs the visitor (방문자 설계).

That is the future of small-city tourism (소도시 관광) in Korea. Not louder campaigns. Not more hashtags. But places that give people a line they want to say—then arrange the world so saying it feels natural.

In the end, the most effective tourism strategy (관광전략) may be the simplest one: don't ask people to understand your city. Help them tell it.

References

[1] Yonago Air. (2010). 空港について – 米子鬼太郎空港. https://www.yonago-air.com/outline/

[2] Japan Travel. Kaike Onsen 皆生温泉. https://www.japan.travel/en/spot/2285/

[3] Japan Experience. Yokai Trains Sakai Line. https://www.japan-experience.com/plan-your-trip/travel-by-train/unique-trains/sakai-line

[4] Tottori Tourism. Mizuki Shigeru Road. https://www.tottori-tour.jp/en/sightseeing/835/

[5] The Kansai Guide. Mizuki Shigeru Road. https://www.the-kansai-guide.com/en/directory/item/11635/

[6] Korea Tourism Knowledge Information System. How Did We Travel in Korea, 2024. https://know.tour.go.kr/

[7] Reuters. Will a curfew ease overtourism in Seoul's historic Hanok Village? https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/will-curfew-ease-overtourism-seouls-historic-hanok-village-2024-10-29/

Primary Source: Mad Times. 소도시를 말하게 하는 '어반 커뮤니케이션': 일본 '요나고'의 캐릭터 활용 지역재생. https://www.madtimes.co.kr/news/articleView.html?idxno=26679