Sentence-ending という

Question

In a short story I found this sentence:

父はまだギターをえらんでいるだろうか。

気のいい父、クラシックギターがこの世でいちばん好きな父。

父と母は新婚旅行でやはりここに来たという。その時も父はギターを買った。母は、ひとつひとつの試し弾きに耳を傾け、根気よく、父の買い物につきあった、と父は言った。そして、お母さんは、あるひとつのギターを指差して、あなたの音はこれ、と言ったんだ、それがうちにあることのギターだよ。

It's the main character speaking to herself/reminiscing about what she knows about her parents and their time in the place where she is now during their honeymoon.

I was wondering about the sentence-ending という: I found this answer about sentence-ending というか, but I'm not sure if it's the same thing, since in my case there isn't the か, and the "I mean" meaning doesn't really seem to apply here.

This is the first sentence of the paragraph; the previous one was one sentence in which she says her father loves guitars more than anything, and the next sentence is about how also during his honeymoon he bought a guitar (since in the present he is in a guitar shop to buy another).

Answer 1

This という is a hearsay marker. "They say ～", "People say ～", "He/She said ～", "I've heard ～", "According to their claim, ～", etc.

• what is the difference between である ＆ という

Judging from this context, the source of the information (i.e., my parents visited here) is probably the parents themselves, but it can be someone entirely different. When in doubt, you can avoid specifying the source by translating it like "I've heard that my parents visited here on their honeymoon".