Paper short abstract:

From 1931, the China Travel Service did not want to be seen to be clearly promoting tours to Japan. However, it did not refrain from publishing tourism writings on Japan during the rest of the Nanjing decade. This paper examines this apparent contradiction while attempting to interpret it.

Paper long abstract:

From 1931, the China Travel Service did not want to be seen to be clearly promoting tours to Japan. So, for example, while it had organized Spring tours to Japan in the late 1920s, it ceased to announce these after the invasion of Manchuria, just as other spring tours continued as usual.

This would have been all the more relevant given that the company claimed nationalist credentials from its foundation, which would lead it for instance to oppose the integration of members of its staff in the Oriental Travel Bureau, an institution agreed jointly by the governments of China and Manchukuo in 1934.

The periodical magazine of the China Travel Service, the "China Traveler", was, for its part, to be just one in a vast array of tourism-related materials where the nationalist issue in relation to Japan repeatedly came out. Yet, even in this context, the fact is that the "China Traveler" did not refrain from publishing touristic writings on Japan during the rest of the Nanjing decade: it actually published a significant number of articles following the invasion of Manchuria, including at a heightened period of tension in 1936 and 1937 before the Marco Polo Bridge Incident. These included accounts by individual tourists from China or by students in Japan, such as a group who travelled from Tokyo to Nikkō in the summer of 1933.

This paper examines this apparent contradiction, while attempting to interpret it. It proposes that publishing touristic articles on Japan would not have been seen as damaging to the reputation of the China Travel Service as actively promoting tourism there. At the same time, this would have been a way of engaging in a line of business it may have been discreetly willing to keep on pursuing.