Paper short abstract:

This paper analyzes the power balance of national, regional and local level public and private actors and the factors that influence the sustainability of cruise tourism in Japan. It compares port governance structure, cruise policies and structure as a tourism destination in 9 port cities.

Paper long abstract:

International cruise tourism, especially in the form of mega-cruises, is a relatively new phenomena to Japan. Before COVID 19, cruise tourists accounted for eight percent of international visitors to Japan. Cruise tourism around the world faces criticism from environmental, economic and social aspects but has been promoted in Japan as part of national policies to develop inbound tourism into a major branch of the economy. However, cruise tourism is actually managed by regional and local administrations and based on a highly diverse system of port governance. This paper aims to analyze the power balance of national, regional and local level public and private actors and the factors that influence the sustainability of cruise tourism in port cities in Japan.

The research is based on statistical data and information acquired through fieldwork and interviews conducted in nine port cities, Kobe, Sakaiminato, Hiroshima, Fukuoka, Kitakyushu, Beppu, Kagoshima, Miyazaki and Nichinan. These cities are compared on their port governance structure, cruise policies and structure as a tourism destination.

Results show a highly complicated power balance. On the national level, promotion and deregulation had been effective in drawing international cruise ships and visitors to Japan, while the sudden interruption through the COVID 19 pandemic proves the vulnerability of this sector. On the regional and local scale, an analysis of cruise governance in the nine port cities showed deviations between areas that actively embrace cruise tourism to others that take a more passive stance. Port management, transportation and tourism structures influence how far cruise tourists travel, how important cruises are for the destination and in which aspects the area benefits or suffers from cruise tourism. The analysis showed that port cities in Japan retain a relatively high level of control based on their individual governance structures. On the other hand, these structures possibly limit their power to create more sustainable structures of cruise tourism through a lack of coordination between ports and between different levels and agencies of administration.

Paper short abstract:

This paper argues for a nuanced understanding of the sea-land and human-nonhuman interface on Japan's developed coastlines through a historical and discursive analysis of coastal infrastructure, focusing on the extensive use and evolving form of the concrete coastal armor unit known as the tetrapod.

Paper long abstract:

Tetrapods—four-footed wave-dissipating concrete blocks used worldwide to "armor" coastal structures and beaches—exist prominently on Japan's coast and in public imagination. The product of a particular conjecture of geology, climate, and imperatives of postwar economic development, the massive walls of tetrapods buttressing Japan's coasts have a complicated historical and ontological relationship with the natural environment in which they are embedded and with the humans who interact physically and discursively with them. Theroetically informed by ontology-inflected infrastructure studies and drawing on published sources in global and Japanese coastal engineering, government environmental surveys and planning documents, interviews with industry representatives and civil engineers, and fieldwork at tetrapod installations on Japan's coasts, this paper argues for an approach to Japan's coastal infrastructure that recognizes it as not simply a one-way imposition of the human-made upon the natural environment. Rather, it conceptualizes it as a more complex heterogeneous assemblage of the built and the natural, activated in the space between tetrapods and constantly evolving with a material, social, and cultural life as a distinctly Japanese icon.

Paper short abstract:

This paper considers how the bicycle—as a prosthesis of the human body, a tool for enhancement of fitness in late capitalist society, a more efficient mode of transportation, and a means to overcome disability—illustrates and negotiates with precarious conditions of urban hardware and software.

Paper long abstract:

In our time, a bicycle ride is promoted—most effectively in regions such as Europe and East Asia—as an energy-efficient, healthy, and environmentally conscious mode of transportation. A historical review of this brand of physical movement may help us assess the socially, politically, and ideologically informed process through which it has acquired such a status. This paper considers how bicycle rides are illustrative of, and negotiate with, precarious conditions of cities, with their hardware (architecture) and software (navigation technology and tactics) that are constantly in the process of being made and unmade. My focus is on the bicycle as a prosthesis of the human body; as a tool for restoration and enhancement of the perceived health and fitness that are threatened by and yet promoted in capitalist society; as a more efficient option for transportation in a culture that prioritizes speed and profit; and as a means to overcome disability and manage the instability of urban infrastructure in wartime. The corpus analyzed consists of canonical modern Japanese authors' quasi-autobiographical works, in which I examine (1) the Japanese male body struggling for greater mobility in London and Wimbledon at the end of Victorian England (Natsume Sōseki, "Jitensha nikki," translated into English as "The Bicycle Diary"); (2) the body of an aspiring author in the developing rural city of Maebashi in Taishō Japan (Hagiwara Sakutarō, "Jitensha nikki"); and (3) a disabled female body enabled by cycling in the air-raid-prone Tokyo of 1945 (Ishikawa Jun, "Meigetsu shu," translated into English as "Moon Gems"). My study reveals how individuality is contested in cities that are precarious for a range of reasons, from air pollution and the traffic of strangers with increasingly less compassion toward each other to law enforcement's surveillance of any unexpected use of public space and residents' communal vigilance toward incidental spectacles in the terrain vague.