Paper short abstract:

The paper analyses Japanese Meiji-period English-language travel guidebooks to Japan, published in the wake of John Murray's pocket guide. Focusing in particular on the "Japan Guide" by the Kihinkai, it discusses their diplomatic aims, in the context of the first wave of inbound tourism in Japan.

Paper long abstract:

The paper discusses English-language travel guidebooks to the Japanese archipelago, published in Japan during the Meiji period (1868-1912).

English-language guidebooks presented "Japan" to foreigners, tracing itineraries and offering practical and "curious" information to travelers. They were redacted in the wake of the editorial success of the pocket guide "Handbook for Travelers in Central and Northern Japan" (published in London and distributed in Europe, since 1881, by John Murray), at first by Europeans based in Japan, and later also by Japanese authors and publishers. Among such publishers, the most notorious was the Kihinkai 貴賓会 (The Welcome Society), founded in 1893 to promote international relationships (including inbound tourism, when a total of about ten thousand travelers visited Japan each year) - or, to quote the marketing blurb on one of the maps it distributed, "to break down the barriers between East and West". The Kihinkai produced six different editions of a "Japan Guide" that clearly followed the model of Murray's Handbook, but also presented some crucial differences.

In my paper, I analyze both John Murray's guide and its Japanese "adaptations" in relation to the cultural climate that fostered the first wave of inbound (mass) tourism in Japan, and discuss the differences between the two in light

1) Of the different cultural canons that informed the work of European and Japanese publishers.

2) Of a possible more deliberate "diplomatic" aim from the part of Japanese publishers (and particularly the Kihinkai): I argue in fact that the guidebooks were carefully constructed to showcase Japan to the world into a specific light - in a way that wasn't totally new to the genre, as a longer tradition of "politically charged" guidebooks dated back to Tokugawa-period (1603-1868) meisho zue.

Travel guidebooks have been rarely studied in relation to Japanese international (cultural and diplomatic) relationships. However, being alleged "exhaustive" narrations of the nation, which "construct both aestheticized and commercialized narratives of nation, [… and] both mirror and reproduce a whole range of taken-for-granted notions […about] history and culture" (Hogan 2008, 169), they can, as I will try to show, shed new light on the topic.

Paper short abstract:

This presentation examines the transnational characteristics of the tea ceremony and how it was significant, for both men and women, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century modernisation of Japanese society.

Paper long abstract:

The Japanese tea ceremony (chanoyu) is considered a crucial element of Japan's national cultural tradition, both in Japan and abroad. It is invariably included in Japanese displays at international exhibits, such as the 2005 Aichi Universal Exposition and the 2015 Milan Universal Exposition. Chanoyu is also one of the features that appeal to foreigners in the Japanese government's Cool Japan Project, which describes the tea ceremony as illustrative of Japanese lifestyle and food culture. Prominent private organisations operate schools to teach it - especially to women - in contemporary Japan.

Many modern discourses describe chanoyu as a female accomplishment. Earlier scholarship on the history of the Japanese tea ceremony in the modern period states that, while chanoyu was feminised in the 1920s, this feminisation originated in the Meiji period when chanoyu was incorporated as a part of the modern education for women. This presentation, however, challenges that narrative. Through a close reading of newspaper articles, magazines and visual materials, it examines how chanoyu became a respectable cultural practice for both males and females in the late Meiji period and discusses its transnational characteristics in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century modernisation of Japanese society.

Paper short abstract:

This article aims to examine how elementary school trips expanded to Ise jingu and Kshihara jingu from the interbellum period and into wartime, mainly focusing on the changes caused by the regional communities' events and the economic activities of a railway company.

Paper long abstract:

This article aims to examine how elementary school trips expanded to Ise jingu and Kshihara jingu - as known as the holy shrines of the Japanese Emperor- from the interbellum period and into wartime, mainly focusing on the changes caused by the regional communities' events and the economic activities of a railway company.

It is suggested that school trips contributed to the popularization of tourism in Japan. It has also pointed out that the militaristic education on elementary school made travel to Ise jingu and Kshihara jingu a widespread. However, a history of the quantitative spread of school trips before World War 2 has not been revealed.

First factor of the implementation and spread of elementary school trips is traveling expenses payment from a community. During the period from the beginning of the Showa era to the wartime, school trips conducted not only as an elementary school event but also as a community's event, which means politicians and regional influences also participated in the travel.

Second factor is a decisive role of Osaka Electric Railway (OER), a private railway company which established in the end of the Meiji era. OER not only developed railway network toward Ise and Nagoya, but also, made attempts to attract urban dwellers, by using shrines, amusement facilities, hot springs and so on. After economic crisis in the Showa era (from 1930 to 1931), OER started sales activities to attract school trips from Tokyo. There were few schools to travel to Kashihara jingu until 1935. In response, elementary schools began to travel both Ise jingu and Kashihara jingu.

We indicated that in order to analyze the implementation and expansions of school trips, it is important to focus on the following 2 aspects - (1) changes caused by the regional communities. Primary education includes students of poor parents so that it is difficult to conduct a trip for each school. (2) the economic activities of a railway company. Kashihara jingu was not a travel destination for elementary schools of Tokyo before OER seeking to be economically successful.

Paper short abstract:

This paper spotlights an independent group of Japanese intellectuals who drafted the basic concept for Expo 1970 Osaka ("Progress and Harmony for Mankind"), which has not been discussed academically, with particular attention to the continuity and discontinuity from Expo 1958 Brussels.

Paper long abstract:

As a backdrop of the argument, this paper will first examine the historical background of how Expos became theme-oriented events rather than those for exhibiting commodities; the positive side of this process was the creation of a trend to promote and emphasise “re-humanisation” in Expo 1958 Brussels. However, on the negative side, the Expo under this trend, sparked fury for "exhibiting" people from the Belgian Congo in what is now called “human zoo”. The paper will then review the position of Expo 1970 Osaka, when many African countries emerged from colonial rule.

Responding to the above trend, the theme for Expo 1970 Osaka was defined as "Progress and Harmony for Mankind", and this was referred to in every aspect of preparations for Expo from the designing of the venues to the planning of events. In the background of the discussions that formed the basic concept, which was used as the base for the theme by the Thematic Committee, there was an independent group of Japanese intellectuals who called themselves "Thinkers Group for the Expo", comprised of those who later became Japan’s iconic thinkers including Umesao Tadao and Kato Hidetoshi. The paper’s central objective is to investigate their position in the preparations for this Expo, thus to illuminate the roles that intellectuals in post-war Japan played in the above-mentioned world trend.

Holding the line against what the political and business establishments and society expected for Expo, they discussed ways to make the event meaningful not only in an economic sense, but also as a civilisational festival, and researched and debated specific ways to achieve this. Although the group began as a private gathering of young intellectuals for ‘drinks’ informally combined with discussions for Expo planning, when Japan was officially elected to host Expo 1970 Osaka, this independent group attracted both positive and negative attention from parties involved in Expo, and was eventually drawn into the whirlpool of Expo. Thus, the "Thinkers Group" made a significant contribution to the draft of the basic concept, which can essentially be dubbed the "constitution" of Expo 1970 Osaka.