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- Convenors:
-
Daniel Milne
(Kyoto University)
Yu Tokunaga (Kyoto University)
Andrew Elliott (Doshisha Women's College)
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- Discussant:
-
Dick Stegewerns
(University of Oslo)
- Section:
- History
- Sessions:
- Wednesday 25 August, -
Time zone: Europe/Brussels
Short Abstract:
This panel examines the connections between hospitality (Derrida, 2000) and empire to examine the policies, practices, and politics of hospitality in terms of subjects—specifically tourists and migrants—moving between the Japanese and other empires in the first half of the twentieth century.
Long Abstract:
Hospitality, as Jacques Derrida (2000) has pointed out, is a concept and a practice closely tied to questions of sovereignty and belonging: offering a welcome is an act that asserts ownership and defines who is "host" and who is "guest." Mobilized in the service of empire, hospitality has thus been a powerful legal and rhetorical tool in forcing treaty talks, laying claim to new territory, or securing rights of travel and residence. This panel takes up this connection between hospitality and empire to examine the policies, practices, and politics of hospitality in terms of subjects moving between the Japanese and other empires in the first half of the twentieth century. The panel explores convergences in the mobilities and reception of migrants and tourists (O'Reilly, 2003; Sheller and Urry, 2006), and considers the debates and struggles over different forms of hospitality that took place in Japanese national government, overseas communities, and tourism hospitality providers.
The first paper examines debates taking place in 1930s Japan about the role of hospitality and international tourism in Japan and colonies. Official efforts to attract large numbers of Western tourists were seen by many as an effective instrument of cultural diplomacy that could offset negative coverage of imperial expansion overseas, while other individuals and agencies sought to limit it as a potentially disruptive influence. The second paper explores discussions about the search for a welcoming place to live that took place in Japanese emigrant communities in Los Angeles following the 1924 Immigration Act, which prohibited Japanese immigration to the United States. It focuses on one local association, the Bokukoku Kenkyū Kai, who in their choice of Mexico articulated a curious mixture of imperial entitlement as Japanese subjects and respect for Mexican locals. The final paper analyzes tourism hospitality in individual encounters between tourists and service industry workers — these workers were on the frontline of official attempts to use tourism as propaganda, but interactions on the ground were typically more complex, and in cases more restricted, than promotional campaigns imagined.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Wednesday 25 August, 2021, -Paper short abstract:
Through analyzing tourist-directed media portrayals of Japan and its empire, as well as government archive materials, the paper will explore notions of hospitality by examining how Japanese state and other actors worked to attract, or alternatively to deter, international tourists in the 1930s.
Paper long abstract:
As recent debates about "overtourism" suggest, the reception of tourists is intertwined with tensions between "hospitality" and "inhospitality." This is seen in contemporary Japan, where terms such as "tourism pollution" (観光公害) have become established in mainstream discourse while the national government continues efforts to maintain international tourist growth at record high levels (Milne, 2017; Sataki, 2019). Similar dissonance was evident in Japan in the 1930s, in which discord emerged between those who sought to encourage inbound tourism in order to attract foreign currency and improve the image of the Japanese empire abroad (Elliott, 2019), and others who suspected tourism for facilitating espionage and international protest against Japan's military and imperial expansion. This tension, for example, is evident in conflict between those who lobbied successfully for the 1940 Olympics to be held in Tokyo, and those who brought about its forfeiture in 1938 (Collins, 2007).
Through analyzing media portrayals of Japan and its empire directed at tourists, as well as news and government archive materials, the presenter will explore why and how Japanese state and other actors worked to attract, or alternatively to deter, international tourists in the 1930s. Through this, it will explore how government and related organizations welcome visitors as part of so-called "soft power" cultural diplomacy, or conversely, vilify and block inbound tourists as undesirable witnesses, a hostile and threatening presence, or a "polluting" influence on local society.
Paper short abstract:
This paper considers touristic host-guest relations in relation to international tourism service provision at a micro level in the Japanese empire from the 1910s to the early 1940s, reading firsthand material produced by industry workers in comparison with visitors' reports.
Paper long abstract:
Much attention has been given to the scripts by which tourists were guided around Japan and its empire from the 1890s to the 1940s (McDonald 2011; Pai 2011; Ruoff 2010; Sand 2014). Whether taking colonial travelers to Japan, imperial travelers to the continent, or domestic travelers to imperial heritage sites across the Japanese mainland, such touristic experiences were variously intended to build affective ties to new territories, the imperial metropolis, and the imperial nation-state. Yet in the case of international tourism — inbound travel by visitors, primarily European or American, from outside the empire — these scripts were arguably less significant. Rather, the Board of Tourist Industry and other agencies who promoted Japan and developed the international tourism infrastructure worked to construct a holistic tourist world that, through its modernity, familiarity, and avowedly-high standards, positioned guests in intimate relation with their hosts. It was in this way, more than control over the minutiae of which sites to visit and how to understand them, that international tourism was a successful propaganda tool. This paper considers touristic host-guest relations in relation to international tourism service provision, especially hotels and ryokan, in Japan and colonies from the 1910s to the early 1940s. It explores relations not primarily at the state level where policy was conceived, but in terms of local encounters of visitors and staff, reading firsthand material produced by industry workers such as ryokan maidservants, as well as those in charge of hotels and ryokan, in comparison with visitors' reports. Building on and engaging with recent studies of service industry workers in European empires (Martinez et al., 2019), this paper explores how tourism hospitality functioned on the ground, its efficacy as propaganda, and the limitations and challenges to its use in support of national policy.
Paper short abstract:
This paper examines Bokukoku Kenkyū Kai, an ethnic Japanese organization in Los Angeles, to consider how Japanese immigrants in the U.S. envisioned Mexico as a hospitable destination for Japanese imperial subjects after the 1924 introduction of an act that banned Japanese immigration to the U.S.A.
Paper long abstract:
In 1924, the U.S. government enacted an immigration law that prohibited Japanese immigration. Past research has explored the historical significance of this policy (Higham, [1955]1981; Daniels, 1968; Minohara, 2002), but the fact that Japanese immigrants in Los Angeles called for remigration to Mexico has been little studied. This paper highlights the activities of the Bokukoku Kenkyū Kai (Mexico Study Society), an ethnic Japanese organization established to study the possibility of migration to Mexico. By drawing on Japanese, Spanish, and English sources, this paper explores how Japanese immigrants in the United States envisioned Mexico as a hospitable destination for Japanese imperial subjects in the western hemisphere.
The Bokukoku Kenkyū Kai gained support from the Japanese consulate in Los Angeles and published a guidebook about migrating to Mexico. Their activities, however, did not result in the large-scale migration of Japanese from the U.S. to Mexico. Nevertheless, they demonstrated their determination to survive in the western hemisphere rather than return to Japan, hoping that Mexico would be, in their words, "the ideal site for the place of our future burial." More importantly, they showed a nuanced view of Latin America that combined an imperialistic perspective with a relatively humble attitude toward its people. A close analysis of the Bokukoku Kenkyū Kai helps us see Japanese immigrants as realistic decision makers who carefully examined the feasibility of resettlement and the hospitality of Mexico toward Japanese imperial subjects, and not as settler colonialists with foolhardy illusions of easy settlement in Mexico and domination over the local people.