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.