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.