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Paper short abstract

This paper discusses how Japanese visual media (guidebooks and prints) produced in the Meiji period as tools for virtual round-the-world-tourism translated the environmental imaginaries of nineteenth-century globetrotters (and their orientalist attitudes), simultaneously invoking and reshaping them.

Paper long abstract

This paper analyses visual media produced in Meiji Japan and related to a novel form of travel - globetrotting - that grew popular in Europe and North America in the 1870s. Taking an interdisciplinary approach combining history, media theory and tourism studies, I discuss how this media translated and adapted ‘Western’ environmental imaginaries connected to this new tourist fad and reshaped them through a Japanese gaze.

After the Meiji Restoration, globetrotters reached Japan in growing numbers, generating curiosity in Japanese observers. Up to 1908 (when the first group of Japanese travellers took part in a touristic world tour organized by the Asahi Shinbun) round-the-world tourism remained essentially a ‘Western’ practice, but already from the late 1870s, a growing sector of the Japanese public came to be enamoured with and invested in the culture of globetrotting. This public curiosity towards the world as seen through the tourist gaze led to the publication of numerous works, including visual (or visually heavy) materials such as the illustrated guidebook "Sekai ryokō bankoku meisho zue" (Aoki Tsunesaburō, 7 vols., 1885-1886), the homonymous woodblock-print collection by Inoue Yasuji (1887), and several immersive maps, particularly in the form of sugoroku board games. These materials drew from the embodied experience of real globetrotters, and turned it into a virtual one, making it easily available to Japanese consumers. Some of them also played with the fantasy of a Japan that was advanced enough to compete with the ‘West’ in the touristic exploration of the world.

Tools for virtual globetrotting, such as panoramas and stereoscopic photography, were commonly produced also in Europe and in the United States, as a way to make a very expensive travel experience ‘affordable’ to the mass public. Both the travel accounts of real globetrotters and these materials contributed to the construction of an environmental imaginary that was rooted in orientalist stances. Focusing both on representations of foreign (including ‘exotic’) nature and landscapes, and on representations of the Japanese landscape, my paper will discuss how the above-listed Japanese visual materials engaged with this imaginary, simultaneously invoking and reshaping it - alongside developing notions of Japanese exceptionalism.