Understanding Tourism Mobilities in Japan

Hideki Endo, Hideki Endo

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780429759901
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Industria dell'ospitalità e del turismo
• Index: Business

The total number of foreign tourists received in countries throughout the world was 530 million in 1995. That number broke through the 1 billion mark for the first time in 2012, at 1, 035, 000, 000. In 2015, it reached 1, 180, 000, 000. According to Anthony Elliott and John Urry, modern society has been characterized as being "mobile", and within that we are also living "mobile lives".

In modern society, flows of people, things, capital, information, ideas and technologies are constantly occurring, and as they are merging like a violently rushing stream, what could be termed a landscape of mobilities has appeared. Social realities are in flux and are transforming to become different than they were before. This volume will expand the inquiry of tourism mobilities comprehensively and clearly from the fields of humanities and social sciences. In particular, tourism mobilities has been actively investigated up to now in the UK, US, Europe and Australia, but even though the Japanese body of literature contains a great many excellent studies of Japanese examples, there are almost no English-language articles presenting their results.

Publishing examples of Japanese tourism mobilities will not only foster new and exciting lines of inquiry for existing and future research on tourism mobilities, but will also have implications for humanities and social sciences throughout the world.

Chapter 1

Seeking sensuous mobilities

Tourist quests for familiarity and alterity

Tim Edensor

Introduction

As the tourist industry continues to expand, its sheer diversity can be bewildering, as can the range of mobile practices being undertaken by tourists. The variety of travel modes, adopted to get to and from destinations, to explore surroundings or as a practice in and for itself, involve an abundance of mobile experiences. Tourists become mobile on aeroplane flights, road trips and organised coach tours; they organise their journeys around train and bus timetables, cruise on canal boats or giant ships, and cycle, walk and run to and around tourist attractions. Some tourists undertake journeys at their own speed, perhaps contingently composing the route as they move. Some engage in competitive races or challenging physical journeys, while others make long pilgrimages to esteemed destinations. Many stitch key destinations together in itineraries organised according to different temporal arrangements and geographical scales. Some follow established tour schedules while others prefer the ‘road less travelled’. There are also considerable variations in who can travel widely and frequently as a tourist and who may only make sporadic journeys for pleasure, geographical inequalities in access to mobility that are reflected in the history of travel writing, where accounts by western travellers hugely predominate. Indeed, ethnocentrism continues to pervade most academic enquiry into tourism and this includes accounts of tourist mobility (though see Cohen and Cohen, 2015, for a critique, and Edensor and Kothari, 2018, for a counter-example). Such ethnocentric distortions will surely change in the context of expanding tourism from Asia, Africa and South America, where travel to elsewhere is increasingly conceived as a right by a burgeoning middle class, as noted in T. C. Chang’s (2015) important paper.

Despite this plethora of mobile tourist experiences, as Tim Cresswell (2006) contends, until recently, studies of travel and mobility have often ignored the qualitative experience of journeys. Accordingly, in this chapter, I explore the multi-sensory qualities of mobile tourist experiences to disavow assumptions that they merely comprise uneventful travel from A to B – the locations between journeys at which tourism really takes place. Instead, I contend that the extremely varied sensorial qualities of such journeys are integral to tourist experience. The bulk of the chapter will focus on the divergence between tourist mobilities that satisfy desires for comfort, convenience and predictability, and those that offer a vigorous enlivening of corporeal and affective experience. I will primarily draw on examples from Asia, and particularly Japan, in elucidating the discussion. Beforehand, though, I discuss how we might further contextualise forms of tourist mobility.

First, I want to emphasise the enormous inequalities in mobility and the persistence of endemic forms of immobility which shape who is able to move and to where. For it is estimated that the percentage of the world’s population participating in international flight is a mere 2–3%, even though these people constitute half of all international travel; ‘hypermobile’ frequent travellers (Hall, 2015). This is not solely a matter of wealth, for there are vastly unequal restrictions on citizens from different nations who are permitted to travel. This current situation bears comparison to the accessibility to travel granted by possession of a British passport during colonial times and the contrasting possibility for mobility for those whom were colonised.

Second, the rise of the internet has prompted a huge increase in virtual mobilities. As Hannam et al. (2014) discuss, as information and communication technologies become more advanced and integrated into corporeal travel practices, there is increasing spillover between the everyday and the holiday. While travelling, tourists are able to access multiple networks and become immersed in hybrid spaces of in-betweenness, fluidly switching between corporeal co-presence with fellow travellers and virtual co-presence with others simultaneously connected to distant social networks. Through blogging, mailing and other social media, mobile connections are newly forged and continuously sustained, while such technologies also provide instant information about the spaces through which tourists move.

Third, as mentioned above, an enduring problem in much academic tourist literature is the figuring of the tourist as a single, lone traveller, usually male and white. Yet the absurdity of this preoccupation is revealed when we realise that most tourism is undertaken with other people, with family and friends. Though recent accounts have foregrounded the social and familial relations in tourism more generally (Schanzel et al., 2012; Baerenholdt et al., 2017), this also inflects experiences of mobility. A brief consideration draws attention to the ways in which tourists endeavour to ensure that long journeys are tailored to the needs and demands of children. We might also acknowledge how forms of mobile intimacy can emerge with friends and family, and more transiently, with strangers. For instance, travel on a compartment of an Indian train involves encounters with mobile traders and beggars, and a temporary intimacy often devolves amongst fellow travellers who share food and stories. Such harmony may not always eventuate. On a 36-hour bus journey through Himachal Pradesh, an American tourist who wearied of the consecutively screened Bollywood films throughout the journey was asked to leave the bus following his loud and persistent protestations.

Fourth, I consider the centrality of particular mobile experiences to particular tourist adventures. For instance, for those travelling on the Trans-Siberian Express, the journey itself seems fundamental, whereas a flight to an airport adjacent to a tourist resort may be less central to a two-week vacation. Nevertheless, I submit that all journeys are integral to tourist experience, for they are part of the experiences of all forms of tourism. The familiar reliability of ‘dwelling-in-motion’ (Sheller and Urry, 2006: 214) may induce a comfortable sense of being in and knowing a place, and such journeys might afford opportunities for reverie, listening to music, conversation with others or computer game-playing, modes of moving away from mundane everyday experience, or indeed, part of quotidian life. Yet even the most apparently functional journey is a time of transition, replete with anticipation and moving from one state to the next, a sense of release, of surrendering to the motion of the vehicle, boat or plane. Moreover, mobile experience is not simply unchanging but contains different phases. For instance, a walk through a scenic landscape might commence with a lively, sprightly gait and an openness to surroundings, during unremarkable stretches might solicit withdrawal into interior circumspection, and towards the end might become overwhelmingly focused on physical pain and exhaustion (Edensor, 2010).

Sensing while mobile

In considering the multiple forms of tourist mobility, I foreground how the body feels during travel, for all spaces in which we are accommodated and move through have the potential to generate sensory experiences. The affordances of ‘tourist space’, like other spaces, constitute ‘the materialities and sensibilities with which we act and sense’ (Rose and Wylie, 2006: 478). While mobile, we apprehend the affordances of the vehicles, ships and aeroplanes we move in, and mobile experience is also conditioned by the ways in which the forms of transport on which we travel respond to the landscapes we pass through as well as the ways these landscapes shape our experience of this space. Rail, automobile and air travel (Budd, 2011) have all radically transformed our apprehension of the world. The interior textures, windows, roominess, degree of insulation, smells and temperatures of travel technologies afford particular sensations, as do the materialities, surfaces, contours and gradients of the routes along which we travel. They encourage us to follow particular courses of action, and solicit a multi-sensory, more-than-visual apprehension of place, space and landscape. Indeed, many of these experiences of distinctive forms of tourist mobility and place become quite familiar to us, contributing to what David Crouch (2000) calls ‘lay geographical knowledge’, a knowing that is discursive, practical and sensual. Claudio Minca and Tim Oakes (2006: 20) underline how mobile experience is integral to the formation of such understandings: ‘[p]laces are at once the sedimented layers of historical experience, cultural habit, and personal and collective memory and continually remade by lived bodily movement’. These diverse forms of movement open up and close down possibilities for engaging with place, vehicle and other people as we move through space.

Given its importance to tourist theory over the past three decades, I briefly consider the salience of John Urry’s (Urry and Larsen, 2011) seminal notion of the tourist gaze as the central sense through which tourist place and space is experienced. Elsewhere, I have critiqued an insistence on this visual centrality, arguing that in many kinds of tourist endeavour, non-visual sensations come to the fore as touching, smelling and listening are mobilised. Caroline Scarles (2009: 466) maintains that since the visual tourist experience of place ‘exists as a series of embodied practices as tourists encounter the world multisensually and multidimensionally’, the gaze continuously ‘emerges via the materiality and corporeality of the body’. More specifically, Katrin Lund (2005: 40) asserts that whilst climbing, ‘the sense of vision and the mountaineer’s gaze cannot be separated from examining the body that moves and touches the ground’. These contentions reveal that tourism cannot be captured by one dominant sensation such as the gaze, but changes continuously according to context and contingency, for ‘there is no beginning and no end, but a series of rhythms, flows and fluxes, in-between points and stages that tourists move in and around’ (Scarles, 2009: 466). This is especially pertinent with regard to the unfolding experience of mobility, during which a ‘static pictorialism’ (Merriman et al., 2008: 192) is not possible. Yet in focusing on the ways in which a mobile gaze is enacted, it is evident that different kinds of tourists focus their attention according to specific imperatives: a birdwatcher will scan the landscape for signs of avian movement and then direct sole focus to that spot, while a photographer will review broad swathes of space (Büscher, 2006).

In mobile tourist pursuits such as swimming, motorcycling and walking, we can similarly apprehend ‘the multiplicity and the interaction between different internally felt and outwardly orientated senses’ (Paterson, 2009: 768) beyond the visual, which include smell, sound and tactility as well as kinaesthesia (the sense of movement), proprioception (felt muscular position and stance) and the vestibular system (sense of balance). As Merriman points out, ‘pedestrians, cyclists and motorcyclists … have very different embodied engagements with and experiences of inhabiting the spaces of streets and roads’ (2009: 590). To emphasise, then, the multiple forms of mobility experienced by tourists stimulate an equally multiple range of sensations.

I now turn to the main theme of this chapter: the contrasting forms of sensory mobile tourist experiences. On one hand, these are characterised by predictable, ordered and comfortable passage through space. On the other, they seek mobilities that produce enlivening, unpredictable and powerful sensations. These resonate with larger contrasting modern impulses and exist in tension with each other. In their contemporary incarnation, they originate in the growth of cities in the west at the turn of the 20th century, articulated by Georg Simmel’s (1995: 31) account of how these urban settings solicited powerful new sensory experiences, an ‘intensification of nervous stimulation’ that assailed the city dweller in an ‘accelerated city life’. The only response of the urban inhabitant, Simmel argues, was to adopt a blasé attitude to form a shield against overwhelming sensory onslaught. However, this very dynamism and the perceived sensory disorder that accompanied it also subsequently encouraged intensive efforts to regulate the urban environment in order to enable more orderly sensory experiences. Consequently, a host of technological developments and political measures were adopted to regulate these supposedly unruly environments, from extensive policing, waste management and traffic control to the rational and respectable recreation made available in parks and libraries. While certainly producing more orderly cities, such regulatory strategies have eventuated in the sterile, homogeneous and sensorially deprived ‘blandscapes’ that proliferate in many settings.

These contradictory modern desires for sensory order and sensory alterity are also discussed in tourist theories that seek to explain the motivations for much tourism. For instance, Chris Rojek (1995: 80) identifies what he refers to as an ‘Apollonian’ modernity that affirms ‘structure, order and self-discipline’, and the contrasting qualities of Dionysian modernity, productive of ‘sensuality, abandon and intoxication’. Whilst the dominant modern urge might be to seek spatial and sensory order, the desire to transcend regulated environments and seek to become immersed in powerful and unfamiliar sensations has constantly bubbled below the disciplined surface of everyday life and stimulated a growing range of ‘escape attempts’ (Cohen and Taylor, 1992). Contemporary expressions might be the radical sensory alterity offered by a range of hallucinogenic and stimulant drugs, the intense sounds and moments generated at large rock festivals, and the many kinds of themed experiences offered in the ‘experience economy’ (Lorentzen, 2009). As I will discuss, peak experiences and immersive environments of many kinds are well provided for by the tourist economy, and many of them involve technologies and spaces of mobility that offer unfamiliar and intense sensory experiences.

Comfortable and predictable sensations

In contemplating how tourism provides predictable and orderly forms of mobility that are eagerly sought as an escape, I emphasise that such experiences should not be lazily critiqued as mindless escapism. For in affording opportunities for bodies to be released from the often onerous duties and toils of everyday life, technologies that facilitate seamless, comfortable movement are part of a vast complex in which infrastructures and networks have been developed to minimise effort, anxiety and strain for tourists. Everything is taken care of by others for a week or two.

Judith Adler (1989) demonstrates how travel programmes, brochures, accounts and guidebooks are ‘a means of preparation, aid, documentation and vicarious participation’ for the western culture of sightseeing. Such technologies prepare tourists to carry out a range of practices that are governed for many by a shared ‘common sense’. Similar observations could be made about the promises made by travel companies about smooth transit via air and coach on the way to the air-conditioned tourist enclave, such as those that proliferate on the island of Okinawa, and that follow a typically standardised format of plush furnishing, pools, sea-based activities and high-end cuisine.

Problematically, tourist literature has overwhelmingly focused upon spatially extensive movements rather than the more modest, everyday mobilities that take place in comfortable, familiar surroundings, as tourists walk from beach to pool, from bar to shop, ambling slowly between amenities. Paying attention to these ordinary routine pleasures further highlights a broader deficiency in the recent upsurge in writing about mobilities. Here, scholars have similarly ignored the most common forms of mobile experience, namely the walk to the shop to buy daily provisions, the short journey to work or school (though see Bissell, 2018), and even the much shorter movements in and around home and garden, where we organise domestic space to facilitate smooth transit between one room and another. Such mobilities are akin to many of the quotidian practices of tourists. For in tourist enclaves, resorts, heritage districts and cultural quarters are similarly organised to facilitate ease of movement, with legible routes clearly marked to enable swift passage, personnel available to guide visitors along preferred routes and the familiar organisation of recognisable patterns making movement through space easily manoeuvrable. Smooth floor tiles and carpeting coerce the body into silent, regular movement and pathways are polished and cleansed to ensure that the body is undisturbed in its unhindered progress towards destinations. In moving through these spaces of continuity and stability, the tourist body is cajoled into enacting regular, well-rehearsed movements and cossetted into sensing familiar experiences of ease and comfort (Edensor, 2007a). Such designs affirm Jennifer Craik’s contention that the production of large-scale, customised, themed touris...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of illustrations
• Notes on contributors
• Series editor foreword
• Introduction: the significance of research on tourism mobilities and related issues
• 1 Seeking sensuous mobilities: tourist quests for familiarity and alterity
• 2 Tourism, ‘nowstalgia’ and the (non)experience of place
• 3 New tourism and social transformation in postmodernity: sociological examination of Japanese new tourism
• 4 Late tourism and ‘boomerang’ mobility in Japan
• 5 Mobility turn in rural districts in Japan: from “Kankō (tourism)” to “Kankei (relationships)”
• 6 The new mobile assemblages created by Pokémon GO
• 7 The roots and routes of Matryoshka: souvenirs and tourist mobility in Russia, Japan, and the world
• 8 “Transference of traditions” in tourism: local identities as images reflected in infinity mirrors
• 9 Marathon mobilities: a western tourist perspective on Japanese marathons
• 10 Performative nationalism in Japan’s inbound tourism television programmes: YOU, Sekai! (The world), and the tourism nation
• 11 Shibuya Crossing as a non-tourist site: performative participation and re-staging
• 12 Mobilising pilgrim bodily space: the contest between authentic and folk pilgrimage in the interwar period
• 13 Digital media as “social spaces” of tourism: the Japanese cases of travelling material things
• Index