War as Entertainment and Contents Tourism in Japan

Takayoshi Yamamura, Philip Seaton, Takayoshi Yamamura, Philip Seaton

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781000603644
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Personal Development
• Subtopic: Travel

This book examines the phenomenon of war-related contents tourism throughout Japanese history, from conflicts described in ancient Japanese myth through to contemporary depictions of fantasy and futuristic warfare.

It tackles two crucial questions: first, how does war transition from being traumatic to entertaining in the public imagination and works of popular culture; and second, how does visitation to war-related sites transition from being an act of mourning or commemorative pilgrimage into an act of devotion or fan pilgrimage? Representing the collaboration of ten expert researchers of Japanese popular culture and travel, it develops a theoretical framework for understanding war-related contents tourism and demonstrates the framework in practice via numerous short case studies across a millennium of warfare in Japan including: the tales of heroic deities in the Kojiki (Records of Ancient Matters, AD 712), the Edo poetry of Matsuo Basho, and the Pacific war through lens of popular media such as the animated film Grave of the Fireflies.

This book will be of interest to researchers and students in tourism studies and cultural studies, as well as more general issues of war and peace in Japan, East Asia and beyond.

1 Theorizing war-related contents tourism

Philip Seaton and Takayoshi Yamamura

DOI: 10.4324/9781003239970-1

The fundamental questions posed by this book are first, how does war transition from being traumatic to entertaining in the public imagination and works of popular culture; and second, how does visitation to war-related sites transition from being an act of mourning or commemorative pilgrimage into an act of devotion or fan pilgrimage? The transition between the immediate postwar situation and the time when war is extensively entertainmentized and touristified may be a bumpy, drawn-out process as a society negotiates within itself and with external others regarding the acceptable ways in which the wartime past may be represented, utilized, touristified, and travelled. Ultimately compromise emerges between what the moral/political milieu will allow and what the market for war representations and tourist sites will bear. This chapter presents a theoretical framework hypothesizing how these transformations occur. This then links to contemporary tourism policy in Japan and the ways in which Japan’s municipalities have been encouraged by the central government to use local narratives (including local war narratives) as part of their regional revitalization and tourism promotion strategies.

From war memories to tourism imaginaries

The war experiences of soldiers and civilians are the raw materials of war discourses in a society. These experiences of war reach the ears of others via composed narratives. Oral historian Alistair Thomson (1994: 8) has identified ‘composure’ as:

an aptly ambiguous term to describe the process of memory making. In one sense, we compose or construct memories using the public languages and meanings of our culture. In another sense we compose memories that help us to feel relatively comfortable with our lives and identities, that give us a feeling of composure.

Composure of memories forms part of our (not necessarily successful) attempts to create a ‘past we can live with’ (ibid.: 9). Oral transmission creates shared memories and ultimately collective memories emerge within families, groups, and communities. Some narratives form the basis of mediatized representations of war, initially in news media but later in memoirs, novels, songs, and other works of popular culture. Other narratives are rooted in specific sites of memory, such as a battlefield or other sites of a significant wartime incident. These locations are initially marked simply – perhaps with a flag, bouquet of flowers, or grave marker – or become iconic place names or signifiers (‘Hiroshima’) via repeated media reportage. When sites of memory become sites of commemorative pilgrimage, there are the beginnings of a touristification process. The sites are developed over time and become popularized as sites of heritage tourism. Discourses regarding the meanings of these memories, narratives, mediatized representations, and tourist/heritage sites circulate within society. At close temporal proximity to the war, identification with war narratives rests heavily on political, national, and cultural identities, while emotional engagement is primarily via mourning, commemoration, or political/national belonging (Figure 1.1).

Figure 1.1 Societal discourses based on war experiences at relatively close temporal proximity to war. Prepared by the authors.

These processes at relatively close proximity to a war form the background context in which works of popular culture entertainment and war-related contents tourism ultimately emerge. Let us now fast forward by an unspecified amount of time – the exact amount depends on the circumstances. Now the raw materials are less the first-hand experiences of witnesses but rather the second-hand narratives of contemporary historians. War history – as told in non-fiction representations produced primarily by professional historians following codes of accuracy and objectivity – is utilized by various actors who edit, reference, and interpret history according to their needs. Over time, shared and collective memories of ordinary people have metamorphosed into cultural memories of war shared by members of a community. These communities are not just nations, ethnic groups, or cultures. Another form of cultural community is a fandom, and membership of war-related fandoms signifies a deep and active interest in a narrative world based on historical wars.

With the passage of time, mediatized representations of past wars reduce significantly within news and current affairs outlets and become predominately works of war-related entertainment. Individuals – as both politically minded citizens and fans of historical entertainment – consume these works and travel to war-related sites. By this time, sites have undergone significant touristification, including the construction of museums, creation of war-related attractions, and provision of tourism products such as battlefield guided tours. Tourists exhibit motivations or behaviours that blend features of heritage tourism and contents tourism in a phenomenon we have labelled heritage and/or contents tourism (Seaton et al. 2017: 32–33). Once again, all narratives and activities circulating in a society continually reshape the nature of the war history being told. History is produced by people susceptible to the surrounding influences within the society in which they live, so even supposedly ‘objective’ history assumes some characteristics of cultural memories. Cultural activities may also unearth new evidence about the past, including new testimonies, hitherto unseen documents, and archaeological evidence. History itself, therefore, is constantly edited, interpreted, and rewritten with reference to the contemporary cultural milieu (Figure 1.2).

Figure 1.2 Societal discourses based on war history at a relatively far temporal distance from war. Prepared by the authors.

Imaginaries

From a tourism perspective, the net result of these processes within society is a set of three interconnecting tourism imaginaries (Figure 1.3), defined by Athinodoros Chronis (2012: 1797) as ‘value-laden, emotion-conferring collective narrative constructions that are associated with and enacted in a particular place through tourism’.

Figure 1.3 Imaginaries of war-related tourism. Prepared by the authors.

The first is imaginaries of (subjective) war experiences. Here the focus is on ‘our’ history and ‘our’ cultural memories. Travel is essentially ‘commemorative pilgrimage’ that validates and reinforces our political and personal identities via travel to and embodied practice at sites related to past conflicts. Examples include visits to national monuments for largely ideological reasons, for example, visits to Yasukuni Shrine (Chapter 15).

The second is imaginaries of (objective) war heritage. War history is seen as the experience of ‘others’ (whether from another nation or another era). The history has objectified heritage value, perhaps enhanced by inclusion on (inter)national heritage lists like UNESCO World Heritage. Travel is essentially an ‘educational rite of passage’ to a place it is deemed important to visit for reasons of personal knowledge and growth. Consequently, the accuracy of information and authenticity of the experience gained is of high priority to visitors. Many visitors to such sites are international travellers. In Japan, the key example is Hiroshima, where people can stand at the very place (‘site of memory’) where the first atomic bomb was dropped in war and use the tourism experience to reflect upon global issues of war, peace, and (nuclear) disarmament.

The third is imaginaries of war-related entertainment. Wars are the subject of or backdrop to works of popular culture, whose appeal lies in their qualities as war-related entertainment. Travel to related sites is essentially ‘fan pilgrimage’ or war-related contents tourism. The narratives and characters possible in works of entertainment are limited only by the imaginations of creators and fans. War depictions range from semi-fictionalized to fantastical, while the levels of historical authenticity and accuracy required by fans in both works and tourist sites may fluctuate drastically from case to case. However, a common pattern within works of historical entertainment is that while great attention is paid to the ‘look of the past’ (Rosenstone 2000: 31) such as armour/weapon design or architectural styles, considerable liberties are taken with the flow of historical events.

These three imaginaries, whether singly or in combination, underpin war-related tourism. A visit to a domestic war site might combine the political and educational aspects of an imaginary of (subjective) war experiences and an imaginary of (objective) war heritage. A visit to an overseas site, by contrast, might focus only on the latter. If visitation is heavily motivated by the consumption of works of popular culture (for example, a person visits Auschwitz after watching Schindler’s List) there can be elements of both contents tourism and heritage tourism. The space in the middle of Figure 1.3 is where the tourism imaginaries combine to enable travel experiences that are simultaneously entertaining, educational, and self-affirming. War narratives where the imaginaries overlap constitute the most usable narrative worlds and generate many of the most significant and commercially viable war-related tourism phenomena in a society.

Authenticity

Using the notion of ‘borders of memory’, Edward Boyle (2019: 294) notes ‘[t]he differences between the collective memories of different groups means that … heritage sites become locations at which both the affirmation and contestation of collective memories occurs’. Such borders within sites can also exist among tourism actors. In sites of war-related tourism, misunderstandings and mutual distrust can occur between local communities and tourists, as well as between commemorative pilgrims, heritage tourists, and contents tourists. This is because the three imaginaries (Figure 1.3) constitute fundamentally different historical narratives, induce different forms of tourism, and are based on different values that should be prioritized. Furthermore, there can be multiple imaginaries within a single traveller, which can cause internal conflict and confusion in individuals while they are at war-related sites.

The concept of the ‘interpretive community’ (Fish 2004) elucidates this structure. In literary studies, ‘interpretive communities’ refer to ‘groups of readers who share a set of conventions for understanding literary works in certain ways’. Furthermore, ‘the formal properties of literary works exist only as they are activated by such communities of readers’ and ‘[l]iterature, in other words, is both production and consumption at once’ (Fish 2004: 217). Consequently, an interpretive community is a group that shares norms and codes for understanding and interpreting literary works. Figure 1.3 can be reinterpreted, therefore, as follows. Each of the three tourism imaginaries has a different set of conventions for understanding, encoding, and decoding war-related narratives. The interpretive communities sharing these norms are also different. Furthermore, fidelity to these norms and legitimacy in the process of interpretation are the criteria for authenticity in each community. Thus, there are at least three different standards of authenticity in the field of war-related tourism. As Gravari-Barbas and Graburn note, tourists ‘decode the images of local authenticity based on imaginaries produced since the early days of tourism’ (Gravari-Barbas and Graburn 2012: para.8).

When different tourism practices, such as heritage tourism and contents tourism, are developed in the same place, there are ‘varying degrees of “authenticity”’. Objects, places, or practices authentic for contents tourists may be inauthentic for heritage tourists, and vice versa (Seaton et al. 2017: 31). The situation is even more complicated in transnational contents tourism phenomena. Accordingly, the challenge of tourism management at war-related sites is how the gulfs between different interpretations, norms, and standards of authenticity can be bridged, and how mutually acceptable and shareable narrative worlds can be created.

War/atrocity as entertainment and tourism resource

Given sufficient time, any war can be adapted for use in entertainment and/or tourism, alth...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Contributors
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Periods of Japanese history
• 1 Theorizing war-related contents tourism
• PART I From myths to the middle ages
• PART II The rise and fall of the Tokugawas
• PART III Imperial Japan
• PART IV The Asia-Pacific War
• PART V Postwar Japan
• Conclusions: Patterns of war-related (contents) tourism
• Index