Mass tourism is demeaning, part two [rewrites] / Mass tourism is a fantasy
[1 a] Before the pandemic, the Japanese media spoke confidently about “tourism pollution.” That kind of language was tolerable to newspaper readers, in part because its target was visitors from China. The “Chinese tourist” was an acceptable villain (this is a category that can include everyone that might be mistaken for someone from the People’s Republic of China). Stories were spun out of shopkeepers upbraiding tourists that failed to live up to an unspoken rule. The Chinese wrenched on the cherry trees to get better pictures of the blossoms. ▭ Perhaps a decade or so ago, where I imprecisely date the popularization of that term, there remained a large enough group of people that clung to the fantasy of national renewal. There was hope in restoring the country. Turning part of the weakened economy over to budget tourism, especially from a cultural and historical rival, seemed revolting. ▣
[1 b] When I was young, there persisted the stereotype of the Japanese tourist with oversized camera, snapping happily away, sucking the world down his lens. I wrote once that I recall my father pointing them out to me in Grindelwald and Paris, but I probably picked up the idea from cartoons. ▭ The Japanese economy failed. The tourism industry replaced them with the Chinese, just in time. Japan became a destination. This is part of the reason of why mass tourism is demeaning: people, who once went out, are now locked inside by economic factors (it is too expensive to travel, too expensive even to play a cosmopolitan), as well as the cultural outcomes of four decades of uncertainty, put into the role of tourist attraction. ▭ The reason that daycare groups on outings now hang signs on their wagons is because tourists like to photograph cute kids in matching hats. This reverses the exploitation once visited by the Japanese on people in the Global South, whether in wartime pictorials of imperial subjects, or High Showa slide shows. ▭ The Nikon F-501 is now a Huawei smartphone. It has been turned against them. ▣
[2 a] Mass tourism is what was at the end of deindustrialization and uneven degrowth. It is intended to make up the difference. Nikon cameras are made in Thailand. It is intended to supplement lagging consumption. It is an excuse to keep the lights on. It is a scheme run by people unconcerned about economic or social equity. For them, it must be considered convenient, that their plans come with easy scapegoats. The newspapers made that clear: it was all the fault of “Chinese tourists.” ▭ There are not the same pressures here as in other countries. In a country without a speculative housing market, rents are stable. It is good that we are protected from short-term rental and ride-hailing platforms. ▣
[2 b] The tourist is what is at the end of the processes that gave us deindustrialization. They help to clear away the roots. They provide the ideal consumer, who puts up no resistance to the transformation of urban spaces. In the future, everyone will be split into the categories of guest worker or tourist—both mobile, rootless, but divided spatially, generally, and economically… ▣
[2 c] I think of the woman I saw in a news report from Kyoto, who complained about the constant rumble of rolling suitcases in her neighborhood. Goro goro was the onomatopoeia she used. I have been infected by the same aversion. I don’t want to hear plastic wheels on city sidewalks. I should be reasonable. We are—the woman in Kyoto and I—both, I imagine, frustrated more often by things that are less easy to name, less easy to fight. We both live in noisy, ugly cities that were long ago covered in concrete, stripped of most of their trees and lawns, and taken over by developers and speculators. The goro goro might be annoying, but so is everything else. ▣
[3] God bless anyone that comes to see the cherry trees, that observes the wretched ritual of laying down a tarp in a concrete park to look up at the survivors, that shuffles into a convenience store to buy a can of flavored malt liquor and a microwaveable lunchbox, that can ignore the constant roar of the city… ▣
[4 a] The Chinese tourist has been replaced. The pandemic limited the trade. Their management was simpler, even if their hosts didn’t realize it. They came to go shopping in Ginza, where they collected designer bags and patent medicine to be distributed at home, then, before a meal back at the hotel, were dropped off by tour buses for a few minutes at a shrine, where they could burn incense and note architectural resemblances to Tang and Song designs. They had no desire to interact in a significant way with the city or its population. Generally speaking, they treated Tokyo as it should be treated, which is as an oversized mall. ▭ In my neighborhood stuck in the tourist belt between Ueno and Asakusa, the typical visitor could be represented by a white couple in their mid-thirties. They wear casual clothes—not the muted gray and pastel purple outdoorsman’s look of European tourists in years previous, nor the Oxford shirts and khaki shorts of well-heeled Americans, but T-shirts and shorts and flip-flops. The women stand out, at least to me, inured to the conservative necklines of Tokyo, and I ■■■■ ■■■■■■■ ■■■■■■ ■■■■■ ■■■■■■ ■■■■■■■ ■■ ■■■■■■■■ ■■■■■ ■■■■■■ ■■■■■■ ■■■■ ■■■■■ ■■■■■■■■■■■■■■ leisure wear. I can’t understand their motivations (I will speak about the “Western budget tourist” as a monolithic entity, just as I blamed the Japanese newspapers for talking about the “Chinese tourist” as one). It might be down to cheap hotels and social media algorithms. I’m not sure what they find here. It seems that they are immune to shame and awkwardness. ▣
[4 b] There is some self-loathing here. I can admit that. ▣
[4 c] I have a particular disdain for the tourist because I am likely to be mistaken for one. In fact, according to the Tokyo Regional Immigration Bureau, I am only one insignificant official notch above them. ▭ I don’t want to be misunderstood. I don’t expect, even if I am granted permanent residency, to not be treated as an outside. I would only like to be taken for a committed outsider. God help me, I don’t want to be mistaken for A■■■■■■■■■. ▭ I don’t want to be misunderstood. I am talking about a certain type of tourist. I don’t resent the Chinese tourist, or the “Chinese tourist,” in part because I could never be swept into that category. Even if I do lament the loss of the love hotel slum, I don’t feel any aggravation about the Indonesians that bundle into the meanest converted guesthouses in Uguisudani. I smiled at the young Vietnamese women at Nezu Shrine making TikTok videos with their phones balanced on the stonework. I could not be mistaken for that kind of tourist. (They are themselves likely to be mistaken for the sort of precarious language student-factory worker-delivery driver that the present immigration system has made possible.) ▣
