tourism – The Duke Reader

Making the World Safe for Tourism in Asia-Pacific

23 Jun 201911 Apr 2023 Etienne RPLeave a comment

**A review of Securing Paradise: Tourism and Militarism in Hawai’i and the Philippines, Vernadette Vicuña Gonzalez, Duke University Press, 2013.**

Securing Paradise When she was a little girl growing up in the Philippines, Vernadette Vicuña Gonzalez considered American tourists and soldiers that she encountered or heard about as a benevolent presence. They were there to protect the land and to share their riches with a people in need of security and prosperity. This positive image was reinforced by the missionary schools founded by Americans, the remittances sent from abroad by relatives, the proceeds from commerce and military bases, and the endless stream of American movies and serials flowing from television. Later on, when her family emigrated to the United States, she would accompany her father to the Douglas MacArthur Memorial in Norfolk, Virginia, and share the gratitude held by many Filipinos for the general who liberated their country from Japanese occupation. For her, America was still the land of the free, a beacon of hope and opportunity for those seeking a better life beyond their own shores. But then she went to study at UC Berkeley and her worldview changed. She learned about the history of American imperialism, the gruesome stories of the Philippines-American war, the propaganda machine of Cold War politics, the complicity with authoritarian regimes, the destruction of the planet by the forces of neoliberalism, and the cynicism of exploitative raw power. Her homeland, the Philippines, became associated with the image of a puppet regime led by a dictator clinging to power with the backing of the US military. She applied the same critical lenses to the state of Hawaii and its populations after the was nominated as Associate Professor of American Studies at the University of Hawaii at Mānoa. For her, the Hawaiian archipelago was forced into the American fold at the end of the nineteenth century by a coalition of military imperialists, colonial planters, and migrant laborers who relegated the natives to subordinary status and even to cultural extinction. Being herself a nonnative in an adopted homeland, Vernadette Gonzalez purports to speak on behalf of the Native Hawaiians who should, however implausible it may sound, reclaim their sovereignty.

In the introduction, the author asks: “What alchemy transforms the terror of imperial violence and American postwar occupation to deeply felt understandings of American rescue, liberation, and benevolence?” One could raise the opposite question: how did a young girl raised in the spirit of America’s gentle embrace turn against a familiar presence and came to see it as a force of evil? How to explain this complete reversal, and what turned her from a believer of American kind-heartedness into a staunch critic of US malignity? Was it her studies in social sciences at UC Berkeley? And why did she choose to study at this university in the first place? Although she doesn’t give any biographical clues, I see three general reasons for this conversion: history, ideology, affect. These factors work both ways: the same historical, ideological and affective formations that explain Filipinos’ conversion to a myth of American compassionate guardianship also explain the anger, resentment, and challenge to the United States’ past and present imperial role. In a reversion of values, the soldier and the tourist can be seen alternatively as the Good American or the Ugly Yankee. Like a Janus-faced figure, the two characters are one and the same. He can be invited by his hosts to come home as a guest or, in the same movement, told to go home and depart. Thinking about tourism and militarism in Hawaii and the Philippines allows Vernadette Gonzalez to vent her anger against US imperialism past and present, and also to disavow the young girl who held hands with her father in American Pacific War memorials. In Securing Paradise, she applies critical lenses to analyze the history, ideology and affects sustaining the “military-tourism security complex” in the Philippines and in Hawaii.

Tourists and soldiers

In a way, the tourism industry is the opposite of militarization. Tourism is a peaceful activity, and tourists don’t go to war zones or to places exposed to the risk of insecurity. Unlike the soldier, the tourist doesn’t engage in violent or threatening behavior. He brings with him a camera, not a gun, and leaves behind dollars and trinkets, not bullets and explosives. The tourist is more often a ‘she’ than a ‘he’: a softer, warmer version of America’s presence in the tropics that stands in stark contrast to the masculine figure of oppression and threat. For Vernadette Gonzalez, the desires and economies of modern tourism are central to American military dominance in Asia and the Pacific. Tourism and militarism are mutually constitutive: both are part of am American project of domination and imperial outreach, and Hawaii and the Philippines form the first line of this concentric projection of power and sentiments. The roots and routes of the US military in these sites are foundational to tourist itineraries and imaginations. Tourism normalizes the presence of the military, prioritizes its needs, and disseminates a racialized and gendered idea of security. Both militarism and tourism rely on sedimented notions of colonized land and people (especially women) as waiting idly for their arrival, passively there for the taking. In many places, tourism has its roots in the militarized “rest and recreation” industry that thrived in the periphery of war theaters. The security that military bases provide is a fiction that starkly contrasts the reality of sexual exploitation and social insecurity that develops in the vicinity of army camps. The male tourist and the soldier both harbor voyeuristic and violent fantasies and usually turn their gaze against the bodies of women. For the author, many modern tourist sites are tainted by the illicit sexual economies and violence produced in rest and recreation sites of military occupation.

“Militourism” is designed as the activity fusing the two activities of militarism and tourism: making historic battlefields fit for tourism, creating memorials and museums to commemorate past military engagements, displaying military presence as a guarantee of security for foreign holidaymakers, or attracting active military personnel and retired soldiers to beach resorts and scenic sites. It also involves transforming former military bases into vacation sites and other sources of economic revenue, or building dual-use facilities and infrastructures such as scenic highways or helicopter landing platforms. In Asia and the Pacific, these “militourisms” take place on terrains that have long felt the impact of being objects of imperial desire. The first touristic explorations and adventures in the Pacific also doubled as military reconnaissance and imperial prospection. The image of the tropics as paradise was instrumental in justifying a policy of land grabbing and imperial expansion; it also served to lure young soldiers enrolling in overseas tours of duty. The world of the soldier and that of the tourist are often one and the same. The business of tourism benefits from the high drama of war: places like Pearl Harbor remain popular because war is at the core of America’s past and present identity. Likewise, the US military benefits from the glorification of American cultures of war that occurs in sites memorializing past military engagements. Gonzalez describes the activities of “remembering Pearl Harbor” at the USS Arizona Memorial or “playing soldier” on former US training grounds in Subic Bay as emotional labor: the labor that it takes to shape a national myth that is instrumental to Hawaiian dispossession and to the Philippines’s subordination.

History, ideology, affect

History is at the heart of people’s ambivalent attitudes towards the United States. The history of Hawaii and of the Philippines can be told in two very different ways: one eliciting sympathy and hope, the other criticism and grief. One reason for the adherence to the myth of American benevolence in the Pacific is that its believers are served with a rosy picture of history. And one reason for their conversion to the message of “Yankee Go Home” is that they come into contact with a very different story. It is this black book of misery and sorrow that Gonzalez presents to her readers. As she notes, Hawaii before the annexation by the United States was a sovereign kingdom that was undergoing struggles for internal unification and also fighting off external attempts on its autonomy. Massive population decline following the arrival of European explorers and sailors had produced conditions for exploitation, dispossession, and cultural ethnocide. A coalition formed by white plantation owners, missionary elites, and the US Navy collaborated to roll back native sovereignty with the Bayonet Constitution of 1887, the overthrow of the monarchy in 1893, and the annexation of the islands in 1898, creating America’s first foothold in the Pacific. This history is paralleled by America’s expansion westwards and its collusion with the Spanish empire in the Philippines. The Spanish-American War of 1898 was soon followed by the Philippine-American War, a nasty and brutish conflict in which torture was used against the native insurgents. This brought the Philippines into the American fold, and allowed the US Navy to strengthen its presence in the Pacific. Indeed, Hawaii and the Philippines would share linked fates as part of the American chain of garrison islands.

American tourists and soldiers are served a version of history that stands in stark contrast with the unofficial narrative told in Securing Paradise. They visit landmark sites and museums that present a sanitized version of the United States’ imperial expansion in the Pacific. America’s presence in the Philippines is retold as a story of rescue, liberation, and sharing of riches. The US administration of the Philippines, from 1898 to 1946, and the period following the annexation when Hawaii became a US Territory, from 1989 to 1959, are characterized as a progressive era during which the United States implemented a benign and modern form of stewardship. The authorities undertook a slate of reforms, hygiene, education, and economic projects that uplifted the population and created sympathy even among former insurgents. For example, in the Philippines, the military took on projects such as road building and land clearing to rehabilitate its public relations, substituting promises of constructive colonialism and economic development to its recent history of brutality and oppression. But it is the Pacific War that sealed the fate of these two territories and anchored them in the grand narrative of the United States’ national history. For the American public, Hawaii and the Philippines remain forever associated with Pearl Harbor, Corregidor, and the Bataan Death March. The enduring narratives of masculine sacrifice and heroism in World War II constitute the framing through which the two archipelagos are imagined and understood. This history is made visible and concrete through memorial sites and scenic circuits that have become a magnet for tourists. In these sites, visitors pay their respects to the dead, take part in rituals of remembering, and celebrate a bond of brotherhood with American soldiers, sealed with blood and anchored in Cold War rhetoric. Pilgrimage to historical military sites is not the preserve of American tourists or local visitors: even Japanese tourists are invited to “Remember Pearl Harbor” or to discover Corregidor as the “Island of Valor, Peace, and International Understanding.” For the author, the fetishization of December 7 overwrites January 17, 1893—the day the Kingdom of Hawaii was overthrown and its native population dispossessed.

Neoliberalism and neoliberation

The second factor that has the strength to induce positive or negative attitudes towards the United States is ideology. For Gonzalez, militarism and tourism in Asia-Pacific embody the ideologies of neoliberalism and what she calls neoliberation. Since the departure of the US military from the Philippines, Subic Bay and Clark Base have been transformed into special economic zones under public-private partnerships and now operate as commercial and tourist hubs integrated into global circuits of capital, labor, and commerce. The “post-base” era has not put an end to military cooperation between the US and the Philippines: on the contrary, US forces benefit from an advantageous Visiting Forces Agreement, they participate in joint training operation with their Filipino counterparts, and they are at the vanguard of the fight against Muslim extremist groups the southern region of Mindanao. The US Army left the Philippines through the door and came back through the window of opportunity provided by the fight against terror. Just as the war theaters of the Pacific War were transformed into symbols of liberation from Japanese occupation and fraternal collaboration between Filipino and American soldiers, the discourse of neoliberation transforms the exploitative economies of predatory capital and imperial outreach into narratives of security and shared prosperity. American military occupation and economic hegemony are cast in the same heroic light that fuses the twin ideologies of neoliberalism and neoliberation. The “return” of the base properties to the Philippines are presented as evidence of American generosity; meanwhile, the American military continues to occupy and tour the Philippines, and foreign capital, bolstered by the structural adjustment policies dictated by the Bretton Woods institutions, benefit from zero taxation and rampant violation of basic labor rights in the Special Economic Zones.

Or at least this is how Vernadette Gonzalez presents it, based on her own biased ideology and slanted perspective in which the United States is cast as the villain and its policies as conspirational schemes to maintain neocolonial influence over its dominion. This is, in a way, a missed opportunity: because beyond the Pavlovian denunciation of neoliberalism as evil, Securing Paradise raises many important economic issues. There is indeed an economic case to be made about the links between militarism and tourism. Both activities stem from certain comparative advantages and resource endowments, like having a long and accessible coastal line to build bases and resorts. Both generate rents and drive domestic prices up, giving rise to a particular version of the Dutch disease. Both military bases and tourism resorts may be the only viable economic sectors in territories that are otherwise too far away from centers of capitalistic concentration. There are complementarities between the two activities, as when the soldier goes on vacation as a tourist or when tourism is made safe by the presence of soldiers. But there are also contradictions, especially when the local population becomes more educated and more prosperous than the soldiers posted in their midst. Beyond a certain threshold, tourism development holds more promises than military build-up. When they are consulted about their own destiny, local populations will aspire to transform their territories into islands of peace, as opposed to hosting bases of discontent. But these issues of territorial specialization and economic reasoning are not raised in this book. Instead, the author adheres to a primitive notion of economics-as-witchcraft, with neoliberalism as dark magic and the Bretton Woods institutions as wicked witches. I don’t know where Vernadette Gonzalez got her economics, but it’s certainly not from UC Berkeley’s economic faculty. Even the variant known as international political economy, taught in political science departments and exerting some influence on literary scholars, has more consideration for basic facts and logical explanations than her casual treatment of economic factors.

Combat boots clamping and digital cameras clicking in Asia-Pacific

A conversion is always an affective turn: from love and attachment to abhorrence and alienation, from warm feelings of joy and happiness to dark motives of grievance and hate. Sometimes this reversal of sentiments can be triggered by a traumatic experience or a dreadful event: as when a story of rape and sexual aggression by soldiers or tourists turn the local population against any foreign presence. For Vernadette Gonzalez, the defining moment may have been provided by the image of President Ferdinand Marcos and his wife Imelda leaving the Malacañan Palace and fleeing the country in US army aircrafts after having been ousted by the people. She also describes a traumatic scene that happened to her shortly after September 11, when she was faced with the barrel of a gun for having committed a small breach of security protocol in a tourist resort. For her, tourism and violence are intimately intertwined. In the eyes of local authorities and American strategists, tourists’ safety and comfort take precedence over the needs and aspirations of the local population. The US military wants to make the world safe for tourism. It prioritizes certain forms of mobility and border-crossing at the detriment of others. As a result it makes the world more insecure, not less, and exposes local populations to new risks and insecurities. Although Vernadette Gonzalez doesn’t explicitly formulate policy recommendations, the solutions that can be inferred from the author’s presentation should be resolutely de-colonial: let the US forces go home for good this time, severe the ties of dependance and domination that bind local populations and indigenous peoples in exploitative conditions, reclaim the sovereignty of native right-holders and democratic representatives, protect the environment from the encroachment of army bases and tourist resorts, and bring an end to the tourism industry’s deleterious influence on the social fabric of host nations.

One may or may not agree with these solutions; but they appear to me as severely out of sync with the present geopolitical situation in Asia-Pacific. As the author herself acknowledges, the region is increasingly becoming more insecure; and the blame cannot be put solely on the presence of US forces, less even so on the continuous flow of American tourists. Any person who has travelled in the region can attest that the majority of tourists are no longer Americans or Europeans. These new tourists, who may be followed by soldiers as in the previous historical sequences described for Hawaii and for the Philippines, bring with them different dreams and aspirations, and interact with local populations and the environment in different forms and modalities. They too are looking for a paradise to cherish and to hold, but their version of heaven is based on different cultural and political assumptions. (For a local version of the mix between militarism, exoticism and affect, I recommend the 2016 Korean drama series Descendants of the Sun and its local adaptations by Vietnamese and by Chinese television.) One should lend an ear to the growing sounds of army boots and tourist crowds in Asia and the Pacific: are they harbingers of a new era when the digital camera will prevail over the machine gun, or will they repeat past experiences on a larger and more devastating scale? This is why I find books such as Securing Paradise useful: they allow readers who come to them with an unjaundiced eye to enter the fabrique of sentiments, and they enable us to envision a future that may not be determined solely by militarized tourism and the touring of armies on and off duty.

When the Korean Wave Hits the Screens

25 Feb 201725 Feb 2017 Etienne RPLeave a comment

A review of Tourist Distractions: Traveling and Feeling in Transnational Hallyu Cinema, Youngmin Choe, Duke University Press, 2016.

tourist-distractions Korean government officials nowadays distinguish three waves of hallyu. The first one occurred serendipitously with the unintended success of Korean TV dramas in Japan, China, and South-East Asia. The second wave was brought by the marketing strategies of entertainment companies that targeted growing markets and developed export products in the form of K-Pop bands, TV co-productions, computer games, advertising campaigns, and restaurant chains. According to these Korean officials, the third wave of hallyu will cover the whole spectrum of Korean culture, traditional and contemporary alike, and will be engineered by the state, which sees the export of cultural content as a linchpin of its creative economy strategy. Korean cinema sits rather awkwardly in this periodization. Korean movie directors didn’t wait for the first ripples of the Korean wave to gain recognition abroad: they featured early on in the Cannes film festival and other international venues where their talent and originality won critical acclaim. Cinema studies constituted Korean films as a topic for analysis before hallyu became a theme worthy of scholarly research and commentary. The first books that addressed Korean cinema as a genre, such as Kyung Hyun Kim’s seminal essay on The Remasculinization of Korean Cinema, were written in the tradition of Asian cultural studies that sees each countries’ movie productions as a distinct whole, thereby overlooking the transnational dimension that is so prevalent in the reception of Korean hallyu.

Hallyu cinema as a subset of Korean film history

Youngmin Choe, who is the coeditor of a Korean Popular Culture Reader, bridges two strands of research: Korean cinema studies—that takes national boundaries as a given and addresses the aesthetic content of movies—and hallyu studies—which are by nature transnational and focus more on reception. She does so by limiting her study to the films produced between 1998 and 2006—the high mark of the Korean wave—and by addressing one particular theme: tourism, or the movement of people and emotions across national borders. The films examined in this book seem to anticipate the travels of their audience. They display traveling and tourism as a theme in their narrative, and present locales and sceneries in a way that is bound to induce travel plans and touristic yearnings. They are, in this way, self-referential: travel or boundary-crossing features both on-screen in the stories that are narrated and in the off-screen transnational movements that these films generate. This allows the author to construct hallyu as a category worthy of academic research and to propose the notion of hallyu cinema as subset of Korean film history. As she states at the outset, “the largest ambition of my study is to transform hallyu, which has become first and foremost a marketing strategy, into a bona fide critical term.”

It all started with Winter Sonata. The TV drama featuring Bae Yong-joon achieved a huge success in Japan and set the standard for the crossover and tourist potential of the Korean wave. Locales shown in the drama became the destination of fan tours and touristic pilgrimages. Middle-aged Japanese ladies craved after the sight of “Yon-sama” and developed a cult-like followership. This in turn set the stage for the ongoing Korean wave, which reached publics well beyond Japan and sparked an interest for all things Korean. Although she doesn’t address this particular drama—she only considers films—Youngmin Choe discusses several movies that were produced in Winter Sonata’s wake. April Snow, a film released in 2005 and featuring the same actor Bae Yong-joon, was produced with the Japanese public in mind. Filmed in locations on the eastern coast of Korea, the film contains a self-referential invitation to what the author calls affective tourism: affective images are projected onto affective sites so that the experience of the traveller reproduces the emotions felt by the viewer. Inspired to visit these locations because of the movie story, the tourist travels as if he or she were in the film. Unlike visitors to Universal Studio Hollywood theme park in the United States, tourists at the April Snow sites are invited not only to the places where the movie was shot, but as if into the diegetic and affective space of the movie itself. For instance, in the small city of Samchok, tourists interested in April Snow can sleep in the same room as the characters in the film, eat the same food, sip coffee at the same table, and walk the same streets, with signs and posters depicting images from the corresponding scenes in the movie.

Tourism, drama, and the emergence of an Asian identity

Tourism and drama are associated with modernity in Asia. Indeed, television series and touristic travel shape the imagined communities of East Asia. They are the modern equivalent of the newspaper printing press and the political exile, two agents that Benedict Anderson saw as central in the emergence of national communities in nineteenth century Europe. In Asia, the leisure class takes the form of the travel group. Mass tourism is the foremost expression of the newly gained access to leisure and mass consumption. The Asian tourist has often been identified with the group-centered, photo-taking, cliché-seeking participant of organized package tours. But there’s more to it than just group-think: Asian tourism creates a new form of commodified experience, which is less centered on exotism or escapism and more on emotions and affects. In this respect, the Asianization of Asian tourism is accompanied by a displacement or tourists’ interest. Less focus is placed on history and cultural heritage, more attention is devoted to bodily experiences such as eating, shopping, and scenery-viewing. The Asian tourist looks for the experience that will yield photo opportunities and conventional memories to be shared with others. Asianization, before being analyzed in economic or political terms, can be conceived as a shared affective experience shaped by regional tourism and media consumption. These networks of travel contacts and emotional yearnings among Asian populations are what made hallyu’s rise possible in the first place.

Lest we forget, the tourist imagination in East Asia began with pornography. Japanese tourism to Korea from the mid-1960 until the late 1970 was predominantly male and centered around sex tourism, often combined with business meetings. Known also as kisaeng tourism, this kind of sexual encounter harkened back to colonial practices in yojong establishments and epitomized the imperial consumption of the colony itself as an object of desire. Youngmin Choe opens her book by a close examination of Park Chul-soo’s Kazoku Cinema, the first film collaboration between Japan and South Korea following the lifting of the ban on the import of Japanese cultural products in 1998. Kazoku Cinema is a self-reflexing film about the making of a film, with strong sexual undertones. As the author writes it, “pornography becomes an allegorical mode of historical reconciliation that foregrounds everyday banality.” The desire for sexual intimacy and physical touch also shapes the story of Asako in Ruby Shoes, which cuts back and forth between Tokyo and Seoul as the two heroes engage in Internet porn, and of April Snow, which narrates an adulterous liaison. The whole production of the Korean wave can in a way be interpreted as soft porn, as the cravings of middle-aged Japanese ladies for “Yon-sama” or the provocative attire of K-pop idols suggest. In turn, these sexual desires and erotic feelings contribute to the transformation of once rival nations unto cooperative friends open to transborder flows. Sex, in Asia, is political.

The political is never far in Korea, a land divided between two states separated by the 38th parallel. Any visitor to the DMZ has experienced the strange feeling of being at the same time in a movie scene and in a tourist attraction. On the face of it, the reality of the place contradicts both impressions: the tension between the two Koreas is very real, and the DMZ is first and foremost a military zone. But visits to the DMZ are shaped as a tourist experience, not least because of the many films that used the zone as their locale. Park Chan-wook’s Joint Security Area (J.S.A.) begins with an aerial shot of the DMZ, as a group of foreigners on a guided tour of the southern side are surveying the Military Demarcation Line that runs through the middle of the demilitarized zone. It ends with picture shots taken by the tourists in this initial scene, which reveal the whole story that has been unfolding. The commodification and marketization of military zones is not limited to the DMZ. The Korean War film Taegukgi illustrates a process labelled as “post-memory”: the memory of a trauma that was never personally experienced, but whose lingering effect is felt by following generations. This Korean blockbuster, produced shortly after the liberalization of the movie industry imposed by the US as part of the FTA, thematizes the struggle against Hollywood hegemony, the nation’s simmering anti-American sentiments, the rise of an Asianization discourse, the realities of national division, and the hopes for reunification. As the film Silmido, set on an island off the coast of Incheon, it has given rise to a theme park and also was the focus of a temporary exhibition, thereby fueling the rise of film-induced tourism. The author opposes the Korean War Memorial, which illustrates how the Korean War should be remembered—as heroic, masculine, and patriotic—, and the “false memorials” created in the wake of war movies, giving way to alternative modes or remembrance that are more feminine, leisurely, and affective.

How do all the movies analyzed in Tourist Distractions relate to hallyu? As Youngmin Choe makes it clear, most of the films she addresses are not part of the Korean wave as defined by state authorities and media reports: only movies geared towards a Japanese audience like April Snow, or the blockbusters produced after the opening of the market to Hollywood competition, qualify as such. The hallyu discourse does not emerge in Korea until 2001. It has roots in twentieth-century visions of Asian integration and serves to support the corporate strategies and geopolitical ambitions of newly-developed Korea. The author links hallyu to neoliberalism, cultural nationalism, and postcolonialism, and she uses the words “neo-imperialist” and “sub-imperialist” to qualify Korea’s projection of cultural power. But her book does not discuss political integration and economic processes in detail. As she states, “I am more interested in the formation of a shared affective experience that transnational cooperation requires in order to build its networks for the exchange of products and capital.” In a reversal of Marxist thought, culture is not the reflect of underlying economic forces, but forms the infrastructure basis or enabling factor which makes economic and political developments possible. Her category of “hallyu cinema”, strictly delineated in time and in scope, is defined by the aesthetic criteria of self-reflexivity and affective content, not by the movies’ marketing strategies or their impact at the box office. Self-referentiality in hallyu movies refers both to the content of the movies—as the films examined in the book seem to anticipate the travel of their audiences—and to their production and circulation that foster transnational exchanges. Tourist films and film tourism are closely interconnected.

The affective turn in cultural studies

Beyond contributing to cinema studies and hallyu studies, Tourist Distractions points towards what has been described as an “affective turn” in cultural studies. The notion of affect—pre-individual bodily forces, linked to autonomic responses, which augment or diminish a body’s capacity to act or engage with others—has become a central tenet of cultural studies. Affect is a concept that places emphasis on bodily experience and that goes beyond the traditional focus on representations and discourse. The turn towards affects is therefore a turn, or a return, to the body. It is also a turn towards new kinds of imagined communities. Affects and emotions help us connect with some people while distancing us from others and in material form can be used for economic and political purposes, making it a form of capital. Emotions help form the boundaries and relationships between individuals and society; they determine the rhetoric of the nation. The hallyu nation, or global Korea, is built on networks of affective exchanges. Korean movies and dramas are valued for their emotional content, for their ability to move people in many ways, including geographically. Call it, if you will, the Greater East Asia Co-Sentimentality Sphere. The emergence of this new affective space that stems from the diffusion of tourism and of films, lies at the core of this groundbreaking study of hallyu cinema.

Lost and Found in Translation

22 Feb 20179 Mar 2017 Etienne RPLeave a comment

A review of Nature in Translation: Japanese Tourism Encounters the Canadian Rockies, by Shiho Satsuka, Duke University Press, 2015.

nature-in-translation How do you translate nature in Japanese? The obvious answer—the word “shizen” is the dictionary translation of “nature”—is not so obvious, at least for historians of Japanese thought. Shizen is a Japanese pronunciation of the Taoist concept of ziran, drawn from Laozi. It describes the condition of artlessness or a situation happening without human intention. Its opposite is the notion of “sakui”, or “invention”, the forces of human agency that intervene to create social order. The opposition between shizen and sakui, between the natural way of heaven and earth and the power of human creation, was revived after the Second World War by public intellectual Maruyama Masao when he tried to identify the responsibility for Japan’s wartime aggression. In order to exonerate the Emperor who remained in place as a symbol of the Japanese nation, the war was narrated as if it happened “naturally”, and ordinary Japanese people were framed as the victims of the war. For Maruyama, who chose to emphasize the forces of sakui as first conceptualized by Confucian scholar Ogyû Sorai, the ambiguity in the notion of shizen, and the difficulty to find a proper translation for human subjectivity, was precisely at stake. In order to reenter the international community as rational agents, the Japanese needed to establish a new spirit of individual autonomy, or shutaisei, and to overcome nature as shizen. Only so could they find a proper sense of freedom—another concept that was difficult to translate, as the word jiyû retains the meaning of its origin in the Buddhist expression of jiyû jizai, which designates liberation as self-detachment.

For Shiho Satsuka, translating nature takes a different meaning. Trained as an anthropologist in the intellectual hotbed of the University of California at Santa Cruz, she did her graduate fieldwork training as a travel guide in the Canadian National Park of Banff, a destination favored by Japanese tourists. Her book, drawn from her PhD thesis and published in 2015, analyzes the way Japanese tour guides translate ecological knowledge into lived experience. Translation of nature involves much more than finding proper Japanese equivalents of English notions. As Shiho Satsuka states, it “concerns what counts as human, what kind of society is envisioned, and who is included in the society as a legitimate subject.” The focus of the book is on the tour guides, not on the tourists they accompany. In classic anthropological fashion, the author elaborates from her field notes to describe how the guides left Japan and came to Canada to live in “magnificent nature”; what image they held from Canada and how it contrasted with the reality they found there; how they went through training and transformed themselves into service workers; and how they negotiated issues of gender, cultural difference, knowledge politics, and personal identity. The book mobilizes a vast array of authors and theories, Western and Japanese, while staying close to the lived experience and worldviews of the tour guides that the author befriended during her anthropological fieldwork.

Narratives of freedom

Japanese guides offer “narratives of freedom” to account for their departure from Japan and their adoption of a new lifestyle in the Canadian Rockies. Their decision to leave Japan coincided with a period of national angst and crisis. In a newly established neoliberal environment, the meaning of “freedom”—remember the ambiguity of the Japanese term—became a contentious issue. The furitâ—the free individual living on small jobs or arubaito—captured the imagination of a generation aspiring to detach itself from the secure but constrained environment of the corporation. Becoming a furitâ was often a choice born out of necessity, or necessity made virtue, in the context of widespread liberalization of corporate regulations and labor laws that resulted in growing youth unemployment and precariousness. In the midst of economic change, as the Japanese economy moved from bubble years to prolonged depression, a growing number of young adventurers “escaped” from Japan to go overseas for self-searching travel. In their pursuit for freedom, they chose to drop out of, or not participate in the Japanese corporate system. A number of them found in Canada and its national parks a convenient site to reinvent themselves and establish their new subjectivities. Some thought guiding was their dream job, while others only considered it as transitional work until they found what they really wanted to do with their lives.

Their aspirations were projected onto “magnificent nature”: Canadian natural environment offered the canvas on which they could reinvent themselves, unfettered by national boundaries, cultural norms, and social rules. Moving to Canada offered them what they couldn’t find in their home society: the opportunity to pursue freedom and the choice to live one’s own life as a self-standing individual. Japan was perceived as oppressing the true, authentic self with layers upon layers of social rules and obligations. Escaping to the West was a way to take back control of one’s life and to embrace the centrality of the individual. At the same time, Canada provided a version of Western subjectivity distinct from the American model, an alternative space in which nature played a significant part in the guides’ construction of subjectivities. Japanese candidates to Canadian immigration were often attracted by mere pictures, anecdotes, or TV shows depicting life in the wilderness. They embraced the image of the natural park’s guide as a figure of independence and freedom—a person who had a solid sense of her own subjectivity and the ability to move beyond national, social, and cultural boundaries. Shiho Satsuka tracks the construction of this imaginary space in the work of a value entrepreneur, former politician and popular television entertainer, Ohashi Kyôsen, who provided his readers with the dream vision of “living one’s own life” free from the company and nation, the two most important social contexts in shaping a sarariman’s life. Although Ohashi’s main target was more the young male retirees whose corporate alienation had left them bereft of any social ties, his vision was also influential among young office ladies and freeters who found that the corporate ladder was closed to them and chose to escape to a world of unbound possibilities.

Co-modification of the self

What they discovered in Canada was that work was still work, and that becoming a tour guide entailed what the author labels a “co-modification of the self”. As service workers, they were enjoined by their training manager to become a commodity, in the sense that their public expected to consume a commodified performance similar to the one offered by an artist or an entertainer. Co-modification also designates the modification and production of self through interactions with nature and with the public who came to see the guides as a reflect of their environment. Becoming a commodity therefore had a quite different meaning from that of the commodification of labor that Marx saw as a centerpiece of capitalist exploitation. If anything, the commodity or shôhin implicit in this process of self transformation retains the qualities of premodern craftsman’s production. There was a tension between the unique skills and personalities of each guide, their obligation to act with “sincerity” and “authenticity”, and the demands of mass tourism which asked for a standardized level of comfort and quality of service. Each trainee was therefore encouraged to build his or her unique narrative, while assimilating the rules and procedures listed in a hefty manual. There was a Zen-like quality in their apprenticeship, as the trainees had to guess what the managers and senior guides had in mind even though they did not spell out their intentions. They were invited to blend with nature and transform themselves into locals, while retaining some traits of “old-style” Japanese behavior. For their instructor, the perfect match between a person and his or her surrounding was the foundation for attaining “freedom”, in the sense that the Buddhist tradition gives to the term jiyû jizai. To achieve this notion of freedom, it is important to train one’s own body and mind, and let oneself detach from one’s self-interest in order to become one with nature.

The guides’s performance as “Japanese cosmopolitans” were the result of this co-modification of self and environment. For the Japanese tourists, the guides embodied the cosmopolitan dream of escaping the standard course of stable yet constraining lives of salaried workers in order to live a frugal yet fulfilling life in nature. Despite—or because of—the stereotypical association of outdoor activity and masculine culture, female outdoor guides played a particularly significant role. They performatively constructed their subjectivities as people who could transcend the dominant gendered norms. By doing so, they produced a charismatic aura and presented themselves as mediators with the special ability to go back and forth between the everyday world and an elsewhere, imaginarily staged on Canada’s vast natural landscape. Shiho Satsuka draws the portrait of three of these charisma guides, referring them to familiar gender figures in Japanese pop culture: the male-impersonating female found in girls’ high schools or Takarazuka plays; the tomboy who refuses to grow up and fall into assigned gender roles; and the girl medium fighting to save the world as in video games or anime movies. The ambiguous characteristics of female tour guides who straddled various sets of two worlds—male and female, adult and child, and human and nature—exemplifies the limits of standard binary frameworks used for categorizing human beings. It shows that being female is not a “natural fact” but a cultural performance: choosing a gender category for oneself or others is not necessarily based on a biological body, but on a person’s social role and position in everyday interactions. Here the author makes reference to the work of Judith Butler, but her “gender trouble in nature” is devoid of any militant charge, and gender ambiguity is presented as an everyday fact of life. If anything, the gender roles performed by female outdoor guides are more “natural” than the artificial roles assigned to young women in Japanese society.

A matchmaker between the tourists and the landscape

Japanese outdoor guides offer “nature in translation”: they are expected to tell the stories of nature as if they were national park interpreters. In the park managers’ view, ecological science is the basis of understanding nature’s language. Guides play a role of environmental stewardship as a result of a neoliberal privatization process that has outsourced nature’s protection to the commercial sector. But nature and science take on different meanings in English and in Japanese. The Japanese guides’ participation in an accreditation program revealed discrepancies of worldview that locate humans in relation to nature. Japanese participants asked more questions about plant and rocks as opposed to animals, they did not laugh when their instructor ironically hugged a tree, and they had trouble translating notions like “nature interpretation” or “stewardship” into Japanese. In their view, the guide was not a decoder of nature’s true message but more like a matchmaker between the tourists and the landscape. They let nature do the talk. This doesn’t mean that Japanese guides were not interested in environmental science and technical knowledge as dispensed in the training program: on the contrary, they were keen to update themselves with the latest research by the park scientists, and embraced the principles of environmental conservation. But they insisted that nature was much larger than any person’s ability to grasp it, and their questioning suggested that the dividing line between nature and society varies across cultures. The notion of stewardship, which implies that man is accountable for this world and has to answer to a higher authority about its management, is not easily translated into other religious and knowledge traditions.

Nature as a constant process of translation

Multiculturalism and environmental protection are two key areas in which Canada has assumed a self-assigned leading role in the world. They have become pillars of Canadian national identity, a source of pride and attractiveness in a world where these two values are put under stress. But nature conservation is seldom seen with the prism of multiculturalism. Instead, ecology has adopted the language of science, with the underlying assumption that scientific knowledge is culturally neutral and universally applicable to people with diverse backgrounds. By following the trail of Japanese tour guides in Banff, Shiho Satsuka shows that nature needs to be understood as a constant process of translation. Ecology as a language is inseparable from the politics of knowledge translation: notions such as nature, freedom, work, or identity are constantly renegotiated in distinct social contexts. The Japanese guides portrayed by the author occupy a liminal space away from mainstream Japanese and Canadian societies. But these service workers have much to tell us about what it means to inhabit nature as cosmopolitan agents seeking freedom and independence in a globalizing world. This book, the first one published by the author, also demonstrates the proper value of a graduate education in anthropology. Anthropology is a discipline that adresses big issues—the relation between mankind and nature, the political economy of neoliberalism and flexible work, the definition of freedom and subjectivity—in a located and situated manner. Theory—and this is a theoretically rich book—always come as a tool to understand our present in concrete situations. Her graduate education has provided Shiho Satsuka with a rich toolbox of concepts and references, but more important to her was the patient learning and questioning accumulated during ethnographic fieldwork. This book marks the birth of a great anthropologist.