Japan, landscape, people, street

The figure of the tourist

January 19, 2025

The figure of the tourist looms large in Japan. The tourist is a hybrid Other: unlike the villager or the nomad, the tourist belongs to one community but sometimes visits others, depending on their hospitality. The tourist is the flâneur of our time: an indifferent, potentially happy consumer-subject who traverses the local and the global. The tourist’s interest is purely consumptive and without direction. Like the flâneur, the tourist is drifting: they view the world with a ‘chance gaze’. Sometimes tourists see things that locals don’t want them to see.

Sony A7 R111
Ginza Tokyo

Hiroki Azuma in his Philosophy of the Tourist argued that the significance of the figure of the tourist is that they transcend the boundaries/limitations of the nation state. He distinguishes the tourist from the immigrant and job seeker as the tourist is essentially a consumer who buys a ticket and goes somewhere to consume goods or services–in my case in Japan. The figure of the tourist, he says, is a different subject to the one who has to decide between friends and enemies (Carl Schmitt) and to animal laborans and homo faber (Hannah Arendt) as they are grounded in the emergence and integration of the world market. They have the right to consume and the right to visit other countries. Hence the importance of hospitality of the other and the transcending of (flying over) the boundaries of the nation state.

As tourists we spent some of our time in a mid-sized regional city–Morioka — on the recommendation of Craig Mod. It has a vibrant sense of life being lived as you walk its streets. It’s part of the growing pantheon of smaller cities in Japan attracting younger entrepreneurs. It is eminently walkable and a good life is possible here: one a human scale within the bounds of a warm community, and a feeling that your own small contributions meaningfully add up in the lives of people around you.

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