Tourist experience and the quest for spatio-temporal contrast: An analysis of contemporary Japanese travel narratives

Abstract

What do tourists experience in travel? What is the meaning of contemporary tourism? These questions have been proposed since the mid 1970's by geographers, anthropologists, and psychologists of tourism in the English-speaking world. Most of the studies attempt to verify MacCanell's theory of authenticity, Turner's process of communitas or Cohen's systematic typology of tourist experience. Are these hypothesis also applicable to the Japanese contemporary tourist experience? The popular travel monthly 'Tabi' proves an indispensable source concerning Japanese tourism. Each edition contains travel essays contributed by readers. I compared 155 travel writings in 'Tabi' from 1992 to 1995 with the contributors ranging from the young to the aged. In the first analysis, I examined three hypothesis. Turner's communitas was verified only in 3 essays; MacCanell's authenticity in 25 essays; and Cohen's typology in 47 essays. These results show that the existing models are insufficient to explain the Japanese tourist experience. In the second analysis, I tried to treat the 155 travel narratives without hypothesis. Based upon the structuralist textual analysis, I extracted six main subjects: encounter of people, perception of panorama or landscape, discovery of another world, observation of culture and history, solution of problem which arise during travel, and recognition of ones life.