The Boundaries of the Interesting: Itineraries, Guidebooks, and Travel in Imperial Japan.

摘要

This dissertation investigates the politics of place in the Japanese Empire. Through an examination of what I call "the interesting"---that which Japanese tourist literature defined as the sights that ought to be seen for Korea, Manchuria, and Taiwan---I argue that the colonial governments general, South Manchuria Railway Company, and local boosters used tourism to argue for the political equality of the colonies and the metropole as places within the empire. Tourist literature published in the 1910s and 1920s suggested that the colonies and Manchuria would soon be assimilated to Japanese cultural and political norms. In the 1930s, however, ongoing colonial unrest led colonial officials to reframe the relationship of Japan's outer territories to its inner territory (gaichi and naichi ) in an attempt to reconstitute the colonies and the metropole as equal regions of a greater "Japan." I argue that tourist literature domesticated the differences between life in the colonies and the metropole by differentiating people from place. Tourist literature treated colonial peoples as docile laborers in the imperial capitalist economy and local cultural practices as non-adversarial, non-political examples of the local landscape.;This dissertation treats the definition of the political, historical, cultural, and geographic boundaries of places as a political argument. Place, in short, has a politics. In the context of the Japanese Empire, the colonial tourism industry deployed new narratives of place to upset existing hierarchies of territorial and political identity. Chapter One traces the efforts of the South Manchuria Railway Company to cement its claims to Manchuria by creating a transportation network that made Japan the center of the Pacific. This network formed the foundation of tourist travel. In Chapters Two through Five, I examine the changing representations of Taiwan, Korea, and Manchuria in tourist literature. I demonstrate that the colonial tourism industry constituted a significant arena in which colonial and metropolitan residents fought over the politics of inclusion and exclusion in the Japanese Empire. Colonial tourist literature charged bodies and places with political meaning, and in so doing transformed itineraries of the ought to be seen into visions of a new Japan.