“To Break Down the Barriers Between East and West". The Kihinkai (Welcome Society, 1893-1914) and Its New Vision of Tourist Diplomacy

In 1892, Deguchi Nao, a Kyoto woman claiming to be possessed by Ushitora no Konjin (the “Golden Kami of the Northeast”), founded Ōmoto, a religious movement that pictured Japan as both prototype and spiritual center of a “world renewal”. This marked the birth of a new concept of "yonaoshi", world-encompassing, revolutionary, and truly millenarian (Miura 2019). A year later, in 1893, a group of businessmen led by Shibusawa Eiichi, Masuda Takashi and Hachisuka Mochiaki, all related to the Tokyo Chamber of Industry and Commerce and all experienced diplomats, founded the non-profit organization called Kihinkai (Welcome Society). Kihinkai was aimed at attracting, assisting and managing the presence of foreign tourists in Japan, and it was inspired by a vision of Japan as an object of “special” interest for international travelers. Kihinkai had no material connections with Ōmoto, but they were products of the same political and social environment: one marked by a heightened political consciousness, and (in the context of the process of revision of the Unequal Treaties) by a heightened sense of and concern with Japan’s role in the world. The promoters of the Kihinkai, much like the leaders of the “yonaoshi movements” of the late Tokugawa period, were responding to an immediate economic problem: the need to bring foreign currency to Japan. However, their organization ended up evolving into a complex experiment in global diplomacy. The Kihinkai was only “half-private, half-public” (Nakamura 2006), but it was a crucial inspiration for the creation, in 1912, of one of the earliest national-level tourist organizations in the world: the Japan Tourist Bureau (Shirahata 1985). It made the geopolitical implications of international tourism manifest, inspiring a new vision of soft-power public diplomacy, with ripple effects that reached beyond modern Japan, into the post-modern global context. This essay uses the Kihinkai manifesto and its publications to analyze this new vision of global diplomacy, relating it to the late Meiji discourse on internationalism and civilization.