Imagining the world: Sekai ryokō bankoku meisho zue as armchair globetrotting in nineteenth-century Japan

This chapter discusses tourist imaginaries in late-nineteenth century Japan, focusing on the travel guidebook titled Sekai ryokō bankoku meisho zue - Illustrated guidebook for travellers round the world (in short, Bankoku meisho zue), published in seven volumes between 1885 and 1886. Meisho zue (illustrated guidebooks to famous places) were a guidebook genre characterized by the prominence given to illustrations. They were launched on the Japanese publishing market in the late eighteenth century, mostly as tools for gayū (armchair travel). Early titles had been focused on Japanese landmarks, but with Bankoku meisho zue the genre came to delve, for the first time, into the popular tourist trend of globetrotting. Japanese travelers did not take part in tourist world tours until the beginning of the twentieth century, but Bankoku meisho zue offered a virtual alternative to the real experience, by tracing an imaginary eastward itinerary around the world, from and to Japan. The guidebook, an editorial success, provides in this sense a unique perspective on the Japanese tourist gaze in the late nineteenth century, and is one key to understanding how globetrotting influenced popular culture in Japan. Scholarly literature about Bankoku meisho zue is, as of yet, very scarce. The chapter aims at discussing the guidebook’s place in the Japanese publishing market, investigating, through a bibliographical approach, the reasons behind its success and its relationship with contemporary editorial trends. Secondarily, moving from an understanding of the cultural and political implications of tourist discourse, as theorized, among others, by Lean et al. (2014), it aims at discussing the tourist imaginary the guidebook created, through a quantitative and qualitative analysis of its numerous illustrations. As the chapter shows, Bankoku meisho zue can be understood as an original immersive virtual tool for globetrotting, produced at a time when discussions of the ‘world’ had come to the forefront of the Japanese cultural debate, and when a fascination for globetrotting had found expression in different types of media. Bankoku meisho zue highlights how the imaginary connected to tourist world tours became part of a complex intellectual negotiation of Japan’s position in a new global landscape. Far from neutral in its representation, the guidebook adopted a Western-centric perspective, in the way it crafted different visual imaginaries associated with different areas of the world, but carefully aligned its representation of Japan to Europe and North America, in subtle (but politically charged) opposition to other East Asian nations.