| This dissertation examines how the Canadian landscape became a site for Japanese tourists to imagine a particular form of cosmopolitanism that responds to Japan's ambivalent position in the world as one of the largest economies, yet one marked as outside the Euro-American cultural tradition. I approach this issue by analyzing how Japanese tour guides mediate various understandings of nature as they interpret the Canadian landscape for tourists from Japan. Ethnographic fieldwork was conducted in Banff, Alberta, Canada and Japan in 2000 and 2001.;I argue that the way knowledge about nature is produced and circulated through tourism provides a tool for imagining global space and individual positions within it. Throughout Japan's modernization process, beginning in the late nineteenth century, the Western notion of nature has provided Japanese thinkers with a new epistemology, enabling them to connect the social order with the natural environment of a national landscape. This practice of envisioning the relationship between individuals and society through nature has been reformulated in the post-WWII era, especially with the development of Japanese consumer capitalism and rapid mobilization of the population into a mass middle class under the strong political, economic, and socio-cultural influence of the United States.;Japanese nature tourism in Canada, which is close to but different from the United States, has become a cultural site where social norms and standards constitutive of postwar development in Japan are manifested in a contradictory manner. The main aim of overseas mass tourism has not been to challenge normative Japanese conceptions of nation and capitalism, yet this form of travel often triggers critical reflection on exactly these norms by offering a comparative viewpoint that reveals the unnaturalness of previously accepted social norms. Tour guides' interpretive practices ambivalently provoke questions about the foundational narratives of the modern nation-state, such as work ethics, gender, and family as social foundations, and scientific knowledge, simultaneously reinforces these discourses. I address the significance of the concept of nature in social imaginaries by analyzing how knowledge about nature are articulated and re-articulated in tourist encounters. |
