Japan’s Amazing Traditions Of Recreational Travel

TOKYO – Japan was one of the first -- if not the first -- country in the world in which recreational travel by large numbers of people became a full-fledged industry.

The Japanese urge to travel for enjoyment has been a significant part of the culture since ancient times, and may have had its genesis in the incredible beauty of the islands and in the development of an extraordinary aesthetic sense in the Japanese psyche.

The mythological gods credited with creating the Japanese islands were so impressed with their handiwork that they descended from the heavens to take up permanent residence on the islands.

Poetry written well over a thousand years ago extols the beauty of the islands, and make it evident that the writers had traveled. Buddhism and Shintoism also played a key role in travel in ancient Japan, as monks and priests sought out locations of exceptional beauty in distant mountains to build temples and shrines that attracted visitors from afar.

During the golden Heian era (A.D. 794-1185) traveling for recreational purposes was common among the elite, and over the centuries, hundreds of places around the islands became famous for their exceptional beauty.

But it was not until founding of the Tokugawa Shogunate in 1603 and the beginning of over two centuries of peace and prosperity that the average Japanese were able to travel for recreational and for religious purposes.

The Shogunate mandated a political control system that required over 260 of the country’s some 300 fief lords to keep their families in Edo at all times, and themselves, along with a large entourage of retainers, spend every other year in Edo.

This resulted in the construction of a network of inns, a day’s march apart, on the five great roads leading to Edo from the rest of the country. While built to accommodate the domain lords and their entourages, the inns catered to other travelers as well.

As the decades passed, the roads and inns became crowded with religious pilgrims, gamblers, salesmen, sumo wrestlers, roving monks and priests, government officials, messengers, painters, poets, and secret agents.

Two types of travel became institutionalized in Japanese life -- monomode (moh-no-moh-day), which consisted of walking tours of famous shrines and temples around the country (that often lasted for months); and yusan (yuu-sahn), which were sightseeing trips to famous scenic places (numbering in the hundreds).

With a nod to the scriptwriters of the Bob Hope and Bing Crosby “road movies,” the first such “road” stories were written by Ikku Jippensha between 1802 and 1822. These stories were entitled Tokaido Chu Hizakurige, which translates as “Traveling the East Sea Road by Shank’s Mare” (on foot).

The series of books chronicled the adventures of two men from Edo, Yajirobe and Kitahachi, who preferred the pleasures and perils of the road to the carping of their wives.

The two dyed-in-the-wool Edo-type men (boisterous, argumentative, and proud) got into every type of comic situation imaginable, and in the process of telling their stories, the author provides a vivid account of the manners and morals of Japanese life during that era in Japan’s history.

The emergence of modern Japan gave rise to three other great categories of domestic travelers—hordes of school children on excursions that were mandated by the Ministry of Education in the late 1800s, millions of big city residents returning to their ancestral villages and towns on holidays and other occasions, and huge numbers of businesspeople going to and fro, from the northernmost island of Hokkaido to the southern island of Okinawa.

In the 1950s, villages and rural organizations nationwide began sponsoring group trips to major cities and scenic attractions. By the mid-1950s virtually all companies in Japan were sponsoring annual outings for their employees to beaches, hot spring spas or mountain retreats.

Today, virtually all Japanese make at least one overnight trip away from their homes and offices each year, and millions travel within the country from a few to dozens of times every year.

Copyright © 2007 by Boye Lafayette De Mente
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Boye Lafayette De Mente has been involved with Japan, Korea, China and Mexico since the late 1940s as a member of a U.S. intelligence agency, student, journalist, and editor. He is the author of more than 50 books on these countries, including the first books ever on the Japanese way of doing business: Japanese Etiquette & Ethics in Business published in 1959, and How to Do Business in Japan, published in 1961.

To see a complete list of his titles [each one linked to Amazon.com’s buy page], go to his personal website: http://www.phoenixbookspublishers.com/.