Reinventing Vacation in Japan

People everywhere have always played games, taken time to relax, and done all sorts of activities just for fun. But “recreation”—in the sense of great masses of people taking weekend trips, going on vacation, and doing activities to recuperate from the stress of work and get ready to do it again—is a relatively new thing, emerging with the urbanization and industrialization of Europe and North America. As historian W. Puck Brecher writes, the idea traveled from those places to Japan, with a great deal of controversy.

Brecher writes that some forms of tourism did exist much earlier in Japan. In the seventeenth century, for example, people of all classes made pilgrimages to temples and shrines, visited hot springs for health reasons, and traveled to see the sights of the country. But, when the US forced Japan to allow some foreigners to settle and trade in the 1850s, the newcomers brought their own leisure patterns with them. They took summer vacations in cooler parts of the country, prompting the creation of Western-style resorts.

After the Meiji government came to power in 1868, Brecher writes, it began encouraging Western-style modernization. This included industrialization, and, with it, the conception of leisure as a way of allowing people to recuperate from work with a temporary escape from the ugly, unhealthy atmosphere of the city. Over time, authorities also sidelined activities like sumo wrestling—considered vulgar by Westerners—in favor of baseball, boating, mountain climbing, and other activities popular in the West.

Japanese school districts began introducing summer breaks in the 1870s. And the growth of railroads made it easy, at least for those with sufficient resources, to travel the country. By the early twentieth century, the Meiji government began actively promoting tourism, for both citizens and foreigners.

However, Brecher writes, not everyone liked these ideas. From the start, many critics worried that school summer vacations would lead students to forget their lessons and waste time in unhealthy idleness. Multi-day vacations remained out of reach for most working people, and many of them resented the upper classes’ summering as a manifestation of inequality. And some small communities fought plans to build railroad lines and otherwise develop rural areas—acts that many considered desecration of the mountains, especially given who was doing it.

“Some willing to tolerate the development of the countryside were less amenable to the prospects of pampered urban aristocrats stomping through those formerly pristine areas,” Brecher wrote.

More broadly, an “anti-civilization” movement presented Western-style modernization as an assault on the spiritual wellbeing of the nation.

In a 1907 essay, the writer Ito Sakon criticized the idea of escaping the hot urban summer, instead presenting the heat as an opportunity for self-improvement. “Summer vacations dull the mind and weaken the body, both of which need to be exercised,” he wrote.

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