Ethnography as Consumption: Travel and National Identity in Oda Makoto's Nan de mo mite yarō

Discussions of Oda Makoto's wildly successful 1961 travelogue Nan de mo mite yarō invariably speak of its brash self-portrait of the Japanese citizen abroad. While this characterization is surely apt, it obscures the shifting affiliations and identities that mark so many of Oda's encounters with minority and otherwise marginalized communities. In this article, I examine the narrator's apparently easy assumption of different ethnographic poses and trace this cultural shifting to Oda's dramatization of travel as a mode of cultural consumption and to his anxiety over defining a national subjectivity amid increasing prosperity and international prominence in the early 1960s.