Nature in Translation: Japanese Tourism Encounters the Canadian Rockies by Shiho Satsuka (review)

According to author Shiho Satsuka, Nature in Translation aims at exploring the following questions:

What is the appeal of magnificent nature to Japanese travelers? How has the vast scale of nature in Canada served as a site for young Japanese to transform their subjectivities at this historical moment? What do their experiences tell us about the subjectivity of flexible workers who were pushed into transnational labor markets? How are the guides’ experiences shaped by the larger historical context of cultural encounters in asymmetrical global power relations?

(p. 2)

As can be surmised from this list of research objectives summarized by the author herself, this book is more about young Japanese tour guides and their lives, experiences, and perceptions than about Japanese tourism to the Canadian Rockies per se. Nor does it seek to analyze how different understandings of “nature” are translated by the guides and conveyed to tourists from Japan, affecting the ways the latter appreciate and consume the destination. Satsuka does show by a few examples how the role of the guides may influence the Japanese tourists’ understanding of Canadian nature, but her main focus throughout is on the experiences of the guides rather than those of the tourists. I must say, therefore, that Nature in Translation slightly sidestepped the original expectation I had about the book’s content when I was first given the title for review.

Largely on the basis of doctoral fieldwork conducted at a Japanese tour guiding company operating in Banff National Park in western Canada in 2000–2001 and through her own experience as a guide, Satsuka offers a detailed description and analysis of the life trajectories of a dozen or so Japanese tour guides, of what motivated them to move to Canada and to choose to become tour guides, and of how their lives have been transformed by their work experience in the tourism business in the Canadian Rockies. As background for this specific type of transnational labor migration, Satsuka discusses in chapter 1 the deteriorating and increasingly precarious conditions of the Japanese economy and job market during the postbubble period that have disillusioned and driven some young people to “escape” Japan and its deep-rooted corporate culture, family obligations, and gender expectations in search of more freedom.

Satsuka then goes on in chapter 2 to explore the characteristic features of the cosmopolitan aspirations of those young people in which Canada with its vast nature is imagined as a space of freedom. Canada was chosen because, in Japan, the dominant image of the West that had been represented by the United States during the postwar years is being gradually replaced by an alternative model of Canada or west European countries that are supposed to be less competitive, less materialistic, and therefore more humane. In this connection, the chapter specifically examines the influence of a well-known television entertainer, Ōhashi Kyosen, in redirecting “Japanese fascination with overseas travel from American culture to Canadian nature” (p. 35).

Chapters 3 and 4 are devoted to detailed description and analysis of the meaning of tour guides’ experiences including their transformation through the guide-training program. It is true that many guide trainees are placed in situations of being commodified in their new role as a guide despite the fact that they feel they have escaped the commercialized society and workplace of Japan. Satsuka argues, however, that they interpret the commodification of self in their new work roles as an opportunity to develop a unique individuality rather than as an expression of the alienation or decay of an authentic self. The Canadian natural landscape plays a significant part in this conflation of commodification and performative construction of individual subjectivity. This theme of subjectivity construction in the workplace is further elaborated in chapter 4 by focusing on female outdoor guides and their negotiation of gender and family, which challenges the normative family system and gender relations that are considered “natural.”

In chapters...