Dogs and Demons_ Tales From the Dark Side of Japan - Kerr [81]
During the boom years of postwar manufacturing, Japan's industrial leaders considered tourism a minor business, a sideshow to the real work of the nation, which was to mass-produce things. While Europe, the United States, and other Asian nations were developing sophisticated tourist infrastructures, Japan was trashing Kyoto, concreting Iya Valley, and designing resorts out of chrome and Formica.
Some economic writers have seen the lack of attention paid to tourism as a great success, for it was part of what has been called the «war on service-ization.» According to such views, any work except that of producing objects on an assembly line or building things is a waste of national effort. Tourism, according to this analysis, merely supports menial low-paid jobs, unlike manufacturing, which creates high-tech, high-salaried jobs. Such an argument presumes that everyone involved in tourism is a waiter or a maid, and neglects the economic activity generated by architects, landscape artists, makers of furniture and dining ware, painters and sculptors, electricians, manufacturers of lighting equipment, tour-company operators, hotel managers, taxi and charter companies, airline companies, lawyers, accountants, travel agents, performers and musicians, interior decorators, instructors of swimming, scuba diving, dance, and language, owners of souvenir shops and restaurants, printers, visual artists, PR and advertising firms, and much more. The «anti-services» theorists also forget that in Japan more than 10 percent of the workforce is engaged in low-paying, hard-hat construction work-financed by government subsidy-and there is no alternative industry to sop up the excess labor force.
In any case, it is undoubtedly true that Japan succeeded in repressing service industries. Unfortunately, some of the services, such as software design, communications, and banking, turned out to be enormous moneymakers. Tourism, likewise, surprised everybody by becoming transformed, overnight, from a lackluster wallflower into a glamorous starlet wooed by all.
Elsewhere in the world, an explosive growth of the international tourist industry began in the late 1980s and picked up pace in the 1990s. By the turn of the century, international tourism accounted for about 8 percent of the world's total export earnings, ahead of autos, chemicals, food, computers, electronics, and even oil and gas. The dramatic growth of tourism didn't fit into Japan's strategies, for it is based on mobility, a concept not dear to Japan's bureaucrats, whose complicated operational structures depend on borders being sacrosanct and people, ideas, and money not traveling easily. When newly enriched populations around the world began to travel by the tens of millions, it became clear that tourism would be one of the most important industries of the twenty-first century. Many states and cities in Europe and the United States, not to mention Asian countries such as Singapore, Indonesia, and Thailand, earn a considerable proportion of their income from tourism. The World Tourism Organization (WTO) estimates that 657 million tourists visited a foreign country in 1999, spending $532 billion.
Meanwhile, tourism within Japan has been dwindling across the board. In the years 1992-1996, the number of people traveling in their own country grew by less than 1 percent, and the value of domestic tours dropped 3 percent every year. For many local areas the fall has been severe, as, for example, on the Ise-Shima promontory of Mie Prefecture. Though it is home to Ise Shrine, Japan's holiest religious site, as well as Mikimoto pearl culturing, Ise-Shima s tourist arrivals in 1999 dropped to a twenty-year low, 40 percent below its height decades earlier. As domestic tourism waned, the number of Japanese traveling abroad nearly quadrupled,