Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015. xii, 263 pp. (Maps.) US$24.95, paper. ISBN 978-0-8223-5880-0.
Should we expect different cultures to appreciate and understand nature in the same way? Anthropologist Shiho Satsuka suggests—well, no! In a fascinating account of Japanese tour guides in the Canadian Rockies (this book is not really about Japanese tourism or Japanese tourists) she explores how Canadians think about and “do” nature, and how Japanese think about and “do” nature amid the same landscapes. She finds there are many differences.
The geographical setting of this study is certainly “big nature”—specifically, Banff National Park in the Canadian Rocky Mountains. Based upon her ethnographic research in the early years of the last decade (2000–2001), she recounts how, as a student fresh from Japan, she and a handful of Japanese young people that she met in the Park’s Banff township navigated not only their own appreciation of the Canadian Rockies, but made sense of the logic (and sometimes illogic) of heritage management of Banff National Park by Parks Canada.
The background to this research is, of course, the “boom” in Japanese mass tourism that took place in the 1980s and 1990s, and the popularity (at that time) of spectacular nature tours taken mainly in cross-country coaches of iconic Canadian sites such as Niagara Falls, the Rocky Mountains and the Columbia Ice Fields. This rapid growth in tourists, together with their lack of English language comprehension, and the special young people holiday working visa that Japanese could take advantage of in Canada, led to a relatively large number of young Japanese in Banff working as tour guides. Who were these guides and how did they find their way to Banff? Satsuka introduces them to us in her book. Essentially, they were “odd-balls” who did not fit into Japanese corporate culture—but they all loved to ski!
In effect, the skill of these “step-on” tour guides added value to the coach tour companies by making the Japanese tourists understand what they were seeing. Through their information and their stories, they helped to ensure that Japanese tourists, whether retirees who wanted an outstanding overseas experience or newlyweds who saw Canada as a “cool” honeymoon tour destination, took back to Japan the fondest memories. Basically, they interpreted the Rockies and its natural setting. But, as can be guessed by the book’s title, there was often something lost in translation, just as in the renowned film of that name, starring Bill Murray and Scarlett Johansson (2003).
Before we get to the main act, however, Satsuka makes us aware of two important characters that also played a role in “translating” Canadian nature to the Japanese in previous eras. In the 1920s a certain Maki Yuko was a Japanese mountain climber who is feted in Banff as the first to climb Mount Alberta, in 1925. A generation or so later, Ohashi Kyosen (the Johnny Carson of Japanese late-night television) opened his first OK Gift Store in Banff in 1973. Satsuka calls him a “populist cosmopolitan” (67) and notes that he was responsible for popularizing the Rockies to Japanese audiences through his TV program. Beyond this, she argues that he also encouraged Japanese to live a middle-class life, and reassured them that going overseas on packaged holidays was also “OK.”
Chapters 5 and 6 provide the climactic twist of Satsuka’s story. In 2001, Parks Canada made it clear that a special guide’s certification would become a condition of any business licensing. Consequently, any Japanese tour or hiking guide working within the Banff Mountain Parks had to be certified. And, a special organization, the Mountain Parks Heritage Interpretation Association (known as MPHIA—or “mafia” to most of the guides) would be responsible for ensuring that guides working in the Rockies actually knew their stuff! So, beyond coping with their status as precariat seasonal workers in a transnational setting, and their rigorous training by a Japanese head guide—almost similar to that of a young Buddhist priest in a temple and with a similar amount of discipline—they also had to study the lessons of ecology and heritage planning promoted by the Park’s scientists. Central to Satsuka’s argument is that the environmental interpretation demanded by the MPHIA was “confusing” and “challenging,” especially the Western (Judeo-Christian) concept of environmental stewardship. In one telling passage (166) she notes that a high-ranking Japanese guide (Takagi-san), after taking the prescribed MPHIA courses, presented for his oral exam a narrative that was “filled with facts highlighting the immense scale of the glacier,” but contained nothing to indicate his position as an environmental steward (as mandated by the MPHIA and Parks Canada). In other words, his “translation” of nature left the “meaning of nature” to the Japanese tourists that he was addressing, rather than impose the desired ecological and environmental stewardship message of Parks Canada.
Satsuko is a good academic and so she then proceeds to reveal how the scientific approaches to “ecological integrity” are not merely neutral scientific concepts, as assumed by Parks Canada, but have “developed within specific philosophical and aesthetic traditions” in North American culture (194). Satsuko ends the book by suggesting that nature is an elusive concept whose interpretation is always changing, and that a more inclusive paradigm is required that “invites people who do not necessarily share the same epistemological traditions to participate in knowing nature” (220).
My final observation on this anthropological study is that since the early 2000s there has emerged a new type of Japanese tourist, the FIT or “free independent traveller,” who comes to Banff either alone or with a small number of friends carrying the Japanese equivalent of Lonely Planet and interpreting Canadian “big nature” in their own way. These new Japanese tourists are more English language-savvy, and more willing to strike out by themselves to various destinations; and so they are less comfortable in joining the limiting mass-tourist coach tours. The present book would provide an excellent start to expanding the theme of how nature is translated as Japanese society evolves.
David W. Edgington
The University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada
pp. 151-153