The Japanese tourism industry, from its formation in the early 20th century to today, bears in many ways the postcolonial contradictions of Japan as a nation that has been at once the colonizer and the Orient. Engaging with the complex power dynamics inherent in the seemingly friendly gestures of “hospitality,” my dissertation analyzes the inconsistent ways in which the Japanese tourism industry has defined and dealt with foreign visitors, comparatively looking at tourists from the “West” and “Asia.” I divide the dissertation into four chapters: “Hospitality Infrastructure: Pursuing the Civilized,” which uncovers the mixed sentiment of national pride and shame behind the ardent discourse of hospitality in Japan, “Tourist Gaze: Searching for the Oriental,” in which I illustrate how Orientalist imaginings of Japan have continued to transform and endure in the tourist gazes today, “Roles of a Host: Performing the Hospitable,” which takes an ethnographic look at social relations between hosts and guests, and “Guests from Greater China: Welcoming the Ex-Colonized,” where I identify the legacy of Japan’s colonial history in the increasing number of visitors from the Greater China Region.

This literature review explores the ways in which the idea of "the tourist" has been theorized by various tourism scholars. First, I will focus on the seminal works and argue that classical tourism literatures have universally approached "the tourist" as one who wishes to be identified as a traveler, coded as a learning-oriented explorer rather than a member of tourists, consumerist dupes who fail to truly experience the wonders of the world. I will refer to this particular type of tourist as "amateur anthropologists," adventurous travelers with a strong do-it-yourself attitude, hoping to discover something both extraordinary and authentic from the journey. Such desires to find the authentic led to a fervent yet futile chase between the tourist industry putting on a lavish performance to lure the tourists, versus amateur anthropologists attempting to access the truly unmediated reality. The latter part of this thesis will analyze more recent literatures on tourism and mediation, and argue that these tourism-media scholars also conceptualize the "tourist" as truth-seekers orienting their travel towards discovering the truth. Finally, I will further allude to the ways in which the advent of cybermedia may give a new shape to tourism practices.

The Asian American Movement (AAM) was one of the social movements that constituted the “cultural revolution of the long sixties” and communicating while vetting the ideals and goals of this new Asian American consciousness was Gidra: The Monthly of the Asian American Experience, published from April 1969 to April 1974.

Given how vital dissident newspapers have been to social movements, there has been correspondingly little research on their significance. Therefore, based on the contention that analysis of the content and form of an alternative newspaper is best understood within the historical context in which it was produced, I employed a tripartite analysis of context, content and form to analyze all 59 issues of Gidra. This data was supplemented by life story interviews of key volunteer staff (n = 10) and a limited on-line survey of readers (n = 20), to ask: what cultural and political work did Gidra do and, by extension, what functions might dissident newspapers play in the life and legacy of social movements?

Situating Gidra within the concentric social and political milieus of the exuberant “Sixties,” the “Movement” of progressive thought and action, and specifically the Asian American movement, I determined that Gidra communicated the overall goals of the AAM primarily in four themes of: 1) vetting Asian American consciousness, 2) providing Asian American analysis of the Vietnam War, 3) building Asian American community and culture and 4) fortifying Third World solidarity; all through a combination of written and visual mediums that appealed to the intellect as well to the heart.

Extrapolating from the political and cultural work that Gidra accomplished - such as acting as public forum for a diversity of perspectives, critiquing as it historicized a movement in the making and providing lessons for future activists, this study contends that social movement newspapers have the unique capacity to: 1) provide an in situ account of the movement as it unfolded, 2) disseminate movement values and culture beyond time and space, 3) capture the ephemeral emotional energy of a movement, 4) serve as a source of new knowledge and 5) provide a history and legacy of a movement for generations to come.