As requested by some people on the list, I am providing here a summary of my
talk at the International House on Wednesday night, September 20th. As a seminar
in the ongoing Ph.D. Kenkyukai series, this talk was entitled "Between Ants and
Grasshoppers: The Evolution of Japanese Outbound Tourism Policy," and focused on
the political, social, and economic determinants for Japan's unique policy of
attempting to increase its flow of tourists leaving the country to vacation
elsewhere.

The Ministry of Transport, or more specifically, the Tourism Policy Department
of the MOT, created the "Ten Million Program" in 1986 with the policy of
doubling, between 1987 and 1992, the number of outbound tourists. The stated
goals of this policy were the reduction of Japan's increasingly criticized trade
surplus as well as the promotion of "international understanding" (kokusai
rikai).

In essence, I argued that it is possible to account for the promotion of this
policy by looking primarily at narrowly definable bureaucratic and industry
interests, combined with the weakness of opposition from the badly organized and
represented domestic tourist industry, but that the proactive shape of the
policy requires a discursive examination of the institutional environment within
which the MOT made its decisions. A Memorandum of Understanding with the United
States had already led Japan to start liberalizing its outbound air travel
market and, combined with the rapid appreciation of the yen following the Plaza
Accord, had led to lower ticket prices. Even without any special Ministry
intervention, the number of outbound tourists appeared at the time to hit the
Ten Million mark (which it actually did a year early) without a hitch.

As a result, this was a more or less fail-safe policy designed to provide
further justification for the Kankou-bu's occasionally pressured existence
(since this fit in with general efforts to reduce the balance-of-payments
surplus in non-threatening ways). It also allowd the MOT to work closely with
developers attempting to invest in hotels overseas in the heyday of the Bubble,
and provided the Kankou-bu a way of moving into ODA budget territory, by
combining the plan with the establishment of a tourism aid institute (currently
a zaidan hojin).

But I argued that the idea for this policy grew not merely out of bureaucratic
opportunity, but also out of a normative environment that actually provided
decisionmakers with the idea of promoting leisure and international exchange.
Recent decades have witnessed Japanese government efforts -- some successful,
some less so -- to increase access to and consumption of leisure activities. In
addition, the promotion of "internationalization" in cultural and social
exchange programs (I argue that these are designed to promote a limited form of
internationalization in lieu of opening Japanese borders and national identity
more widely) also provided the MOT with the belief that this program would be
accepted as a legitimate one.

I believe that these normative environments did not spring from the well of
Japanese uniqueness or anything like that, but rather from a response to
increasingly institutionalized patterns of leisure consumption and international
exchange in the western industrialized countries. Following the world polity
approach, associated most closely with John Meyer of Stanford University, I
suggest that it is currently "taken for granted" that citizens of advanced
industrialized states will behave in more or less equivalent or "normal" ways in
the leisure time, and will also be cosmopolitan in nature in outlook. Even when
behavior actually differs overseas, the image, the taken for grantedness, has
some normative power, both in the West and in Japan. In my view, the highly
unusual proactive approach to both leisure and "internationalization" in the
Japanese case is necessary to understanding why the MOT's actions took this
particular form.

A number of sharp and useful questions were asked. I will not list them here,
but will simply state that many of them focused on conceptual issues, largely on
whether or not the normative environments are "necessary" in a causal analysis
of the Ten Million Program and successive policies. I have stated above the
basic reason for my belief that they are, but the question is a good and
important one. Other excellent questions focused on the role of gaiatsu, the
definition of "leisure," and on my efforts to compare Japan with other countries
on these dimensions. As I had hoped, my audience provided me with much food for
thought, and I'm grateful to them for their help.

David Leheny
Department of Government
Cornell University