A post inspired by last week’s episode of Anthony Bourdain: No Reservations – Laos. This is a comment I left on Bourdain’s blog on the Travel Channel website; I am sure to get no response, but felt the need to write it anyway.
As a white American with a fascination for Japan, someone who has lived there for over a year, and who very much intends to go back to live there more permanently, I give a lot of thought to the notion of being the intruder, the stranger.
There is nothing we can do as white people to not stand out, nothing we can do to truly fit in. We visit places because we are fascinated by the culture, because we want to learn more, because we want to experience something exotic, traditional, and different. We often come not knowing the local language or customs, and wanting to take photos to remember our journey.
In one scene from this Laos episode, a local from Luang Prabang explains to Tony that this alms-giving ritual they just filmed, in which the local monks, every single morning, walk down a major thoroughfare, a sea of orange, and are given alms in the form of rice by the laypeople, alms-giving devotees, is a real traditional ritual, the real thing, not DisneyWorld, and one can sense in his face and in his tone of voice the anger against Western tourists, who come in ever increasing numbers and snap photos of this sacred ritual. I find it impossible to not, while watching No Reservations, or even when traveling myself, have some disdain for the tourists I see around me. I find it difficult to think that they are not simply the kind of tourists who are only there to get their pictures, to have a fun and interesting holiday, and who are not as deeply interested in the culture as they should be. That somehow I am different, because as a historian, and a student of Asian Studies, I somehow have more right to be there, that I am somehow less an invader. This is stupid, and hypocritical, I know. But I just cannot help but think this way.
How can we avoid treating real world places and traditional sights like DisneyWorld? How can we explore the world, and get photos to remember the journey, the experience by, without being seen as invaders, as obnoxious tourists, as representative of an inflow of outsiders who in turn represent a slow destruction of the traditional way of life?
When I am in Japan, I find myself almost always quite welcome; the further I go from the major tourist areas, the major cities, the more welcomed I feel. I speak the language, I am accustomed to much of the etiquette and customs, and I have a genuine interest in the culture, and I think the Japanese can sense this quite easily, that I am not just another tourist, or at least not a certain kind of tourist. Or maybe they’re just kind, welcoming, people, very good at being polite on the outside no matter how displeased they may be in truth.
I am hoping to spend a lot more time in Japan in the future, and to explore, to journey much of the continent. I dream of going to Viet Nam, to China, to Taiwan, Thailand, Indonesia, Tibet, Bhutan and elsewhere. What can I do to not be the invader with a camera, the sore thumb, the symbol of Western cultural imperialism, or whatever else it may be that the locals may think of foreign tourists?
One of the things that I do that makes me feel better is that I take very few pictures of myself when I travel. That is, I don’t ask others to take pictures of me.
This has less to do with a desire to not bother people (though, it’s true that underneath my excessively talkative exterior I am quite shy), and more to do with some personal conception of what type of tourist I am, what I get out of visiting a place, what I get out of taking photos.
There are surely people out there who travel just for the fun of it, with no genuine interest in the history and the culture. And, I suppose, perhaps, to some extent, I cannot fault them for this. Who am I to say you’re vacationing the wrong way? … But there are those people whose primary goal in visiting places is to say they’ve been there. To check it off some mental, or actual physical, checklist. They take photos of themselves in front of all sorts of famous sites and monuments, the focus being on capturing that they’ve been there, so they can go back home to their little lives in their little towns, show off to their girlfriends, and stick it on their mantelpiece to make themselves feel a bit more cultured. …
If I said I was 100% not like that, it would surely be a lie. I really must admit I am surely a hypocrite about some of this. But I want so badly to not be like them, to not be that kind of person. I take photos of places because I appreciate them aesthetically, because I am wowed by their presence, because I want to try to capture the emotion, the feeling of being there, because I am fascinated by the cultural and historical significance, and, yes, because it is hard to not feel something special when visiting a super famous place that you have seen in photos innumerable times.
Does this make me actually different? Maybe not. Anyone looking at me with my camera out at a Buddhist temple; hell, anyone looking at me at all, camera or no, a white guy at a Shinto shrine, is going to know I’m a tourist, a visitor, a stranger, an invader into their sacred space, who surely cannot appreciate it as a native does.
Even so, it makes me feel better. My choice of sites to visit, my attitude about visiting them, and my appreciation of the historical and cultural significance of the places I visit, sets me apart from the “tourist”. Or at least I should like to think so.