Virtual Tourism, Reality and its Wrapping
Image by timtak
Amida Temple in Aio Futajima (top left) provides one example of the Japanese virtual tour. At Amida Temple, the enterprising owner has brought earth from the sites of 88 other temples in the local village pilgrimage route, which itself is a copy of the famous 88 temple pilgrimage route: the Shikoku Henro (Reader, 2005).
So, those who do not have the three weeks required to walk around Shikoku Island can walk around Aio-Futajima in a day or two. Those who do not have a couple of days to walk around Aio Futajima can come to this one temple. These temples, such as Lakan Temple in Tokyo, were the first foreign village tourist attractions (Gaikoku Mura) (Hendry, 2000) such as Nagasaki’s Huis Ten Bosch or Parque Espana, that allowed the convenience loving Japanese to experience the far away and foreign in one place near to home.
Those that can do not have the time to come to this one temple can enjoy a virtual tour via a map, especially a traditional Japanese map which provides a bird’s eye view, and those that do not have the mental age to figure their way around a real map (Imao, 2005; see image right), even a Japanese birds eye view map (see image right), can play a game of "Sugoroku" (image bottom left), which is like snakes and ladders played on a simplified map: virtual tourism for all the family.
When you are as good at imagining things as the Japanese, or when you see a world that is the visual, when you see the light, where perhaps the "Madness of the Day" (Blanchot, 1995) is rather a normal frame of mind, then you do not travel to *see* things at all. You can visit copies, watch pictures, imagine them and dream (Nenzi, 2008, p189) about them. If the Japanese travel it is for the authenticity of the icons that they can there receive. Conversely believing signs to be perfectly copied in human and minds (and the omnipresent mind of the logo-god) Westerners would never travel for signs. Do Western readers feel like they are travelling when they read this blog?
So while Western tourists go to Gaze (Urry, 2002), the Japanese co to have signs indicated to them. Conversely if the gaze is important to the Japanese tourist at all it is autoscopically, via photography taken of themselves and if signs are important to western tourists it is primarily there ability to narrate themselves and the site, auto-semiotically in the post-cards (Derrida, 1987) and, which is, their self-narrative.
This difference in tourism preference, for Western gawping and Japanese icon (or ‘stamp) collecting reflects a different world view. For Westerners the is a dark, The-Matrix-like world of the things-in-themselves, it Konigsbergian (Nietzche, 2007), robotic (Beaton, 2005). For Japanese the real world is the visual world, the tain of the mental mirror (Nishida 1988; Heisig, 2010).
The difference in tourism also reflects a different view of the stuff, the fluff, that, spreads out the real world, allows for the private other distinction, and moves about, the stuff that needs to be exchanged and brought back.
For Westerners it is the image that stands between ourselves and the word. The image is but a boundary or "hymen". On the one hand it is a wispy neurological effervescence – qualia -, on the other it is like coat of ever so thin paint. By covering the real world the image promises that the real world is out there. It is a reflection of the real world that we must travel to see. The image is the pseudo-event (Boorstin, 1992) that promises us that there is something called reality (Baudrillard, 1995).
But Baudrillard (1995) is wrong to think that it this separating function — the graph, pharmakon, or hymen (Derrida, 1998) or wrapping (Hendry) — is universally enacted by the image.
In Japan it is the symbol that provides the division. It is the symbol that separates, allows view of the world to be, at the same time private belonging to a certain person with a certain name. It is the symbol that Japanese travel to accept to allow them to conceive the images that are the world, images that at ‘ruins of identity’ (Hudson, 1999) have long since become invisible.
The Western "world" is like a steel framed building covered in the reflective glass of the image. The Japanese world is a tapestry pinned down and out by name-places.
Afterword
The beautiful Amadia Temple is behind Yoshimatsu Store, which is opposite Futajima Primary School, Yamaguchi City. There are so many stone Buddhas that the temple feels crowed, or that one is being watched. I recommend going in the early evening when the setting sun makes the statues glow.
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