the purpose of travel could be anything today: experiencing the transportation facilities alone, sightseeing at your destination; tasting unusual and special foods; or staying in certain hotel accommodation according to your preferences, while in ancient times the purpose was to stay overnight in any possible shelter for protection from rain or evening dew.
I have repeatedly used the word ryoko for 'travel' in my speech and we Japanese have almost the same impression of 'travel' as of 'tourism,' although they are different words. I said that it was around 1927 when travel became popular among the general public in Japan, but we can in fact trace it back earlier than this.
From the mid to late 19th century when Japan changed its isolation policy and opened its doors to foreign countries, many students and delegations went abroad. Although it was officially announced that the former went to study and digest foreign civilizations, and the latter to encourage exchange with overseas countries, I see from their reports and diaries that they were mostly engaged in leisure-type travel activities, rather than encountering the hardship that tabi implies. Comprising of Japan's high ranking officials such as Tomomi lwakura, the famous lwakura delegation left Japan in 1873 and remained abroad for over a year for the purpose of learning about the advanced civilizations of Europe and the United States. As some of you may already know, they visited zoos, botanical gardens, museums and art galleries, factories and industrial facilities, as well as railways and weapon manufacturing facilities, which, despite having very different functions, were also new and therefore of equal importance to them.
Nowadays, if a government official was to visit the aforementioned places whilst on business in a Western country, he would be suspected of having gone sightseeing outside of his official duty, therefore nobody would dare do such a thing, except for those involved in relevant fields. However, then these facilities were all symbols of modern civilization, and if their functional differences were of interest to the leaders of the day, this interest was minimal. They were impressed by all that they saw and enjoyed themselves, for it was their duty to see the kind of facilities that Japan was lacking and accordingly had no experience of. Today zoos and museums are considered as sightseeing attractions, and weapon manufacturing facilities and railways as technical facilities to be visited only by industrial groups and so on, but all being new, they were all the same to the members of the delegation.
So we must consider the basics of what comprises a tourist attraction. The lwakura delegation example demonstrates that what we consider tourist attractions today may not be so in the future, and similarly, things which are not considered so today could become such in the future. Studying abroad and engaging in exchange with foreign countries as undertaken by the Japanese students and delegates contained many elements of tourism and inspired them to visit all over, and it was through such sightseeing that students and officials were able to understand the advanced civilization of the Western countries as a whole.
Therefore, although we hesitate to recommend public employees that they go sightseeing when on an official trip, it is regrettable if they only visit their specified destination and return straight home. It is natural that everyone wants to learn and grasp the basic essence of the land he visits. We can see that culture and tourism are inseparable from the desire to travel, felt even in the early stage of Japan's modernization.
2. History of travel and tourism
Here I would like to discuss the environment of the travel industry which formed the foundations of such study and travel. Personally I think that the travel industry in Japan originated from the Kihinkai, a welcome society founded in 1893. the members of which were mostly politicians, nobles and businessmen of high standing. Such tycoons as Eiichi Shibusawa, an important figure in the financial field, and Takashi Masuda, the founder of the Mitsui Company (which at that
