Abstract
Phuket is Thailand’s largest island, with long and beautiful beaches. Because of the government-led tourism development since the late 1970s, Phuket has become the South’s most popular international tourist destination. Scuba diving is one of major tourist attractions in Phuket, which well satisfies tourists’ desire to spend leisure time in untouched beautiful nature—underwater landscapes of colorful marine life in coral reefs. In addition to Thai nationals, many Japanese (and other foreign) diving guides are found in Phuket, and attend to mainly Japanese (and other international) tourists.
This paper describes a current situation of diving tourism in Phuket, in terms of host-guest relationships between Japanese diving guides and their guests, namely Japanese tourists, with a specific interest in Japanese diving guides’ attitudes toward their guests. The purpose of this paper is to understand the nature of their job, with a particular focus on their occupational risks and personal or individual security.
Japanese diving guides in Phuket seem to live in a “risk society,” where various environmental factors make them highly risk-conscious. In addition to the industrial structure of international diving tourism, severe competition in the labor market for Japanese diving guides in Phuket leads not only to difficulty in finding jobs, but also to unstable employment in the future. Moreover, when viewed from the perspective of working conditions, Japanese tourists can be considered one of the most serious risk factors for Japanese diving guides and, at the same time, Japanese diving tourists are the largest source of income for these guides; they have found that Japanese tourists tend to be very demanding and often bring various troubles which may affect any and all aspects of guides’ everyday lives.
Nowadays, it seems that some of the Japanese diving guides in Phuket have begun to regard their guests as threats to their livelihood. Clarifying an analytical distinction between risk and security, this paper argues that personal securitizations of guests (or host-guest relationships) are observed among Japanese diving guides in Phuket, as a result of multilayered “riskization” of their occupational life.
