This paper examines travelogues written by Americans who resided in Japan under the allied occupation of the country and analyzes their depictions of encounters with Japanese people from a face-to-face interactionism point of view. It highlights behaviors and experiences that go beyond the writers' expected role of “unofficial ambassador”. Based on the results, this paper considers the possibilities and problems associated with “unsettled empathy.”
American travel writings about Asia during the Cold War, which often described the writer's communication and empathy with the local people, were also complicit in the US strategy of international cooperation. This paper relooks at travel writings from a face-to-face interactionism point of view, which emphasizes the importance of otherness in behavior and perception and its variability. Americans in these writings traveled while being conscious of the gazes of the Japanese people they were close to and they could not always perform the role of “unofficial ambassadors” effectively. Rather, face-to-face interactions provided the authors with an opportunity to acquire a critical vision of the allied forces and occupation reforms. This came through an awareness of each other's uneven positionality. Discommunication which led to such “unsettled empathy”, however, was also, in some cases, an opportunity to reinforce stereotypes about the Japanese people.

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The coronavirus has had several variants, all of which have spread worldwide and have adversely affected our social life.Consequently, the tourism industry is now facing a crisis, as there are almost no international tourists, even in cities that would normally be overflowing. Given these circumstances, what does “Writing Tourism” mean and what are the possibilities in this unsure environment? In this paper, I will discuss them beyond the “Writing Culture: The poetics and politics of ethnography” published in 1986 by James Clifford and his colleagues in the field of cultural anthropology.

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As the COVID-19 pandemic intensified after its emergence in 2020, the tourism industry has had to develop a new framework based on a dichotomy between “real travel” (mobile and face-to-face) and “nonreal travel” (online tours), where the tours take place in a virtual space in which the actual tourist destinations are immaterial. However, because the latter perspective reduces online tours to pseudo-events or fiction, it fails to capture the various aspects of online tours, which encompass plural values and develop in many directions. By embracing actor network theory and “agency of absence” perspectives, this study articulates how the navigation of online tours provides value from the associations between the “real” and “nonreal.” Three online tour case studies are given to redress the reductionist “nonreal” perspective and to discuss how the real and nonreal “reverse,” “conjoin,” and “blend.” This case study evaluation raises questions about tourism anthropology, which separates authenticity into imitation and the real into the nonreal.

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The COVID-19 pandemic has significantly affected the global tourism industry. To respond to this crisis, tourism researchers have been actively developing international platforms for sharing knowledge. Many articles have also been published in international academic journals. This study focuses on tourism and hospitality management, an important field within tourism research. For this study, journal articles focusing on the COVID-19 pandemic and tourism published in major tourism and hospitality management journals were analyzed using a text mining tool in order to capture research trends in the field. An analysis of 242 articles extracted from a database revealed that a wide variety of research topics, such as human resources management in the industry, travel during the pandemic, and tourism after the pandemic, have been studied by researchers from many countries. It was also found that there are some different research trends among journals in the field. However, the data showed that research contributions from Japan are somewhat limited. Because further publications on this topic are expected, this paper also discusses future research directions. It is hoped that this study will serve as a useful resource for tourism researchers in Japan and can encourage research in the field.

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