What are the moral implications associated with visiting places precisely for their dark sides?
Dark tourism and slum tourism involve visiting locations with a horrific, sad, or risky present or past. Dark tourism typically refers to visits to sites of sorrow – think concentration camps, sites of assassinations, and prisons. Slum tourism refers to visits to impoverished neighborhoods, where people live in squalid conditions and/or areas often considered too dangerous to visit without a guide – think favelas in Rio de Janeiro or the slums of New Delhi. In either case, the goal is to see something most others have little interest in. Such tourists tend to be politically engaged, well-educated people who are conscious of gross inequalities in the world. They feel empathy for others and want to look behind the glossy facades created for them in tourist districts. However, underlying these kinds of tours is an ethically shaky desire to witness the suffering of others – either in the past or the present.
One of the underlying goals of any study tour is to introduce students to a side of a place/city/country that they previously were unaware of; or, to make real an aspect of the place/city/country that students only read or heard about.
In my effort to introduce students to the multiple sides of rural Kyushu, I wanted to show them not only cities undergoing a kind of revival, like Minamata, and largely successful places, like Kurokawa Onsen, but also places that are struggling with economic demise and depopulation. However, in doing so, was I participating in an ethically questionable practice akin to slum tourism or dark tourism?
I hadn’t considered the problem before our mini bus dropped us off; however, as we walked along the deserted alleys of Tsuetate Onsen, this ethical question began to rise to the surface. Along with an acquaintance and long-time resident of a nearby town, I began explaining the former heyday of this town, explaining how shifts in tourist desires, forms of transportation, gender expectations, social relations at work and more led tourists to gradually leave Tsuetate. It would be too simple, and inaccurate, to say all of the tourists who once filled Tsuetate now fill Kurokawa, but I’m sure for the local business owners it must feel that way.
Beginning our walk in Tsuetate
A small sign announces Tsuetate’s recognition on an NHK program as the most “hometown” (furusato) street
We had the town to ourselves. In the hour that we explored the attractive twists and turns of its streets, we only encountered seven people – two tourists checking out of an inn, the inn owner seeing them off, two other inn owners returning from business outside town, and two shopkeepers. In a resort that still has dozens of hotels and inns with hundreds of rooms, it was sad to see so few people.
One of the attractive, yet dilapidated, alleys
Ironically, perhaps, many students later remarked that they enjoyed Tsuetate precisely for its quiet streets and its sense of calm. While I do not deny students the joy of quiet streets, one cannot imagine local business owners happy about quiet streets. Quiet streets means no visitors. No visitors means no business.
Shuttered inn – out of business and nearly impossible to renovate
The entrance of a former inn
There are endless challenges to revitalizing Tsuetate – narrow streets and limited access not only dissuades elderly visitors, unfortunate given the demographic shift taking place in Japan, which promises more older tourists for years to come. The narrow streets also make it extremely difficult and costly to repair and renovate buildings in desperate need of a makeover. In some places, only a wheelbarrow or dolly will be able to transport the necessary materials – wood, concrete, glass, pipes, toilets, fixtures, kitchen items, tatami mats, bedding, the list goes on.
Reminders of past guests, some recent
While we were talking about all of these challenges, I had the sickening feeling that business owners were eking out an existence just meters away, behind the walls of their inns. We were talking about this place as if it were a ghost town, where tourists used to come, workers used to live, businesses used to thrive. Students were busily photographing empty streets, rusted window sills, broken tiles, all the while half-joking that the entire town could be used for a large-scale haunted house at Halloween.
Abandoned inn on the right
Worst of all, we were only visiting for an hour. Then we would leave and stay the night in Tsuetate’s local rival hot springs village, Kurokawa. Kurokawa doesn’t need our money or our praise, while Tsuetate clearly does. Two of the people we met along our tour were inn owners. One closed his inn a few years ago to stop losing money. Now he makes handicrafts from bamboo. We stepped into his store and looked around. However, only window shopping feels wrong when the entire town is suffering. One student purchased something.
Abandoned inn
The last person we met has just renovated his inn, which we passed before meeting him. He invited us to visit the cafe, but we were already on our way to the bus, and some of the students were tired and depressed. It was emotionally draining to walk through a place that was so run-down. It was like sorting through an attic full of someone’s keepsakes – things that are tattered and faded. In each object one imagines how someone in the past enjoyed it, but now it looks sad and used.
It strikes me now that if we want to move past being voyeurs of the plight of Japan’s rural villages, we should stay in them, infusing them with our money and our energy. Of course, like all tourism, this will involve choosing some places at the expense of others. Geographer Peter Matanle believes the future of Japan’s small cities, towns and villages involves nothing less than a zero-sum game, in which some towns will become deserted. Will these become ghost towns like those that dot the Western United States? Will Japanese and foreign tourists visit these places and speculate on what life was like in the past? Did we already do this on our study tour?
A few inns still show some life
Date of visit and photos: May 22, 2012
