ABSTRACT
This chapter begins with an account of natural resource development and use in the region, in state-sponsored industrial forestry, to situate modern practices of ecotourism within the regions broader historical ecologies. It argues that images and discourses are key components of ecotourism in Otaki and the Kiso region, due not only to their capacity to frame ecotourist encounters, but also to their capacity to invade lived reality and shape material environments through the active bodies that work to assemble ecotourism. The chapter explains that images and discourses are critical components of political ecologies of ecotourism in Japan. The ecotourism is not, as it appears in images and discourses to be, a panacea for the social and ecological ills of Japan's central highlands. It concludes with a discussion of assemblage of a politics of imagination in which the author suggests that what is at stake within political ecologies is the power to imagine, envision, and actualize ecologies and ways of being.
