ABSTRACT
From the beginning, travel television in Japan has represented impossibility. When Nihon Hoso Kyokai (NHK) aired the first Japanese travel television series produced abroad, African Journey, with less than a month from recording to broadcast, it brought to Japanese viewers a world that was still off-limits to most of the population. There is a new impossibility at the heart of contemporary Japanese travel television, however: in an era in which viewers can go anywhere they please, Japanese travel television continues to keep the world at a distance. On the domestic front, NHK's celebrity-driven Tsurube's Salute to Families spotlights regional Japan but emphasizes the host and his celebrity guests. On Tsurube's Salute to Families, actor and traditional rakugo storyteller Shofukutei Tsurube II, known across Japan simply as Tsurube, is accompanied each episode by a celebrity guest to a different small town in Japan.
