ABSTRACT
This chapter examines three of the most popular travel programs in contemporary Japan. On all of these shows, an alienation from the very world such programming promises to make available reveals itself anew via a variety of distancing subject positions. Tsurube’s Salute to Families (Tsurube no kazoku ni kanpai, NHK, 1995–present) spotlights regional Japan but emphasizes the host and his celebrity guests. Ainori (Fuji Television, 1999–2009, streaming on Netflix starting in 2017) demonstrates how it was possible for the entire world to play second banana to Japanese youths. Walk the Town, Encounter the World (Sekai fureai machiaruki, NHK, 2005–present) would seem to solve the problem by removing the travelers altogether and having the camera stand in for them, but it proves not to be so simple. It is worth asking how Japanese travel television shows reflect and resist a contradictory era in which the world has never been closer and yet is still kept at a respectable distance. Without denying the pleasures of these compelling iterations of what is often among the most banal of genres, it is possible to perform a counter-reading that connects Japanese travel television to a mainstream unwillingness to confront a national past.
