CHAPTER OBJECTIVES

This chapter will enable you to:

SELLING ETHNO-CULTURAL STEREOTYPES

In 2010 I had the opportunity to visit Hakone, a small tourist town about an hour's train ride west of Tokyo. Expecting an ‘authentic’ Japanese experience after having visited global Tokyo, I was more than a little surprised when I found that Hakone station was dominated by Swiss imagery. There was a large billboard of Swiss Tourism with an image of Disentis/Muster, a small town in Grisons in Eastern Switzerland. The billboard was as much a celebration of the fact that the Hakone Tozan Railway is a sister railway of the Rhaetian Railway operating in Grisons as it was an invitation to visit Switzerland. Even the umlaut in the original German spelling of ‘Rhatische Bahn’ was there – as was the abundant use of the national colour red, the Swiss Tourism emblem which has the Swiss cross at the heart of an edelweiss, the ‘national’ flower, and the slogan of Swiss Tourism, ‘Get natural’. In close proximity to the billboard, there was a little coffee shop, named ‘Cafe St. Moritz’ after another famous resort town in Grisons. The Cafe St. Moritz, too, was liberally displaying the Swiss flag, including on table tops designed in the shape of the Swiss cross in a circle.

It has become a truism that in today's globalised world commodified cultural and linguistic symbols and imagery rapidly circulate around the globe and turn up in unexpected places (Appadurai 1996; Hannerz 1996). In the example above, Swiss symbols and the tokenistic use of the German language reference one tourist space (Hakone, Japan) to another (Grisons, Switzerland) and they associate a modest train-station food outlet with the glitz and glamour of St. Moritz.