Arthur Asa Berger’s book Tourism in Japan: An Ethno-Semiotic Analysis, one of a series of books published by Channel View Publications on tourism and cultural change around the world, reflects his ethno-semiotic approach to the subject. He collected his data as both a traveller and a fi eldworker. For Berger, ‘cultures are composed of a wide variety of codes or ways of behaving, rules that are passed on from generation to generation that affect human relationships. They are directives, often quite specifi c, that often function below our levels of awareness’.

His objects of analysis are aspects of Japanese cultures that tourists frequently encounter such as the Japanese flag, Japanese school children in their uniforms, Japanese baseball, Zen rock gardens, geishas, the Sanja Matsuri festival in Asakusa, department stores, manga, the Tokyo subway system map and sumo wrestlers. Berger aptly points out that underneath these cultural elements, in the case of school children who become hermits (the Hikikomori), are ‘enormous unresolved social and cultural problems in Japan’. We Japanese have not yet found the solutions to this problem and others like it.

If I were asked to write a book on American culture and tourism, I would have focused on what I have observed in the United States since my fi rst initiation into the American culture in 1969 as a foreign student. I remained there for more than eight years as a graduate student. I would have written about American baseball, American football, the west, the NY subway, various kinds of ethnic festivals, department stores in big cities and guns. For Americans, these phenomena are things they tend to take for granted; the average American does not believe they have any social or cultural signifi cance at all. Japanese tourists in America might fi nd them interesting but, generally speaking, would not recognize their cultural signifi cance.

One example of interest involves his discussion of high-tech toilets.