The Japanese Word for Tourism Comes from the I Ching's Guan Hexagram｜Its True Meaning Is Observing the Light of a Country's Virtue

Kanko, the Japanese word for tourism, is one we use without a second thought. Written with two characters, one meaning “to observe” and the other “light,” this worn and overhandled word has a weighty origin that has been almost entirely forgotten.

It comes from the oldest classic of the East, the I Ching, or Book of Changes, and specifically from Guan, the twentieth of its sixty-four hexagrams, known in Japan as the hexagram of wind over earth. The I Ching is one of the Four Books and Five Classics, the foundational scriptures of Confucianism, and for more than a thousand years it was required reading for every Confucian scholar. It has been forgotten now, but Japan too once enjoyed a golden age that could fairly be called a great Confucian era. When Ieyasu Tokugawa, who emerged victorious from the Warring States period, founded the Edo shogunate, he built Confucianism into the governing philosophy of the new order, and its influence lasted until World War II. Only after the war, when the occupation forces banned Confucian teaching, did it enter its lost age.

Within the I Ching stands the line 觀國之光、利用賓于王. Read in the traditional Japanese way, it says that one beholds the light of a country, and that it is fitting to become the guest of its king.

The word kanko derives from this passage, but it came to carry its present meaning only after the Meiji era, when this ancient term was adopted to translate the English “tourism” and “sightseeing.” In that moment, the meaning kanko had carried since the I Ching was reduced to an empty shell and drawn into the Western, capitalist context of consumption. Seen this way, it seems only natural that the word’s final destination, 160 years on, should have revealed itself as overtourism in countries all over the world. From the standpoint of language, the English word “tourism” has no power to hold back today’s age of mass consumer tourism. If anything, this age is where the word was always bound to lead.

This year I began working in the tourism industry myself, and this was exactly the problem I ran into. Among the municipalities, listed companies, bureaucracies, and assorted organizations involved in tourism today, and even among those who hold real power over the land, not one person knows what kanko originally meant, and every one of them is struggling along an extension of the Western logic of consumption. In the middle of all this, only the word kanko floods everything, with nothing real behind it.

Japan once gave rise to the belief in kotodama, the faith that words themselves are gods, and for us Japanese, any hollowing out or slippage in language is reflected directly in the real world. If you want to look at tourism afresh as someone in the business, the first thing to do is return to the root meaning of the word. But because this is always a blind spot for people today, it can never be achieved on a large scale. The only way is to carry it out small, scattered, and together with people who understand.

From this point of view, places overrun by tourists and, conversely, regions struggling to attract visitors look much the same. Both still stand on an old and mistaken structure, waiting of their own accord to be consumed down to the last thing, like sheep offered up to wolves.

It is true that the vast sums consumption leaves behind in a locality become political power for the community’s influential figures, and that visitor numbers make convenient material for officials who want to feel they have accomplished something. But is there anything real in it?

That money flows quite directly into the support base of the Liberal Democratic Party government, and it is a fact that the tourism industry operates within that structure. A state-led tourism strategy may not be wrong in the short term, but over the medium and long term it is surely a path that drives the land, the region, and its people to ruin.

Put the other way around, if we can return to the original context of kanko and take our stand on it in earnest, Japan has a chance to propose what comes after this age of mass tourism, which has spun beyond anyone’s control around the world. Such an idea could never come from the Western world, which stands on the context of tourism and sightseeing and is today’s global tourism industry. In other words, we must strip tourism and sightseeing back out of the word kanko. The countries capable of this are China, South Korea, and Japan, all of them shaped by Confucianism, but the real opportunity belongs to Japan, which has digested and sublimated Confucianism more fully than any of them. If so, what must we look at first in order to pull kanko back into its original context and set out again, not as consumption but anew?

So let us look once more at the line about beholding the light of a country and becoming the guest of its king. To begin with, the “light” spoken of here does not mean scenery or famous sights in the modern sense, which is what tourism means. It refers to the radiance of a country’s virtue, the flourishing of its culture and institutions, the brightness given off by good government. Incidentally, it is important not to read “country” as Japan but to think of it at the level of place.

Simply put, kanko originally meant traveling to a country and observing the radiance of its governance, its matsurigoto. And the decisive part is what follows, that it is fitting to become the king’s guest. If the line ended with its first half, one would observe the radiance of another country’s governance and that would be the end of it, which is precisely where the Western capitalist context of consumption stops. Yet in ancient China, not a single teaching approved of ending in private satisfaction, and one was always called upon to find an opportunity to put what one had seen and heard into practice. Only the whole of this, taken together, makes up a single act of learning. If it ends with one’s own satisfaction, it is of no use to the world or to anyone in it.

The words about becoming the king’s guest carry the implication that if a country is governed well enough to give off the light of virtue, a wise person should stay there and serve as the king’s guest, which is to say as one of his officials. Because this idea is peculiarly Confucian, it is disliked in the Western world, and especially in the Anglo-Saxon sphere, where individualism is held as the ideal. But we are not Westerners, and we share almost none of their historical context. Above all, it simply does not ring true for us. The Confucian teaching we have lived with for more than a thousand years has soaked far deeper into our bodies and minds, and it is what awakens the heart.

At the core of the word kanko lies the Confucian thought of when to take office and when to withdraw. Which lord should one serve, and in which country should one place oneself? To decide that, one observes the light of that country’s virtue. The Song dynasty Confucians Cheng Yi (1033–1107) and Zhu Xi (1130–1200), whose teaching came to be called Neo-Confucianism, read this as [盛徳光輝], virtue flourishing and shining with light.

In short, the true meaning of kanko is to discern from the radiance of a place whether it is the country of a lord worth serving, a radiance that springs from virtue. Kanko was neither carefree pleasure travel nor a stage for finding oneself. It was an intensely political and ethical act of observation.

Yet with the arrival of the modern age, the word was turned toward mere sightseeing and gutted. The layer of tourism became dominant, and over 160 years it became the force that destroyed the Japanese spirit of kanko. Gone is the resolve to look at another country in earnest, staking one’s own course in life on what one sees, and stripped away with it is the thought of virtue, which has no place in the Western world.

What must we look at again now? Unless we look at that, nothing but wasteland will remain once this storm of an age of mass tourism has passed.