| In this dissertation I examine the world of ryokan, traditional Japanese inns that dot Japan's landscape by the tens of thousands. Ryokan create a welcoming space for tourists by utilizing normative ideas of the Japanese home, including notions of the home as a comforting, unchanging escape from the modern world of work, and the home's unquestioned reproduction by women.;In this study I draw on seventeen months of research conducted in three onsen, or hot springs villages in Kumamoto, Japan. I rely on interviews and extended conversations with over one hundred workers, owners, and other individuals associated with ryokan, as well as the experience of working (washing dishes, scrubbing baths, cleaning rooms, and interacting with guests and coworkers) over thousand hours in a handful of traditional inns. Critically, I find that many women working in ryokan originally come to the job to escape domestic violence or out of a desire to no longer rely on a man. The women often claim they have no job skills and no home, and thus have nowhere else to turn.;This realization led me to the following questions: what happens when women who have no home, are paid to reproduce a normative idea of home for others? Are such women victims of the ideologies associated with a normative Japanese home, or can they instead be said to resist the same idea of home, through the very performance of domestic tasks ? Drawing primarily on the ideas of James Scott, Michel de Certeau, and Judith Butler to theorize resistance and performativity, I argue that ryokan employees both reproduce and resist norms related to domestic space that are consumed by tourists. Thus, I combine theories of mobility, gender, resistance, and the home within the context of tourism. |
