Good People in Good Health: Vacationing as Moral Practice in the Meiji Era

This paper examines the institutionalization of vacationing during Japan’s mid-Meiji era (1870s-90s). It focuses on how state efforts to galvanize popular consent for normative, regimented lifestyles engendered perceptions of vacationing—that is, prescribed forms of leisure undertaken at prescribed times and at prescribed sites—as a moral practice suitable for the urban middle classes. The moralization of institutionalized vacationing was catalyzed by newly-arrived Westerners espousing hygiene and salubrious living environments as essential to good health. Subsequently, perceptions of cities as unhealthy environments compelled Japanese public schools to incorporate summer vacations into their academic calendars. “Muscular Christianity,” similarly, espoused fresh air and physical exercise as foundational to moral character-building. Western values thus exerted indelible influences on the purpose and practice of outdoor activities in late 19^th century Japan, helping to establish and popularize mountaineering, camping, swimming, and other healthful activities fashionable in the West. Westerners traveling through the Japanese countryside were also active in establishing bucolic summer resorts like Karuizawa and Hakone. The institutionalization of vacationing was not universally embraced, however. Leisure and the resources it required magnified socioeconomic inequities, and the transformation of rural landscapes into summer resorts engendered ambivalence among those without the means to partake in these new “moral” pleasures. The paper discusses these conflicted concepts and spaces with a view toward explaining, first, how vacationing became an important means of self-identification for Japan’s emergent middle classes, and second, how the moral utilization of time and space became integral in devising what it meant to be a modern “good person” in Japan.