The hotel as an infrastructure of cross-cultural learning: Indian and Iranian tourists in Meiji Japan

Abstract Positioning Indian and Iranian elite tourists to the Tokugawa pilgrimage town of Nikko in relation to their European and American counterparts, this article shows how Meiji-era modern hotels served as mechanisms for an informal and amateur mode of learning about Japanese culture. What enabled Nawwab Hamid Ali Khan, Maharajah Jagatjit Singh, Mehdi Qoli Hedayat, and Ali Asghar Khan to visit the inland shrine town was its integration into the modern tourist infrastructure of the Meiji period by way of the rail connection to Tokyo; the construction of the Kanaya Hotel; and the availability of guides and guidebooks. Consequently, Nikko—and the Kanaya Hotel in particular—functioned as venues for pioneering Indian and Middle Eastern encounters with ‘authentic’ Japanese culture, subsequently published in Urdu and Persian. Japan’s ties to a global tourist system of hotels, restaurants, guides, guidebooks, postcards, photographs, and souvenirs thus contributed not only to Euro-American Japonisme , but also to nascent Indian and Middle Eastern appreciations of Japanese culture.