A trip amongst spirits: tourism, affect, and the supernatural in Tōno, Japan.

In 1910, Kunio Yanagita published Tōno Monogatari (Legends of Tōno), a collection of folktales that turned the town of Tōno into the ‘Japanese hometown of folklore.’ The tales represent mythologised places and events, introducing a myriad of supernatural deities and demons, and offering snapshots of what rural village life looked like for previous generations. Since the 1990s, Tōno has developed folklore-based tourism, drawing on the rich pantheon of human, non-human, and supernatural characters that make up the cultural and religious ecosystem of the Tōno monogatari. Tourism to Tōno is marked by a search for nostalgia and enchantment: that of domestic tourists – mostly city-dwellers – for a magical and simpler rural past, and that of international tourists for a place where they can still find the ‘real Japan.’ In this chapter, I analyse tourism in Tōno using the geographies of affect. Affect denotes other-than-conscious, difficult-to-represent feelings, and intensities that exist in-between places, people, and objects and that can attach to and permanently alter the meaning of almost anything (Anderson, 2006). As the production of enchantment mobilises the flow of affects (Lovell & Griffin, 2022) such as nostalgia, I look at how the mythical time of legends, the rural past, and the present of touristic Tōno can coexist, investing ‘enchanted tourist’ experiences with meaning.