Visiones de Japón en los diarios de viajes italianos

Travels to Japan by Italians began to intensify from the post-war period, giving rise to a growing trend which saw the number of annual Italian visitors and immigrants to Japan climbing from some hundred in the 50s to 64 thousands in 2010. One of the overall outcomes of such trend is a significant number of travelogues, which can be roughly divided into two groups. On the one hand, the earlier works by the most widely known and reputed Italian journalists and writers, which combine the traditional view of Japan’s cultural heritage with new insights on its con- temporary. On the other hand, travelogues produced in the 2000s that are less elitist both in their authorship and audience, which draw consistently on popular and mass culture. I will introduce a comprehensive survey of this corpus, which I believe it can prove extremely significant since it delineates a diachronic map of the evolution of the image of Japan’s cultural heritage by Italian society in the last sixty years, an image which these works undoubtedly contributed to foster.