EXCERPT As noted in the preface to the original Japanese edition, this book travelled a winding road to publication. It was the first issue of a magazine created for the supporting members of Genron, a company that I founded 2010 and continue to run today, while also being an independent monograph. It was titled Genron 0 as the former, and Philosophy of the Tourist as the latter. The company Genron is not known in the English-speaking world. This English edition is simply titled Philosophy of the Tourist. Thus, writing the above may not necessarily seem of interest to readers. However, this context is crucial to understanding my philosophy. To this day I am known outside of Japan as a postmodern thinker well-versed in pop culture and information society. In other words, it seems that I am thought of as a scaled-down version of Slavoj Žižek, who ‘analyses’ contemporary culture and politics using ‘cutting-edge’ ‘theory’. However, such an image is vastly different from the reality today. I began my career as a critic in Tokyo in 1993. The influence of postmodernism was still powerful at the time, and I began writing in such an atmosphere. So in my early years I published works in a pedantic prose reminiscent of Žižek, and this image still lingers in Japan as well. But even in works dealing with pop culture, such as Animalizing Postmodern (published in English as Otaku: Japan’s Database Animals), I could not be satisfied with simply analysing symbols and iconography. I have always been drawn to the people behind them. Because I was educated in the era of the postmodern, I still often use the words of the postmodern. The philosophers I reference tend to be European or American. But this is simply a reflection of the limits of my knowledge, and my arguments and interest themselves are quite different from postmodernism as it is commonly understood. I continue to work in philosophy today so that I can live well and so that those interested in my work can live well. Philosophy is nothing more than a tool to live well. A postmodernist would never utter such words. And in the past, neither could I. But I no longer have any hesitation in doing so. …