Can tourism education take a “beautiful risk” of waiting and listening?

In his works Kiku-koto-no-chikara [The Power of Listening] and Matsu-to-iukoto [The Meaning of Waiting], Japanese philosopher and phenomenologist Kiyokazu Washida argues that both matsu [waiting] and kiku [listening] are not merely passive behaviours but actions that create space for the unexpected to arrive. Washida suggests that these acts involve being attentive rather than simply conscious, in a sense similar to that noted by Tim Ingold (2015) and Jan Masschelein (2010). In ecofeminist philosophy, Kato (2015) describes kiku not
as simply catching a sound but as an act of honouring others. This involves surrendering one’s ego and allowing others to be subjects. Such practices of listening and waiting, or what Biesta (2011) calls “hesitation,” in educational settings may carry the risk of being addressed by others in unexpected ways. However, these encounters are not necessarily negative; Biesta frames them as a “beautiful risk” of education, arguing that if education does not contain this risk, it simply becomes uneducational.

Drawing inspiration and guidance from these thinkers, I reflect on a community-based learning programme in rural Japan that I coordinated (2023/2024) for tourism degree students, where students, teachers, and local communities interchange their roles of teaching and learning. The presentation attempts to examine how a beautiful risk of waiting and listening can create spaces for tourism students, educators, and local communities to imagine alternative possibilities for living with tourism in ways that contribute to a global and sustainable future.