This paper explores the concept of “ethnic contact” used by a Japanese sociologist Eizo Koyama (1899–1983) to analyze three types of travel/displacement: immigration, tourism and fieldwork. Since the early 20^th century, many fieldworkers had begun to authorize their own inter-cultural practices in contrast to other ones by tourists and immigrants, etc. But Koyama claimed that tourism involved the meaning of fieldwork as well as one of leisure activity. Why is it? By reconsidering his claim under the Japanese tourism policy in the 1930–
40s, I argue that it reflected the process in which tourists were perceived as agency mediating between different cultures while ethnic contact became an efficient medium for (re-)presenting national self-image. I also argue that his population policy attempted empire building through the media of contact between Japanese immigrants and natives in the colonies.