Doing Fieldwork in Japan (review)

Imagine yourself suddenly set down surrounded by all your gear, alone on a tropical beach close to a native village, while the launch or dinghy which has brought you sails away out of sight....Imagine further that you are a beginner, without previous experience, with nothing to guide you and no one to help you. For the white man is temporarily absent, or else unable or unwilling to waste any of his time on you. This exactly describes my first initiation into field work on the south coast of New Guinea. I well remember the long visits I paid to the villages during the first weeks; the feeling of hopelessness and despair after many obstinate but futile attempts had entirely failed to bring me into real touch with the natives, or supply me with any real material. I had periods of despondency, when I buried myself in the reading of novels, as a man might take to drink in a fit of tropical depression and boredom.¹

Like the initial descent of Izanagi and Izanami to the coagulating island of Onogoro, Bronislaw Malinowski's arrival at his first field site in 1912 is the stuff of disciplinary legend in anthropology. This overwrought paragraph is emblematic because it opened an introductory chapter to his first ethnography that formulated a fieldwork methodology that remained programmatic—and problematic—for decades. We have become embarrassed by his language, appalled by some of his attitudes, but nonetheless convinced that he captured the complex emotions of vulnerability, anxiety, and uncertainty that for many of us are among the strengths of the fieldwork method, not its liabilities.

Sites and sensibilities have changed radically in the interim, but "doing fieldwork" is a gerund still much used to characterize a research method the core of which is long-term hanging around in a particular life-world or activity sphere. Of course, this is a deceptively slothful phrasing because most fieldworkers supplement their "participant-observation" with surveys, questionnaires, formal interviews, focus groups, and archival study. This more capacious methodological mix is the subject of the volume under review. "Doing fieldwork in Japan" here embraces any research in which data collection and analytical understandings emerge from direct, extended personal engagement with particular people and places.

Of the 21 contributors, anthropologists lead (9) but do not dominate. Others are from political science (4), sociology (3), religious studies (2), legal studies (1), and history (1). For instance, the sociologist Mary Brinton dissects the highly interpersonal and often tortuous work of building her own massive data set to study the gender wage gap in "fact-rich, data-poor" (p.234) Japan. The religion scholar Ian Reader studied Shikoku pilgrimages by riding minibuses with pilgrims, staying at temples, and stopping by travel agencies and tour promotion offices. The legal scholar David Johnson pursued the role of the prosecutor in the legal process through over 200 extended visits to the Kobe Prosecutor's Office. The political scientist Ellis Krauss spent years, off and on, in television newsrooms and broadcast studios. Even the historian Andrew Gordon, whose research was perhaps the most archival, reminds us of how the discovery and assembling of primary documents and writings and oral history testimony usually require the sensitive cultivation of complex social networks and personal relationships. Thus the first strength of this essential volume is its focus on the issues, challenges, and dilemmas common to a commitment to field research, whatever the discipline.

It is topically diverse as well. The 37 or so field sites mentioned in the text range from northern Hokkaido to Okinawa, and the people and places are a panoply of contemporary Japan: small rural communities and municipal wards, government bureaucrats of many stripes, factory assembly lines, distressed mining communities, Self-Defense Force bases, religious groups, pilgrimage routes, high school classrooms, Shibuya teenage girls, government prosecutors, research lab scientists, incarcerated leftist activists, NHK television news studios, enka fan groups, and more.

The volume's...