Doing Fieldwork in Japan

Getting in and Getting along in the Prosecutors Office

From 1992 to 1995, I spent a thousand days in Japan doing research about the prosecution of crime. This chapter is organized around three challenges I faced while conducting that study: getting in to the research site, getting along with my research subjects, and getting close enough to prosecutors to explain how they shape the Japanese way of justice (D. Johnson 2002). Getting In I arrived in Kobe on August 15, 1992, intending to study Japanese prosecutors (kenji) ethnographically, something no one had done before. It took five months before I actually began. This protracted preliminary period started when a professor at Kobe University wrote a letter to the chief (kenjisei) of the Kobe District Prosecutors Office (KPO), introducing me and my research goals, asking for permission to visit the office, and stating that he would telephone in the near future to follow up on our request. The letter suggested that the KPO treat d a v i d t . j o h n s o n Getting in and Getting along in the Prosecutors Office David T. Johnson building research relationships with prosecutors. me as it did the legal apprentices (shihö shüshüsei) who rotated in and out of the office at four-month intervals.1 The chief agreed to consider this proposal and instructed me to call on Mr. Ono (a pseudonym), the “instructing prosecutor” (shidö gakari kenji) in charge of the legal apprentices. I telephoned Ono to arrange the date, and on October 2, 1992, made the first of some two hundred visits to the KPO. Ono was then in his mid-thirties, a ten-year veteran, and one of the procuracy ’s rising stars. He became my primary handler throughout the Kobe phase of research. During our first meeting, Ono and I talked for about two hours, moving from self-introductions, favorite foods, preferred beverages, and sports interests, to family background, educational history, and marital status, to (finally) research goals and needs. In response to this interrogation, I told Ono the same story I provided all prosecutors in the months that followed: I am an American graduate student interested in Japanese law and society, and I want to understand the role prosecutors play in both. I also explained why I wanted to do participant observation and open-ended interviews in the KPO, justifying my request by noting that Japanese police had been the subject of numerous field studies but that prosecutors had received barely any academic attention. Ono said little in response to these requests. Instead, at the conclusion of this visit, he gave me a few brochures about the office, instructed me to call him in two weeks, and saw me to the door. My follow-up call also failed to generate a clear reply to the request for access. It did, however, produce a second appointment, one month after the first. On November 2, Ono related two notable developments. First, although the Kobe executives were considering my request, it would probably “take a while” before they decided either way. This was unsurprising, for I knew that in a bureaucracy like the procuracy, no single prosecutor could make this decision on his own. It seemed significant, however, that the KPO had forwarded the research request, together with my mentor’s letter of introduction, to executives in the Ministry of Justice for higher-level “consultation and approval” (kessai). At the time, I knew two truths about the ministry: prosecutors run it, and they are wary of outside scrutiny. I also knew that the key to access for Walter Ames, who studied Japanese police in the 1970s, had been “official permission . . . from the supreme authority—the National Police Agency” (Ames 1981, xi). Ono’s second point was more discouraging . While agreeing that prosecutors are important but understudied, Ono said that conducting research inside the office would be “difficult” 140 | d a v i d t . j o h n s o n because prosecutors are obligated to protect the privacy of suspects, victims, and witnesses. He asked me to understand their position and saw me to the door with the same request he had made on my first visit a month earlier: to telephone again in two weeks. I parted with a plea to accept my research request. The incessant tick-tock of my Fulbright fellowship clock was growing louder by the day. On Ono...