Doing Fieldwork in Japan

Introduction: Doing Fieldwork in Japan

“You can observe a lot just by watching.” —attributed to Yogi Berra This book brings together the experiences and reflections of twenty-one foreign scholars whose research in Japan has relied on talking to ordinary people (and extraordinary ones as well) about their lives and experiences; participating in everyday events; reading and listening to Japanese media, both popular and highly specialized; slogging through archives and bureaucratic records; and piecing together analyses and interpretations of contemporary Japanese life through the direct experiences of fieldwork. The book is certainly not a step-by-step how-to manual, but it does offer many insights and suggestions about doing research in Japan. We hope that it will be useful and accessible to various audiences concerned with information about Japan: graduate students and advanced researchers; Japan specialists and comparativists; academic scholars and people who use academic research for business or policy goals; journalists and businesspeople; students and t h e o d o r e c . b e s t o r , p a t r i c i a g . s t e i n h o f f , a n d v i c t o r i a l y o n b e s t o r Introduction: Doing Fieldwork in Japan instructors in courses about contemporary Japan. All of these audiences are concerned in one way or another with how field research in Japan is accomplished , if only to evaluate the usefulness of its results. We also hope that the book offers models for social scientists planning research in other modern, complex societies; this book is focused on Japan and necessarily involves content and context specific to Japan, but it is our point that fieldwork in any society involves careful attention to cultural specificity. Many social scientists have written books on fieldwork and methodology , but we know of no other collection of research essays that explores such a range of research topics and methodologies with cultural context in clear focus. The fact that our contributors tackle such a wide variety of topical issues in their research should enable researchers planning fieldwork in other cultural contexts to draw inspiration, or at least insight, for their own projects elsewhere. On a practical level, researchers encounter many issues as they plan for and engage in field research in Japan. Graduate students often struggle to identify appropriate methods for conducting their first fieldwork in Japan, sometimes because of a lack of detailed familiarity with either field research or with Japan, at other times because adapting general research methods to a specifically Japanese context presents unexpected problems. Non-Japan specialists doing short-term comparative research in Japan (with or without Japanese collaborators) face other challenges of reworking familiar techniques to unfamiliar settings. Still other questions about fieldwork in Japan, often raised by people who are interested in Japan but have little or no exposure to social science research methods, revolve around how a field researcher can “penetrate” the supposedly “closed” world of Japanese information and emerge with any useful, informed observations. Through this book, we hope those who actually conduct fieldwork will gain a better understanding of some successful, concrete strategies for such research. We hope that the interdisciplinary insights made by our contributors will broaden understanding of the ways fieldwork can provide important data that are not easily found through other means. And we hope that general readers with an interest in Japan will find in these accounts of fieldwork a wide spectrum of illustrations of the grassroots realities of everyday life in contemporary Japanese communities, companies, institutions, and social movements. If field research is regarded as a distinctive methodological approach, some academic disciplines such as anthropology and sociology that rely 2 | b e s t o r , s t e i n h o f f , a n d b e s t o r heavily on this technique are the obvious focus of attention. But in this volume we have defined fieldwork as gathering information in situ: on site, nonexperimentally , from and about human informants. Framed in this way, researchers in many fields including history, political science, literature, religion, theater and performance studies, linguistics, organizational behavior , art history, legal studies, media studies, geography, management, architecture , and economics also rely to a greater or lesser extent on field research, even if “fieldwork” as such is not defined as part of a particular discipline’s methodological...