Doing Fieldwork in Japan

Beginning Trials and Tribulations: Rural Community Study and Tokyo City Survey

I often wish I could say that I had an avid interest in Japan from the time I was a small child and that I eagerly rushed into the first Japanese-language class I could find in high school, but that isn’t the case. I did have two Japanese pen pals in grade school, but Japan was as far out of my reach as the moon. I was first introduced to the study of Japan while completing a Ph.D. in sociology at the University of Hawai‘i with a fellowship from the EastWest Center in Honolulu. The study of an Asian culture and language was a requirement of the center. When I was fortunate enough to receive a Fulbright grant, I made my first trip to Japan in 1984 to undertake two years of field research for my dissertation. I was forty years old, had never been outside of the United States, and had just begun studying the Japanese language the year before. I continued an intensive ten-month program of Japaneselanguage study after arriving in Tokyo before moving into the mountains of Hokkaido to start the dissertation research project. I lived in the coal-mining city of Yübari and conducted an interview survey with over two hundred s u z a n n e c u l t e r Beginning Trials and Tribulations: Rural Community Study and Tokyo City Survey Suzanne Culter with coal miners in Yūbari. households and forty city and company officials regarding the effects of community restructuring after the closures of the local coal mines. Nearly ten years later, I began another research project in and around Tokyo that involved interviewing officials at local government offices that had developed services for the new influx of foreign workers in Japan. Although a similar qualitative research methodology of structured interviews was used for both projects, there were significant differences in other contextual aspects that influenced whether the project was successfully completed as planned or completed with revisions. Having conducted prior survey and interview research in the United States, I had gone into Japan with a research methodology “mind-set” that was geared to completing the tasks in an American setting. The dissertation research was my first awakening to the need for dramatic adjustments, but later projects brought even more unexpected lessons in the cultural differences and expectations regarding field research in Japan. In reviewing my research experiences over the past ten years, I feel there are several major areas that highlight the differences between conducting research in Japan as compared to a similar project in the United States and that also demonstrate the differences between the two projects I completed in Japan. These focal points often overlap and interact in any one situation and include: (1) language proficiency; (2) means of gaining access to the study population; (3) context of place, such as urban versus rural, or public versus private; and (4) context of person, such as the gender, age, and social status of the researcher and the participants. I can best point out how these issues were operating in the research settings I encountered by using examples from the two projects. Language Proficiency One’s level of skill in using the Japanese language should be an important consideration in the planning stages of a research project. A number of different factors become involved in mastering a second language, and using that language in a research setting brings additional concerns. I found that I proceeded along a typical path for an adult learner of Japanese. I first began to develop listening comprehension then progressed to speaking and thinking in Japanese while trying to read and write the language as I studied. What I learned in the classroom, however, did not always carry over adequately into the field. I began studying the language at a later age, thus I progressed Beginning Trials and Tribulations | 215 more slowly than an eighteen- or twenty-year-old. Being immersed in a rural city where no one spoke English soon increased my pace, but I was never as fluent as those who had begun their language training at an earlier age or who had lived in Japan while studying the language. Having less ability may initially slow down a project but should not prevent its completion. Which language skill is more necessary than another also depends on the...