Doing Fieldwork in Japan

Bottom Up, Top Down, and Sideways: Studying Corporations, Government Programs, and NPOs

I study working people’s lives and people’s working lives. This overarching theme has engrossed me ever since I began my first research in 1983. It consumes my curiosity and pushes me to ask new questions to this day. My main areas of interest are gender and labor in contemporary society. These interests have expanded to include migration and population issues as I began to see the impacts of new trends in those areas on people’s working lives. Through studying people’s working lives I also came to realize the importance of policy as a force in shaping opportunity. One could say I like to engage in both “studying up,” that is, looking at work from the situation of the worker, and “studying down” (see Schwartzman, 1993), critically viewing the policy frameworks, both corporate and governmental, to attempt to obtain as broad as possible an understanding of the status quo and where it g l e n d a s . r o b e r t s Bottom Up, Top Down, and Sideways: Studying Corporations, Government Programs, and NPOs Glenda S. Roberts interviewing leaders of the Zentoitsu Workers’ Union, 1997. may be headed. Although I had not planned it that way, looking back on my career to date I can see how long relationships with a number of Japanese scholars and professionals in fields other than mine, especially law, economics , and labor sociology, led me to develop a kind of bifocal research perspective. I learned to focus at the microlevel, but then try to situate those microcontexts into the wider frameworks of corporate, governmental, and even global trends. I was trained as an anthropologist; when I say trained, mostly that consisted of reading vast numbers of books on theory and the history of the discipline as well as ethnographies and listening to my professors’ stories of life in “the field.” Language training was also a very important part of the graduate school experience, and without it I could never have functioned convincingly or effectively. At Cornell’s anthropology department in the early 1980s, though, there were no formal methods courses; one was to pick this up eclectically, in a context-appropriate manner, by way of the sink-or-swim method. To date I have done major research in two corporations, one a lingerie firm that I will call “Azumi,” the other a foreign multinational financial services corporation that I will call “MNF.” I have also studied two government programs: Silver Talent Centers, a program that gives senior citizens opportunities to work on a part-time basis in their communities, and programs within the Angel Plan, a policy program that is shared among several government ministries with the aim of creating a Japan (in terms of child rearing , work, education, and environment) that is more amenable to family life. In an increasingly ethnically diverse Japan, I have also studied support groups for undocumented migrants. In these last cases, I have been focused on nonprofit organizations (written as “NPO,” pronounced enu-pii-oo in Japanese), sometimes also called nongovernmental organizations (NGO, or enu-jii-oo). All these research projects share some similar challenges; each also had its peculiarities. Each is also connected to the others in interesting ways—that is, knowledge gained from each is cumulative and helps me to illuminate the diversity in working lives in Japan. In this chapter I will first discuss aspects of access to each field site, then I shall talk about methodologies I have used. Next I consider the importance of awareness of emotion as an aspect of research. From there I discuss some of my other identities, as a mother and as an “embedded researcher” who resides in “the field.” I shall close with a bit of a “cautionary tale.” Let me first turn to access. Bottom Up, Top Down, and Sideways | 295 Access My first study resulted in my doctoral dissertation and later my book, Staying on the Line, Blue-Collar Women in Contemporary Japan (Roberts 1994). I had done a lot of reading about professional housewives and their salaryman counterpart husbands, but I did not understand what life was like for women who remained at work throughout childbearing and rearing. What were their motivations to work? How did they manage home and work in a culture that so lauded the professional homemaker? I thought the most likely place to find such women would be in a blue-collar...