Doing Fieldwork in Japan

New Notes from the Underground: Doing Fieldwork without a Site

I study radical social movements and their conflicts with the state. Although some of my work has been historical, I use participant observation and interviews to study the social movements that arose from the great protest wave of the late 1960s. A fieldworker normally begins by finding a site—a community , an office, a school, a work site—and then settling down to observe and interview people in their natural setting. However, the groups I want to study do not have a regular place of business; indeed, they attract a crowd of plainclothes police whenever their members gather. In order to do fieldwork without a fixed site, I have to find the trails that lead to my invisible subjects and then work out ways to talk to them and observe their activities intermittently, in scattered locations. I have found four different strategies for tapping into the social networks of the people I want to study, each of which leads eventually to all of the others. They include entering through network portals, monitoring communications networks and publications, observing gatherings, and following individual p a t r i c i a g. s t e i n h o f f New Notes from the Underground: Doing Fieldwork without a Site Patricia G. Steinhoff (third from left, holding the orange juice) being toasted on the publication of her Japanese book, Nihon Sekigunha: Sono shakaigakuteki monogatari, 1992. cases. To emphasize how unsystematic and serendipitous the process of discovering these pathways to the underground has been, I will first narrate some of my early experiences and then take a more general, analytic look at the four strategies. Serendipitous Beginning If I had started the field research a few years earlier, I could have found my subjects on any college campus or clashing with the police in violent street demonstrations. In fact, I was in Tokyo, based right at the University of Tokyo, when the massive protest wave of the late 1960s began rising in 1967 and early 1968, but I was busy then studying the conflict between the Japanese communist movement and the state in prewar Japan, and I paid very little attention to the new protests that were beginning to swirl around me. By the time I was ready to examine how protest and its social control by the state had changed in postwar Japan, the protest wave of the late 1960s had already peaked and the people I was most interested in had been driven underground, surfacing only in occasional bursts of violence that splashed across the front pages of the newspapers. It was no longer an easy matter to find the postwar principals, let alone to observe their activities. And I was no longer in Japan. It turned out that the easiest and safest place to find my subjects was in jail, but that raised its own set of access problems. I found my first one in Israel, a Japanese college student named Okamoto Közö who had been captured after a devastating attack on Lod (now Ben Gurion) Airport in 1972. Just after his military trial had concluded, I obtained permission from the Israeli government to interview their high-profile Japanese prisoner, with their caution that he might not be willing to talk to me. My working hypothesis was that both the constitutional changes and educational reforms of the early postwar period might have given this generation of young activists better resources for standing up to the overwhelming power of the state than their prewar counterparts had possessed. I wanted to study this, as I had the prewar communist movement, by looking very closely at the experiences of individuals who had chosen to confront the state out of personal ideological commitment. Since organizations, even more than individuals, become the targets of the state, my larger goal was to understand the group that had sent him on his deadly mission. Israel is quite literally halfway around the world from Hawai‘i, so I decided New Notes from the Underground | 37 to go by way of Japan. In addition to collecting some background material, I thought that if I could make contact with Okamoto’s family, I could offer to take something from them to their son. I naively imagined walking into the interview and handing him a gift from his parents, which would set us up for a standard Japanese interview. I did not know...