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Doing Fieldwork in Japan taps the expertise of North American and European specialists on the practicalities of conducting long-term research in the social sciences and cultural studies. In lively first-person accounts, they discuss their successes and failures doing fieldwork across rural and urban Japan in a wide range of settings: among religious pilgrims and adolescent consumers; on factory assembly lines and in high schools and wholesale seafood markets; with bureaucrats in charge of defense, foreign aid, and social welfare policy; inside radical political movements; among adherents of "New Religions"; inside a prosecutor's office and the JET Program for foreign English teachers; with journalists in the NHK newsroom; while researching race, ethnicity, and migration; and amidst fans and consumers of contemporary popular culture. Contributors: David M. Arase, Theodore C. Bestor, Victoria Lyon Bestor, Mary C. Brinton, John Creighton Campbell, Samuel Coleman, Suzanne Culter, Andrew Gordon, Helen Hardacre, Joy Hendry, David T. Johnson, Ellis S. Krauss, David L. McConnell, Ian Reader, Glenda S. Roberts, Joshua Hotaka Roth, Robert J. Smith, Sheila A. Smith, Patricia G. Steinhoff, Merry Isaacs White, Christine R. Yano.
Doing Fieldwork in Japan taps the expertise of North American and European specialists on the practicalities of conducting long-term research in the social sciences and cultural studies. In lively first-person accounts, they discuss their successes and failures doing fieldwork across rural and urban Japan in a wide range of settings: among religious pilgrims and adolescent consumers; on factory assembly lines and in high schools and wholesale seafood markets; with bureaucrats in charge of defense, foreign aid, and social welfare policy; inside radical political movements; among adherents of "New Religions"; inside a prosecutor's office and the JET Program for foreign English teachers; with journalists in the NHK newsroom; while researching race, ethnicity, and migration; and amidst fans and consumers of contemporary popular culture. Contributors: David M. Arase, Theodore C. Bestor, Victoria Lyon Bestor, Mary C. Brinton, John Creighton Campbell, Samuel Coleman, Suzanne Culter, Andrew Gordon, Helen Hardacre, Joy Hendry, David T. Johnson, Ellis S. Krauss, David L. McConnell, Ian Reader, Glenda S. Roberts, Joshua Hotaka Roth, Robert J. Smith, Sheila A. Smith, Patricia G. Steinhoff, Merry Isaacs White, Christine R. Yano.
Recounting her own field experiences in Japanese-American relocation centers during World War II and later in American Indian communities, Rosalie H. Wax offers advice to help the beginning field worker anticipate and confront the exigencies and accidents of fieldwork with good nature, fortitude, and common sense. Doing Fieldwork is a useful book in many respects: as a guide to participant observation and ethnographic fieldwork; as an analysis of the theoretical presuppositions and history of fieldwork; as a discussion of contemporary issues in social science research; and simply as an entertaining and dramatic story.
Studying Japan is the first comprehensive guide on qualitative methods, research designs and fieldwork in social science research on Japan. More than 70 Japan scholars from around the world provide an easy-to-read overview on qualitative methods used in research on Japan's society, politics, culture and history. The book covers the entire research process from the outset to the the first comprehensive guide on qualitative methods, research designs and fieldwork in social science research on Japan. More than 70 Japan scholars from around the world provide an easy-to-read overview on qualitative methods used in research on Japan's society, politics, culture and history. The book covers the entire research process from the outset to the completion of a thesis, a paper, or a book. The authors provide basic introductions to individual methods, discuss their experiences when applying these methods and highlight current trends in research on Japan. The book serves as a foundation for a course on qualitative research methods and can also be used as a reference for all researchers in Japanese Studies, the Social Sciences and Area Studies. It is an essential reading for students and researchers with an interest in Japan!
In this highly personal account Joy Hendry relates her experiences of fieldwork in a Japanese town and reveals a fascinating cross-section of Japanese life. She sets out on a study of politeness but a variety of unpredictable events including a volcanic eruption, a suicide and her son's involvement with the family of a poweful local gangster, begin to alter the direction of her research. The book demonstrates the role of chance in the acquisition of anthropological knowledge and demonstrates how moments of insight can be embedded in everyday activity. An Anthropologist in Japan illuminates the education system, religious beliefs, politics, the family and the neighbourhood in modern Japan.
What makes for a meaningful life? In the Japanese context, the concept of ikigai provides a clue. Translated as "that which makes one's life worth living," ikigai has also come to mean that which gives a person happiness. In Japan, where the demographic cohort of elderly citizens is growing, and new modes of living and relationships are revising traditional multigenerational family structures, the elderly experience of ikigai is considered a public health concern. Without a relevant model for meaningful and joyful older age, the increasing older population of Japan must create new cultural forms that center the ikigai that comes from old age. In Making Meaningful Lives, Iza Kavedžija provides a rich anthropological account of the lives and concerns of older Japanese women and men. Grounded in years of ethnographic fieldwork at two community centers in Osaka, Kavedžija offers an intimate narrative analysis of the existential concerns of her active, independent subjects. Alone and in groups, the elderly residents of these communities make sense of their lives and shifting ikigai with humor, conversation, and storytelling. They are as much providers as recipients of care, challenging common images of the elderly as frail and dependent, while illustrating a more complex argument: maintaining independence nevertheless requires cultivating multiple dependences on others. Making Meaningful Lives argues that an anthropology of the elderly is uniquely suited to examine the competing values of dependence and independence, sociality and isolation, intimacy and freedom, that people must balance throughout all of life's stages.
From computer games to figurines and maid cafes, men called “otaku” develop intense fan relationships with “cute girl” characters from manga, anime, and related media and material in contemporary Japan. While much of the Japanese public considers the forms of character love associated with “otaku” to be weird and perverse, the Japanese government has endeavored to incorporate “otaku” culture into its branding of “Cool Japan.” In Otaku and the Struggle for Imagination in Japan, Patrick W. Galbraith explores the conflicting meanings of “otaku” culture and its significance to Japanese popular culture, masculinity, and the nation. Tracing the history of “otaku” and “cute girl” characters from their origins in the 1970s to his recent fieldwork in Akihabara, Tokyo (“the Holy Land of Otaku”), Galbraith contends that the discourse surrounding “otaku” reveals tensions around contested notions of gender, sexuality, and ways of imagining the nation that extend far beyond Japan. At the same time, in their relationships with characters and one another, “otaku” are imagining and creating alternative social worlds.
How do couples build intimacy in an era that valorizes independence and self-responsibility? How can a man be a good husband when full-time jobs are scarce? How can unmarried women find fulfillment and recognition outside of normative relationships? How can a person express their sexuality when there is no terminology that feels right? In contemporary Japan, broad social transformations are reflected and refracted in changing intimate relationships. As the Japanese population ages, the low birth rate shrinks the population, and decades of recession radically restructure labor markets, Japanese intimate relationships, norms, and ideals are concurrently shifting. This volume explores a broad range of intimate practices in Japan in the first decades of the 2000s to trace how social change is becoming manifest through deeply personal choices. From young people making decisions about birth control to spouses struggling to connect with each other, parents worrying about stigma faced by their adopted children, and queer people creating new terms to express their identifications, Japanese intimacies are commanding a surprising amount of attention, both within and beyond Japan. With ethnographic analysis focused on how intimacy is imagined, enacted, and discussed, the volume's chapters offer rich and complex portraits of how people balance personal desires with feasible possibilities and shifting social norms. Intimate Japan will appeal to scholars and students in anthropology and Japanese or Asian studies, particularly those focusing on gender, kinship, sexuality, and labor policy. The book will also be of interest to researchers across social science subject areas, including sociology, political science, and psychology.
This is the only book of its kind - written by an anthropologist who spent twelve months doing fieldwork in a major Tokyo agency and who has spent the past 30 years studying and living in Japan. By examining the production of advertising, this book turns other semiotics, media and cultural studies theories on their heads. By analysing the social structure of a modern media organization from the inside, it makes anthropology relevant and intellectually stimulating. By treating the Japanese as a more-or-less normal and rational people, it explodes the usual myths of exotic Japan and steps boldly into a global arena that embraces 'east' and 'west' in a new theory of values.
Drawing on ethnographic data gathered from fieldwork spanning a 15-year period, this book offers new insights into understanding the lives and experiences of women managers in Japan. Based on empirical case studies, it explores the ways in which professional women in Tokyo creatively mobilize their friendships as a strategic site for mitigating the disappointments in their working lives, and conceptualizing new understandings of independence and equality. It analyses their use of language, time, space and money to negotiate new identities in an increasingly flexible work environment. In examining the challenges and opportunities faced by these corporate workers, this book also extends anthropological debates about the changing meaning and importance of work for women, as well as their relationship with money and separation from the realm of domesticity. As a study of women's lives in and out of the workplace in Japan, this book will be of great interest to students and scholars of Japanese studies, Japanese culture and society, anthropology, sociology, gender and women's studies.