Toward a new perspective for Japan studies reflecting overseas field experiences

Keywords

fieldwork abroad,anthropology back home,Japan　

Objectives

The objective of this inter-university research project is to propose new perspectives for a cultural anthropological understanding of Japanese society and culture through ethnographic experiences of conducing fieldwork abroad. Except for a period of time following WWII, cultural anthropology in Japan has mainly developed as a study of intercultural understanding through conducting fieldwork abroad. Because the act of intercultural understanding compares the other culture against one’s own, it inevitably becomes a kind of study of one’s own culture. But in most cases, this is embedded between the lines of the ethnography without the researcher being fully conscious of it. However, there is an exceptional intellectual tradition in Japanese anthropology of proposing unique hypotheses on Japanese culture by anthropologists who carried out outstanding ethnographic research abroad such as Tadao Umesao, Komei Sasaki, and Chie Nakane. Continuing this tradition, the researchers participating in this inter-university research project will leverage their extensive experience conducting ethnographic research in other countries to propose new possibilities for Japan studies stemming from fieldwork conducted abroad by making Japanese culture, which has been assumed as an implicit reference, the object of research.

Research Results

This inter-university research project discussed the possibility of understanding Japanese culture through fieldwork abroad, taking a clue from the concept of “ethnographic reading in reverse ” developed by Takami Kuwayama, a member of this project. The project revealed the following.
1) Kuwayama’s “reverse reading” is an outstanding bilateral process. If ethnography conducted abroad is the reverse of Japan studies, then researchers conducting Japan studies through fieldwork abroad implicitly compare Japan with the object of study in said fieldwork. And if Kuwayama’s approach is a reciprocating process, then whether the starting point is Japan or not is not a fundamental problem. Japanese anthropologists coming back to Japan and ethnographers going abroad may share the same horizons.
2) If the essence of researching other cultures abroad is to attempt to make others’ affairs one’s own, then when doing fieldwork within Japan through this process, one’s own affairs should conversely be made into a newly discovered object of study as the affairs of the other. Therefore, in an anthropologist’s work, the opportunities for both familiarization and defamiliarization activate simultaneously in reverse whether it is within Japan or abroad.
3) Anthropologists’ coming back home accompanies self-disclosure regarding their upbringing and background to a greater or lesser extent. To that extent, we can see that highly recursive “anthropology back home” has common ground with the dialogue with autoethnography and, based on that, the potential for further development.
4) The “anthropology back home” is not necessarily the same as native anthropology. Who is a native in a land is prescribed in the logic of demarcation of the stakeholders of said land. At its core, there is no difference between conducting fieldwork on the other abroad and conducting fieldwork on the other in Japan. Rather, it may foreground the more universal issue of the power relations between the researcher and the researched.