Studying Japan Handbook of Research Designs, Fieldwork and Methods

Nora Kottmann | Cornelia Reiher [eds.
Studying Japan
Handbook of Research Designs,
Fieldwork and Methods
Nora Kottmann | Cornelia Reiher [eds.]
Studying Japan
Handbook of Research Designs,
Fieldwork and Methods
BUT_Kottmann_5085-6.indd 3 16.11.20 13:18

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Kottmann, Nora | Reiher, Cornelia
Studying Japan
Handbook of Research Designs, Fieldwork and Methods
Nora Kottmann | Cornelia Reiher (eds.)
501 pp.
Includes bibliographic references and index.
ISBN 978-3-8487-5085-6 (Print)
978-3-8452-9287-8 (ePDF)
Onlineversion
Nomos eLibrary
1st Edition 2020

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Table of contents
List of figures .............................................................................................. 11
List of tables ................................................................................................ 12
Foreword
Franz Waldenberger ............................................................................... 13
Ilse Lenz .............................................................................................. 14
Acknowledgements ....................................................................................... 17
Introduction: Studying Japan ........................................................................... 19
Nora Kottmann and Cornelia Reiher
Chapter 1 How to begin research: The diversity of Japanese Studies ....................... 29

Roger Goodman
1.1 Positioning one’s own research in Japanese Studies: Between Area Studies and
discipline ............................................................................................ 40
Verena Blechinger-Talcott
1.2 Let the field be your guide ....................................................................... 43

Daniel P. Aldrich
1.3 Studying marriage in Japan: A social anthropological approach ....................... 47

Joy Hendry
Further reading ..................................................................................... 51
References ........................................................................................... 51
Chapter 2 How to ask: Research questions ....................................................... 53

Gabriele Vogt
2.1 Your research questions may change and that is ok ....................................... 65

Nicolas Sternsdorff-Cisterna
2.2 Studying Japanese political behaviour and institutions ................................... 68

Kenneth Mori McElwain
2.3 Capturing social change in Japan .............................................................. 72

David Chiavacci
Further reading ..................................................................................... 76
References ........................................................................................... 76
Chapter 3 How to organise research: Research designs ........................................ 78

Kaori Okano
3.1 Developing a comparative study: Single women in Hong Kong, Tokyo and
Shanghai ............................................................................................. 88
Lynne Y. Nakano
5
Table of contents
3.2 Contained serendipity as fieldwork in Japan: Studying Chinese people in Japan ... 91
Jamie Coates
3.3 The universe of cases: Agricultural cooperatives in Japan as a case study ........... 95
Kay Shimizu
Further reading ..................................................................................... 99
References ........................................................................................... 99
Chapter 4 How to identify relevant scholarly debates: Reviewing the literature ......... 102
Urs Matthias Zachmann
4.1 Looking for sources in all the right places ................................................... 117
Patricia L. Maclachlan
4.2 Ambiguity and blurred boundaries: Contextualising and evaluating heterogeneous

sources ............................................................................................... 121
Sonja Ganseforth
4.3 Doing migration research in Japan: The roles of scholarly literature .................. 125
Gracia Liu-Farrer
Further reading ..................................................................................... 130
References ........................................................................................... 130
Chapter 5 How to collect data: An introduction to qualitative Social Science

methods ...................................................................................... 132
Akiko Yoshida
5.1 Participant observation and interviews: Going with the flow and dipping in and
out .................................................................................................... 142
Emma E. Cook
5.2 Transnational research in Japan Studies—an oxymoron? Studying cross-border

labour mobility in globalising Japanese production organisations ..................... 146
Karen Shire
5.3 ‘Bullseye view on happiness’: A qualitative interview survey method .................. 151
Barbara Holthus and Wolfram Manzenreiter
Further reading ..................................................................................... 155
References ........................................................................................... 155
Chapter 6 How to do fieldwork: Studying Japan in and outside of Japan ................. 157
Levi McLaughlin
6.1 The cosmology of fieldwork: Relationship building, theoretical engagement and

knowledge production in Japan Anthropology ............................................. 169
Nana Okura Gagné
6
Table of contents
6.2 A mobilities approach to ‘Japan’ fieldwork .................................................. 173

James Farrer
6.3 Building arguments on national policies from everyday observations ................. 177
Hanno Jentzsch
Further reading ..................................................................................... 181
References ........................................................................................... 181
Chapter 7 How to interview people: Qualitative interviews .................................. 184

7.1 The empire of interviews: Asking my way through Japan ............................... 196
Christoph Brumann
7.2 The art of interviewing: A Japanese perspective ............................................ 200

Tomiko Yamaguchi
7.3 Talking through difficult topics ................................................................ 204

Allison Alexy
Further reading ..................................................................................... 208
References ........................................................................................... 208
Chapter 8 How to observe people and their environment: Participant observation ..... 211
Christian Tagsold and Katrin Ullmann
8.1 Of serendipities, success and failure and insider/outsider status in participant

observation ......................................................................................... 223
Susanne Klien
8.2 Doing and writing affective ethnography ..................................................... 227

Akiko Takeyama
8.3 Reflections on fieldwork in post-bubble Japan: Gender, work and urban space .... 231
Swee-Lin Ho
Further reading ..................................................................................... 235
References ........................................................................................... 235
Chapter 9 How to access written and visual sources: Archives, libraries and
databases .................................................................................... 238
Theresia Berenike Peucker, Katja Schmidtpott and Cosima Wagner
9.1 Clever approaches to tricky sources: How to extract information from business
archives and war memorials .................................................................... 248
Katja Schmidtpott and Tino Schölz
9.2 Writing transnational history through archival sources .................................. 252

Sheldon Garon
7
Table of contents
9.3 Accessing quantitative data for qualitative research: White Papers, official
statistics and micro datasets .................................................................... 256
Shinichi Aizawa and Daisuke Watanabe
Further reading ..................................................................................... 261
References ........................................................................................... 261
Chapter 10 How to combine methods: Mixed methods designs .............................. 264

Carola Hommerich and Nora Kottmann
10.1 Reflections on multi-method research ......................................................... 283

Robert J. Pekkanen and Saadia M. Pekkanen
10.2 Texts, voices and numbers: Using mixed methods to sketch social phenomena .... 287
Laura Dales
10.3 Examining facts from different angles: The case of the deregulation of
employment relations in Japan ................................................................. 292
Jun Imai
Further reading ..................................................................................... 297
References ........................................................................................... 297
Chapter 11 How to analyse data: An introduction to methods of data analysis in

qualitative Social Science research ..................................................... 300
David Chiavacci
11.1 Negotiating the ethics of gathering research data in a subcultural context .......... 310
Katharina Hülsmann
11.2 Researching sex and the sexuality of Japanese teenagers: The intricacies of
condom use ......................................................................................... 313
Genaro Castro-Vázquez
11.3 Studying economic discourse ................................................................... 317

Markus Heckel
Further reading ..................................................................................... 321
References ........................................................................................... 321
Chapter 12 How to make sense of data: Coding and theorising ............................... 323
Caitlin Meagher
12.1 Cresting the wave of data ....................................................................... 335

Nancy Rosenberger
12.2 Lost in translation? Grounded theory and developing theoretical concepts .......... 339
Celia Spoden
12.3 Coding: Mapping the mountains of ethnographic post-disaster data ................. 343
Julia Gerster
8
Table of contents
Further reading ..................................................................................... 347

References ........................................................................................... 347
Chapter 13 How to systematise texts: Qualitative content and frame analysis ............. 349
Celeste L. Arrington
13.1 Qualitative content analysis: A systematic way of handling qualitative data and
its challenges ........................................................................................ 363
Anna Wiemann
13.2 Analysis of biographical interviews in a transcultural research process ............... 367

Emi Kinoshita
13.3 Qualitative content analysis and the study of Japan’s foreign policy .................. 371
Kai Schulze
Further reading ..................................................................................... 375
References ........................................................................................... 375
Chapter 14 How to understand discourse: Qualitative discourse analysis .................. 377

Andreas Eder-Ramsauer and Cornelia Reiher
14.1 Media buzzwords as a source of discourse analysis: The discourse on Japan’s

herbivore men ....................................................................................... 389
Annette Schad-Seifert
14.2 Analysing affect, emotion and feelings in fieldwork on Japan .......................... 393
Daniel White
14.3 From buzzwords to discourse to Japanese politics ......................................... 397

Steffen Heinrich
Further reading ..................................................................................... 402
References ........................................................................................... 402
Chapter 15 How to finish: Writing in a stressful world ......................................... 405

Chris McMorran
15.1 Training your ‘writing muscle’: Writing constantly and theoretically ................. 414
Aya H. Kimura
15.2 Writing stories ...................................................................................... 418

Christian Tagsold
15.3 Writing about Japan .............................................................................. 422

Richard J. Samuels
Further reading ..................................................................................... 426
References ........................................................................................... 426
9
Table of contents
Chapter 16 How to conduct reliable and fair research: Good research practice ........... 428
Cornelia Reiher and Cosima Wagner
16.1 Fairness in research and publishing: The balancing act of cultural translation ...... 442
Isaac Gagné
16.2 Digital oral narrative research in Japan: An engaged approach ........................ 446
David H. Slater, Robin O’Day, Flavia Fulco and Noor Albazerbashi
16.3 Writing for publication: Eight helpful hints ................................................. 450

Christopher Gerteis
Further reading ..................................................................................... 452
References ........................................................................................... 452
Chapter 17 How to present findings: Presenting and publishing .............................. 455

James Farrer and Gracia Liu-Farrer
17.1 Finding an audience: Presenting and publishing in Japanese Studies ................... 466
Scott North
17.2 Ethnographic film and fieldwork on active ageing in rural Japan ...................... 470
Isabelle Prochaska-Meyer
17.3 Weird and wonderful: Popularising your research on Japan ............................ 474
Brigitte Steger
Further reading ..................................................................................... 478
References ........................................................................................... 478
Notes on contributors .................................................................................... 480
Index ......................................................................................................... 493
10
List of figures
Figure 1.1: Heuristic overview of sociological theory 33
Figure 1.2: Heuristic model of the relationship between structuralist and interpre-
tative theories and the methods they use 34
Figure 1.3: Some heuristic dichotomies for thinking about research in Area Studies 36
Figure 5.1: Bullseye chart in practice, three examples 154
Figure 10.1: Three core mixed methods designs 269
Figure 14.1: Three concepts related to discourse 379
Figure 14.2: Key steps in discourse analysis 381
Figure 14.3: Questions in Social Science discourse research 383
Figure 14.4: An overview of Critical Discourse Analysis 384
11
List of tables
Table 5.1: What to consider in choosing data collection methods 138
Table 9.1: List of main White Papers in Japan 257
Table 12.1: The process of coding 324
Table 12.2: Elicited and extant text 327
12
Foreword
Waldenberger
Franz
‘Anything goes, as long as it is relevant and convincing.’ This guidance by my supervisor
sounded like an invitation to confidently rely on my curiosity and creativity when doing re-
search for my PhD back in the late 1980s. But I soon learned to translate the statement into
‘Anything goes, as long as it complies with the rules.’ The rules set by the academic community
defined what was relevant and convincing. Methods form an integral part of this. They are the
tools and rules of the trade of scholars: as tools they enhance our abilities to explore, test and
verify, as rules they constrain what is acceptable.
German Japanese Studies mostly differs from the more traditional Japanology with regard to
its focus on subjects beyond culture, literature and language. When the new academic commu-
nity started to establish itself at German-speaking universities in the 1980s, it had no genuine
methodology. Instead it borrowed from the so-called Methodenfächer (method subjects) like
Sociology, Political Science or Economics. But how could methods developed by disciplines
that favour theories which are abstract from time and space be usefully applied to academic
enquiry interested in phenomena that are defined by specific time-space constellations, like the
family in post-war Japan or Japanese firms in the 1990s?
Anthropology provides a solution as it offers a methodology which explicitly honours time-
space contingencies, and some of the best research on Japan, like Ronald Dore’s classic British
factory—Japanese factory (1973), has been achieved by applying anthropological methods.
However, not all issues in the realm of management, the economy, politics and society lend
themselves to anthropological methods. So, scholars in the field of Japanese Studies continue
to be confronted with the tension between research interests about phenomena specific to
Japan and research methods not primarily concerned with specifics.
The handbook Studying Japan does not resolve this tension, but it does provide a pragmatic
way of coping with it. And it does so in a comprehensive and systematic manner. By making
the various methods of the Social Sciences accessible and by offering guidance on how to ap-
ply these tools and rules during the different stages of a research project, this handbook will
prove highly valuable for those who study, teach and do research on Japan. Given its pluralis-
tic approach, the handbook does not proclaim that there is only one right way to conduct re-
search. It has no intention of being the Bible of Japanese Studies, but it certainly has the poten-
tial to become The book of recipes on how to make one’s research both relevant and convinc-
ing.
The editors deserve both thanks and respect for taking up the challenge of embarking on this
project as well as for what they already accomplished with the conference in 2019 and now
with the timely publication of this handbook. The German Institute for Japanese Studies (DIJ)
in Tokyo is very happy and proud to have been part of this endeavour.
Franz Waldenberger
Director, German Institute for Japanese Studies
Tokyo, July 2020
13
Intercultural research, methodology and the emerging space of
Lenz
Ilse
transnational knowledge
When people from other corners of the world do qualitative research on Japanese contexts,
they engage in an intercultural enterprise. I am not speaking of closed national cultures in
terms of methodological nationalism. In this globalising world, the mass media, personal trav-
el and capitalism have contributed to opening up and interlinking cultures: people in many
places watch anime on the Internet, eat sushi of diverse quality and wear trousers produced by
low-paid female workers from the Global South. But this has not resulted in a globalised, flat-
tened world culture. Rather, cultures have been and are thriving as contradictory complex con-
figurations of meaning and practices, and they blend elements from what is seen as home or
far away.
In this sense, those not socialised in the Japanese context and language start on an intercultur-
al tour when they decide to do research on social or cultural issues focusing on Japan. This
approach of intercultural interaction, communication and interpretation can bring new per-
spectives to the study of Japan, which of course is already comprehensively covered by
Japanese researchers. This book is a detailed, diverse and extremely useful travel guide and
companion on the road to reflexive and successful intercultural research in and on Japan. I
want to congratulate the editors for this constructive and timely collection. They belong to the
middle generation of researchers and thus show rich expertise in identifying and handling the
various challenges of qualitative research on Japan. Like other pioneers in Germany, I had to
find my way through the confusion, traps and thickets on this road mainly on my own with
some support from advisors in Japan and elsewhere, when researching gender in industrialisa-
tion and later in industrial computerisation in Japan from the 1970s. Therefore, I find it ex-
tremely gratifying that younger generations can refer to this compendium on the why, how
and where of doing research in Japan.
Let me go on with the why, how and where: intercultural and transcultural research is an ur-
gent issue for Cultural and Social Sciences in globalisation (Gerharz 2021; Rosenthal 2018).
However, it is charged with tensions which are also present in the national context but less vis-
ible. Let me touch on some basic issues while drawing on the rich suggestions from the articles
in this volume.
The first is the relationship between the researcher and the researched subjects: the main aim
of qualitative research is to bring to light and to interpret how actors as subjects see and con-
struct sociocultural contexts and themselves (Rosenthal 2018). As researchers often used to see
themselves as the main subjects of their projects, this creates tensions which have been debated
as the representation problem or crisis in intercultural research (Gerharz 2021). Researchers
and actors enter interactions in qualitative research as a process of cocreation (see Bruman,
Ch. 7.1). As many contributors highlight in this handbook, (self-)reflexivity is an indispensable
compass or everyday eyeglasses for researchers on the intercultural research road. They need
to reflect on their own interest in the research issue and on the interaction, including its ethical
and power dimensions. How am I ‘pre-formed’ and pre-informed by my social position ac-
14
Foreword
cording to class, gender, minority/majority status or world region? Researching about gender
in education, will I ask only women or also men or queer people? And will I interview migrant
men and women as well as ‘ethnic Japanese’? So researchers have to reflect on whom they in-
clude or exclude through their concepts (e.g. of gender) and selection of interview partners.
This also applies to interpretation: Will I accept the fact that mothers make lunchboxes (bentō)
for school children as something natural (as some interviewed mothers might say) or will I
look for contradictions and ambivalences in the interview texts? Researchers do not have to
belong to the group they do research on; the contributions in this volume rather suggest that
crossing borders of age, gender or nationality may add value to both the interviewer and the
interviewed. But they will have to reflect on their own position, experiences and potential
power.
The second issue are the hermeneutic dynamics in qualitative cocreated research or how to cre-
ate and interpret meanings in an intercultural process. The first obvious barrier is the Japanese
language, which in my view can be only overcome by using it. Expert interviews with interna-
tional actors may be done in English or German. But for interpretative qualitative research this
may not work. Having tried it at the request of my interview partners, I found that at least the
semantics are different in the end and thus qualitative substance may suffer. Also, many
Japanese appreciate the outside researcher taking the trouble to learn their language, with the
result that the interview situation becomes more like an everyday interaction.
But reflexivity is also needed in intercultural qualitative research as a continuous exchange

process of meaning between cultures or intercultural hermeneutical dialectics. In which ways
can researchers craft their theoretical and empirical framework so that it does not follow Eu-
rocentric (or ‘Nipponcentric’) codes and is open to articulation and interpretation by the ac-
tors? Asking why mothers make a bentō-box for schoolchildren makes sense in Japan but not
so much in Germany, and may also involve new stereotyping. Doing research on otaku, would
one translate the term and look for English equivalents or start from the fact that it is now an
international term explained in various national Wikipedias? Referring to these examples, I
want to argue that intercultural hermeneutical dialectics are not simply a matter of translation
but rather of reflecting the ongoing cocreation of meanings between researchers and actors/
research subjects. Doing intercultural qualitative research in Japan implies that the actors ar-
ticulate their meanings and constructions and have an open space for this. The researchers will
have to understand these meanings and then go beyond them in their own interpretation,
while keeping the trust of their interview partners.
Intercultural qualitative research in this sense is evolving in many world regions. Thus, new
spaces of transnational knowledge creation are emerging (Gerharz 2021) and Area Studies like
Japanese Studies can play a key role in this. Let me raise some questions to conclude: Will
these spaces still be centred on Japanese Studies outside Japan and research inside Japan? Or
will mainstream Cultural or Social Sciences in the ‘West’ overcome their tendency towards ex-
oticising or singularising Japan and (finally) join in creating these spaces, thus opening them-
selves up to comparative and reflexive universal research (Lenz 2013)? With more intercultural
research covering shared problems, will the circulation of knowledge still be a one-way road
15
Foreword
between ‘the West’ and Japan or become a truly transnational exchange (see, for example,
Ochiai 2012–)? And how will the emerging transnational academic spaces recognise and nego-
tiate the deep inequalities in the postcolonial world of academia?
Ilse Lenz
Professor Emerita of Sociology, Ruhr-Universität Bochum
Berlin, July 2020
References
Gerharz, Eva (2021): Postkoloniale Ethnographie und Indigenous Research Methodology. In: Poferl, An-
gelika/Schroer, Norbert (eds.): Soziologische Ethnographie. Wiesbaden: Springer.
Lenz, Ilse (2013): Differences of humanity from the perspective of gender research. In: Rüsen, Jörn (ed.)
(2013): Approaching humankind: Towards an intercultural humanism. Göttingen: V&R unipress, pp.
185–200.
Ochiai, Emiko (ed.) (2012–): The intimate and the public in Asian and global perspectives. https://brill.co
m/view/serial/IPAP, [Accessed 27 August 2020].
Rosenthal, Gabriele (2018): Interpretive social research: An introduction. Göttingen: Göttingen University
Press.
16
Acknowledgements
Research can’t be done alone and builds on other people’s support, on critical and oftentimes
controversial discussions, on mutual help and the exchange of resources and knowledge. All of
the above apply to this handbook. Editing a book across continents and coordinating more
than seventy authors requires time, logistics and help from others. We could not have put to-
gether this handbook without the close collaboration, effort, support, trust, knowledge and
work of numerous people around the world.
From the very beginning, we received wholehearted support for this project from Sandra Frey
and Alexander Hutzel and their colleagues at Nomos publishing. The same is true for our col-
leagues at Freie Universität Berlin (FUB), the German Institute of Japanese Studies (DIJ) and
the Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf (HHU). The editors would particularly like to thank
Verena Blechinger-Talcott, Susanne Brucksch, Lorenz Denninger, Andreas Eder-Ramsauer,
Isaac Gagné, Sonja Ganseforth, Barbara Geilhorn, Markus Heckel, Steffen Heinrich, Barbara
Holthus, Katharina Hülsmann, Hanno Jentzsch, Agnes Laba, Elena Meyer-Clement, Hannes
Mosler, Theresia Peucker, Richard Samuels, Annette Schad-Seifert, Elisabeth Scherer, Kai
Schulze, Christian Tagsold, Julia Trinkert, Katrin Ullmann, Franz Waldenberger, Corey Wal-
lace and Matthias Zachmann for their contributions, their valuable feedback, their trust
and/or for providing overall support. Both editors are also greatly indebted to their home insti-
tutions, Cornelia to FUB, Nora to the DIJ. We would like to express our sincerest thanks to
Cosima Wagner who has been a source of motivation throughout the process that finally led
to the completion of this handbook. She will also take on the task of creating a webpage to
digitally enhance this book.
A lot of inspiration emerged from discussing methods and the handbook with our students.
We thank all students who participated in our method courses at FUB, HHU and Musashi
University. FUB students’ suggestions for the structure and content of this handbook were pre-
sented by Thora Singer and Egor Skripkin to the chapter authors during the conference ‘Study-
ing Japan: The impact of transnationalisation and technological innovation on methods, field-
work and research ethics’ in July 2019 in Berlin. At the same conference, Susanne Auerbach,
Andreas Eder-Ramsauer and Jan Niggemeier presented PhD students’ expectations of what a
method handbook for the study of Japan should look like. They inspired many authors to
think more about their audience and to reconsider the structure of their chapters.
We are greatly indebted to Karin Klose, Brigitte Peek and Thomas Weitner at FUB and
Joachim Röhr at the DIJ for their administrative support of the conference. We also thank An-
dreas Steinhöfel for the wonderful design of the poster and the flyer. Without the commitment
and great help by FUB’s student assistants Antonya Schmidt, Maria Natalia Seidel-Hirose, Ju-
lia Süße and Toby Wolf and DIJ interns Isabel Schreiber and Marie Ulrich the conference
would not have been possible. We also thank the German Research Foundation (DFG), the
DIJ, FUB’s Ernst Reuter Society and the Gender Equality Fund at the Department of History
and Cultural Studies at FUB for their financial support.
After the conference, we were tasked with writing our own chapters, collecting the contribu-
tions, editing and formatting manuscripts. For their invaluable help during this process, we
cannot thank Marie Ulrich and Isabel Schreiber enough. We are extremely happy and grateful
that they both agreed to keep on working with us after their internships to finish the project
17
Acknowledgements
together. We thank both of them for formatting all chapters and reference lists, organising all
formal matters and index terms and for helping with the final proofs. Of course, we would
also like to thank the DIJ for paying them. We are grateful to Furkan Kemik, student assistant
at FUB, for his help with creating the handbook’s index and formatting the notes on contribu-
tors. Without language support from native English speakers and their copy-editing skills, this
handbook would have been less accessible to its readers, thus, we very much thank Martyn
Ford, Hilary Monihan and Katrina Walsh for their great work. Last but not least, we thank
Robin Weichert who kindly provided the wonderful cover picture.
Most of all we thank the authors who contributed to this book, who believed in the project
and who shared their knowledge and expertise with us. Their trust and overwhelming positive
and encouraging feedback was especially valuable when we were—at times—discouraged by
the sheer amount of work and the multiple tasks related to this project. Our families and
friends were of invaluable aid and we would also like to thank them for listening to us when
we were facing problems, for helping us to think about other (more enjoyable) things and for
celebrating (interim) successes with us. With the finished manuscript in our hands we are de-
lighted to present this handbook to the Japan(ese) Studies community and hope that readers
find it useful.

Berlin and Tokyo, August 2020
18
Introduction: Studying Japan
1. Introduction
The handbook Studying Japan emerged—just like any good research project does—from a
puzzle. In 2016, we were both teaching in Japanese Studies programmes at German universi-
ties where methodological training is often squeezed into the curricula here and there, but gen-
erally not taught in a systematic manner. In our courses, we were often confronted with ques-
tions from students such as ‘How do I start my research?’, ‘Which methods suit which re-
search questions and designs?’, ‘How should I conduct my research?’ or ‘What should I do
with my data?’ This made us wonder how we could teach Social Science research methods to
students who want to conduct research in or on Japan in a more systematic way. Lacking a
comprehensive handbook on the methods of Social Science research on Japan that we or our
students could use in class, we started to think about what such a handbook could and should
look like and eventually decided to create one ourselves. Now, more than four years later and
after countless discussions, millions of Skype calls, two conferences and numerous encounters
with our authors, we are very proud to write this introduction to just such a handbook.
For us, this handbook is a milestone that began with (still ongoing) discussions on methodolo-
gy in Japan(ese) Studies over the course of sharing our experiences teaching research methods
to Japanese Studies students at Freie Universität Berlin and Heinrich Heine University Düssel-
dorf. From these conversations emerged a joint teaching project of (method) courses focusing
on Japanese foodscapes in Berlin and Düsseldorf, which resulted in a conference in Berlin in
2017 where students from both universities presented their projects and discussed method ed-
ucation with scholars from Berlin, Düsseldorf and Japan (Reiher 2018a). Around that time,
we first talked about the idea of creating a method handbook for a Japanese Studies audience,
and in early 2018 we wrote a book proposal and began to recruit authors. From the very start
we were (and still are) overwhelmed by the positive feedback from colleagues and everybody
else we talked to about this project. We soon realised that there was so much material to dis-
cuss with regard to methodological challenges and the method handbook that we decided to
invite the authors of each chapter to Berlin for a conference in the summer of 2019. Discus-
sions with the authors substantially shaped some of the common threads that run through al-
most all chapters of this book: 1. What is specific to research on and in Japan? 2. How do
transnational entanglements change the study of Japan? 3. How do technological innovations
enable and challenge research on Japan? and 4. What are the ethical implications when study-
ing Japan? This handbook is a collaborative effort, and we are grateful to everyone who sup-
ported it.
19
2. Why this handbook and why now?
Why is a handbook of qualitative Social Science research methods for the study of Japan nec-
essary at all, and particularly at this point in time? There are wonderful books on Social Sci-
ence methods, fieldwork and research designs on the market and for Japan(ese) Studies, the
volume Doing fieldwork in Japan, edited by Theodore Bestor, Patricia Steinhoff and Victoria
Lyon-Bestor (2003), is certainly the most influential.1 It is widely used by those who plan to or
are already conducting fieldwork in Japan. Some other edited volumes or special journal issues
have addressed issues related to fieldwork and to ethnography, in particular, in Japan such as
reflexivity, responsibility and fieldwork ethics (Alexy/Cook 2019; Furukawa 2007; Hendry/
Wong 2009; Linhart et al. 1994; Reiher 2018b; Robertson 2007). Very few discuss data analy-
sis (Kobayashi 2010; Shimada 2008). Several individual contributions primarily address field-
work, fieldwork ethics and ethnography in Japan (Aldrich 2009; Gill 2014; Hendry 2015;
McLaughlin 2010; Numazaki 2012; Yamashita 2012). Yet, despite the valuable publications
this handbook builds on and is indebted to, there is, at least to our knowledge, no comprehen-
sive and coherent handbook on the study of Japan that addresses the whole research process
from the first idea to the publication of findings, explains and discusses the most common
methods in Social Science research in and on Japan in a ‘how-to’ manner and can be used by
students, researchers and teachers alike. Therefore, one motivation for putting this handbook
together is to offer a starting point for learning and teaching methods as well as research de-
signs in a Japanese Studies context and beyond.
In addition to this relatively pragmatic reason, there are, however, three more reasons why we
consider this handbook necessary and timely. First, there is an increasing demand for systemat-
ic and transparent research practices in Japanese and Area Studies communities against the
backdrop of the increasing marginalisation of Area Studies in academia, particularly in Europe
(Basedau/Köllner 2007; Ben-Ari 2020).2 Secondly, the transnationalisation of Japanese Studies
as a research field, of Japan as its research subject and of research teams requires researchers
to rethink traditional national and disciplinary boundaries. Thirdly, technological innovations
provide new and exciting opportunities for research, yet also pose various challenges, includ-
ing in regard to ethical questions. This handbook is our attempt to address and discuss these
and further developments with scholars around the world and contribute to respective
methodological discussions. We believe that it is important to strengthen international and in-
terdisciplinary exchange and discussion about how students and scholars of Japan can best
conduct research in a transparent and ethical way and produce reliable, comparable and com-
prehensive research results that scholars from Area Studies and Social Science disciplines alike
can relate to.
1 There are many Social Science method books focusing on a range of topics. Thus, in this handbook’s individual
chapters, the authors give recommendations and introduce handbooks on the respective topics. Of course, there is
also a great variety of method books in Japanese (see, for example, Kishi et al. 2016). We would also like to men-
tion two edited volumes that explicitly address teaching in/for Japan(ese) Studies in a Japanese and a global con-
text, namely Gaitanidis et al. (2020) and Shamoon/McMorran (2016).
2 For an ongoing, interactive discussion on the topic, see Curtis (2020). For an early contribution on the position-
ing of Japanology in the Social Sciences in a German context, see Lenz (1996) and Seifert (1994).
20
Introduction
3. What this handbook is about
Studying Japan mainly targets (PhD) students and researchers who plan to draw on qualitative
Social Science methods to conduct research on Japan. It also offers a handy tool for colleagues
who teach courses on fieldwork, research designs and methods or want to address specific
methodological issues in class in order to prepare their students to conduct their own research
projects and write theses. This handbook is about qualitative Social Science research on Japan,
focusing on the entire research process that begins with a vague interest in a research topic,
which is then developed into a research question and eventually leads to findings presented in
a thesis, an article or a book. Since the study of Japan is an interdisciplinary field, research
focusing on Japan’s society, politics, culture, economy and history draws on a wide variety of
theories and methods from various disciplines. Therefore, throughout this handbook the au-
thors present insights from Sociology, Political Science, Anthropology and History, but also
address several recurring themes and challenges.
One challenge for both Japanese Studies and Area Studies scholars has been the translation of
methods developed in other disciplines (mostly in the West) to specific (often non-Western)
field sites and research subjects. One could argue that these translation processes are part of
every research project, where methods have to be adjusted to a specific field site or a re-
searcher’s skills or resources. However, there are some issues that are particular to the study of
Japan in and outside the country. The most obvious is language. Translation of Japanese
sources and data as well as cultural norms is the task of every Japan researcher, regardless of
their nationality. Therefore, it is important to be reflexive regarding one’s own positionality,
the reciprocity of trust-relations (Takeda 2013), the ways sensitive issues are handled or con-
ventions for encounters in the field.
At the same time, an increasing focus on transnational entanglements, mobilities and processes
(not only) in Japan-related research challenges traditional national and disciplinary boundaries
(Soysal 2016). This implies that research on Japan is not only carried out in Japan anymore
(Adachi 2006; Aoyama 2015; Kottmann 2020). It also means that it is important to contextu-
alise findings on Japan in a global context, no matter if a researcher studies Japan’s transna-
tional entanglements or compares Japan with other countries.3 In addition, an increasing focus
on the transnationalisation of cultural, social and political phenomena in and beyond Japan
involves several methodological challenges. For example, researchers may need to visit multi-
ple sites or be able to conduct multilingual case studies within Japan (Arrington 2016; Avenell
2015; Farrer 2015). Furthermore, the research enterprise itself has become more transnational.
In addition to cooperation across the boundaries of individual Area Studies (Middell 2018),
research teams are increasingly international and interdisciplinary. This provides new opportu-
nities, but also poses questions with regard to languages, institutional differences or divergent
ethical requirements.
Transnational collaboration is often enabled through recent technological innovations ranging

from online communication tools to software for data analysis or data repositories. Techno-
logical innovations provide new tools for getting in touch with informants via social media,
3 For an ongoing discussion on comparisons in Japan(ese) Studies and Area Studies, see Sidaway/Waldenberger
(2020).
21
accessing data online, making large sets of data available for other researchers or a public au-
dience or coordinating an international research team. In fact, this very handbook would not
have been possible without tools for online communication and for storing data online! But
these new technologies also pose challenges to researchers studying Japan and require them to
develop new strategies for research. They create new types of reciprocity and demand atten-
tion is paid to the impact of social media in the whole research process online and offline
(Baker 2013; Danley 2018; Gerster 2018; Postill/Pink 2012).
Not only do translation processes have (new) ethical implications, but so does the transnation-
alisation of Japan research and technological innovations. In fact, ethical issues are of high rel-
evance during the whole research process, ranging from the originality of research questions to
ensuring fairness in publishing. While these issues pop up in almost all chapters, we devote a
separate chapter to the topic to stress the importance of good research practices, academic in-
tegrity and research ethics, such as properly quoting sources, ensuring fairness and respect to
research participants and colleagues, and protecting the privacy of interviewees.
4. Editorial decisions
This handbook offers a large number of contributions on a variety of topics, but we are aware
that we cannot cover everything there is to say about methods and methodology in the study
of Japan. Thus, we had to make a number of decisions to limit this handbook’s scope, includ-
ing the level of detail in the chapters, author selection and the format of the handbook. One
choice we made was to focus on qualitative methods because these are the methods we are
most familiar with and which our students are most likely to use. Another was to only write
short overviews for each topic in the main chapters, although much more could have been said
about each of them. To account for this, we provide further reading for those who would like
to know more about the specific topics as well as to connect the literature on research design,
fieldwork and methods from the Social Science disciplines with the study of Japan.
Selecting contributing authors for the handbook was a more difficult process. We planned the
handbook as an international collaborative project and sought to balance contributions with
regard to disciplines, nationality, gender and career level, but because of our own academic
background and the context from which this handbook emerged, many of the handbook’s au-
thors are food, family and gender scholars, and a significant number were educated and/or
work in Germany. Nonetheless, we offer interdisciplinary perspectives on each topic, and the
handbook unites contributions by anthropologists, political scientists, sociologists and (fewer)
historians. In short, the more than 70 selected authors whose contributions are featured in this
handbook do not represent the full spectrum of Social Science research on Japan, but rather
this selection reflects our own positionality in the field. We are, of course, aware that there are
many more wonderful Japan scholars in the world!
Finally, and despite a variety of technological innovations, we decided to publish this hand-
book as a physical, and therefore static, book that might be quickly partly outdated, especially
the information on social media, websites and technological tools. Why did we choose a static
format like a printed book? The short answer is: we love books and we are sure that at least
22
Introduction
some information will remain pertinent. We imagine students and researchers carrying this
handbook to Japan and back and having it at hand when they need it, even when there is no
internet connection available. Despite these parochial and romanticised ideas about books, we
are planning to enhance the printed version of the handbook with a website that features more
information on methods and will be updated on a regular basis.4
5. How to use this handbook
This handbook offers a starting point for learning, teaching and applying methods in a
Japan(ese) Studies context and beyond. It is structured in such a way that it can be used for
(self-)studying and teaching alike. The handbook could be utilised for comprehensive reading
in order to gain an overview of qualitative methods in Social Science research on Japan as well
as to structure one-term method courses. Yet, the handbook’s seventeen chapters can also be
read individually; they can be used to learn about a specific method of data collection or ana-
lysis, expand one’s knowledge, familiarise oneself with a certain topic or just look up specific
information. In addition, the individual chapters can be applied to courses as and when re-
quired.
The handbook covers the entire research process in seventeen chapters from the outset to the
completion of a thesis, paper or book. While this structure and the ‘how-to’ style might sug-
gest that the research process consists of neatly separated steps, in reality, this is not the case.
We are aware that the research process is often circular and dynamic and that the individual
steps are often not carried out one after another in a linear manner, but sometimes even in re-
verse order. The blurred boundaries between the different tasks and steps in the research pro-
cess are also addressed in the individual chapters. Yet due to the limitations of a book, which
only allows for linear narration, as well as for reasons of clarity, this handbook is structured to
follow the steps of the research process as they are most commonly organised.
The seventeen chapters are all structured in a similar and easy-to-access format: a chapter in-
troduction (‘main chapter’) and three short essays with further reading and a joint reference
list. The main chapters feature an introduction to key ideas, concepts and practices, point out
key terms, address the most important problems and the strategies that can be employed to
solve them, present selected case studies and offer further up-to-date reading. While the main
chapters address the respective topics in a relatively general way, they always refer to the spe-
cific challenges and opportunities encountered when doing research on and/or in Japan. Three
short essays written by senior and junior researchers in Japan(ese) Studies from around the
world follow the main chapters. There are a total of 51 essays, each offering insights into how
4 A number of smaller decisions were made related to gender-sensitive language, the order of Japanese names, the
order of authors and the transcription of Japanese terms. With regard to gender, we decided to use ‘she’ or ‘her’
for female, male and other genders when the gender of the subjects is unclear. This is not meant to be exclusive,
but rather to challenge old ways of thinking that took the use of masculine forms to refer to both genders for
granted in academia. Japanese names are written in the following—and in Japan unusual—order of first name
first and last name second. This is due to criticism from some of our Japanese authors, who did not want to be
treated differently from the other authors. Therefore, we decided to deviate from the way of writing Japanese
names normally practised in Japan(ese) Studies. In the case of more than one author, names are mentioned in al-
phabetical order. Japanese terms are romanised based on the modified Hepburn system.
23
individual scholars actually deal with their respective method in practice. The authors share
their experiences, offer concrete advice on and precise insights into their fields of interest, and
elaborate on their perspective(s) and individual way(s) of studying Japan both in and outside
the country. Yet, the essays are not only illustrations of research experiences but also give in-
sights into a wide range of topics in the study of Japan, including nuclear power plants, single
women, families, food safety, Japan-China relations, condom use, social inequality, host clubs,
party politics and agriculture. In so doing, the essays celebrate the diversity and plurality of
scholarship on Japan. Furthermore, the essays show that there is no ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ way of
doing Japan research, but that research always reflects the researchers’ positionality and that it
is necessary to make thoughtful decisions and explain them well.
6. Structure and content of this handbook
The first four chapters set the context for Japan research and address fundamental steps that
often take place at the beginning of the research process. In chapter 1, Roger Goodman pro-
vides an introduction to the diversity of Japanese Studies and to research on Japan in the So-
cial Sciences. Against this backdrop, Goodman provides advice on finding a research topic and
explains how a researcher’s biography and theoretical (pre-)assumptions affect this choice. The
importance of research questions as well as the actual process of finding and asking questions
is the focus of chapter 2 by Gabriele Vogt. In chapter 3, Kaori Okano addresses (case study)
research designs and touches upon the discussion of theory building and testing as well as in-
ductive and deductive processes. Urs Matthias Zachmann discusses the importance of review-
ing scholarly literature and the need to identify and position oneself in relevant debates in
chapter 4. He also explains the challenge of balancing debates from Area Studies, the Social
Sciences as well as debates from Japan.5
The subsequent chapters focus on data collection. Chapter 5 by Akiko Yoshida starts with an
overview of the most common qualitative data collection methods used in Social Science re-
search. Yoshida explains different types of methods and comparatively discusses their respec-
tive characteristics, which is followed by chapters that each introduce and discuss one specific
method in more detail. Levi McLaughlin addresses fieldwork—physical and virtual as well as
in and outside of Japan—in chapter 6, Nora Kottmann and Cornelia Reiher introduce and dis-
cuss the world of qualitative interviews in chapter 7 and Christian Tagsold and Katrin Ull-
mann elaborate on observational research with a focus on participant observation in chapter
8. Finally, in chapter 9, Theresia Berenike Peucker, Katja Schmidtpott and Cosima Wagner
deal with the collection of written and visual sources in archives, libraries and Japanese online
databases.6
5 The essays in these chapters are written by Verena Blechinger-Talcott (Ch. 1.1), Daniel P. Aldrich (Ch. 1.2), Joy
Hendry (Ch. 1.3), Nicolas Sternsdorff-Cisterna (Ch. 2.1), Kenneth Mori McElwain (Ch. 2.2), David Chiavacci
(Ch. 2.3), Lynne Nakano (Ch. 3.1), Jamie Coates (Ch. 3.2), Kay Shimizu (Ch. 3.3), Patricia Maclachlan (Ch.
4.1), Sonja Ganseforth (Ch. 4.2) and Gracia Liu-Farrer (Ch. 4.3).
6 The essays in these chapters are written by Emma E. Cook (Ch. 5.1), Karen Shire (Ch. 5.2), Barbara Holthus and
Wolfram Manzenreiter (Ch. 5.3), Nana Okura Gagné (Ch. 6.1), James Farrer (Ch. 6.2), Hanno Jentzsch (Ch.
6.3), Christoph Brumann (Ch. 7.1), Tomiko Yamaguchi (Ch. 7.2), Allison Alexy (Ch. 7.3), Susanne Klien (Ch.
24
Introduction
Chapter 10, by Carola Hommerich and Nora Kottmann, focuses on mixed methods research,
and it connects the chapters on data collection and data analysis. It serves a somewhat special
role, as it provides a basic introduction to key terms and concepts of quantitative methods.
The chapters that follow are devoted to data analysis, which may occur during and/or after
the data collection process. In chapter 11, David Chiavacci addresses the importance of data
analysis for the whole research process, introduces the main analytical approaches and dis-
cusses the use of computer-assisted qualitative data analysis software. The subsequent chapters
each address specific analytical methods. In chapter 12, Caitlin Meagher focuses on (modified)
grounded theory designs, the process of coding, the development of concepts and, ultimately,
theory. Following this, in chapter 13, Celeste Arrington introduces content and frame analysis,
and discusses their similarities and differences as well as each method’s strengths and weak-
nesses. In chapter 14, Andreas Eder-Ramsauer and Cornelia Reiher discuss various forms of
discourse analysis, define basic concepts and explain individual steps in analysis.7
Finally, the last three chapters of the handbook deal with finishing one’s research projects and ad-
dress basic cross-cutting issues like ethics and writing. In chapter 15, Chris McMorran writes
about the importance of successfully completing one’s research project(s) despite the various ob-
stacles in researchers’ private and professional life. Furthermore, he encourages researchers to de-
mystify the writing process. In chapter 16, Cornelia Reiher and Cosima Wagner address the im-
portance of following good and fair research practices throughout the whole research process
and introduce new trends, such as open scholarship. In the final chapter 17, James Farrer and
Gracia Liu-Farrer introduce various oral and written forms of presenting one’s findings for both
an academic and a wider audience. In this context, the authors stress the importance of carefully
thinking about the audience one wants to reach.8
Throughout the handbook, all the authors write as concretely as possible and in an easy-to-access
manner. They summarise key points, highlight key issues, define key terms, include visual models,
offer lists of important journals, provide links to important webpages and introduce helpful tools
(digital and analogue). While all the authors write from their respective perspective—as novice or
established researchers; as Japanese, European, Australian or American citizens; as sociologists,
political scientists, anthropologists, human geographers or economists; as people of a specific
gender and age—they provide information that is helpful and applicable for students, researchers
and colleagues from different national contexts and academic cultures.
8.1), Akiko Takeyama (Ch. 8.2), Swee-Lin Ho (Ch. 8.3), Katja Schmidtpott and Tino Schölz (Ch. 9.1), Sheldon
Garon (Ch. 9.2) as well as Shinichi Aizawa and Daisuke Watanabe (Ch. 9.3).
7 The essays in these chapters are written by Robert J. Pekkanen and Saadia M. Pekkanen (Ch. 10.1), Laura Dales
(Ch. 10.2), Jun Imai (Ch. 10.3), Katharina Hülsmann (Ch. 11.1), Genaro Castro-Vázquez (Ch. 11.2), Markus
Heckel (Ch. 11.3), Nancy Rosenberger (Ch. 12.1), Celia Spoden (Ch. 12.2), Julia Gerster (Ch. 12.3), Anna Wie-
mann (Ch. 13.1), Emi Kinoshita (Ch. 13.2), Kai Schulze (Ch. 13.3), Annette Schad-Seifert (Ch. 14.1), Daniel
White (Ch. 14.2) and Steffen Heinrich (Ch. 14.3).
8 The essays in these chapters are written by Aya H. Kimura (Ch. 15.1), Christian Tagsold (Ch. 15.2), Richard J.
Samuels (Ch. 15.3), Isaac Gagné (Ch. 16.1), David H. Slater, Robin O’Day, Flavia Fulco and Noor Albazerbashi (Ch.
16.2), Christopher Gerteis (Ch. 16.3), Scott North (Ch. 17.1), Isabelle Prochaska-Meyer (Ch. 17.2) and Brigitte Ste-
ger (Ch. 17.3).
25
7. Summary and future perspectives
In a nutshell, the handbook Studying Japan provides an overview of and hands-on advice for the
individual steps in the research process and discusses methodological opportunities and chal-
lenges brought about by the transnationalisation of research subjects, research practices and re-
search groups as well as by technological innovations and the digital revolution, while paying at-
tention to good research practice and ethics. It enables students and teachers to study, teach and
apply methods and to develop research designs and strategies for fieldwork in Japan. The chal-
lenge of producing both an area-sensitive yet academically sound study is a problem not only for
scholars and students of Japanese Studies but also for researchers from all Area Studies. Thus,
this handbook is a valuable tool for both the international Japan(ese) Studies community as well
as for all Area Studies scholars who take the local characteristics and languages of ‘their’ areas se-
riously. At the same time, scholars from the Social Sciences who plan to study Japan in more
depth can use this book to engage with Japan more deeply.
We hope this handbook inspires further reflection on the conducting and teaching of research in
and beyond Japan. We think that the discussion of the methodological and ethical challenges aris-
ing, in particular, from transnationalisation and technological innovations in Social Science re-
search in and on Japan should be continued. We are looking forward to future discussions, possi-
bly an interdisciplinary handbook on quantitative methods in the study of Japan and to enhanc-
ing this book through a website that could serve as a means to connect researchers internationally
who would like to share their experiences of using and teaching methodology in a Japan(ese)
Studies context. Meanwhile, we hope that you find this book useful in facilitating your research
or teaching. It might help to keep in mind this advice: while there is no single ‘right’ or ‘wrong’
way of studying Japan, work as precisely and reliably as possible, be critical and pragmatic and,
most importantly, have fun, follow your curiosity and don’t lose your fascination with your re-
search.
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28
Chapter 1
How to begin research:
The diversity of Japanese Studies
Roger Goodman
1. Introduction
The single most important decision for any research project is where to start: what question to
examine and how to address it. This chapter sets out some of the key processes that re-
searchers should consciously and conscientiously go through in making these decisions and at-
tempts to turn them into a set of explicit and transparent steps to help those who are about to
begin their own research projects. These principles apply at any level, from an undergraduate
dissertation through to a major new project by a senior professor. They are built around the
very simple premise that, in all research projects, the researcher is the main research tool. Just
as any workman needs to know their tools, the researcher of Japan needs to know themselves.
This chapter, therefore, looks at the importance of interrogating the personal biography and
theoretical assumptions that all researchers bring to their work before they decide upon a re-
search topic and research puzzle. In doing so, it also provides a guide to reading research
which has already been undertaken by others in any field of Japanese Studies, from Natural
and Medical Sciences through to the Social Sciences and Humanities.1
2. The importance of personal biography
As the accounts by Daniel Aldrich, Verena Blechinger-Talcott and Joy Hendry in the essays fol-
lowing this chapter show, every research project starts with the researcher. We study—or we
should study—things that we know about and things that interest us. We tend, however, to be
very bad at acknowledging this fact. Until the 1970s, indeed, most social scientists failed to
acknowledge in more than the most superficial way their own role in their studies. They felt
that to do so was in some way not scientific. They presented themselves as objective re-
searchers who collected data in a value free manner through robust methodologies which they
then analysed using the latest theoretical models available.
1 The ideas in this paper were first explored when the author was looking for a topic for his doctoral thesis (Good-
man 1984) and were developed in articles which reflected on the relationship between how that project and a
number of subsequent projects were designed and the conclusions which were drawn from them (Goodman
1990a; 2000a; 2006).
29
Roger Goodman
From the late 1970s these assumptions of ‘scientism’ began to be challenged by what some
called the ‘reflexive turn’ (O’Reilly 2009, pp. 187–93). Increasingly, not just social scientists
but even medical and physical scientists began to realise that, consciously or unconsciously,
they brought with them a personal perspective on an issue which might influence not only why
but also how they asked a particular question and how this might indeed affect what they saw
and concluded.2
By the mid-1980s, as ‘reflexivity’ increasingly became intertwined with various debates about
‘post-modernism’ in Social Science, some researchers began to question whether it was possi-
ble to examine anything objectively and whether every research project was nothing more than
a reflection of the cultural and political prejudices of the individual researcher. To some extent,
this denial of objective truth was linked to and pushed by those whose beliefs in the ‘certain-
ties’ of Marxism had been crushed by the crumbling of the former Soviet Union. One response
to this collapse in faith in the scientific method was to turn the researchers’ microscope on to
the researchers themselves. What did they discover about themselves as a result of looking at
the other? Examples of this in the case of Japanese Studies can be seen in the works of Brian
Moeran (1985), Matthews M. Hamabata (1990) and Dorinne Kondo (1990).3
Most researchers in the 1980s took a less extreme position which took into account three ele-
ments of any research project: the researcher, the research and the reader (Okely/Callaway
1992). They argued that it was sufficient to give the reader ample autobiographical informa-
tion and a detailed account of how a project was set up to allow them to judge the research
they produced against their background knowledge of the researcher.
What was some of the personal information which researchers felt was important to share in
the case of research on Japan? Gender (as exemplified in Hendry’s account, see this chapter,
Ch. 1.3) was one. Women had a very different experience of Japan from men (Roberts 2003).
Indeed, the fact that there are such strong gender divisions in Japan often leads to different
forms of study, for example, with a tendency for men to study the public sphere and women
the private sphere.
Sexuality was another variable which was increasingly made explicit in studies of Japan in the
1980s, as indeed it was elsewhere as the study of identity politics and gender more generally
became a global focus for research. This was most clearly expressed by Western authors who
felt that the public expression of their sexuality was important since they did not want to sepa-
rate their sense of self (which included their sexual orientation) from their role (as a re-
searcher). An explicit example of this is the autobiographical account by John W. Treat
(1999), but the importance of sexuality in giving access to certain worlds in Japan is also ac-
knowledged in the work of Mark J. McLelland (2000) and Wim Lunsing (2001), who were
among the first scholars to provide deep ethnographic accounts of the experience and world-
views of homosexuals in Japan.
2 Different disciplines have their own key figures in the ‘reflexive turn’ movement, but history will probably
suggest that the single most influential figure was Pierre Bourdieu and the single most influential book was
his Outline of a theory of practice (1977) with its notion that all researchers need to ‘objectify their own
objectifications.’ Other important figures in these debates were Mikhail Bhaktin, Jacques Derrida and Michel
Foucault.
3 Ostensibly, Moeran’s ethnography is on a rural community in Kyushu, Hamabata on family businesses and Kon-
do on small manufacturing firms in Tokyo. In practice, each of them is also an account of what they discovered
about themselves through their encounters with Japan.
30
Chapter 1 How to begin research
A variable which could be inferred from these personal accounts, though not always stated ex-
plicitly, is age (Smith 2003). This, of course, affects the researcher’s ability to empathise with and
access different generations of Japanese. Age, gender and sexuality, of course, all interact. If one
accepts that Japan is still a very patriarchal and gerontocratic society (and the make-up of the Di-
et and company boards would suggest that it is), then there is an argument that young women
make the best researchers since they are the most likely to have the basic categories of how
Japanese society operates ‘explained’ (‘mansplained?’) to them. Older, more experienced male re-
searchers may be expected to ‘know’ these things. The ideal scenario for a social scientist is to be
‘patronised’ since that is when people reveal what they think are the basic underlying assump-
tions of their worldview. This is one reason (along with, ironically, the fact that their Japanese is
too good) why it is often more difficult for native anthropologists to undertake research on their
own society than it is for foreigners (see Yamaguchi, Ch. 7.2).
At the end of the 1980s, Harumi Befu and Josef Kreiner (1992) carried out an interesting
project which explored the impact of national background on the way that overseas re-
searchers approached the study of Japan. They argued that researchers with different national-
ities and different ethnic backgrounds bring with them ‘cultural baggage’ which impacts (gen-
erally unconsciously) on the type of questions they ask about Japan. North American scholars
have a cultural predisposition when they look at Japanese society to focus on ‘race’, Koreans
and Chinese on blood ties, Indians on minority and outcaste status, the Soviets (at the time) on
collectivism, Germans on social democracy and the English on social class since these are the
‘key’ social variables in their own societies.4
Another issue which is rarely discussed in the personal introductions to accounts of Japan is
politics, either personal or national. As Sheila Johnson (1975) has shown, the U.S. view of
Japan between the 1940s and 1970s was largely determined by U.S. relations with China.
That is almost certainly still the situation today. Further, within societies, right-wing commen-
tators have generally had a more sympathetic view of Japan in the postwar period—because of
its economic success and high levels of social stability—than left-wing commentators, who
have been concerned about the lack of national unions to protect and fight for workers’ rights.
3. Interrogating the relationship between the person and society
The above are all personal biographical details which may be pertinent to understanding the
position which a researcher brings to their study of Japan. There are two other sets of assump-
tions which are actually much more significant, but which are rarely, if ever, discussed explicit-
ly, although they can be gleaned by an astute reader simply by looking at the bibliography and
acknowledgments of any academic book on Japan. These two sets of assumptions 1. about the
relationship between the person and society (see sections 3 and 4) and 2. about the distinction
between Japanology and Japanese Studies (see section 5) overlap to a considerable degree.
Moreover, they are essentially independent from any of the other variables that have been ex-
4 It was during their workshop that I realised for the first time that the way I was looking at the issue of returnee
children (kikoku shijo) in Japan was so strongly driven by my interest in the class effects of education as a result
of my own experience of the highly class-divided English education system.
31
Roger Goodman
amined previously; they have no relation to gender, ethnicity sexuality and educational back-
ground and, since the collapse of Communism in 1989, there is no reason why they should
have a connection with nationality, age or class.
The first of these sets of assumptions relates to the very nature of what constitutes academic
research in the Social Sciences and Humanities. Put at its most simple, the Social Sciences and
the Humanities can be defined as the study of the relationship between the person and society,
depending on how ‘person’ and ‘society’ are defined in a particular place or time. This simple
formulation is what disciplines as apparently varied as Archaeology and Psychology, Law and
Economics, History and Literature, Linguistics and Business, and Education and Sociology all
share, even as they invent their own special language for describing these key variables.
In Anthropology, what is termed the study of the person or personhood lies at the very core of
the study of any society, but an understanding of personhood is key in other disciplines too.
While every society makes a distinction between self (ego) and role (persona), the relationship
between the two varies over time and space. In Western societies, post-Enlightenment ideolo-
gies have seen the conflation of the two as leading to healthy ‘individuals’—and their separa-
tion as problematic. Western ideas of Freudian and Jungian psychoanalysis, for example, seek
to find out how the role that a person is forced to perform (mother, worker, student) con-
strains their sense of self and how the self can be allowed to express itself fully again. In most
societies, however, it is the ability to separate the two which is seen as essential to a healthy
lifestyle. In Japan, when the self and role become overly conflated, the person may be per-
ceived, or perceive themselves, as ‘selfish’. Distinction (kejime) is the skill that all small chil-
dren develop that enables them to separate their sense of self from any role they need to per-
form and anyone who is unable to do so may be perceived as immature. Naikan and Morita
therapies (Reynolds 1989) are focused on meditating on how one’s sense of self has got in the
way of good role performance.
In Social Science disciplines, the study of society can most simply be described as the examina-
tion of how rituals and symbols have been used, and by whom, to construct a sense of com-
munity. As Cohen (1985) shows, this can be either internally or externally generated; people
can construct their own sense of who they are or they can be defined by others. Who does the
constructing is a question of political and economic power—domestic or extra-domestic—in
both cases.
As Figure 1.1 shows, there are two ways that the relation between the person and society can
be examined. Structuralist approaches look at how society constrains the actions of the per-
son. Interpretative or social action approaches look at how the person constructs society.5
Structuralist approaches in turn can be broken down into two traditions: those which assume
that society is essentially based on consensus and those which assume it is based on conflict.
The former used to be described as functionalist and the latter as Marxist. Both terms have
increasingly come to be used in a derogatory fashion (functionalist for being too ‘conserva-
5 Karl Marx, Max Weber and Émile Durkheim, generally credited as the ‘founders’ of these three approaches in the
Social Sciences, are today often dismissed as ‘dead white men’, but it can be argued that virtually all current So-
cial Science theory is either derived from, or developed in opposition to, their seminal work.
32
tive’, Marxist for being too ‘socialist’), but in purely analytical terms they remain the most
useful way to think of work which looks at how society constrains the person.
Figure 1.1: Heuristic overview of sociological theory
Sociological theory
Structuralist Interpretative/agency
↓ ↓
Society based on Society based on Society based on
consensus conflict competition
↓ ↓ ↓
Functionalism Marxism Social Action
↓ ↓ ↓
Emile Durkheim Karl Marx Max Weber
1858–1917 1818–1883 1864–1920
Functionalist and Marxist approaches have very different underlying assumptions. This can be
seen very easily in work on education systems.6 Both functionalists and Marxists see education
as effectively a black box in to which are fed the raw material of pre-school children. It is the
outcome of the educational experience over which they disagree. Functionalists describe rela-
tions between the educational system and other institutions; Marxists explain why these rela-
tions exist and change over time. Functionalists see the socialisation process as a common val-
ue which holds society together; Marxists examine interests underlying those values and how
socialisation differs systematically by social class. Functionalists see the education system as
offering opportunities for mobility; Marxists see the role of education as maintaining struc-
tured social inequality (reproducing social class through reproducing social capital).7
In opposition to the structuralist theories of the Marxists and functionalists who see education
as a black box, interpretative or social action theorists are more interested in what happens
inside the black box of education. They want to know how the participants—the teachers,
parents, policymakers and children among others—construct the society that makes up the
school. Unlike structuralist theories, which assume these participants are passive in the face of
societal rules and norms, the assumption in social action theory is that the participants have a
level of agency, even if they cannot all express it equally. Students can conform to the goals
and the methods for achieving those goals that the school has set, but they can also rebel, re-
treat, ritualise, colonise or innovate, to use some of the categories identified in the classic work
of Robert K. Merton (1938). As Peter Woods (1979) has shown, teachers can also take a num-
ber of different roles and positions in relation to the curriculum and school rules. It is report-
ed, for example, that left-wing teachers in Japan have sometimes supported adopting right-
wing history textbooks as exemplars for their students of the dangers of the state getting in-
volved in controlling the messages of history (Goodman 2020).
6 For an overview of these theories, see Sever 2012.

7 For probably the best-known analysis of the difference between functionalist and Marxist interpretations of
Japanese society, see Ross Mouer and Yoshio Sugimoto (1986, chapters 2 and 3). A classic functionalist account
is the work of Chie Nakane (1970); a classic Marxist account can be found in the work of Rob Steven (1982).
33
Roger Goodman
Figure 1.2 suggests that the choice that a researcher makes between a structuralist or a social
action approach to studying a particular problem can also influence the methodologies that
they need to use. While it is not always the case, very often structuralist theories require quan-
titative research methods since they set out to measure the extent to which society constrains
the activity of the person. Interpretative theories, on the other hand, often require qualitative
research methods since they set out to examine how persons construct the world around them.
Figure 1.2: Heuristic model of the relationship between structuralist and interpretative theories and the methods
they use
Structuralist theories Interpretative theories
e.g. functionalist (Durkheimian), conflict e.g. social action (Weberian) theories

(Marxist) theories
↓ ↓
measure the extent to which society con- examine how persons construct the world
strains the activity of the person and tend around them and tend to use
to use
↓ ↓
quantitative methods qualitative methods
e.g. questionnaires, structured interviews, e.g. participant observation, unstructured
big data sets. interviews.
The best research should take into account both structuralist (functionalist and Marxist) and
interpretative social action theories. They should also draw on both quantitative and qualita-
tive research methods—in what is sometimes called ‘mixed methods’—since the difference be-
tween structuralist and interpretative theories can not only push researchers towards different
methodologies (see Hommerich/Kottmann, Ch. 10). This difference can also explain why they
may end up with very different conclusions when looking at apparently the same phe-
nomenon, as the following example suggests.
4. Example of the impact of theoretical assumptions on research on

contemporary Japan
During the 1990s, Joshua Roth (2002) and Takeyuki Tsuda (2003) undertook detailed anthro-
pological fieldwork among the nikkeijin (Latin Americans of Japanese descent) community
who were invited, in large numbers, to come and work in Japan in the late 1980s which was
then facing severe labour shortages in the country as the economy boomed (see Gagné, Ch.
6.1). Roth and Tsuda’s subsequent ethnographies agreed on almost all points in their account
of this community. In particular they agreed on the fact that the nikkeijin, who had been so
34
proud of their Japanese ancestry when in Latin America, were disappointed on the reception
they received in Japan and, in the process, ‘rediscovered’ their ‘Latin Americaness’.
Where Roth and Tsuda differed was in the conclusions they reached for the future of nikkeijin
in Japan. While Roth believed Japan would be able to contain within it minority groups, like
the nikkeijin, as ideas of ‘Japaneseness’ became more broadly defined, Tsuda believed the
nikkeijin identity would disappear inside the boundaries of an increasingly tight definition of
‘Japaneseness’. The reason for their different conclusions lay not so much in their views of the
nikkeijin community as in their views of Japanese society and in particular their underlying as-
sumptions of the relationship between the person and society.
Tsuda (2003) saw Japan in very functionalist terms. He believed that the intrinsic nature of
Japanese culture meant that anything coming from outside was perceived as potentially con-
taminating and, hence, in need of either rejection or purification before it could be accepted
into society. Such an approach saw society functioning like a self-contained, biological organ-
ism with clearly defined boundaries and mechanisms for dealing with anything polluting from
outside. Roth (2002), conversely, saw Brazilian Japanese ethnic identity coming from interac-
tion with the political and economic structures within which the nikkeijin were forced to oper-
ate in Japan. It was not Japanese culture as such that was responsible for the rejection of the
nikkeijin, but interest groups within Japan—such as employers, politicians, journalists and,
particularly, labour brokers (hence the word ‘brokered’ in the title of his book). These groups,
he said, used the language of culture and history to legitimise the marginalisation of the
nikkeijin group for their own economic (cheap labour) and political (reinforcement of
Japanese ethnic identity) ends. It was in opposition to this marginalisation that the nikkeijin
had been constructing their own cultural forms (drawing on ideas of ‘Brazilianness’). As their
class position strengthened in Japanese society, so the Brazilian nikkeijin would be able to ex-
ert economic and political pressure that would lead to their cultural lifestyles being accepted as
part of the definition of ‘Japaneseness’.
Compared to Tsuda, Roth’s view of society was much more flexible in terms of the power
(‘agency’) that it gave to the different actors, even though he recognised that these same actors
were themselves constrained by the political and economic realities of the contexts in which
they moved. It was his (what might be termed ‘social action’) assumptions about the way soci-
eties operated that explained the very different conclusions he reached from Tsuda’s function-
alist approach.
Twenty years later, what can we now say about the situation of the nikkeijin in Japan? To a
certain extent, we can say that neither Tsuda nor Roth was correct in identifying the future for
the nikkeijin. The bursting of the economic bubble in the early 1990s meant that many of the
nikkeijin were forced to return to Latin America and those who did stay often ended up as
distinct but marginalised communities who operated as a peripheral and insecure workforce
for sections of Japanese industry. In short, the functionalist and social action theories of Tsuda
and Roth needed to be complemented with insights from Marxist thinking.
35
Roger Goodman
5. Japanology versus Japanese Studies
The former section on the importance of the structure/agency dichotomy, with its references to
some of the major intellectual traditions in Social Science, might have appeared rather abstract
for a chapter on starting research on Japan, even if it has been spiced with some examples
from the study of Japanese society. This has been on purpose because it is easy to lose sight of
some of these big questions in the excitement of commencing a new project. Not taking them
into account can have major ramifications for the project. The advice to look at such issues
from the very beginning applies to anyone undertaking any project on any topic in the Social
Sciences, but perhaps it is particularly important in the case of those in Area Studies. This is
because, as Verena Blechinger-Talcott (see this chapter, Ch. 1.1) points out, Area Studies re-
searchers can suffer from being considered ‘less rigorous or theoretically sophisticated’ than
their disciplinary colleagues.
There is a second set of assumptions which also needs to be taken into account at the very
beginning of a research project which relate specifically to those doing research in Area Stud-
ies. These might be characterised broadly as ‘Area-ology’ versus ‘Area-Studies’ approaches or,
in the case of Japan, ‘Japanology’ versus ‘Japanese Studies’. While the former long predates
the latter, these two approaches have existed alongside each other in almost all Area Studies
communities since the 1950s. In many parts of the world, however, they inhabit virtually par-
allel universes, publishing in different journals, attending different conferences and, some-
times, even being placed in different departments within the same institution.
Figure 1.3 sets out, very simply, some of the key differences between these two communities.
The core intellectual difference between them is whether a society is best studied in its own
terms (an emic approach) or through a comparative lens (an etic approach). The former sees
History as the key discipline and Philology as the key tool; the latter sees Sociology (in the
broadest sense) as the key discipline and the use of universally applicable theory as the key
tool. The former focuses on, and looks, for continuities; the latter discontinuities. The former
assumes a society can only be studied in its own right; the latter that it should be judged by
universal normative values. In general, the former has a view of society as essentially based on
consensus; the latter sees society as more conflict-ridden. Even more broadly, the former is of-
ten associated with the Humanities; the latter with the Social Sciences.
Figure 1.3: Some heuristic dichotomies for thinking about research in Area Studies
(Area)-ology (Area)-Studies
Approach Emic Etic
Reference point Internal comparison External comparison
Key disciplines History Sociology
Key tools Philology Theoretical terms
Assumptions Continuities Discontinuities
Moral universe Relativistic Universalistic
36
Human behaviour Society based on harmony Society based on conflict

(functionalist) (social action theories, Marxism)
University depart- Humanities Social Sciences
ments
As with the relationship between the person and society described above, the significance of
taking a Japanological or Japanese Studies approach to a project is rarely explicitly addressed
even if its impact is potentially considerable. To give just one example, whether we believe it is
the past (‘history’) which determines the present (the Japanological approach) or the present
which writes the past (the Japanese Studies approach) leads to a very different view of how we
should think about contemporary Japan.
Since they are social scientists, the three contributors of case studies to accompany this chapter
all work in the Japanese Studies rather than Japanological tradition. All of their work is ex-
plicitly or implicitly comparative; they are interested in how the examples they look at in
Japan shed light on the experience of similar phenomena in other countries—particularly their
own (U.S., U.K. and Germany)—and vice versa. In order to do this, they all draw on theoreti-
cal ideas from their disciplines, which have a common currency, at least in the English-lan-
guage Social Science literature on Japan. While they all place their studies in a historical con-
text (Hendry’s study of marriage in rural Japan in the 1970s has a detailed analysis of histori-
cal antecedents, see this chapter, Ch. 1.3), they are sceptical about narratives which suggest
Japan is somehow unique because of its distinctive history or topography. Where they do come
across narratives of uniqueness—such as Japan being a society based on ‘natural’ consensus-
seeking harmony and group-mindedness—they question the source of such narratives and ask
whose interests they serve—as in Blechinger-Talcott’s analysis of political corruption in Japan
(see this chapter, Ch. 1.1). They all encourage the use of multiple theoretical perspectives and
mixed methods in order, as Daniel Aldrich neatly puts it, ‘to convince skeptics that our find-
ings are not an artefact of the way that we approached the problem’ (see this chapter, Ch. 1.2).
Blechinger-Talcott most clearly picks out the distinction between Japanological and Japanese
Studies approaches in her essay (see this chapter, Ch. 1.1). This is not surprising, since the
philologically-based Japanological approach to Japan is still strong in continental Europe and
the Social Science community tended until relatively recently to see the study of Japan as some-
how ‘exotic’. The Japanese Studies community has had to fight hard in the past two decades
to create a distinctive voice in Continental European institutions but, having done so, it possi-
bly now enjoys a better, more mutually respectful, relationship with its Japanological col-
leagues than almost anywhere else.
6. Practical steps for beginning graduate research on Japan
It is because so few researchers begin with analysing their intellectual assumptions that the
majority of this essay has emphasised that element when beginning research. Most researchers
do, however, start with themselves when they look for a topic to study in that they generally
37
Roger Goodman
understand that they need to build a project around their own skills, ideally around a topic
that they are in a position to study better than anyone else. Ironically, by identifying their so-
called ‘unique selling points’ and designing a project around them, most researchers then dis-
cover that this is what they really do want to research because it is a topic they already know
something about.
Finding a topic is relatively easy compared to nailing down a puzzle within that topic which is
going to keep the researcher engaged for months (in the cases of master’s students) and years
(in the case of doctoral students). Put simply, research projects need a ‘research itch’. A re-
search itch is a puzzle to which the researcher genuinely does not know the answer but the
search for which will keep them intellectually challenged for the length of the project. The im-
portance of the ‘research puzzle’ is that—even if the researcher never actually finds an exact
‘answer’ to the puzzle—it becomes the researcher’s ‘elevator pitch’ and sets the boundaries to
the project and gives it an overall shape (see Vogt, Ch. 2).
Most research puzzles are centred on specified data sets which appear to be counterintuitive or
social institutions which cannot be explained in one’s own cultural terms. Examples of re-
search puzzles which have guided my own research (and the publications which then ap-
peared) over the past three decades include:
• Why is Japan the only country in the world where the government has established special
institutions for children who have returned from living overseas (Goodman 1990b)?
• Why was there such anxiety among the heads of children’s homes in Japan in the early
1990s around the reduction in the number of children needing to be taken into care
(Goodman 2000b)?
• Why, when it was widely predicted in the mid-2000s that the number of private universi-
ties would fall over the following decade by between 15–30%, did the actual number in-
crease by 15% (Breaden/Goodman 2020)?
Having found a research puzzle to which they genuinely do not know the answer and to which
they cannot find an obvious answer in the research literature, the researcher needs next to un-
dertake the hypothetical exercise of how a Marxist, Durkheimian and a Webarian scholar
would approach this topic and what the implications of each of these approaches are for their
methodology.8 The researcher also needs to run the project through the heuristic Japanologi-
cal–Japanese Studies dichotomy since it is likely that much of the literature that they use (espe-
cially the literature in Japanese) will also be divided along these lines.
Finally, the whole project is turned on its head, so that what is presented is not only an impor-
tant puzzle which needs to be solved, but also one which the researcher is particularly well
placed to tackle. Classically, therefore, the best research proposals—and certainly the ones
most likely to win research funding—generally looks something like the following:
• This is the ‘research puzzle’ (written to catch the attention of the reader; the first two sen-
tences are the most crucial of any research funding application).
8 All new graduate students in the Oxford School of Global and Area Studies are required to undertake such a hy-
pothetical exercise as part of their first-year methods training course. The assignment that they are set is: ‘Take a
research topic to do with contemporary Japanese, Chinese, Indian or any other society and describe and analyse
what would be the different assumptions that a Marxist, Weberian and Durkheimian researcher would bring to
such a topic—and how those assumptions might affect both their research questions and their research method-
ologies. The word limit for this exercise is 1000 words.’
38
• This is what has been done in this general area before (preferably not too much but also
not nothing).
• This is why the research is so important (these are the theoretical, methodological, applied,
ethnographic, data gaps it seeks to fill).
• This is how I am going to tackle it (an account of theory and methodology—where; how
long; how).
• Just by chance: I happen to be particularly well qualified to address this puzzle because of
my background, networks, language, research skills.
7. Summary
This chapter on ‘how to begin research’ has focused more on the researcher than what they
study since, as stated earlier, the researcher in the Social Sciences and the Humanities is the
main research tool. Every researcher brings with them a bag of skills and strengths as well as
biases and weaknesses which will, necessarily, affect the way that any research project is ap-
proached. These all need to be acknowledged before the project can even begin. If they are ful-
ly accommodated, then the project will be able to take an intellectual puzzle, examine it from
all angles and make a serious contribution to our understanding of Japan. Indeed, the skill of
the researcher to incorporate multiple theoretical positions and research methodologies in ad-
dressing important questions about Japan is what will distinguish them as an academic
scholar.
39
1.1 Positioning one’s own research in Japanese Studies:
Between Area Studies and discipline
In Social Science research on Japan, and especially in the field of Japanese politics, identifying
a good research topic often presents itself as a major challenge for young scholars. While Polit-
ical Science usually expects scholars to develop research projects based on theoretical consider-
ations, for example the relationship between two variables, and to identify cases for study ac-
cording to features relevant to theory and related hypotheses, most students in Japanese Social
Science research are genuinely interested in studying empirical phenomena in Japan. Scholars
from the discipline might thus consider Area Studies (and Japanese Studies) less rigorous or
theoretically sophisticated, more interested in thick description than in ‘relevant’ contributions
to the field of Political Science. Traditional Japanologists, on the other hand, may challenge
social scientists working on Japan for over-theorising or oversimplifying and over-reducing ac-
tual complexities in the interest of theoretical models. While there is no one-size-fits-all recipe
with which to overcome these challenges, in my experience, it is helpful to base one’s own re-
search on genuine empirical research based on phenomena in Japanese politics and/or society,
while at the same time placing Japan in a broader comparative context. An active search for
interdisciplinary debate is important, as is a true passion for one’s topic.
My first research project on corruption in Japanese politics started out with a keen interest in
institutions in Japanese law, politics and society (Blechinger 1998). I had just finished my MA
in Japanese Studies with a thesis on the relationship between social practices and changing le-
gal norms after 1945, looking at ways in which family law and new legal norms such as gen-
der equality and individual freedom affected family relationships. I wanted to understand how
normative change affected social behaviour, and how actual social practices affected the ways
in which norms were shaped and implemented. For my MA, I had studied Civil Law, Political
Science and Japanese Studies. Realising that I had acquired knowledge about Japan and the
Japanese language, but was lacking the analytical and methodological tools to answer my
questions, I enrolled in a PhD programme in Political Science, where I focused on institutions
and the relations between politics and law. By the time I had completed my course work, de-
bates in German and Japanese politics centred on issues of political finance and corruption,
and I was puzzled by the differences in both debates. While the German debate about illegal
party donations to the Christian Democratic Party (CDU) under the then chancellor Helmut
Kohl was strongly shaped by arguments about personal misconduct and individual miscon-
duct, arguments about systemic corruption and deeply entrenched practices of bribery were
shaping debates in Japan. German newspaper reports about corruption in Japan also pointed
to aspects of Japanese culture, such as gift-giving relations, to explain the assumed intrinsic
nature of corruption in Japan. I was not only puzzled, but had also found my research topic:
How could we explain the prevalence of corruption in political systems, and in which ways
could legal reform, for example in the electoral system, affect corrupt phenomena? What
40
makes corruption systemic? What are the incentives for politicians and bureaucrats, but also
for private sector actors, to engage in corrupt behaviour even in the face of highly negative
sanctions?
As corruption is a phenomenon that takes place in secrecy and usually only comes to light
when it is exposed in a scandal, I had to spread my research further in order to find answers to
my questions. In the following years, I analysed how politicians in Japan were financed, where
they received funds for their work and how they defined the boundaries between legitimate be-
haviour and corruption. I also looked at the legal norms and related discourses in Japanese po-
litics and its bureaucracy to prevent or at least reduce corruption. I interviewed politicians and
spoke with political secretaries who administered politicians’ accounts and were involved in
fundraising. I spoke to business representatives about their experience with political contribu-
tions, and I spent many hours studying records of parliamentary debates about political and
campaign financing reform. I also participated in regular study groups on campaign financing
in Tokyo and discussed the state of political financing with Japanese journalists who had fol-
lowed campaigns and exposed (or decided not to expose) corruption scandals. I also followed
politicians on the campaign trail to learn how they spent their funds and where they felt the
pressure that might have made them inclined to take the risk of engaging in corrupt behaviour.
The research led to my dissertation and my first book.
Throughout that time, I worked in academic contexts on Japanese politics both in Japan and
elsewhere, but I also formed a network with scholars working on corruption elsewhere. The
comparative perspective, and also the questions asked by non-Japan specialists shaped my
work and stimulated further research. At the same time, through exchange with ‘general’ po-
litical scientists and non-Japan area specialists, I learned how to position Japan as a case in a
broader comparative context—which also was useful for countering arguments that focused
on culture and gift-giving as the main cause of corruption in Japan.
Through the work on my first project, I developed a keen interest in the relationships between
business and politics as well as the state and the market, which has since shaped my academic
work. Having studied the relationship between politics and money, I started to become inter-
ested in the role of companies as political actors, both at the domestic and the international
level. In later projects, I looked into patterns and strategies used by Japanese (and internation-
al) firms to affect political decision-making processes. In my current research project, I am in-
terested in the role of politics in globalised markets and especially in the governance of global
value chains.
When I started my dissertation, the field of Japanese Studies in Germany was just changing
from scholars using a predominantly historical and philological approach to a more diverse
field including Social Science approaches. At the same time, Political Science in Germany was
very strongly focused on Germany, Europe and the U.S., and non-Western cases were not com-
mon. In Germany, my dissertation research was thus considered ‘exotic’ both for my col-
leagues in Japanese Studies and those in Political Science. I benefitted greatly from cooperation
with scholars and colleagues in Japan, especially at the Institute of Social Science at the Uni-
versity of Tokyo, where I was able to learn from highly empirical political scientists with a
strong comparative focus. I also encountered international graduate students working on
Japanese politics. The study groups at the Institute of Social Science (and later at the German
Institute for Japanese Studies, where I initiated the Social Science Study Group) and also the
Japan Politics Colloquium at the University of Oxford, led by Arthur Stockwin at that time,
41
provided a network of like-minded social scientists working on Japan and a forum for con-
structive criticism and exchange.
Moreover, working together with doctoral students from Japanese universities who were inter-
ested in similar issues helped me to reflect on my basic assumptions and expectations in a dou-
ble way—on the one hand, these discussions often challenged my somewhat German perspec-
tive on the ways of politics and, on the other hand, they allowed me to revisit my theoretical
literature based on the empirical evidence from Japan. In two cases, we also did joint inter-
views. My presence as a German researcher allowed me to ask questions that would have been
more difficult for my Japanese research colleague to ask. Afterwards, we compared notes
about linguistic aspects of the interview.
In summary, researchers studying Japan often face the challenge of balancing disciplinary and
Area Studies’ demands. This will affect researchers’ choices of research topics as well as the
ways in which they conduct and present research to appeal to different audiences. In order to
perform this balancing act successfully, I suggest that young researchers start out with empiri-
cal research on Japan, but put their empirical findings in a broader comparative context and
reach out to interdisciplinary debates—theoretical ones and debates that discuss Japan as a
case among others. Academic debates often vary in different national contexts, as was the case
with my research on corruption. These differences can pose puzzles and thereby motivate re-
search projects. In this sense, researchers should always keep their eyes open for contradictions
and differences in public and scholarly debates within and across national borders. Forming
networks with scholars outside one’s discipline or national academic context as well as with
those studying the same phenomenon in a different setting is another piece of advice I can of-
fer to young scholars. This will help researchers to position their research in broader compara-
tive contexts (see Kimura, Ch. 15.1). Collaboration with colleagues from both other disci-
plines and Area Studies, and particularly with colleagues from Japan, will provide researchers
with inspiration and networks they can draw on in the future—both intellectually and profes-
sionally. In particular, I recommend that researchers make themselves familiar with academic
debates on Japan in the Anglo-American community and reach out to colleagues from the U.S.
and the U.K. This will help to produce research that the global community researching Japan
will perceive and to which scholars from Area Studies and Social Science disciplines alike can
relate to.
42
1.2 Let the field be your guide
Daniel P. Aldrich
There is no single way to begin research, nor is there any sure-fire strategy to ensure that top-
ics evolve into successful publications. Nevertheless, I am a big fan of several approaches, in-
cluding building up interesting puzzles from real world empirical examples, being flexible
when in the field, avoiding using culture as a catch-all explanation and writing about your in-
terests and passions.
Puzzles from the real world
Almost all of my research projects began as puzzles that I observed in the real world while
spending time in the field, whether Japan or North America, and not from reading peer-re-
viewed articles, books or political theory. My first book project grew out of the failure of an-
other, more standard Political Science project that I began while a graduate student at Harvard
University. The abandoned project focused on the electoral strategies used by a Liberal Demo-
cratic Party (Jiyūminshutō, LDP) politician who was running for office. I hoped to follow in
the footsteps of past social scientists like Gerald Curtis at Columbia University and Richard
Fenno of the University of Rochester, both of whom ‘soaked and poked’ in the lifestyles of
their subjects. Rather than writing articles and books from the comfort of a library carrel,
these political scientists shadowed politicians, watching them on the campaign trail and talk-
ing with them after a day of glad-handing and baby kissing. My own dreams of success evapo-
rated after several weeks of shadowing and ringing ears from the ‘nightingales’ (female an-
nouncers who used microphones to speak to crowds as their buses passed by) when my candi-
date abruptly lost the election and told me to get lost.
Stuck in Japan for several more months without a viable project, I remembered a question that
had come to me when thinking about Japan’s scientific progress following World War II: How
did the only country in the world that experienced the horrors of nuclear weapons end up de-
veloping one of the most advanced commercial nuclear power programmes in the world? I
wondered what the Japanese government had done to assist private utilities as they sought to
promote atomic energy after going through the shock of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bomb-
ings. With time on my hands, I wangled an interview with Tokyo Electric Power Company
(Tōkyō Denryoku kabushiki-gaisha, TEPCO) executives at TEPCO HQ in Tokyo through
some cold-calling to the phone number listed on their website. After I had pestered them a
number of times, they invited me in, and I began to ask them about how they sited their nucle-
ar power plants. Engineers and bureaucrats at that firm spoke of the ways that they sought to
induce compliance through a variety of side payments and benefits.
Then I began speaking with anti-nuclear activists at local organisations such as the Citizens’
Nuclear Information Center (Genshiryoku Shiryō Jōhōshitsu, CNIC). After some soaking and
43
Daniel P. Aldrich
poking, I discovered a whole system of benefits and incentives offered to host communities in
rural, coastal communities that were willing to have a nuclear facility in their backyard. The
Japanese government had been far more than a passive umpire in the field of energy as some
might envision. Instead, it took a side early—supporting the growth of the field in the late
1940s—and sought to support private energy firms throughout the nuclear power plant. This
initial foray grew into several articles and the book Site fights: Divisive facilities and civil soci-
ety in Japan and the West (Aldrich 2008).
From personal experience to a research project
Where my first project sprang from the collapse of my intended research, my next major re-
search project came from going through an actual disaster. As I was finishing up my disserta-
tion on controversial facilities like nuclear power plants and turning it into a book, my family
and I moved to New Orleans, Louisiana. There we settled into a short-lived but comfortable
existence in the neighbourhood known as Lakeview, just south of Lake Pontchartrain. Within
seven weeks of our arrival that name became all too real with the arrival of Hurricane Katrina
and the collapse of the levees that held back Lake Pontchartrain and the Mississippi River.
Lake water flooded our neighbourhood, with twelve feet of water destroying everything in our
home, including my hard drive, all of our clothes, toys, books, records and material posses-
sions.
We got out alive, but evacuating and then trying to rebuild showed me how misconceived my
vision of recovery was. My vision of disaster response involved U.S. government agencies like
the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) swooping in to support survivors in a
government-led process. Alternatively, the private market, such as homeowners’ insurance,
was able to help rebuild. But rather than the government (through FEMA) or the market
(through insurance), all of the aid, assistance, offers of places to stay and schools for our chil-
dren came through friends, friends of friends and our social network. Instead of such aid com-
ing from the market or the state, social capital and social ties proved to be the engine of re-
silience. I wondered if my own experiences might be similar to those of survivors from other
major catastrophes around the world. With the support of the Abe fellowship, I spent time
poking and soaking in disaster-affected communities around the world. This research grew in-
to a comparative research project on disaster recovery in India, North America and Japan
called Building resilience: Social capital in post-disaster recovery (Aldrich 2012).
My most recent project came from watching Japan experience the triple disasters of March 11,
2011—the 9.0-magnitude earthquake, tsunami and nuclear power plant meltdowns (sadly
enough at the Fukushima reactor near the town of Futaba, where I had done fieldwork for my
first book). While many observers argued that cultural factors (Japanese stoicism, etc.) could
account for the initial signs of recovery, and others claimed that it was going to be a function
of damage (e.g. how high the tsunami was when it came ashore to each village), it was imme-
diately obvious that certain locations were bouncing back faster than others. Some cities,
towns and villages had higher levels of mortality, while others were decimated; and in the
years since the events, some have rebuilt and increased in population, while others have only
brought back the elderly. After I had spoken to several mayors, local administrators and
NGOs, it was obvious that some had built strong and broad networks of assistance, while oth-
44
ers had far more limited ties. During the two years I spent in the field between 2011 and 2018
through a series of short, medium and longer stays (one funded by a Fulbright fellowship), this
investigation became my newest book Black wave: How networks and governance shaped
Japan’s 3/11 disasters (Aldrich 2019).
The challenge of Japan’s presumed uniqueness
But studying Japan also comes with some difficulties. One of the regular challenges about us-
ing cases from Japan has been the belief in the uniqueness of Japan. If, as many Japanese and
non-Japanese observers like to claim, Japan is indeed unique, then it is very hard to apply
lessons and best practices from Japan to other settings. For example, if Japanese citizens are
indeed the only ones in the world who say one thing and do another (tatemae and honne), or
if there are esoteric aspects of the Japanese aesthetic that cannot be easily captured (wabi sabi),
then there are few conversations we can have with scholars and observers of other nations and
systems. It would be hard for a scholar of American or African politics, for example, to have a
useful exchange of ideas with those of us studying Japan (see Kimura, Ch. 15.2; McElwain,
Ch. 2.2).
However, if Japan has institutions, incentives and policy arenas like other countries—and I’ve
enjoyed scholarship from Hayden Lesbirel (1998), Steven Vogel (1996) and Richard Samuels
(2003) that exactly builds on this approach—then we should be able to learn something from
its experiences. One of the reasons I have followed the work of these scholars is because they
begin by recognising explanations for empirical outcomes that stretch beyond those built on a
belief in a nativist or unique culture. Instead, organisations and rules can in turn change be-
haviour and create new outcomes and norms. In this sense, we have seen more ‘mainstream-
ing’ of work on Japan, especially Japanese political outcomes, from various scholars
(Catalinac 2016; Ono/Yamada 2018; Pekkanen et al. 2006; Rosenbluth/Thies 2010; Saito/
Horiuchi 2003) who use a variety of tools to demonstrate the broader lessons from events in
Japan to events and phenomena far outside it.
Be flexible!
I know from experience that it’s great to have a clear plan in mind before beginning a research
project, whether one in a library carrel in Berlin or in the agricultural areas around Rokkasho.
But I have also learned how important it is to be flexible and open to the realities of the field.
Too often students may feel trapped by their proposal or by existing theories rather than feel-
ing free to go off list and try out new approaches. I provide a long list of specific advice about
beginning research in Japan in my article ‘The 800 pound gaijin in the room’ (Aldrich 2009),
including suggestions on going with letters of introduction, business cards, thank-you gifts and
an affiliation with a Japanese institution. I also strongly suggest using multiple methods. That
is, if you enter graduate school able to carry out a regression analysis using quantitative data,
then you should leave with a new skill set, such as the ability to carry out focus groups, inter-
views and participant observation. If, on the other hand, you’re only comfortable using quali-
tative methods, then you should take courses in social network analysis, regression analysis
45
Daniel P. Aldrich
and geographic information systems (GIS) analysis to expand your toolkit. Our research
should always be driven by a problem, not by our methods. If we can only carry out one type
of analysis, we miss the chance to study a phenomenon from other angles and to convince
sceptics that our findings are not an artefact of the way that we approached the problem. Hav-
ing a broader toolkit means that when you tackle a new problem you’ll be able to come at it
convincingly from multiple angles (see Hommerich/Kottmann, Ch. 10).
In this sense, once you’ve found an interesting puzzle, I would encourage students to think
about the different ways to empirically understand it, running from direct talks with relevant
actors to a map of their social network, to a survey of communities in which they operate.
One lesson from my own career has been that projects need to develop organically from em-
pirical observation. I would encourage graduate students to keep their eyes open to the real-
life puzzles that are constantly emerging around us and to think through ways to study those
outcomes methodically and systematically.
46
1.3 Studying marriage in Japan:
A social anthropological approach
Joy Hendry
My choice of marriage as a subject to study in Japan was made rather easily, for I spent six
months prior to my formal study sharing a room in a house with five young Japanese girls, for
whom the subject was far and away the most discussed. This period was largely for language
study, and I was enrolled at the time in an intensive course at a language school in Shibuya/
Tokyo. Fortuitously I saw an advert offering accommodation in a house with ten young
Japanese who wanted to have a native English speaker in their midst, and we spoke in English
every evening over dinner. Otherwise they chatted to each other in Japanese, which not only
helped my own language acquisition but gave me a wonderful insight into issues interesting to
young people at the time. In the case of my female roommates, this was definitely marriage,
especially whether such a thing should be based on love or arranged by their elders. My topic
was decided then (Hendry 1981/2011 for the outcome).
Finding a field site
Starting fieldwork in the discipline of Social Anthropology requires planning, of course, but
serendipity is also useful for a successful study (see Coates, Ch. 3.2; Gagné, Ch. 6.1; Klien, Ch.
8.1), as we have seen in the way my attention was drawn to the topic. When I did that first
fieldwork many years ago now, we were actually given little preparation, but it was usual to
expect to spend at least one year in the same place. The idea was to get to know all the people
in a chosen area—it could be a geographical area, a community around a common interest or
perhaps an enterprise of some sort. Whichever area was chosen, spending a year with people
enables several things. First, it sees through a full annual cycle of events—understanding the
seasons and attitudes to them and witnessing the enactment of all the annual rituals. A year
also gives the researcher time to get to know people well, and indeed, the people to know the
researcher and to understand what they are about. In Japan, first questions may elicit answers
that the interlocutor thinks the researcher may want to hear; with time, an in-depth response
is more likely to be revealed. A year also allows the researcher to become used to the local
dialect and linguistic idiosyncrasies. These vary greatly throughout Japan, even more so in Ok-
inawa, for example, and failure to take them into account could result in severe misunder-
standings.
With these issues in mind, and my choice of marriage as a topic, I set out to find a suitable
location. As it happened, I thought it would be good to work in a village. It was common
practice in those days, and I resolved to look at the rituals involved in building a relationship
and expectations for the future, as well as the various ways of meeting a suitable partner that
my Tokyo friends had been debating. Within one village, I would be able to place the subject
47
Joy Hendry
of marriage within a broader social context. It didn’t really matter to me where the village
would be, or what would be the local economic base; there is quite a bit of Japanese literature
on marriage and I was able to compare my findings with those picked up elsewhere. I simply
needed to find a place to live for me and my husband, among a manageable number of houses,
and I thought it would be good to find a beautiful spot. The most important plan then—a vital
plan for an anthropologist or indeed any researcher—is to start out with some good introduc-
tions to the people with whom you will work.
When I set out to do my first fieldwork, my supervisors were in Oxford, and at the time there
was no one there who had worked in Japan, so I asked a Japanese scholar who had visited my
department in Oxford to help. He introduced me to a senior Japanese anthropologist who has
helped me all my life, and I realised that it is always a good plan to have a supervisor in Japan
wherever a student’s university is based. They can provide a great deal of local assistance un-
available at home, and mine was able to tell me about the related fieldwork his colleagues and
students were doing. This introduction also gave me a university attachment in Tokyo, which I
think inspired more confidence in the people I approached than my Oxford one did. So I have
tried hard ever since to procure the same facility for all my PhD students.
We discussed various possibilities for locations, and I spent some time visiting a selection of
them. In every case, I would need somewhere to live, so this was an important consideration
within a relatively small community. For the first village I tried, I only had a personal connec-
tion through a friend, and people seemed suspicious. For the second, I was introduced by an
English teacher to the local education office as I had heard that they had houses for teachers.
They did indeed and were kind enough to take me out to see some. It was a delightful area in
rural Shikoku, and stunningly beautiful, but my project seemed likely to fail because they re-
vealed that, sadly, all the young people were leaving. In the end, the village I found was a
thriving community in Kyushu (Hendry 2021), and I found it through a Japanese anthropolo-
gist who had worked in the area—a student of my supervisor, as it happened. He not only
found me an empty house, but took it upon himself to introduce me to all the important peo-
ple in the area and to make sure they knew who I was and what I was planning to do. That
was wonderful, for the head of the village immediately invited me to his son’s wedding, where
I met and shared sake with almost all his neighbours, who were happy to help me with my
research afterwards. A first stroke of serendipity then, because they asked me (and my hus-
band) all sorts of questions about our marriage, so I assume they then felt some obligation to
reciprocate. I also learned that weddings are a great time to discuss details about marriages,
and fortunately I was invited to many more (Hendry 2003).
Settling in
My new next-door neighbour explained another Japanese custom, which I would recommend
to all those who plan to live in Japan, anthropologists or otherwise. Later, I learned and could
identify all the important divisions for sharing community tasks, but for the time being my
neighbour took me to the other houses in the immediate vicinity, where I introduced myself
and handed over a small gift. ‘Not too big,’ he said, ‘they won’t want to be obligated to you.’
So I gave them a few postcards from Oxford. My house was actually over the border from the
village I had chosen as my focus, so I didn’t see those neighbours much over the year, but some
48
40 years later, when I approached one of them for business purposes, he remembered me, and
it was quite helpful. These people were also then able to explain to curious strangers who the
‘funny foreigners’ were—we were rather rare in those days—certainly the only two in our im-
mediate vicinity, possibly the only two in a town of 35,000.
Settled in, I then had to work out a way to approach people, and to start the inquiry. An ad-
vantage of having a year to spend is that there is no need to immediately impose a list of ques-
tions on people. Of course, it is useful to have an idea of the questions you want answered,
but I found that I learned a lot more if I was able to insinuate myself into open situations
where people were already talking, and gradually steer the conversation around to my subjects
of interest. In the village, my first task was to identify times and places where I would natural-
ly meet people going about their everyday lives. There were three shops, and these were al-
ways good locations, the two fish shops attracting two different generations, which helped me
to understand in-law issues, and a tobacconist’s, which I later discovered was a favourite place
for outsiders to ask about local families (with a view to arranging a marriage). There was also
a village hall where meetings took place, but most helpful of all in those days was the village
bath house. Almost everyone went there: the older women first, then the younger ones, and
finally the housewives, so I could choose my time depending on what I was after, and people
were wonderfully talkative soaking in the hot water!
Another good approach to learn about the villagers was through the local policeman. He lived
with his family in a nearby police house, and he kept a detailed list of all the occupants of his
patch, together with a record of particularly valuable property. Probably because of the appro-
priate introduction from the Japanese anthropologist, he was willing to share all this with me.
It was a perfect introduction because I created a notebook, which I use to this day, in which I
entered the names of the residents of each of the 54 houses in the village, and then called on
them in turn to verify his record, and to ask about how their marriages were arranged. It
sounds pretty cheeky, and I am not sure it would work everywhere, but the people of this vil-
lage cooperated. I also approached local policemen in later research projects, but in some cases
you needed an introduction. My introduction from Kyushu to other far distant places actually
worked better than a letter from my own university. In one area, they filled me in on all the
yakuza families in the area, and I discovered that the son of one of them had become best
friends with one of my sons at school.
Some final thoughts on taking notes
In that village notebook, I eventually collected the names and dates of death of all the ances-
tors remembered in the Buddhist altars, and I made a detailed diagram of all the families and
their relationships. It was very useful to see who was related to whom and how that affected
their invitations to weddings, introduction to potential spouses (still common in those days)
and other life-cycle events including funerals. I have returned to this village many times over
the forty years since I first worked there. The notebook offers me a great opportunity to go
around updating it with new births, marriages and deaths, asking to pray at the Buddhist altar
to say goodbye to those with whom I had worked when they were alive, and generally keeping
in touch. Early on, I also made a detailed map of the houses, which I numbered, and this
helped me to find my way around. I recommend that both these tasks are undertaken at the
49
Joy Hendry
very start of a research project, though of course the notebook may be a computer file these
days, but together they become a superb investment for all subsequent activities (see
Kottmann/Reiher, Ch. 7). A general diary is also crucial, for things observed early on are only
properly explained much later, and small things may be forgotten if not recorded. I almost
never used a tape-recorder, although I know others do, but I found that people would often
elaborate on what they first said while I was writing, and things would come out that I had
never thought to ask.
50
Further reading
Befu, Harumi/Kreiner, Josef (eds.) (1992): Othernesses of Japan: Historical and cultural influences on
Japanese Studies in ten countries. München: Iudicium.
Bourdieu, Pierre (1977): Outline of a theory of practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Goodman, Roger (1984): Is there an ‘I’ in Anthropology? Thoughts on starting fieldwork in Japan. In:
Journal of the Anthropological Society of Oxford 15, No. 2, pp. 157–168.
Lury, Celia/Fensham, Rachel/Heller-Nicholas, Alexandra/Lammes, Sybille/Last, Angela/Michael, Mike/
Uprichard, Emma (2018): Routledge handbook of interdisciplinary research methods. London: Rout-
ledge.
Okely, Judith/Callaway, Helen (1992): Anthropology and autobiography. London: Routledge.
O’Reilly, Karen (2009): Key concepts in ethnography. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
References
Aldrich, Daniel P. (2008): Site fights: Divisive facilities and civil society in Japan and the West. Ithaca, NY:
Cornell University Press.
Aldrich, Daniel P. (2009): The 800-pound gaijin in the room: Strategies and tactics for conducting field-
work in Japan and abroad. In: PS: Political Science and Politics 42, No. 2, pp. 299–303.
Aldrich, Daniel P. (2012): Building resilience: Social capital in post-disaster recovery. Chicago, IL: Univer-
sity of Chicago Press.
Aldrich, Daniel P. (2019): Black wave: How networks and governance shaped Japan’s 3/11 disasters.
Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
Befu, Harumi/Kreiner, Josef (eds.) (1992): Othernesses of Japan: Historical and cultural influences on
Japanese Studies in ten countries. München: Iudicium.
Blechinger, Verena (1998): Politische Korruption in Japan: Ursachen, Gründe und Reformversuche. Ham-
burg: Institute of Asian Affairs, Vol. 291.
Bourdieu, Pierre (1977): Outline of a theory of practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Breaden, Jeremy/Goodman, Roger (2020): Family-run universities in Japan: Sources of inbuilt resilience in
the face of demographic pressure, 1992–2030. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Catalinac, Amy (2016): Electoral reform and national security in Japan: From pork to foreign policy. New
York, NY: Cambridge University Press.
Cohen, Anthony (1985): The symbolic construction of community. London: Tavistock Publications.
Goodman, Roger (1984): Is there an ‘I’ in Anthropology? Thoughts on starting fieldwork in Japan. In:
Journal of the Anthropological Society of Oxford 15, No. 2, pp. 157–168.
Goodman, Roger (1990a): Deconstructing an anthropological text: A ‘moving’ account of returnee
schoolchildren in contemporary Japan. In: Ben-Ari, Eyal/Moeran, Brian/Valentine, James (eds.): Un-
wrapping Japan: Society and culture in anthropological perspective. Manchester: Manchester University
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Goodman, Roger (1990b): Japan’s ‘international youth’: The emergence of a new class of schoolchildren.
Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Goodman, Roger (2000a): Fieldwork and reflexivity: Thoughts from the Anthropology of Japan. In:
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Goodman, Roger (2000b): Children of the Japanese state: The changing role of child protection institu-
tions in contemporary Japan. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Goodman, Roger (2006): Thoughts on the relationship between anthropological theory, methods and the
study of Japanese society. In: Hendry, Joy/Wong, Dixon (eds.): Dismantling the East-West dichotomy:
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References
Hendry, Joy (2003): From scrambled messages to an impromptu dip: Serendipity in finding a field loca-
tion. In: Bestor, Theodore C./Steinhoff, Patricia G./Lyon-Bestor, Victoria (eds.): Doing fieldwork in
Japan. Honolulu, HI: Hawai‘i University Press, pp. 55–70.
Hendry, Joy (2011): Marriage in changing Japan: Community and society. London: Routledge.
Hendry, Joy (2021): An affair with a village. Stirling, Scotland: Extremis Publishing.
Johnson, Sheila (1975): American attitudes toward Japan, 1941–75. Washington, D.C.: AEI Press.
Kondo, Dorinne (1990): Crafting selves: Power, gender and discourses of identity in a Japanese workplace.
Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press.
Lesbirel, Hayden (1998): NIMBY politics in Japan: Energy siting and the management of environmental
conflict. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
Lunsing, Wim (2001): Beyond common sense: Sexuality and gender in contemporary Japan. London:
Kegan Paul International.
McLelland, Mark J. (2000): Male homosexuality in Japan: Cultural myths and social realities. Richmond:
Curzon Press.
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52
Chapter 2
How to ask: Research questions
Gabriele Vogt
1. Introduction
We constantly ask questions, but we rarely ever think about the very process of doing so. We
wonder, we ponder and we eventually pose questions that we strive to explore. Will it be rain-
ing today? Should I bring an umbrella? What are the chances I will end up soaked if I decide
to leave the house without it?
This chapter sets out to highlight the process of asking questions, not just any questions, but
research questions. A research question will be your companion for a couple of weeks or
months or years, depending on the scale of the research you embark on. No matter how long
you plan on sticking to each other, it is of utmost importance that you choose your companion
wisely, and not only because you will need to face them day in and day out (and in your
dreams or nightmares). Your research questions will also determine what kind of theories and
methods you will need to familiarise yourself with, what kind of data you will need to gather
and analyse, and, finally, what the punchline of your research project will be.
Let me try and give some structure to what, in the beginning, might seem to be an impenetra-
ble jungle: How can you carve out your research question from what usually starts as a broad
field of interest? This chapter, in particular, follows three lead questions: What are the specific
steps in designing a research question? What difficulties will you most likely face in the pro-
cess? And what strategies are there to overcome those difficulties? Before discussing this pro-
cess of asking a research question, I will provide an overview of the types of research questions
and address the elements generally deemed essential to any good research question.
Moreover, throughout this chapter, I will highlight aspects that I deem important or at least
peculiar when formulating research questions in Japanese Studies. I do so as a long-time stu-
dent of Japanese politics and society myself, and as a teacher who has supervised a hundred
MA theses and two handfuls of PhD theses. Disclaimer: While experience surely does no
harm, every new endeavour of embarking on a research project follows its own set of rules,
and your supervisor will only be able to assist you up to a certain point. From there on you
(and your research question) will need to fly on your own.
53
Gabriele Vogt
2. What is the core of a research question?
Every research question is based on an idea, a genuine or vague interest in a phenomenon and
curiosity. Yet, in Social Sciences not every idea that pops into your mind will eventually devel-
op into a research question. Firstly, we need to make sure that nobody else has had and de-
veloped the same idea before (i.e. we need to do our literature review, see Zachmann, Ch. 4;
for good research practice see Reiher/Wagner, Ch. 16), and, secondly, we need to embark on
the often painful process of pairing an idea that we feel passionate about with social scientific
rigour (i.e. we need to be thorough in our research design, see Okano, Ch. 3).
And then, of course, there is the question of what to do when no idea pops up. Let yourself be
consoled by the experience of Max Weber: ‘ideas come when we do not expect them, and not
when we are brooding and searching at our desks. Yet ideas would certainly not come to mind
had we not brooded at our desks and searched for answers with passionate devotion’ (Gerth/
Mills 1948, p. 136). So, reaching the idea that will eventually turn into our research question
is equally a matter of hard work and patience.
For Japan scholars, in particular when you study contemporary Japan, these ideas often origi-
nate while you are in Japan. You may find yourself riding a train in rural Japan and notice
how you feel increasingly annoyed by many passengers staring at you or calling you gaijin
(foreigner) behind your back. You may feel intrigued by a personal story a Japanese friend
shares, or you may stumble across an exciting picture in a museum—anything that sticks with
you has the potential of awakening your curiosity. The train story is actually my own: I expe-
rienced the gaijin calls in the late 1980s, and while I was still in junior high school back then,
these train rides may have sparked my general interest in studying international migration to
Japan. I did not find ‘my’ research question, though, until many years later—and after reading
widely on Japanese politics and society, thoroughly familiarising myself with the numbers and
laws in Japan and in Germany (adding a comparative matrix focuses your view onto the actu-
al case study; see Nakano, Ch. 3.1), debating my hinges with friends and colleagues, and div-
ing deeply into migration literature at the same time.
3. Types of research questions: The common denominator and specific

forms
Let us now think about the general types and characteristics of research questions first before
addressing the more hands-on issues of how to turn our idea into a research question. Karen
Mattick, Jenny Johnston and Anne de la Croix (2018, p. 104) provide one of the most
straightforward and, at the same time, simplest definitions of what a research question is: ‘a
research question is a question that a research project sets out to answer.’ While we can agree
that this is indeed the common denominator of research questions, it is also important to ac-
knowledge that research questions take on different forms depending on the specific research
project. Are you engaged in a descriptive study or an analytical study? Or maybe in explorato-
ry research of a subject that has hitherto not been studied? In a study that aims to compare,
54
Chapter 2 How to ask
e.g. across time or across countries or cultures, a study that explains or evaluates, e.g. the ef-
fect of certain policies? In a study that provides a close-up on one case, or a study that aims to
contribute to theory building? Are you proceeding inductively or deductively (see Okano, Ch.
3)?
Moira Kelly (2018, p. 82) provides a set of six types of research questions, which reflect this
variety of approaches—some of them being more suitable for qualitative research, some of
them rather for quantitative research designs aimed at testing variables (see Hommerich/
Kottmann, Ch. 10). I will list them here and, in order to clarify the scope of the various re-
search questions with some concrete examples, I will add some mock questions, thematically
connected to my research on the migration of health-caregivers from South East Asian coun-
tries to Japan (Vogt 2018).
Types of research questions

1. Describing and finding correlations: What are the characteristics of the newly in-
troduced migration avenue for health-caregivers from South East Asian countries
to Japan? How is the recruitment of health-caregivers connected to developments
in Japan’s labour market?
2. Examining an aspect of an issue in detail: What is the role of language training in
the newly introduced migration avenue for health-caregivers from South East
Asian countries to Japan?
3. Drawing on theory to examine an issue: Does the push/pull-model of internation-
al labour migration (Hollifield 2000) explain the small scope of health-caregiver
migration to Japan?
4. Comparing attributes: Do gender, ethnicity or age influence the likelihood of po-
tential migrants applying for health-caregiver migration to Japan?
5. Explaining: Why do only few health-caregivers come to Japan under the current
models of labour migration?
6. Assessing whether an intervention works: Would a reform of language education
in the sending countries help raise the number of international health-caregiver
migrants to Japan?
While I framed my mock questions according to Kelly’s model (2018, p. 82), I should add two
aspects that readers might want to understand as warnings regarding these very categories:
first, I firmly believe that, whenever possible (and it would easily be possible in the above ex-
amples), we should stay clear from yes/no questions. This is because 1. they are less exciting
than any other question you could ask,1 and 2. because social reality is never black or white,
which means that the answer to yes/no questions will always be a ‘to such and such a degree’
rather than a simple ‘yes’ or ‘no’.
Secondly, most research projects will have components of more than just one of these cat-
egories inherent in their design. In particular, I would hope that no piece of research stops at a
simple description of a phenomenon (category 1 question) without developing the knowledge
gained by describing this phenomenon into further questions that are designed to strengthen
1 Andreas Sebe-Opfermann (2016, p. 26), for example, states that yes/no questions are too simple and not worth-
while pursuing at all.
55
Gabriele Vogt
the analytical component of the research. Also, projects tend to consist of more than just one
research question. Often you see a lead question supplemented by two or three sub-questions.
Either way, part of the process of developing your research question is to decide which kind of
research question to pursue. This decision is strongly connected to the question of how to de-
sign your overall research project. I will address this interwoven process in more detail in the
following subsection. Before I do so, let me lay out some of the core characteristics that all
research questions share.
Key issues
Your research question is the linchpin of your research project. Creativity and hard work in-
terplay when you are carving out your research question. Good research questions stress the
analytical component over the descriptive side.
4. The characteristics of research questions: Relevance, originality and

rigour
Relevance, originality and rigour are the three core characteristics of any well-designed re-
search question (Mattick et al. 2018, pp. 105–107).
4.1 Relevance
A research question should address something relevant. This immediately opens up the
question of relevance to whom? When you think about the relevance of your research
question, it is important to be aware of the audience you are writing for. Is it your thesis super-
visor, the editorial board of a journal, a committee deliberating approving or declining a re-
search grant proposal? Is it a researcher from your discipline or another? Or is it the general
public, the media or policymakers? In more general terms, it is important that you are able to
explain the relevance of your research question to any given audience (see Farrer/Liu-Farrer,
Ch. 17). So be prepared to deliver the core content of your research question (and by exten-
sion your research project) to a variety of interested people, i.e. in scholarly terms as well as in
lay terms (Mattick et al. 2018, p. 105).
Also, observe your audience when talking about your research question, since you will be able
to draw insights from their reactions as well. Is this project equally relevant to others? Are you
getting to your point quickly enough? I.e. have your ‘elevator pitch’ prepared: the content and
relevance of one PhD thesis in 30 seconds! I have always found it extremely painful to squeeze
years of work and thinking into the blink of an eye, yet let me assure you that it has been ex-
tremely useful at times: as an opener to an interview with a politician who is juggling meeting
with you between a campaign speech and a strategy meeting in her office, or a coffee break
conversation after a panel with business representatives who grant you just enough time for
the ‘elevator pitch’ and an exchange of name cards before floating on to the next person. The
56
quality of your ‘elevator pitch’ will determine whether you will be able to land a follow-up
meeting and an actual interview appointment (see McLaughlin, Ch. 6).
Moreover, as a researcher on Japan, be prepared to deliver the core content of your research
question and project not only in your mother tongue, but also in English and Japanese. Addi-
tionally, be prepared to answer questions regarding the relevance of your research question to
the country you are from. For example, I found it extremely useful to study the history and
scope of international labour migration to Germany before/while studying this issue in Japan,
since I was frequently asked about this comparative dimension during interviews, in the
question and answer sessions following presentations, etc.
4.2 Originality
‘[E]nsure that the research question will lead to original work that generates new insights and
does not duplicate previous research’ (Mattick et al. 2018, p. 106; see Reiher/Wagner, Ch. 16).
There are essentially two ways to ensure the originality of your research, and I strongly advise
you to see both of them through: a thorough literature review, as well as multiple and intense
debates about your research question with peers and teachers (see Zachmann, Ch. 4).
The how to of a literature review is dealt with in chapter four of this book,2 but at this point,
let me address two aspects that are of particular importance with regard to the relevance of the
literature review for ensuring the originality of your research. As Japan scholars, you must not
ignore the probably vast research literature on your chosen research area that has been pub-
lished in the Japanese language. I speak from own experience when I stress that in some cases
the research literature in Western languages may cover one or at best two dozen volumes
(which you can go through relatively speedily), while the research literature in Japanese can fill
a whole section in any major bookstore or library (which will take you much more time to
work your way through). I certainly found this to be the case with literature on the Okinawan
protest movement against the continuous system of forward deployment of U.S. military units
in the prefecture (Vogt 2003). Also, while doing your literature review, revisit your research
question numerous times (Browne 2013, p. 103). In fact, I suggest you engage in some sort of
ping-pong game between reading what has been done in your research field, and refining your
original question, until you are confident that you have reached and are able to articulate the
research gap that your work will be able to fill (see Zachmann, Ch. 4).
Next to the rather quiet work of reading, debating your research question with peers and
teachers and basically anybody who would take the time to listen to your early ramblings, and
later on more refined thoughts is equally important in ensuring the originality of your re-
search. You may notice that all three essays paired with this chapter—by David Chiavacci,
Kenneth Mori McElwain and Nicolas Sternsdorff-Cisterna—refer to this very point. Kelly
(2018, p. 85) calls this process the ‘“friendly” version of peer review’. In this process you look
for both academic and practical advice. The academic advice will essentially be directed at the
quality of your research question. It can trigger you to rethink your perspectives, and—in a
best-case scenario—it can reopen your eyes to patches to which you have gone almost blind
because of the overfamiliarity you have already acquired with your research subject. Also, very
2 Also, I found Anthony Onwuegbuzie and Rebecca Frels (2016) to be very useful as a book to be used in the class-
room when teaching the path to a comprehensive literature review.
57
Gabriele Vogt
importantly, choose your debate partners from backgrounds as diverse as possible. McElwain
(see this chapter, Ch. 2.2) explicitly refers to this point when explaining how he improved his
own research projects. And, again, make sure you also choose Japanese colleagues for your de-
bate group. You can initiate some of these encounters yourself: volunteer to present your
project in study groups and workshops designed for junior scholars; go lunching with your su-
pervisor; attend conferences and make sure you meet new people during coffee breaks and so-
cial events. Some of these encounters will just happen to you: the person in the seat next to
you on a plane ride might turn out to be full of practical advice regarding the research
question you have in mind. On a flight from Dubai to Manila, I once talked for hours with a
registered Filipina nurse working abroad. By sharing some of her life course events, she en-
lightened me with hints at where my research question was still insufficient.
4.3 Rigour
Finally, rigour is among the core characteristics of any well-designed research question. Rigour
speaks directly to the development of a research question. Mattick et al. (2018, p. 107) high-
light several points ensuring rigour in research questions, but most prominently they stress the
need to align the research question with methods of data collection and data analysis that you
can apply. This is a valid point that I will come back to in the following subsection, and also
discuss the somewhat extreme case of this alignment, i.e. cases when research questions are
‘shaped by researchers’ preferred methodological tools, which are inevitably linked with the
way they see the world’ (Mattick et al. 2018, p. 107; see Goodman, Ch. 1).
One final word of advice regarding the rigour of research is to handle research questions that
are close to your heart with even more carefulness than any other. If you feel too passionate,
too emotionally involved with a research question, you may lose the objectivity you need to do
research (Sebe-Opfermann 2016, p. 23). The degree of personal involvement with a certain
topic is something that ultimately everybody needs to judge for themselves. How research dis-
ciplines position themselves to this question, where the disciplines draw their boundaries and
what tools they suggest applying in order to handle emotion in research varies largely. While,
for example, anthropologists to some degree need and want to immerse themselves fully into
the field, many political scientists shy away from even becoming a member of a political party
as they strive for a neutral and detached position within the area they study. Just some months
ago, while studying political participation in Okinawa, I attended a citizens’ rally and found
myself struggling over whether to join the concluding chants and whether to hold the protest
posters up high in the air or not. Where is the point where I lose my distanced view of the
research object, and ‘go native’ instead? To what degree can I actually keep a distance from an
issue I have been following for a quarter century and feel deeply sympathetic about? There is
no one-size-fits-all answer to this question. I would, however, like to urge you to keep in mind
your role as a researcher, to be reflexive about your research methods and activities through-
out the process of conducting research, and to disclose them without holding back on any of
the applied methods and activities (see Alexy, Ch. 7.3).
As a supervisor I have, however, come to dread theses that reflect a student’s personal life
course events, political engagement, sexual orientation, etc., as very often these theses trade in
a rigorous research design for emotional involvement and an activist tone, and eventually re-
58
semble policy papers rather than academic theses. A more experienced researcher, however,
may well be equipped with enough coolness to tackle issues close to their heart in a rigorous
manner nevertheless. However, do not let yourself be fooled: a research project that you feel
passionate about will, on the one hand, help you pull through the times when you find it hard
to motivate yourself to keep working on your project; on the other hand, it is always more
difficult to pull through with such a project, as the constant efforts to stay away from any sub-
jectivity—which will be needed in data collection, data analysis and in the process of writing
up your study—can be quite tiring.
Key issues
Relevance, originality and rigour are the core components of any good research question.
Make sure you develop your research question in close dialogue with the expertise present
on your topic in Japan. Always keep in mind who your audience is. Be aware of the difficul-
ties of emotional engagement with your research topic.
5. How do I develop my research question?
Now that the general types and characteristics of research questions have been laid out, how
do we develop our research question? Think about the following two approaches. Firstly, to
borrow the words of Kelly (2018, p. 81): ‘We ask questions all the time, so how hard can it
be? Developing good research questions, however, involves a level of craft.’ Secondly, in the
words of Doris Leung and Jennifer Lapum (2005, p. 63) while reflecting on their own research
process: ‘Poetry has taken them beyond the traditional limits of knowing and allowed them to
conceptualise their research questions by situating and locating their selves within their re-
search.’ I argue that we need in fact both: we do need the craft component in order to design
our research question, and we do need a bit of art in order to transform our research question
into something enlightening. The good news is you can learn craft, and you can hope for arty
inspiration. Actually, there is no bad news to this story. (Please do not despair if writing poems
has so far never inspired you to draw up a research question!) Now let us focus on the steps
you can acquire through training.
5.1 The process: Ping-ponging back and forth
When discussing the originality of your research question in the subchapter above, I have al-
ready sketched out the idea of a ping-pong game: your research question will be refined from a
broad idea to actual ‘research question[s] [that] will lead to a project that aims to generate
new insights’ (Mattick et al. 2018, p. 104) by going back and forth between the initial idea,
the relevant secondary literature and debates with peers. Each round you play of this game,
your question will become more refined. You may need to take a detour once in a while, and
be assured that this is rather the rule than the exception. Let me stress two aspects in particu-
lar.
59
Gabriele Vogt
Detour: While ping-ponging, be prepared not only to go multiple rounds, but also to ‘consider
alternative questions’ (Kelly 2018, p. 84) altogether. Obviously, this will be necessary when
you happen to figure out that your initial research question is lacking in relevance, originality
or rigour (see above). Also, if you feel that your initial idea is not going anywhere, such as, for
example, when a policy reform your hypothesis is based on does not come through (see this
chapter, Chiavacci, Ch. 2.3), or when social reality is changing quickly, which might make
your research question significantly less interesting or even obsolete (see this chapter, McEl-
wain, Ch. 2.2). Sometimes you cannot help but ‘[g]o back to the basics’ (Bodemer/Ruggeri
2012, p. 1439).
It always hurts to make a radical cut like that, but be aware that following through with a
research question that, for valid reasons, you can no longer fully support is the significantly
worse choice than starting from scratch again. Most likely, by the way, you will not even need
to start from scratch, but will be able to build on your previous work in ways that might sur-
prise you. In 2005, when I started researching labour migration to Japan, I basically started to
wrap my head around a ‘non-case study’. Little did I know that in 2006, a new government
initiative would open up a sector-specific migration avenue to Japan. Needless to say, I needed
to completely rethink the story and refine my research question. However, I was still able to
use what I had studied on migration policymaking in Japan, on the stakeholders, the laws, the
numerical development and diversity of the migrant population and much more.
On track: ‘Define your terms and identify assumptions that underpin the question(s)’ (Kelly
2018, p. 84). Once you feel confident that you can settle on a research question, i.e. one you
are on track with, be prepared for some serious brainwork as the process of ‘back and forth’ is
about to really kick in. Let me quote Kelly’s (2018, pp. 84–85) list of bullet points to illustrate
this thought.
The back and forth process of defining research questions

• Identify possible research topics.
• Identify possible questions.
• Consider alternative questions.
• Break down your proposed research question(s).
• Define your terms and identity assumptions that underpin the question(s).
• Decide on a question.
• Check the literature to see whether the chosen question (in the form it is in) has
already been answered.
• Refine your question, if necessary.
• Develop a project proposal around your research question.
• Seek feedback on your draft proposal from supervisors and peers.
• If necessary, reframe the research question in the light of issues raised by construct-
ing the proposal.
• Carry out your study.
• Go back to your question from time to time to check that you are still on the track
that you started on.
60
I think it might be helpful to think about the process of developing your research question, not
in the form of a list but as a circle or a spiral: most work packages will reappear frequently
and ask you to revisit and rethink them. Also, when you respond negatively to the final check
of whether or not you are still on track, go back and refine your question, or come to terms
with the fact that your research has obviously started to take a different route.
While you proceed through this spiral, your research question will naturally change. Some-
times there will be little changes; sometimes the changes will be quite profound. As an anthro-
pologist embarking into the field without a clear-cut question in the first place, you actually
hope and strive for the research question to emerge based on the empirics you encounter (see
this chapter, Sternsdorff-Cisterna, Ch. 2.1). Also, for researchers in other disciplines, to experi-
ence a change in research questions is not only ok, but it is actually a really good thing! It
gives proof of your project development. Just make sure your overall research design still cor-
responds to your questions, and in case adjustments should have become necessary, implement
them as soon as you can.
A word of caution is in order here: an important part of the art of developing your research
question is to know when to break out of that circle! When has the time come to stop revisit-
ing and refining your question? If you feel insecure about making that decision by yourself,
talk to your supervisor, other researchers who have more experience than you and to peers or
researchers from other disciplines you possibly can relate to. If you still feel insecure, another
approach might be to just do it: break out of the cycle, stop wondering and pondering for a
while and do some empirical work for a change. This will help you to find out how far your
research question will take you, and most likely you will be pleasantly surprised.
Key issues
Be prepared to rethink your research question multiple times before reaching a solid level of
confidence with your questions. As Sternsdorff-Cisterna (this chapter, Ch. 2.1) points out,
your research question will change eventually during your project. That is ok!
5.2 Narrowing down your research question: Don’t bite off more than you can chew
The process of ‘back and forth’ can easily make you feel overwhelmed or at least cause some
significant headaches. Another strategy to deal with this—apart from breaking out of the (in-
creasingly vicious) cycle—is to ‘[b]reak down your proposed research question(s)’ (Kelly 2018,
p. 84). While many of our research questions focus on social change (see this chapter, Chiavac-
ci, Ch. 2.3), it is also important to acknowledge that we will probably face limitations in what
we can do in one project. We will not be able to explain social change as such, but maybe only
specific changes occurring in a certain area at a certain time. It is helpful to bear in mind the
picture that Nicolai Bodemer and Azzurra Ruggeri (2012, p. 1439) use. ‘Research today re-
sembles a relay race: We focus on a small part of a larger question and then pass the baton to
the next scientist.’
Specifically, we should try to separate our research question into ‘manageable “sub-problems”’
(Browne 2013, p. 103). Not only will this strategy be helpful in conducting the actual re-
search, it also will make it easier for our audience to follow our thoughts. If you find it hard to
divide your grand ideas into small packages, try to work graphically: use a simple sheet of pa-
61
Gabriele Vogt
per, a flip chart or a white board, and draw out your idea with all its components (see this
chapter, Sternsdorff-Cisterna, Ch. 2.1). You may also add colours, lines and arrows or any-
thing else that highlights important details.
Skilfully chosen sub-problems may serve well as the consistent thread running through our
work. These sub-problems should be logically connected to the lead question! The master of
sub-problems, of course, is James S. Coleman (1990). The Coleman Diagram, also known as
Coleman Boat or Coleman Bathtub, suggests that when studying social change on a macro-
level, you should do so by choosing and studying processes on a micro-level that will eventual-
ly allow you to make causal connections to the macro-level (Institute for Analytical Sociology
2016; see Jentzsch, Ch. 6.3). So try not to bite off more than you can chew, but rather ap-
proach your project in multiple bites at a time. In other words, it is always a good idea to
break down your research question into multiple sub-questions.
I have found it useful to do so by identifying the actors that are central to my research project.
When I first came to Okinawa in the autumn of 1995, the whole island population seemed to
be on their feet demonstrating against the national government’s base siting policy. However, I
could hardly ask ‘What is going on here?’, even if that probably was the first question that
popped into my head. So I tried to disentangle the social reality in front of me by creating
manageable sub-problems using an actor-centred approach: Which movements are part of this
protest wave, and what exactly do they demand? Who are the movement leaders, what is their
background, and why are they stepping up right now? Who are the political leaders in Oki-
nawa, how do they position themselves towards the protest wave, and how are they trying to
make use of the island-wide protest in their bargaining with national level politicians? Who
are their exact target actors in Tokyo and Washington, and what do they stand for? Next to
this kind of actor-centred approach, you could also design sub-problems by focusing, for ex-
ample, on a certain period of time, on a certain event, on a certain set of sources such as a law
revision or testimonies of eye-witnesses to an event. There are multiple ways of cutting out
your analytical packages. While doing so, you should bear in mind the size of the project you
are setting out to conduct. What is the word count you can fill with your analytical work? Be
careful not to bite off more than you can chew.
Key issue
Narrow down your research question by addressing manageable sub-questions rather than
trying to explain the world.
6. How the research question affects your methodological choices:

Quantitative, qualitative and mixed method approaches
You will need to decide on the methodological approach to your study at the latest once you
have a manageable package at hand. Realistically, however, the question of which research
methods to apply is one that will linger in the back of your head from the very onset onwards.
Frankly, there are research methods that you feel familiar with and that you tend to use (Kelly
2018, p. 82). Or, maybe you deliberately fancy venturing out and trying some new approach-
62
es. Collaboration—as McElwain points out in this chapter (see Ch. 2.2)—can be a fruitful
path to choose in this case. Either way, sometimes—Alan Bryman (2007) argues that more of-
ten than not—your preference for research methods also impacts on the research question you
will eventually settle on. It is important that the approach you choose—quantitative, qualita-
tive or mixed method—is ‘appropriate to the question asked’ (Kelly 2018, p. 82).
The different approaches to data collection and data analysis that follow this choice are dealt
with in other chapters in this volume (see Ch. 5–14). Let me at this point just sketch out in
broad strokes that the research literature generally refers to one core difference between quan-
titative and qualitative research that has a direct impact on the research question (assuming
that you decide on the methodology before the question): While quantitative research is said to
follow deductive reasoning, qualitative research is often associated with induction. While
quantitative researchers will have identified all the relevant variables before data collection be-
gins (which is a precondition if you aim at doing surveys or experiments), ‘some qualitative
researchers may be resistant to setting out a formal question and specific details of how to an-
swer it at the start of a project’ (Kelly 2018, p. 83). Please note that Kelly (2018, p. 83) talks
about ‘some’ qualitative researchers. The open approach is particularly common in ethno-
graphic research and is associated with methods like grounded theory (Sebe-Opfermann 2016,
pp. 30–32; see Meagher, Ch. 12). Not all qualitative researchers shy away from identifying
variables. The disciplinary background in which a study is situated generally determines the
research approach, and political scientists and some sociologists who apply qualitative meth-
ods would surely deem it necessary to lay out a question and/or a hypothesis, and concrete
variables to study and/or test before embarking on data collection.
Another alternative to deciding for a quantitative or qualitative approach is to combine ele-
ments from both and embark on a mixed method study (see Hommerich/Kottmann, Ch. 10).
Through data gathered in interviews with fellow researchers, Bryman (2007, p. 5) argues that
the ‘traditional view, whereby mixed-method research is viewed as only appropriate when re-
search questions warrant it’, is gradually pushed into the background. Instead the new view on
mixed method research claims that it is superior because it tends ‘to provide better outcomes
more or less regardless of the aims of the research’ (Bryman 2007, p. 8). This view is based on
the fact that we trust data more if it generates the same outcome via different paths, and thus
prevents critics from dismissing it as coincidental.
According to Bryman (2007, p. 10), there are, however, more reasons that explain the rise in
mixed method studies, beyond what you could argue is a ‘task-driven’ decision. These are ‘to
secure funding, to get research published or gain the attention of policymakers’ (Bryman 2007,
p. 14). More often than the other way around, it is the qualitative researchers that set out to
incorporate quantitative data collection and analysis into their research. This is due to the fact
that quantitative data is favoured by funding agencies, journal editors and policymakers as
seemingly more reliable data. Bryman (2007, p. 18) argues that ‘a widely held principle of so-
cial research—that decisions about research methods and approach are subservient to the re-
search questions that guide them—is questionable as a representation of social research prac-
tice.’ Bryman challenges the textbook approach, according to which the research question
comes first, and theory, methodology, data, etc. fall into place afterwards. He claims that these
days a researcher’s approach to the design of their topic is driven more by pragmatic consider-
ations such as: Where do I get funding for this project? Where can I publish my results? How
will I most likely be able to have an impact (academic and/or public) with my research?
63
Gabriele Vogt
As a junior scholar reading this, you may feel disillusioned (or you are well aware of the deter-
mining power of research funding as you may hold such a position yourself); as a senior schol-
ar, you will know that Bryman has a valid point and maybe feel called upon to rethink the
essence of a research question for your next proposal. But, of course, in an ideal world it is the
enhancement of knowledge that we strive for when formulating our research questions.
Key issue
On the path from developing your research question into an overall research design, ideally
value a task-driven approach over pragmatic necessities of the contemporary research land-
scape.
7. Summary
This chapter set out to discuss the steps involved in developing a research question, the poten-
tial difficulties faced and possible strategies with which to overcome these difficulties. While
there are different types of research questions—ranging from descriptive to analytical ques-
tions—any good research question will be characterised by three components: relevance, origi-
nality and rigour. When you develop your research question, make sure you are prepared for a
lengthy process of back and forth between your initial idea, a thorough literature review and
debates with peers and teachers. Also, make sure you divide your larger question into manage-
able sub-questions, as this will make it easier for you to follow through with your research
and for your audience to understand your approach. Keep in mind that once you develop your
research question into a research project, you will need to settle on the methodological ap-
proach, most likely according to your disciplinary background. Developing a research
question can be a daunting task for any scholar. Do not despair, and talk to your peers and
teachers as much as you can throughout this process. Remember, good research always hap-
pens in dialogue.
64
2.1 Your research questions may change and that is ok
My training is in Cultural Anthropology, a discipline that uses ethnographic methods to learn

about the culture of the places where we work and the lifeworlds of the people we meet. While
ethnographic methods are central to Cultural Anthropology, a number of other disciplines use
them as well.
When conducting ethnographic fieldwork, I have experienced that research questions often
change as the project progresses. It is difficult to predict how fieldwork will unfold and thus it
is important to have some flexibility about one’s approach. The social world is not static; cir-
cumstances change, new connections emerge, etc. Over the course of a project, events can
change the conditions that led to an initial research question and the project will need to be
adapted. Many colleagues with whom I have discussed fieldwork have also relayed their expe-
riences of adapting their projects to what happens in the field. Given all the contingent ways in
which fieldwork can develop, my suggestion is to remain flexible so that the researcher can
respond to the actual experience of fieldwork and make the necessary adjustments to their
project.
Furthermore, ethnographic fieldwork hinges on the person conducting it. The ethnographer is
a vehicle of sorts through which interactions happen and data is gathered. Researchers, how-
ever, are not neutral figures. They carry with them identities that include their gender, class,
race, age, nationality and others, which shape how they are perceived by the people they work
with. As such, even if two ethnographers worked on the same topic, there is a good chance
that their positionality and individual interests would lead them in unique directions. These
factors shape the body of data they collect and the types of questions they can answer. What
an ethnographer envisions in the design phase of a project does not always work out, and thus
it is important to have some flexibility to adapt one’s research to the vagaries of fieldwork.
I have also found that I often need to revise my research questions as I become more familiar
with a topic. What seemed like a good question at the beginning later reveals itself to be too
broad or in need of adjustment. There are areas of inquiry that I may not have initially consid-
ered but later learned about, and they become central to the project. I usually ask at the end of
an interview if there was anything that we did not discuss that the interviewee considers im-
portant (see Alexy, Ch. 7.3). Sometimes I have been told that we covered all the bases and I
am reassured about my line of questioning. Other times, however, interviewees have pointed
out aspects that they see as important that I did not address. These moments have been
tremendously useful in broadening my perspectives and have sometimes resulted in revisions
to my research questions, so I can incorporate these new angles.
In my first major project (Sternsdorff-Cisterna 2019), I shifted the focus of my research in re-
sponse to events that took place a few months before I planned to begin my main period of
fieldwork in Japan (see this chapter, McElwain, Ch. 2.2). I entered graduate school with the
65
intention of studying food safety and quality in Japan. I was particularly interested in the dis-
tinction between domestic and imported food products; consumer surveys showed that given a
choice, many consumers in Japan preferred domestic products, which they perceived as safer
compared to imported alternatives. In the spring of 2011, I was in the United States preparing
to begin my fieldwork on this topic. Then, Japan was struck by the triple disaster of March
11, 2011. I followed with alarm the news about the disaster and learned from these reports
about the pressing concerns regarding food safety because of the radiation released from the
Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant. From these reports, I learned that discussions about
food safety were shifting and I began to consider how I could adapt my research to incorpo-
rate these new developments. A few months later, I left for Japan and, with my committee’s
blessing, I decided to use my preliminary research on food safety as background information
which I could utilise to focus my attention on food safety in light of the accident at the
Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant.
After I began my fieldwork, I learned about topics that I was not initially familiar with, such
as the technical aspects of measuring radiation. Radiation does not have a colour, smell, tex-
ture or visual cues that reveal its presence. Rather, detectors are needed to measure how much
radioactivity is present in a food sample. During my fieldwork, I met people who ran testing
centres and learned from them about the different types of detectors available and how testing
procedures can affect the degree of confidence in the results. In a nutshell, the longer a sample
is tested, the more fine-grained the results become, and, as such, the length of the test affects
the degree of confidence with which it can be said that a product has undetectable levels of
radiation. As I learned about how these detectors operate, I realised that their technical specifi-
cations played a role in the production of data about the effects of the nuclear accident on
food safety. From these insights, I developed new lines of inquiry that allowed me to include a
discussion of measurement as part of my overall project.
I have thus far stressed the importance of remaining flexible so that the ethnographer can
adapt to new circumstances and what they learn during fieldwork (see McLaughlin, Ch. 6).
Given the fluid nature of this process, it is important to have moments of reflection in order to
evaluate what one has done thus far and where the project is heading. One of my mentors,
anthropologist David Slater, introduced me to an exercise halfway through my fieldwork that
allowed me to do this. In this exercise, we divided a blackboard in half. On one side, I sum-
marised all the data I had collected thus far and the places I was gathering it. On the other side
of the board, I listed the research questions that I wanted to answer by the end of my field-
work. With everything laid out in front of us, we began matching my data to the questions
listed on the other side. During this process, we discussed which questions looked like ones I
could already address, which questions I could not yet answer, whether there was data that
related to questions I had not listed, and also found connections between topics that I did not
notice until everything was diagrammed in front of us. This exercise created a moment in
which I was able to take stock of my fieldwork; it also gave me an opportunity to brainstorm
how I might change my research strategies to ensure that I collected data with which to ad-
dress the questions I could not yet answer. Through this exercise, I also began drafting an out-
line of what my ethnography would eventually look like and how I might organise the various
research questions I was working with into an overall narrative.
My next suggestion comes from advice I was given when I was preparing applications for
graduate school. At the time, I was living in Tokyo and anthropologist Anne Allison was
66
teaching a seminar in which we read ethnographies about Japan and discussed our individual
research interests. As Allison listened to our ideas, we discussed their merits and whether they
were feasible. In addition, she often asked us to answer what seemed like a difficult question:
why now? Asking a compelling research question was a first and crucial step, but by asking
the ‘why now’ question, Allison prompted us to think about how our projects would speak to
the contemporary moment.
Different projects will have different answers to this question. For some, the answer may hinge
on events of contemporary significance or social issues that merit further attention. In other
cases, a project is designed to intervene in theoretical debates and its results will move disci-
plinary knowledge forward. I have also worked on projects for which it seemed difficult to ex-
plain what was unique about the topic at that moment in time. Nevertheless, even when it
seemed difficult to answer this question, reflecting on it helped me to think about how to pos-
ition my project and articulate the ways in which it would contribute to our knowledge about
contemporary Japan and/or debates in Anthropology. In addition, I realised that thinking
about the timeliness of the project became useful down the line when preparing funding appli-
cations. A good project will hopefully be competitive for funding, and it is important in these
applications to make a compelling case for the significance and urgency of the research.
In my current project, I am examining the role of artificial intelligence (AI) and sensors in the
makings of a ‘super-smart society’ in Japan. AI as a field dates back to the 1950s and sensors
also have a long history, so when designing the project, I took care to note recent develop-
ments that make the contemporary moment unique. In 2016, the Japanese government intro-
duced a vision to move towards ‘Society 5.0’, a super-smart society that relies on AI, the Inter-
net of things, big data and robotics to optimise social processes and create a smart society. In
2020, Japan will also introduce 5G cellular networks, which will dramatically expand band-
width and the speed of data transmission. As 5G networks become available, it is forecast that
many objects and places that are currently not connected to the cloud will become ‘smart’ and
transmit digital data; AI will play a crucial role in analysing these increasing quantities of data.
When I conceptualised the project, I highlighted these developments to explain its contempo-
rary relevance and why it was necessary at this moment in time to explore the role of AI and
sensors in Japan.
Lastly, I would like to introduce something that may seem obvious but is worth emphasising,
and that is to choose a research subject that one is passionate about. Depending on the scope
of the topic, a researcher can spend a substantial amount of time working on it; it can take
years to decades to see a project through from conceptualisation to publications. Beyond disci-
plinary concerns, we have our own sense of curiosity, past experiences, political commitments
and numerous other variables that shape our interests. The answer to why we are committed
to a topic may not always be immediately clear or can change over time, but I would recom-
mend taking a moment to reflect on what drives our desire to learn more about it.
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2.2 Studying Japanese political behaviour and institutions
Finding a ‘good’ research topic or puzzle, and more importantly, avoiding a ‘bad’ one, is hard
to do on one’s own. We are often drawn to questions and cases that interest us personally, but
as a professor told us in graduate school, ‘everybody has the right to study what they want,
but nobody has the right to get paid for it’. I often bear this aphorism in mind when advising
young scholars: there is a distinction between a hobby and a profession. In Political Science,
research agendas are inevitably shaped by real-world events. Over the last 30 years, scholar-
ship on populism, climate change and terrorism has grown rapidly, even as interest in the inner
workings of the Soviet era Kremlin has waned.
The same holds true for the study of Japanese politics. The end of the Cold War and the rise of
China have altered the salience of the U.S.–Japan Alliance or Article 9 to East Asian security.
Following the collapse of the economic bubble, research on the supposed merits of the devel-
opmental state has given way to understanding the political causes of the Lost Decade. After
electoral reform in 1994, many scholars began to work on their consequences for party system
change and public policy outcomes, while abandoning further analysis of the old electoral sys-
tem. In some ways, Japanese politics has become less exceptional since the 1990s, thereby
challenging researchers who wish to publish in international journals or university presses to
justify their case selection in new ways.
In comparative politics, the value of studying a specific country—especially if the researcher is
based outside that country—is often defined by its ability to explain events in other countries.
This manifests in two ways. First, is the case an ‘exception to the rule’, whereby its internal
operations or political outcomes force us to re-evaluate accepted theories? Second, is the case
‘typical’, in that understanding its inner mechanisms have direct implications for explaining
empirical outcomes in a wide range of countries?
Like most scholars who began their careers outside Japan, my research on political institutions
uses Japan as a comparative case to explain broader political patterns. Having been trained in
the United States after the Liberal Democratic Party’s (Jiyūminshutō, LDP) first defeat in 1993,
‘single-party dominance’ was no longer a sufficient hook to attract attention from my peers,
advisors or hiring committees. However, Japan has a treasure trove of data that is unavailable
in other countries, making it a useful case in which to (re)test (un)conventional theories empir-
ically. In the rest of this chapter, I will discuss how research on Japanese political institutions
and behaviour has changed over the last two decades, through the lens of my own work on
electoral and party politics.
68
Studying electoral politics and LDP single-party dominance
A central tenet of democracy is electoral accountability, wherein voters have the opportunity
to throw out governments that enact unpopular policies or lack administrative competence.
One expectation is that we should observe periodic turnovers in governing parties; exceptions
to this rule, such as the LDP’s electoral supremacy between 1955 and 1993, attract interest as
outlier cases (Pempel 1990). There are multiple explanations for the LDP’s success, particu-
larly under the 1955 System. First, the LDP’s popularity was buoyed by rapid postwar growth
and rising living standards (Miyake et al. 2001). Second, the LDP distributed pork-barrel
projects to compensate for slower growth in rural areas, which were also their electoral
strongholds (Calder 1988; Ramseyer/Rosenbluth 1993). Third, opposition parties failed to co-
ordinate effectively against the LDP, and were particularly hampered by their inability to at-
tract quality candidates (Scheiner 2006). Fourth, the electoral system was biased in favour of
rural incumbents, through a combination of seat malapportionment and restrictive campaign
regulations, thereby insulating the LDP from challengers (McElwain 2008). These explana-
tions are not exhaustive, mutually exclusive or equally relevant to all time periods. However,
the rarity of single-party dominance drew significant academic interest in the determinants of
the LDP’s success and its implications for electoral accountability.
After the LDP’s first defeat in the 1993 House of Representatives election, academic attention
pivoted towards the effects of electoral reform. In 1994, the lower house system was changed
from multi-member districts with single non-transferable votes (MMD-SNTV) to a mixed-
member majoritarian (MMM) rule, which combined single-member districts with a propor-
tional representation tier. The early 1990s saw electoral reform in a number of other countries,
notably Italy and New Zealand. These offered opportunities to test long-standing theories
about the relationship between 1. the electoral system and the number of parties, as well as 2.
the effects of new electoral incentives on public policy outcomes.
On the first point, the predominance of single-member districts under the new MMM system led
to predictions that the fragmented opposition parties would gradually merge into a viable alter-
native to the LDP (Christensen 1994; Curtis 1999). This transition was messy, as both governing
and opposition parties experienced a series of defections by Diet members (Kato 1998; Reed/
Scheiner 2003). On the second point, the elimination of intra-party competition over votes,
which was endemic under MMD-SNTV, led to a greater focus on policy-based, programmatic
competition over clientelistic redistribution (Catalinac 2016; Noble 2010). Since 2005, election
outcomes have hinged on national swings in voter sentiment, rather than district-by-district char-
acteristics, suggesting that elections have become ‘nationalised’ (McElwain 2012).
The victory of the Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ) in 2009 seemed to herald a new era of (most-
ly) two-party competition, marked by greater electoral accountability and government turnover.
The DPJ’s loss in 2012 was consistent with this trend, but the manner of its loss, as well as the re-
fragmentation of opposition parties, belied simple expectations of a two-party equilibrium. New
smaller parties continued to crop up only to fade away quickly—a still ongoing process. The DPJ
itself no longer exists, and many of its former members have splintered into other parties.
The fragmentation of opposition parties is important to understanding contemporary Japanese
politics. However, it is not clear if the fluidity of the party system is a short- or long-term fea-
ture, raising the possibility that any in-depth, contemporaneous account of individual parties
or events will quickly become obsolete. More fundamentally, the Japanese political system has
69
become less distinctive from a comparative perspective. The LDP’s first loss in 1993 was due
to the perfect storm of political scandals, economic collapse and intra-party defections, but it
still remained the largest party in parliament. Its second loss in 2009 was more conventional:
it was beaten by the more popular DPJ. The resurgence of the LDP since 2012, as well as the
inability of opposition parties to settle on a unified banner, may have systemic roots in the in-
stitutional architecture of government, but this may be better studied when (if) the dust settles,
rather than following events election-by-election.
One possible avenue of comparative research is through the lens of party emergence and sur-
vival. There is a robust range of European literature on ‘new parties’, many of which have
made significant gains in recent years, buoyed by growing anti-establishment or anti-immigra-
tion sentiments. There is evidence that the ideological basis of party politics in Japan has been
changing over the last twenty years too. Christian G. Winkler (2017) argues that the LDP has
been placing greater emphasis on post-materialist policies, rather than neo-liberal issues, in
their election manifestos. The salience of constitutional revision, both in party platforms and
in voter decision-making, has increased dramatically in the last decade (McElwain 2018;
Sakaiya 2017). These may reflect generational shifts in ideological priorities and perceptions
of the left–right dimension, as documented by Willy Jou and Masahisa Endo (2016).
What’s new is what’s old: Public opinion and economic performance
One topic in which Japan researchers have renewed their interest is the political causes and
consequences of economic performance. Between the 1970s and 1990s, the focus of Social Sci-
ence research on Japan was the political economy: the determinants of the ‘miracle’ growth of
the 1960s–70s, the asset bubble of the 1980s, and policy paralysis in the 1990s. However, as
the economy remained mired in the doldrums of the Lost Decade, comparative researchers
shifted their emphasis to better-performing countries. This trend has begun to shift in recent
years, in large part because of the global financial crisis. What was once seen as a ‘Japanese
problem’—prolonged deflation, stagnant growth—started to afflict other advanced economies.
While political economy research has historically focused on elite decision-making, there has
been a proliferation of work that centres on voters, drawing on the literature on ‘economic
voting’. Public support for the government is correlated with macro-economic performance,
but governments often need to enact long-term policies that entail short-term pain. This makes
it crucial to understand how voters perceive the economy, learn about public policies and at-
tribute changes in their own lives to government actions. In a series of public opinion projects,
I have been examining these linkages. I show that people’s macro-economic evaluations are
highly sensitive to stock market fluctuations, in large part because these are the most reported
economic items in the news (McElwain 2015). Greg Noble and I (2015) find that Japanese
voters are more likely to support increases in the consumption tax if these are explicitly tied to
funding social insurance programmes. Finally, Junko Kato, Tomoko Matsumoto and I (2018)
explore attitudes towards government budgets and find that older men with higher education-
al attainment are more likely to worry about government debt, suggesting important sub-pop-
ulation differences in economic beliefs.
There are three reasons why Japan is an ideal case to test the relationship between the econo-
my and public opinion. First, Japan has been a front-runner in many (pessimistic) trends, such
70
as prolonged deflation and ballooning government debt. These link to other issues that indi-
rectly affect the economy, such as the labour market consequences of an ageing population
and reticence towards increasing immigration. Second, there is a wealth of public opinion data
in Japan that allows us to test existing theories and develop new frameworks. For example, Jiji
Press, a newswire service, has been running monthly surveys on attitudes towards the econo-
my and politics since the late 1960s without ever changing the question wording. Third, Japan
has an excellent infrastructure for running original surveys. While costs vary by vendor, survey
length and sampling strategy, it is possible to run an original 2000-person survey for JPY
60,000–100,000. For many overseas researchers, this will be possible to budget in research
grants, and is probably cheaper than a round-trip flight to Tokyo (see Hommerich/Kottmann,
Ch. 10).
Some concluding thoughts
When conducting research on Japan, there are two broad approaches: using new knowledge
from Japan to inform theories of comparative politics, and applying comparative theories to
explain Japanese phenomena. Most scholars try to do both, but as I argued, Japan is no longer
an obvious outlier among developed democracies on conventional political topics. Exceptions
exist, such as the consequences of and policy responses to demographic ageing, but it is incum-
bent upon the researcher to justify one’s case selection. One way to do so is to identify ways in
which Japan continues to be an empirical rarity that challenges conventional theory. Another
is to use original or rare data from Japan that allows us to test theories in a more refined way.
My interest in Japanese public opinion, particularly on perceptions of the government’s macro-
economic competence, comes from my belief that both approaches can be married successfully.
Let me end by offering some practical suggestions about conducting new research on Japanese
politics from my own experience. First, the best way to learn whether you have a good topic is
to present your work in front of different audiences. In my case, learning to give different
types of talks to political scientists, economists and Japan specialists has pushed me to better
explain the Japanese case and also broadened my comparative scope. Each group has different
types of expertise and interests (e.g. quantitative versus qualitative analysis, economic policy
versus public opinion), which can inform avenues for fruitful research, gaps between theory
and empirics, and ways to integrate Japanese and comparative research.
Second, collaboration can be crucial for innovative research. Survey work is extremely difficult
to do on one’s own, and I co-author with two graduate students at the University of Tokyo for
both survey design and empirical analysis. Dissertations obviously require original, individual
work, but for scholars who have an opportunity to do fieldwork in Japan, attending confer-
ences and workshops can be valuable for identifying other like-minded scholars with whom
you may eventually want to collaborate.
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2.3 Capturing social change in Japan
David Chiavacci
The research question is the alpha and omega of research and academic writing. It is, in my
view, even more important than theories or methods. Throughout my academic career, I most
often ended up with meaningful research results when I had a good research question to start
with. In these cases, I let the research question flourish and develop, and tried not to lose sight
of or to forget it along the way. It is, foremost, the research question that will allow you to
generate findings that are new and innovative contributions to your field. Ideally, the research
question defines which theoretical approaches and methods should be used and not the other
way around. However, how do you find a good research question? Actually, I have to admit
that, during over two decades of doing Social Science research on Japan, I never gave this
question too much thought. I could even claim that I do not know if I found my research ques-
tions or if they came to me like uninvited but highly welcome guests. Still, the door has to be
open for an uninvited guest to materialise. My main advice for ‘opening the door’ is to follow
your interests: read up on those research topics that excite you and about which you would
like to know more. And if you happen to come across a research gap or even a puzzle, then
seize your opportunity and start to frame and reframe a research question, but don’t forget to
think about which data or material is needed to answer this—ideally—open question.
Research question first: From the question to the project
When I review my research projects and questions, social change can easily be identified as the
common and general issue that played an important role in most of them. In my experience,
focusing on social change is a quite productive way to identify a research question, because a
first step is to ask why change occurs. However, this does not mean that everything will go
smoothly if you try to capture the meaning of social change. In fact, over the years, I encoun-
tered different challenges in developing research questions on issues of social change depend-
ing on the project.
In my PhD project, I analysed the sudden surge in popularity of Western companies as employ-
ers of graduates from prestigious universities in Japan. In the final year of my master’s studies,
together with a colleague I was able to secure financial support from the Swiss Asia Founda-
tion for an empirical survey on the perception of Swiss companies as employers in Japan and
the job satisfaction of their Japanese employees (Chiavacci/Lottanti 1999). As part of this re-
search project, we found several quantitative surveys whose data showed a surprisingly sudden
and strong increase in popularity of Western companies among graduates of top-ranked
Japanese universities. Up to the mid-1990s, difficulties and often the complete failure in re-
cruiting university graduates was, together with the high costs of doing business, one of the
two by far most important barriers to Western companies successfully making direct invest-
72
ments and entering the market in Japan. However, in the late 1990s, almost from one day to
the next, Western companies became attractive employers and many secured top positions in
the rankings of the most sought-after employers of university graduates, even including those
from the most prestigious institutions. In my PhD project, I discussed this new popularity as
an indicator of macro-sociological change from the perspective of the continuing economic
stagnation and increasing discourse of crisis under the buzzword ‘Lost Decade’ (ushinawareta
jūnen) in Japan.
In this case, the research question was already clearly defined at the very beginning of the re-
search project. In fact, the new popularity of foreign companies as employers of elite universi-
ty graduates was one of the main findings of the earlier research project on Swiss companies,
for which we had, however, no explanation. The research question in my PhD project asked
how this sudden increase in the attractiveness of foreign companies could be explained in the
context of a new discourse of crisis and national stagnation, a changing transition process
from university to labour market and the new life course ideals of the generation of university
graduates in Japan in the late 1990s. As the research design was clearly defined from the very
beginning of the project, the research question did not change at all during the research. More-
over, I was fortunate that I had already been able to gain ample experience in qualitative inter-
view methods in the preceding project about Swiss companies in Japan and was able to suc-
cessfully secure access to interview partners. This resulted in the smooth and fast realisation of
the whole PhD project in about two years and its publication the following year (Chiavacci
2002).
Struggling with research questions
Developing good research questions in the two later projects was much more complex and
time-consuming. When I came to Japan as a postdoc in the early 21st century, I soon noted an
increasing number of academic publications about rising inequality and a public debate on this
issue gaining momentum. My interest in social change and in social structures led me to em-
bark on this topic immediately. However, empirical data and research were puzzling for me in
this case. In public and academic debates, a new model of Japan as an increasingly unequal
society became dominant up to 2005. It became condensed into a new discursive frame for
Japan as a gap society (kakusa shakai) and displaced the former frame of Japan as a general
middle-class society (sōchūryū shakai). Still, from a comparative perspective, the discursive
juncture was not at all supported by empirical data. Quantitative indicators and research re-
sults showed an increase in social inequality, but widening social and economic gaps were very
moderate in international comparison and by no means justified the complete transformation
of Japan’s self-perception from a general middle-class society to a gap society.
This contradiction between strong structural continuities and complete frame reversal inspired
me to move away from my original research questions, which focused on explaining the con-
text and main factors for increasing inequality. My new research question was how the gap
between the dominance of a completely new frame on a discursive level versus a very moderate
change according to structural data could be explained. This shift led me to explore the Sociol-
ogy of Knowledge as a completely new and unplanned theoretical field. My focus was no
longer on questions of structural or discursive change, but on the interrelationship between so-
73
David Chiavacci
cial structures and discursive frames as central pillars of social reality. My research in this area
resulted in publications on the question of why and how certain macro-sociological models re-
flect everyday experiences and become dominant frames in academia and society. The main
finding was that these processes and the sequence of dominant social frames were not a
question of scientific truth of models based on evidence, but a question of their persuasiveness
in the micro-sociological lifeworld of the population and especially among those groups shap-
ing public debates and discourses (Chiavacci 2008). While the research took years, I can also
say that these unsolved puzzles helped me to turn a rather boring research question into a
much more interesting research question. The excitement of this topic has not diminished for
me, and I have continued to do research on it (Chiavacci/Hommerich 2017).
Asking questions about non-change
My main postdoctoral project was even more complex. After finishing my PhD, I urgently
needed a new research project to be able to apply for research funding. Immigration and the
need for comprehensive immigration policy reform in view of Japan’s demographic trajectory
started to become an increasingly important issue in the mass media and on the political agen-
da. The emergence of a more active and less restrictive immigration policy seemed to be only a
question of time. Hence, I had the idea of studying the forthcoming immigration policy reform
and writing my second book about it. However, the more I worked on immigration policies,
the more I noted a huge gap between an intensive and heated debate in public discourse and
among policymakers versus a standstill and reform bottleneck in immigration policy.
As the years passed by without any significant reform despite heated ongoing discussions, my
frustration grew. Obviously, I had completely underestimated the risks of real-time research.
Its degree of timeliness is excellent, and opportunities to collect good qualitative data on the
policy process are very good, but the outcome is completely unknown and insecure. At some
point, I even considered writing my second book about the research question of why no com-
prehensive immigration policy reform was happening in Japan. Hans Geser, one of my former
professors in Sociology at the University of Zurich, had formulated a theory about non-action
and refraining (Geser 1986). However, Geser pointed out that writing a whole book about a
non-occurrence is very unusual in the Social Sciences.
Finally, I realised that I had to expand my research question to solve my problem of political
standstill by covering not only Japan’s immigration reform in the 2000s, but its immigration
policy since 1945 in the context of developments in the East Asian region. While I had origi-
nally planned to analyse the large, upcoming immigration policy reform and its social conse-
quences, my new research question focused on how immigration and immigration policy in
Japan had developed and changed in a larger East Asian context and against the backdrop of
the national institutional setting in immigration policy. In this book, I discussed the transfor-
mation of Japan from a non-immigration country to an immigration country in the late 1980s.
I also compared the immigration policymaking processes that led to significant reforms
around 1990, but only very limited reforms in the 2000s. This research design enabled me to
comparatively analyse the question of why some reforms stall, while other are formulated and
implemented very fast (Chiavacci 2011). This whole project took me eight years, much longer
74
than originally envisaged, but made me realise the importance of developing an alternative
plan if the original research question reaches a dead end.
Concluding remarks
Overall, my experience with research questions is that sometimes you are very lucky—like in
the case of my PhD project—but normally it is a cumbersome process with many twists and
turns, as in the two other projects discussed above, until you finally have your research
question. As I said above, you are desperately looking for good research questions, but nor-
mally they seem to suddenly (and often after a long time) present themselves to you. This long
process can be very stressful, especially for young researchers as they work under time con-
straints and know only too well that their academic career depends on their speed and ability
to produce output in the form of publications. Still, this quest is not only a part, but a funda-
mental piece of the whole research process. The most important thing along the ride is not to
lose track of your research question and to constantly try to improve it. Never forget to be and
remain the master of your research question instead of letting it pull you in a one-way direc-
tion!
75
Further reading
Bryman, Alan (2007): The research question in social research: What is its role? In: International Journal
of Social Research Methodology 10, No. 1, pp. 5–20.
Coleman, James S. (1990): The foundations of social theory. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Har-
vard University Press.
Kelly, Moira (2018): Research questions and proposals. In: Seale, Clive (ed.): Researching society and cul-
ture. Los Angeles, CA: Sage, pp. 79–99.
Leung, Doris/Lapum, Jennifer (2005): A poetical journey: The evolution of a research question. In: Inter-
national Journal of Qualitative Methods 4, No. 3, pp. 64–82.
Mattick, Karen/Johnston, Jenny/de la Croix, Anne (2018): How to … write a good research question. In:
The Clinical Teacher 15, pp. 104–108.
References
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1439.
Browne, Jacinta E. (2013): Getting started with research ‘Beginning: Defining a research question and
preparing a research plan’. In: Ultrasound 21, pp. 102–104.
Bryman, Alan (2007): The research question in social research: What is its role? In: International Journal
of Social Research Methodology 10, No. 1, pp. 5–20.
Calder, Kent E. (1988): Crisis and compensation: Public policy and political stability in Japan. Princeton,
NJ: Princeton University Press.
Catalinac, Amy (2016): Electoral reform and national security in Japan: From pork to policy. New York,
NY: Cambridge University Press.
Chiavacci, David (2002): Der Boom der ausländischen Unternehmen als Arbeitgeber: Paradigmawechsel in
Japan? München: Iudicium.
Chiavacci, David (2008): From class struggle to general middle-class society to divided society: Societal
models of inequality in postwar Japan. In: Social Science Japan Journal 11, No. 1, pp. 5–27.
Chiavacci, David (2011): Japans neue Immigrationspolitik: Ostasiatisches Umfeld, ideelle Diversität und
institutionelle Fragmentierung. Wiesbaden: VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften.
Chiavacci, David/Hommerich, Carola (eds.) (2017): Social inequality in post-growth Japan: Transforma-
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Curtis, Gerald L. (1999): The logic of Japanese politics: Leaders, institutions, and the limits of change.
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Geser, Hans (1986): Elemente zu einer soziologischen Theorie des Unterlassens. In: Kölner Zeitschrift für
Soziologie und Sozialpsychologie 38, No. 4, pp. 643–669.
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Brettell, Caroline B./Hollifield, James (eds.): Migration theory: Talking across disciplines. New York,
NY: Routledge, pp. 137–185.
Institute for Analytical Sociology (2016): The Coleman Boat explained [film]. https://www.youtube.com/w
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Leung, Doris/Lapum, Jennifer (2005): A poetical journey: The evolution of a research question. In: Inter-
national Journal of Qualitative Methods 4, No. 3, pp. 64–82.
Matsumoto, Tomoko/McElwain, Kenneth Mori/Kato, Junko (2018): Why do government deficits prevail?
A survey experiment on budget making. Presented at the 2018 American Political Science Association
Annual Meeting, Boston, MA.
Mattick, Karen/Johnston, Jenny/de la Croix, Anne (2018): How to … write a good research question. In:
The Clinical Teacher 15, pp. 104–108.
McElwain, Kenneth Mori (2008): Manipulating electoral rules to manufacture single party dominance. In:
American Journal of Political Science 52, No. 1, pp. 32–47.
McElwain, Kenneth Mori (2012): The nationalization of Japanese elections. In: Journal of East Asian
Studies 12, No. 3, pp. 323–350.
McElwain, Kenneth Mori (2015): Kabuka ka kakusa ka: Naikaku shijiritsu no kyakkanteki/shukanteki
keizai yōin. In: Leviathan 57, pp. 72–95.
McElwain, Kenneth Mori (2018): Constitutional revision in the 2017 election. In: Pekkanen, Robert J./
Reed, Steven R./Scheiner, Ethan/Smith, Daniel M. (eds.): Japan decides 2017: The Japanese General
Election. London: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 297–312.
McElwain, Kenneth Mori/Noble, Gregory W. (2015): Who tolerates tax increases? Age and gender in the
raising of Japanese consumption taxes. In: Shakai Kagaku Kenkyū 67, No. 2, pp. 75–96.
Miyake, Ichiro/Nishizawa, Yoshitaka/Kōno, Masaru (2001): 55-nen taisei-ka no seiji to keizai: Jiji yoron
chōsa dēta no bunseki. Tōkyō: Bokutakusha.
Noble, Gregory W. (2010): The decline of particularism in Japanese politics. In: Journal of East Asian
Studies 10, pp. 239–273.
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timodal & cultural approach. Los Angeles, CA: Sage.
Pempel, T.J. (1990): Uncommon democracies: The one-party dominant regimes. Ithaca, NY: Cornell Uni-
versity Press.
Ramseyer, J. Mark/McCall Rosenbluth, Frances (1993): Japan’s political marketplace. Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press.
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Chikuma Shobō.
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nant state. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
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baden: Springer Fachmedien, pp. 21–36.
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Chapter 3
How to organise research: Research designs
Kaori Okano
1. Introduction
Having decided on a research topic, researchers begin considering what research design best
addresses their topic. By research design, I mean the whole process of investigation from refin-
ing the research questions based on a review of the literature, to writing up the findings in the
form of a paper or a thesis. We design research so that it can most effectively address our re-
search questions. A good research design functions like a map that provides researchers with
orientation when they are aiming to collect the evidence that is needed to answer their re-
search question or to test a theory in a convincing way (De Vaus 2001, p. 9). In this chapter, I
will focus on case study research design, as it is most broadly conceived. While different disci-
plines (e.g. Anthropology, Sociology, Political Science, etc.) and paradigms (e.g. positivist, in-
terpretive and constructionist) may have slightly different ideas about case study research,
there are generally agreed features.
All research projects on Japan, which are intended to be published in a language other than
Japanese, are ‘case studies’ in the widest sense of the term, in that they aim not only to under-
stand Japanese society for its own sake, but also to advance our understanding of the social
world at a more abstract level. Any study of Japan is inherently comparative in that re-
searchers bring their own perception lens created through past experiences, when observing
and interpreting the phenomena under study. Japan could be studied, for example, as an ex-
ample of a non-Western liberal democracy with particular institutional features and cultural
norms. This view reflects the reality of the Anglophone or Eurocentric dominance in global
knowledge production, which views non-Western societies as peripheral societies with specific
conditions for case studies, where researchers collect raw data or test a theory developed in the
West (Okano 2018). In view of this, Yoshio Sugimoto proposes a cosmopolitan methodology
which presumes that all Social Sciences are ‘Area Studies’ (including studies of Anglophone so-
cieties) without privileging studies based on societies at the centre (Sugimoto 2018).
This chapter aims to address first-time or emerging researchers with little experience who are
about to embark on a project. You may be an undergraduate honours student or a postgradu-
ate student with Japanese language proficiency adequate for studying Japan (of course, your
Japanese will improve as your project progresses). I write this chapter as a senpai with a par-
ticular positionality, which may help you understand what follows. Born in Hiroshima, my en-
tire schooling was in mainstream schools in Japan until I completed an undergraduate degree.
While I was an undergraduate student, I spent a year as an exchange student in Auckland,
New Zealand. I subsequently studied comparative education in Australia for a master’s degree,
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Chapter 3 How to organise research
and then worked as a full-time teacher (and a participant observer) at secondary schools in
Sydney and in New Zealand. Inspired by micro-level experience of schooling as a teacher in a
predominantly anglo-white environment, I subsequently researched working-class high school-
ers in urban Kobe for a PhD from a New Zealand university. Writing in a foreign language
was a challenge. Since then I have been a university-based academic in Melbourne, Australia.
In this chapter, I will first provide an overview of different approaches in case study research
designs and their features, advantages and disadvantages; I will then discuss ways to select a
unit of analysis (single case or multiple cases both synchronic and diachronic). There are five
types of multiple case study designs: 1. multiple cases within Japan, 2. cross-national multiple
cases, 3. a time-series (or diachronic) design, 4. time-series analysis of multiple cases within
Japan (which provide both diachronic and synchronic analysis) and 5. time-series cross-na-
tional multiple cases. Time-series design can take the form of a wave study or a panel study.
Finally, I will discuss theory building and testing, and inductive and deductive processes.
2. Case studies
A case study is an in-depth empirical investigation of a case or multiple cases bounded by time
and activity. These cases can be institutions, phenomena, events, processes, individuals, groups
of people, organisations, activities and programmes (Hancock/Algozzine 2006, pp. 16–29).
Case studies are useful when studying a phenomenon as a whole in its natural setting. Most
case studies use multiple sources of data, including any combination of documents (both pub-
lic and private), interviews, observations (direct and participant), archival records, physical
items (e.g. CDs, pictures) (Yin 2018, p. 111), as well as surveys (see Hommerich/Kottmann,
Ch. 10). Surveys can be officially designed and conducted by government agencies or com-
panies, or by the researchers themselves.
Most case studies include both quantitative and qualitative data components for different
parts of a project, even when they claim to be qualitative studies (Gerring 2007, p. 11). In
Japanese Studies, it is rare to see studies which comprise only narratives. For example, a study
of non-regular workers in a company would first locate the place of non-regular workers in
the national labour market (e.g. income levels, gender) and the company in the national con-
text (e.g. size of companies), using quantitative data available in published statistics. The re-
searcher may deliver a short questionnaire to employees of the company as a starting point to
assist in refining research questions and formulating interview questions. Marie Roesgaard’s
study of cram schools (juku) (2006), for example, included extensive quantitative data from
surveys and national statistics about these institutions and their students, as well as qualitative
data from interviews and observations.
Key issues
A case study is an in-depth investigation of phenomena in their natural setting. Case studies
often use multiple sources of data, both quantitative and qualitative, at different stages of
the investigation.
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Kaori Okano
3. Different approaches of case studies
While John W. Creswell and Cheryl Poth (2017, pp. 65–109) name case studies as one of five
research approaches to inquiry, along with narrative (biographical) research, phenomenologi-
cal research, grounded theory research and ethnographic research, I see case studies as a gener-
ic term inclusive of all these approaches. Let me explain these one by one.
Studies adopting a narrative and biographical approach investigate a person or persons (or
other forms of units of analysis) over a relatively long period of time, drawing on oral life his-
tories and other forms of narrative. For example, Ruth A. Keyso (2000) examined the life his-
tories of eight women residing in Okinawa in order to understand their life trajectories and the
nature of changes in their community. David Plath’s study of maturity (1980) examined the
life paths of several individuals in the Kansai region over the postwar period, drawing on oral
histories, archives and other documents, as well as novels. A biographical study of a promi-
nent individual would also take this approach.
Phenomenology is often adopted by studies that have a psychological or micro-sociological
orientation. This approach illustrates the shared meaning of a phenomenon that all individuals
of a group commonly experience in interaction, and attempts to grasp the meaning and essen-
tial nature of that interaction (Creswell/Poth 2017, p. 75), for example, between pupils and
teachers, elderly and carer workers, doctors and patients, and so on. The study aims to identi-
fy and explain the essential nature of that interaction, drawing on interviews with these indi-
viduals. For example, when Nobuo Shimahara and Akira Sakai (1995) investigated fledgling
teachers in a case study of primary schools, they found that all teachers considered teacher–
pupil bonding, mutual trust and empathetic relationships as the most crucial elements in learn-
ing to teach at Japanese primary schools. Shimahara and Sakai called this phenomenon kizu-
na.
The grounded theory approach, originally developed by micro-sociologists who studied the in-
teraction between dying patients and their relatives (Glaser/Straus 1965), is most effective
when little has been studied about the process in question. It aims to seek an explanation for
the process and generate a theory that is ‘grounded’ in data. Researchers collect vast amounts
of data through observation and interviews, devise categories and sub-categories in that data,
identify patterns and try to explain them (Creswell/Poth 2017, pp. 82–90), which eventually
leads to the formulation of a tentative hypothesis. Advantages of this approach are that it is
likely to lead to original understandings (since little has been known) and grant a larger scope
of ‘freedom’ to the researcher. But this can be a challenge to inexperienced researchers in that
they are not guided by existing theories that inspire hypotheses they can build on to the same
extent as the other approaches (see Meagher, Ch. 12).
An ethnographic approach captures the unit of analysis as a whole in the most natural setting.
It also encompasses a natural process of knowing, like someone entering a new organisation
and getting to know the people and the place by observing, talking to people and becoming
familiar with the immediate surroundings (see Tagsold/Ullmann, Ch. 8). It often involves long-
term immersion in, and observation of, the organisation or people, and events and pro-
grammes as they occur in a natural setting. There are many advantages. A researcher can gath-
er data from a wide range of sources and, since it involves a relatively long period of time, can
revise questions as the study progresses. It also allows the researcher to test emerging interpre-
80
tations (tentative hypothesis) by asking relevant questions, seeking rival theories and/or other
sources of evidence while in the field. The main challenge is the length of time required, not
only for conducting the fieldwork but also for negotiating access to the fieldwork site. If the
study includes institutions as a unit of study, it requires the institution’s approval (see Reiher/
Wagner, Ch. 16). If a study includes minors (under 18 years old), the ethics approval process
will pose more challenges, since consent needs to be obtained from their parents or guardians.
This is particularly true for ethnographies that examine schooling processes: preschools (Lewis
1995; Peak 1991), primary schools (Bjork 2016; Cave 2007; Sato 2003; Tsuneyoshi 2001),
middle schools (Bjork 2016; Cave 2016; LeTendre 2000), senior high schools (Aspinall 2012;
Okano 1993) and minority students in schools (Bondy 2015; Gordon 2008; Roth 2002;
Ryang 1997).
Instead of using an ethnographic approach that includes several methods, researchers can
choose only one of these individual methods like interviews, observations, document analysis
(including content analysis), policy analysis or discourse analysis (see Kottmann/Reiher, Ch. 7;
Tagsold/Ullmann, Ch. 8; Arrington, Ch. 13; Eder-Ramsauer/Reiher, Ch. 14), separately, or in
any combination, when the research question is more specific. These methods of data collec-
tion require significantly less time commitment, since they are more or less ‘one off’, and the
time spent on data collection is shorter. The data collected will usually be more focused and
specific than for an ethnographic study.
Tasks for researchers

• Consider why the case study method would be more effective for your project than
other methods.
• Consider what approach best suits your research question (narrative/biographical,
phenomenology, grounded theory, ethnographic).
• What aspects of your project may be a challenge for each of the above approaches
if you select one?
4. Selecting cases: Analysis of a single case or multiple cases
A research project can involve a single case or multiple cases. Researchers make this decision
based on their research questions and practical considerations of time and resources. Some re-
searchers select a case (or cases) because of typical and representative features that it presents
(e.g. salarymen, married women with irregular employment), so that they can claim that the
findings shed light on wider Japanese society. Others choose a case because of its unique and
distinct features (e.g. motorbike gangs). Some choose cases with similar features: middle-in-
come schools in suburbs (Cave 2016) and working-class urban schools with minority popula-
tions (Okano 1993). Others select cases with distinctive features like Thomas Rohlen’s study
of five schools in Kobe (an elite private school, a high-ranking government academic school, a
medium-ranking government academic school, a vocational high school and an evening high
81
Kaori Okano
school).1 It is also possible to examine ‘all cases’ in order to cover the ‘universe of cases’, like
Kay Shimizu’s study (see this chapter, Ch. 3.3). It examines all the local chapters of the Japan
Agricultural Cooperative (JA) in order to understand the institutional changes that occurred in
the nationwide institution.
In a single case study, researchers examine one organisation, individual, phenomenon or event.
Emma Dalton (2017) chose one political party, the LDP, in order to study Japanese political
parties’ positions (both overt and covert) regarding women in politics. This is a relatively con-
tained process, which may be a good starting point for a novice researcher. In multiple case
studies, researchers select two or more typical cases (e.g. two urban primary schools) in order
to study representative and mainstream features; or two or more schools with distinct but sim-
ilar features (e.g. urban disadvantaged schools) in order to study working-class reproduction
through schooling. On the other hand, a researcher may want to select two cases with con-
trastive features, for example, one working-class school and an elite private school, in order to
illuminate differences in class-specific socialisation and reproduction. Another researcher may
choose one girls’ working-class school and one boys’ working-class school in order to include
gender in its analysis, with the social class factor constant. Existing studies of ‘working wom-
en’ in Japan illuminate how researchers have bounded their units of study. Studies have exam-
ined a group of clerical workers and a group of factory workers to illuminate differences (Lo
1990), factory workers (Roberson 1998; Roberts 1994) and tertiary educated white-collar ‘of-
fice ladies’ (Ogasawara 1998). The choice depends on the research questions.
Analysis of multiple cases takes five different forms: 1. multiple cases of the same institution
(or any unit of analysis) within Japan, 2. cross-national multiple cases (Japan and other soci-
eties), 3. a time-series design which examines a single case diachronically at different points in
time, 4. a set of multiple cases within Japan across different points in time and 5. a set of
cross-national multiple cases at different points in time. A project becomes more complicated
both in design and implementation as it goes from 1 to 5. I will provide some examples in the
following. We see the first type of multiple case design in Rohlen’s (1983; see above) study,
which examined five different types of schools in Kobe, Japan. On the other hand, I chose two
municipal vocational high schools (technical and commerce) with some minority students,
since my interest focused on how final year high schoolers decided on and obtained post-
school employment under the school-based job referral system, and the impact of class and
minority backgrounds in this process (Okano 1993). An example of the second type (cross-
national analysis of multiple cases in Japan and in other societies) is Lynne Nakano’s study
(see this chapter, Ch. 3.1), which compares single women in Tokyo, Hong Kong and Shanghai.
There are several cross-national analyses of this kind about schooling. Gerald LeTendre (2000)
presents an ethnographic study of two middle schools in Japan and two in the U.S., in examin-
ing how middle schools interpret adolescence and assist their adolescent students. Shimahara
and Sakai (1995; see above) compared how fledgling teachers learn to teach at primary
schools in Tokyo and the East Coast of the U.S. The third type investigates the same case (or
unit of analysis) at different points in time, which is often called a time-series design (Tight
2017, pp. 109–110). The time-series design considers each time period as a case, and illumi-
nates the chronological sequence of events, continuities and changes over that period. A di-
1 For comparative case studies and most similar or most different case study designs, see also Alexander George
and George L. Bennett (2005).
82
achronic approach is useful in a study of changes resulting from a new policy or intervention.
When the time span covers years, then we can call it a longitudinal study.
The fourth type of multiple case design is diachronic analysis of multiple cases within Japan at
different points in time, presenting both synchronic and diachronic analysis of cases. This
could take the form of a panel study which examines the same people over time, or a wave
study which examines similar cases over time. For example, my own ongoing research, the
Kobe women’s longitudinal panel study, takes the former approach. It examines a group of the
same working-class girls (multiple cases) from 1989 (when they were in their final year of high
school) to the present, examining their identities, and the accumulation of advantages and dis-
advantages over their life courses in light of structural changes during the Heisei period
(Okano 2009). If the study had taken a wave study approach, the project would have studied
the final year students of the same high schools (or similar high schools) in Kobe at different
points of time, rather than following the same individuals over 30 years. The project’s aim
would have been to identify continuities and changes in how final year high schoolers make
decisions about their post-school destinations, and how the schools guide this process and
with what outcomes. On the other hand, Cave’s study (2016; see above) can be seen as a wave
study, in that it studied the same two middle schools 10 years apart.
The fifth type is diachronic cross-national analysis of multiple cases, again presenting both
synchronic and diachronic comparative analysis. Like the fourth type above, this can take the
form of a panel study or a wave study. Preschools in three cultures revisited (Tobin et al.
2009) adopts a wave study design in examining changes and continuities in observed school-
ing practice in the same preschools in China, Japan and the U.S., 17 years apart in 1984 (To-
bin et al. 1991) and 2002. Nakano’s project on single women in Tokyo, Hong Kong and
Shanghai (see this chapter, Ch. 3.1) has the potential to take on a panel study design, if it were
to follow the same women in the future.
5. The Kobe women’s panel study: An evolving project
I must confess that I did not originally design the Kobe women’s project as a diachronic analy-
sis of multiple cases when it began. The project began as an ethnographic study of two work-
ing-class schools in the 1989–1990 academic year (the first year of Heisei), examined how fi-
nal year high schoolers decided on their post-school destinations under the institution of
school-based job referral, and identified the roles of class, minority status and gender in that
process. I interviewed 100 students during that time. When I interviewed some of the same
students two years later (when they were employed) in order to uncover the extent of the
school-based job referral system’s effectiveness, I was intrigued by their descriptions of their
emerging adult lives (including relationships and childbirths). It occurred to me that an inter-
esting project would be to follow their process of attaining adulthood as a life course study. It
has since then evolved beyond this into a 30-year project with the 22 participants now in their
late 40s. There has been further development in the Kobe women’s project into another disci-
pline. I vaguely felt that these women’s speech patterns and styles had changed over the years,
and casually mentioned this to my colleagues working in sociolinguistics. They then became
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Kaori Okano
interested in studying language variations (both synchronic and diachronic) in the discourse of
my interviews with these women over 30 years. The sociolinguistic part of the Kobe women’s
project now involves a team of five linguists and me, and is funded by the Australian Research
Council (Maree/Okano 2018). A novice researcher’s postgraduate project has unexpectedly
evolved into something larger, and has involved serendipity and redrawing the boundaries of
the unit of analysis (see this Chapter, Ch. 3.2). To my surprise, my own speech in the inter-
views was also closely analysed by my co-researchers! This (for me unexpected) widening of
the scope of my research leads to another issue of research design—bounding the unit of ana-
lysis or a case.
Tasks for researchers

• Consider if your research question is best addressed by studying a single case or
multiple cases in light of the advantages and disadvantages.
• In view of your research questions, consider what specific features your case must
have, and what features you can compromise in selecting cases.
• If you adopt multiple cases, is it better to have cases with similar features or con-
trastive features?
6. Bounding cases and units of analysis
Researchers need to limit the boundaries of a unit of analysis in order to make the project
manageable. While we as researchers are curious about many things, we cannot study all that
interests us and need to limit the focus of our research and the boundaries of a chosen case in
order to complete the project within the required time and resources. I would advise novice
researchers to follow Pamela Baxter and Susan Jack’s approach (2008, p. 546) and confine
their cases by considering these categories: time and place, time and activity, definition (of the
case) and the context. For example, the case can be limited by time and place (e.g. the third
year of a particular newly introduced type of six-year secondary school), time and activity (e.g.
volunteer activities at the time of the Hanshin-Awaji earthquake), and by definition (of the
case) and context (e.g. the elderly’s use of day-care services, in the context of other available
care options, in an urban centre). The boundaries of a case can alter in the course of the re-
search process, when researchers encounter relevant aspects that they had never considered.
While it is wise to define clear boundaries for a case (or unit of analysis) at the outset when
deliberating on data collection methods, I would also suggest being sufficiently open-minded
to adjust the boundary at later stages of the project, a point that Jamie Coates (see this chap-
ter, Ch. 3.2) would concur with.
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7. Knowledge production: The theory building and theory testing

continuum
How does case study research contribute to theory building and theory testing, and ultimately
knowledge production? In theory building, the research begins with an empirical observation
of a phenomenon, and develops a theory by making sense of the empirical study through in-
ductive reasoning. In contrast, in theory testing, the research begins with a theory, which will
guide empirical observation in the research process; and eventually assesses the value of the
theory through deductive reasoning (De Vaus 2001, pp. 5–6). Critics of the case study method
have long commented that case studies cannot contribute much to theory building and testing
(Maoz 2002) because of their limited scope of generalisation, non-replicability, ‘subjective’
conclusions or too many variables examined in too few cases (Gerring 2007, pp. 7–8). These
debates, however, depend on what you mean by a theory.
I see a theory as a tentative explanation. A theory may include identification of causal relation-
ships, a sequence of events or simply a particular interpretation informed by analysis of evi-
dence. The scope of tentative explanation (here in my understanding as theories) differs signifi-
cantly: at what I would call a lower and immediate level (also: micro-level), a theory can be a
tentative explanation of a specific event in a specific context, that is, an informed interpreta-
tion based on evidence of that particular case (e.g. class size has little impact on student learn-
ing in a Japanese primary school since learning centres on interaction amongst students there).
On the other hand, at a higher abstract level (also: macro-level), a theory can be well estab-
lished and deemed widely or universally applicable, such as the theory of gravity in physics.
Somewhere between the two on the continuum are medium level theories (also: middle-range
theories), that is, theories about phenomena which are often based on multiple units of study
(e.g. school class size generally promotes self-directed learning). Therefore, theoretical discus-
sion can occur at different levels.
There are variations in how (far) studies want to contribute to theory building beyond an im-
mediate specific level. Case studies undertaken to understand a specific society are called ‘in-
trinsic’, while those with the aim of contributing to general theory building are ‘instrumental’
(Stake, 1995, pp. 3–5). However, I do not see being either intrinsic or instrumental as mutually
exclusive but complementary. Researchers can build theories both from single case and multi-
ple case studies. A single case study (within-case analysis) collects data, and identifies patterns,
sequences and themes in an event (the unit of analysis). In a multi-case study, researchers iden-
tify cross-case patterns and sequences, and develop a thematic analysis from within their own
case study or from other published case studies. In so doing, they develop a tentative explana-
tion, again look at another case and modify a tentative explanation to refine their theory, and
the process continues. Novice researchers are likely to aim to advance theories at specific and
lower levels, and possibly medium levels, rather than aiming to build grand theories.
Theory building and theory testing are closely related, although it is often considered that
qualitative studies contribute to the former and quantitative studies to the latter. However,
case studies usually involve both inductive and deductive processes. A simple theory testing
case study can investigate the extent to which an existing medium level theory is applicable in
a specific local and institutional context, and where the theory might fail to provide an expla-
nation. In so doing, the study can modify or refine that medium level theory. A more ambi-
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Kaori Okano
tious theory testing case study may examine a more established higher level theory (usually)
developed in the West to see to what extent it is applicable in Japan, with its specific institu-
tional and cultural features. Japan can be a useful setting for testing what is considered an es-
tablished theory that has been developed elsewhere (Árnason 2002; Sugimoto 2014, pp. 24–
28).
We can understand a case study’s relationship with theories as a continuum between deductive
and inductive processes, drawing on and modifying classifications (Dooley 2002; Welch et al.
2011). One end of the continuum is the most deductive process, whereby a study attempts to
test an existing theory for its applicability in the specific context of the chosen case. At the
other end is the most inductive approach, whereby research begins with a large amount of em-
pirical data (rather than an existing theory), which is coded and organised into categories and
themes to identify patterns and sequences if any (see Meagher, Ch. 12). From these, re-
searchers develop a tentative explanation concerning the phenomenon being studied in the
particular case. A grounded theory approach especially strives to advance a theory of an un-
studied theme from information from participants.
Most qualitative studies are found somewhere in between the two poles, often involving both
deductive and inductive processes at different phases of the study (Creswell/Creswell 2018,
pp.56 – 58; pp.63 – 64). A study may begin with a tentative hypothesis that the researcher has
developed from existing research literature. Even when researching an unstudied area using a
grounded theory approach, a study is (at least to a certain degree) likely to be guided by some
prior, if limited, understanding of the area and/or a theoretical perspective. The research pro-
cess is thus both inductive in that case studies generate and build theories, and deductive in
that existing theories are applied to a unit of analysis in the specific case.
Let’s finally look at these processes in Nakano’s study of single women in three countries as an
example (see this Chapter, Ch. 3.1). The study presents tentative explanations about single
women in Tokyo, Hong Kong and Shanghai (at the immediate and specific level). By compar-
ing the findings of these three cases, the study identifies patterns across three cases (cross-case
patterns) of single women, and builds a tentative hypothesis as to how certain features of local
laws, institutional practices and cultural norms may have influenced their lives in different
ways (at the medium level). In the future, Nakano may wish to discuss these findings in the
context of published case studies of single women in other societies, identify any cross-case
patterns and develop theories at a more abstract level. At the same time, other researchers in-
terested in single women, for example in Germany, may be interested in examining Nakano’s
cases as published case studies in shaping their own theories. The value of case studies is that
they provide empirical examination of a phenomenon, event and people in the natural setting
of a specific local context with particular sets of institutions and cultural norms. Studies thus
produced and published can be used as published cases where other researchers attempt to
build or refine tentative hypotheses at a higher level. Therefore, I suggest that every case study
contributes to tentative theory building in the long term, and eventually to knowledge produc-
tion.
Key task
Think about the potential contribution of your study to theory testing or/and theory
building.
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8. Summary
The major value of case studies is their capacity to study diverse social phenomena empirically
in the natural setting of their specific local context. A single case study (within-case analysis)
identifies patterns, sequences and themes within the unit of analysis. In a multi-case study, re-
searchers identify cross-case patterns and sequences. I consider all research on Japan to be case
studies in the widest sense of the term, because Japan research never only aims at understand-
ing Japanese society for its own sake, but also to advance our understanding of the social
world at a more abstract level. Researchers studying Japan can advance, build or test theories
based on their own empirical studies. This process involves studying other published case stud-
ies while other researchers may also be examining your case studies while modifying and refin-
ing their tentative hypotheses and theories. Therefore, every case study (not only) about Japan
contributes to theory building in the long term, and ultimately to knowledge production.
Knowing this gives us a sense of fulfilment in doing research. I encourage you to explore the
opportunities offered by case study design for your project. In my research career, case study
research has been both insightful and enjoyable. You never know where it might lead!
87
3.1 Developing a comparative study: Single women in
Hong Kong, Tokyo and Shanghai
Lynne Y. Nakano
Soon after arriving in Hong Kong in the mid-1990s, I enrolled in Cantonese language courses
at the Chinese language school operated by the university where I worked. I took night cours-
es with other faculty members, and learned that the daytime programme enrolled many wom-
en from Japan who were in their late twenties to early thirties and unmarried. They had quit
their jobs in Japan to study the Cantonese language full-time in Hong Kong. Their actions
contradicted the literature on Japan at that time, which stated that most women were very
concerned about ‘marriage deadlines’ and basically married on time, that is, by their early to
mid-thirties. What were these women doing in Hong Kong? Weren’t they worried about miss-
ing so-called ‘marriage deadlines’? If not, were social values changing or was something hap-
pening in Japanese social institutions such as workplaces or the employment market? These
early questions led me to study the rise of singlehood in Japan. As I explored the topic, I dis-
covered that women in Hong Kong married even later than women in Japan. In the late
1990s, women in Hong Kong were marrying at the age of about 29 and women in Japan were
marrying around 28. Given the similar statistics, it seemed reasonable to construct a study that
compared the two societies. I wanted to find out whether parallel changes in attitudes or social
structures were occurring in the two societies or whether there were differences, and, if so,
what was the nature of these differences.
In my reading, I learned that the age of marriage is rising across Asia and the world, and the
reasons for later marriages are complex, involving women’s increased levels of education and
employment opportunity, and wealthier and smaller families. Rather than investigating statisti-
cal factors, I wanted to understand women’s views on marriage, how women’s choices reflect-
ed changing social values, and how women’s experiences were shaped by family, workplaces
and friendships. To address these questions, I decided to interview women who had never mar-
ried in the two cities on a broad range of topics, including their views and experiences of
work, family, marriage, friendships and views of the future. When possible, I also conducted
participant observation by joining single women in their everyday activities such as eating out,
shopping, going to concerts, trips and other leisure activities. I met them wherever was conve-
nient for them: in their homes, offices, coffee shops and restaurants.
In structuring the study, I decided to compare Hong Kong and Tokyo rather than Japan as a
whole. It made sense to me to focus on cities because singlehood is rising fastest in cities, cities
attract single women and cities are home to more single women than rural areas. Tokyo has
the largest percentages of single women in the country and the latest ages of first marriages.
The two cities, Hong Kong and Tokyo, host consumer cultures that cater to single women
such as restaurants, bars and leisure activities. The two cities are global cities (Sassen 2001)
88
that share similar structural features such as a high concentration of educational institutions,
service industries and the availability of employment opportunities for women.
After I started interviewing women, I began giving talks on my findings. At these talks, I was
often told by members of the audience that my findings described the situation for single
women in their home city as well. I was encouraged by audience members to add a third or
even fourth city to my study. I received suggestions that I should conduct my study in Singa-
pore, Taipei, Seoul, Bangkok and New Delhi. I agreed that the study would be more interest-
ing with a third or even fourth city included for comparison. After considering my language
abilities and time limitations, I decided to include Shanghai as the third city. I thought that a
city in China would pose an interesting contrast to Hong Kong. People living in cities in main-
land China would have very different understandings of marriage and a different recent histo-
ry of marriage and family relations. I chose Shanghai because women marry later in Shanghai
than in any other city in mainland China.
I found it difficult to locate my study in a theoretical framework because there were many the-
ories that might explain the data. I was not sure which body of literature I should address.
One body of literature explains global shifts in marriage and family relationships. For exam-
ple, the ‘second demographic transition’ argument developed by Ron Lesthaeghe (2014) iden-
tifies global patterns that describe some of the changes occurring in the societies in my study.
Anthony Giddens’s (1991; 1992) theories of changing relationships in the modern period pre-
dicted greater freedom and equality in romantic relationships, but not all of his observations
applied to the societies I was studying. A second body of literature explored singlehood from
feminist perspectives, examining how singlehood is an inferior category that is necessary to
create the superior category of married people (Borneman 1996; Lahad 2017). A third body of
literature examines the rise of singlehood in East Asian societies. Eventually, all three kinds of
studies helped me to shape my argument. The literature on global family changes helped me to
identify commonalities in singlehood in the societies in my study, and see how they differed
from Western societies. One key difference, for example, is that in Western societies single-
hood is understood as a product of the decline of extended families. In the societies in my
study, however, singlehood occurs in the context of strong family relationships. For a fascinat-
ing study on changes in family relationships over time in China, I recommend Yunxiang Yan’s
study (2003) that explores this topic over a fifty-year period in a village in northeastern China.
Feminist studies, such as those by Angela McRobbie (2004), helped me to see that single wom-
en are supposedly free to choose their own paths in life, but these paths are actually highly
circumscribed. Studies of singlehood in the societies under study helped me to understand how
the organisation of family resources in the three societies created different experiences of sin-
glehood for women in the three cities.
When I sat down to write about the data, I looked to studies that had taken a comparative
approach for ideas about how to develop my analysis. I drew on the work of Ching Kwan Lee
(1998), who compared women workers in a factory in Hong Kong and another across the bor-
der in Shenzhen, China. Building on what Michael Burawoy called ‘an extended case method’
(1991a), she asked why these societies with a similar cultural history produced very different
work regimes. Don Kulick and Jens Rydstrom (2015) adopted a similar approach when they
asked why two countries with similar cultural histories and welfare systems, Denmark and
Sweden, had two very different ways of dealing with the sexuality and the desire for intimacy
89
Lynne Y. Nakano
of individuals with severe disabilities. Similarly, I tried to explain why three cities with similar
cultural backgrounds would produce three different marriage regimes.
In the end, I was glad that I had the opportunity to conduct a comparative study (Nakano
2016a; 2016b). It allowed me to take a macro-perspective, which is often difficult for anthro-
pological studies. The comparative approach prevents myopic conclusions. Scholars and the
mass media, for example, frequently comment on the nature of single women in their society,
but their arguments do not hold up when we compare singlehood across the region and the
world. Comparative studies, particularly within Asia, prevent simple conclusions about Japan
or China versus Western societies. But there were serious drawbacks to the comparative ap-
proach. The biggest drawback was that it took an enormous amount of time. To make the
most out of the data, I wanted to understand the three societies well. As a Japan specialist, I
was familiar with the literature on Japan but less familiar with the literature on Hong Kong
and China. It took me a year to read the literature on China. A third major challenge was my
low level of spoken Mandarin. I already spoke Cantonese and Japanese at the start of the
study, but my Mandarin was rudimentary and required an investment of time to make it ser-
viceable.
As I proceeded with the project, another issue emerged that I could not fully address. That is, I
struggled with how I could discuss three societies without flattening the great diversity within
each society. The handling of diversity within a society can be partially addressed by research
design; one can narrow the focus of one’s study. In my case, I focused on never-married wom-
en who were near or beyond marriage ‘deadlines’, that is, women from their late twenties
through to their early forties. But I did not narrow my study to a certain socio-economic class,
although this may have been a better strategy in retrospect because it would have made the
project more manageable. Excellent studies that explore women’s experiences in reference to
socio-economic class include Kaori Okano’s study (2009) on working class women’s transition
to adulthood in Japan and Jesook Song’s study (2014) on working class women’s struggles to
find appropriate housing in South Korea. As I only interviewed around 35 women in each city,
I could not come to far-reaching conclusions about different kinds of class-based experiences.
But I could convey some of the diversity of the three societies when I explained my findings,
and I suggested to the reader how I thought different walks of life and perspectives shaped my
findings.
For researchers who would like to try a comparative approach, I suggest starting with societies
that one knows well, including the relevant research literature. I would also recommend nar-
rowing the focus of the study so that the comparison is manageable in terms of the time it will
take to conduct the study. I would then set out to consider the ways in which the societies un-
der comparison are similar as well as different, and look for surprises (Burawoy 1991b). The
strategy of explaining surprises may lead to interesting research questions and directions.
90
3.2 Contained serendipity as fieldwork in Japan:
Studying Chinese people in Japan
Jamie Coates
My research has focused on how new and emergent communities in China and Japan identify
with one another. In particular, I have focused on the ways young Chinese people living, study-
ing, working and travelling in Japan develop a sense of ‘being-in-common’ among themselves
and with the various contexts they found themselves in in Japan. This research is part of a
wider, loosely defined conceptual interest in how people imagine their place in the world, and
more specifically, how young Chinese encounters with places like Japan afford new kinds of
cosmopolitan imagination.
In stating that these issues are the focus of my research today, I should note that it has taken a
long time, a lot of mistakes and several poorly designed projects to come to my current under-
standing of my work. Each step of my research has relied heavily on what we might call ‘con-
tained serendipity’, where I set certain parameters around a research project, while still allow-
ing myself considerable freedom to discover ‘unsought findings’ (Van Andel 1994, p. 631). I
was classically trained as an anthropologist. For readers who might not be familiar with the
discipline of Anthropology, it has both scientific and humanities-oriented sub-disciplines, but
most sociocultural anthropologists, such as myself, rely heavily on long-term fieldwork to de-
velop new case studies and concepts about what it means to be a person. The research I would
like to focus on in this short essay is comprised of the conceptual project I mention above, and
two periods of ethnographic fieldwork I conducted to try and address this broader conceptual
direction.
The first project was for my PhD, which was about how Chinese student-workers form new
communities in Japan. While studying in China in the early 2000s, I was struck by the anti-
Japanese sentiment I came across in daily life. Yet, when I went to visit a friend studying in
Japan in 2004, I soon discovered a large number of Chinese students in Japan whose percep-
tions of their place in the world had been transformed by their experience overseas. In the ear-
ly stages of my PhD in 2008, I proposed to conduct fieldwork among a cohort of Chinese stu-
dents in Japan, hoping to find further examples of the people I had met previously. I had origi-
nally designed this project as an investigation into how experiences of mobility, study and
work affected young Chinese people’s sense of belonging in Japan.
Trained in Chinese and Anthropology, I did not speak Japanese very well at the time, so I pro-
posed to firstly enrol in a Japanese language class, where I could improve my Japanese and
potentially meet more Chinese students as my sampling method. My goal was to eventually
live with a group of students to better understand the daily pressures they faced, while also
collecting interviews from my classmates and peers. This approach is an urban modification of
the standard form of ethnographic fieldwork design in Anthropology, where you find a group
of people to live with and observe how they go about their lives for extended periods of time.
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Jamie Coates
Typically, you supplement this approach with interviews, social mapping and surveys depend-
ing on your research goal. I was also interested in how experiences of transnational mobility
(e.g. being a migrant or international student) contrasted with experiences of mobility in the
city (e.g. walking around in Tokyo), so I also proposed to use a variety of methods by which I
would follow participants across the city. My approach took inspiration from the growing em-
phasis on ‘multi-sited ethnography’ as the best way to understand migration and globalisation
(Marcus 1995) as well as the ‘mobility paradigm’ at the time by which movement was seen as
foundational to social and cultural processes (Sheller/Urry 2006).
When I started my fieldwork using this approach the first few months found me following a
few generous individuals through their daily routines in Tokyo. Yet, I soon came to realise
that, while I was learning a lot about this small number of people, I was struggling to develop
a wider framework for how their different experiences related to each other. Moreover, the
sample of people I was working with was very small and not growing. Through these first few
months of following a few individuals however, I came to learn that in 2008 a group of busi-
ness owners near a major station in Tokyo (Ikebukuro) had proposed to have the northwest
corner of the station renamed ‘Tokyo Chinatown’. So, I started focusing on this area, setting
clearer boundaries around my proposed field site. I became friends with the owner of a small
hairdressing salon and decided to try observing daily life among young Chinese people from
this one strategic location. My methodological ‘idleness’ (Coates 2017) allowed me to see the
comings and goings of a larger number of young Chinese people, and eventually I was invited
to other small spaces in the area where people lived, worked, studied and played, including a
small privately owned dormitory where I lived with a group of young Chinese people. By tak-
ing up the opportunity to focus on this one area, my cohort shifted from focusing solely on
students to a mixture of students and entrepreneurs in the area, although most of the people I
conducted research with had previously been students.
Making strategic decisions about when to move or not within a smaller fixed location allowed
me to cultivate a form of serendipity (Hendry 2017), learning a lot about the unexpected as-
pects of people’s lives, and making close observations of the details of how people fostered
friendships, maintained ties with their families and developed a nascent but somewhat con-
flicted sense of community. Altogether I conducted two years of fieldwork for this project. The
material I collected and the people I met not only served as data for my final PhD dissertation
on how young Chinese people foster a sense of ‘being-in-common’, but it also led to side
projects on their favourite celebrities and a growing interest in the media they consumed.
The second project built on these initial approaches and experiences, while also aiming to ad-
dress some of the frustrations I faced in trying to write about everything I had observed. While
writing about my first period of fieldwork research, I felt that much of what I had observed
was difficult to capture in field notes and ethnographic prose. In particular, I became increas-
ingly interested in how I might capture the intense point at which the media, emotions and
play intersect in the tiny spaces of conviviality that I had observed in my previous fieldwork.
Feeling that my words were not enough, I took some intensive filmmaking training over the
summer before starting a postdoctoral project at Waseda University in 2014. In this research
project, I proposed to look at how young Chinese people’s everyday interactions with various
kinds of media might reflect their changing identities in the Sino–Japanese context.
My approach focused on conducting filmed interviews with people in their living spaces, ask-
ing them to speak about the various items in their homes. I would then follow this up with an
92
interview about their media habits, filming over their shoulder as they showed me various
items and content. My intention was to use their living spaces as a way to define the parame-
ters of my research, while also allowing for a very broad definition of what constituted ‘the
media’ in their lives. I took inspiration from Daniel Miller’s The comfort of things (2008),
where he used a similar approach among people in London to develop an argument about the
importance of material culture in everyday life. My intention was to generate themes about
their media consumption, rather than using pre-defined categories typical in Media Studies,
such as forms of technology or platforms. My goal was to be more rigorous than in my previ-
ous study, using more structured interviews as the people guided me through whichever social
media and streaming services they felt comfortable sharing with me. While filming these inter-
views, I also asked if I could participate in and document the online spaces they mentioned in
their interviews. These spaces ended up mostly being group-based interactions on platforms
such as Weibo, WeChat and to a lesser extent Instagram and Facebook.
While doing this research, I was invited to film and document a range of other spaces, social
events and interactions. These filmed observations blurred the lines between many of the cat-
egories I had developed from my interviews, but they also allowed me to develop contextualis-
ing insights. Further, through these invitations I met a network of young musicians and artists
who were eager to share their story with me and help me produce a small ethnographic film.
This opportunity saw me combine some of my PhD project themes about play, friendship and
community with my interest in the media, which resulted in a 50-minute ethnographic film
titled Tokyo pengyou (Coates 2018). The process of making the film provided feedback on the
themes I was developing in my other work too. As I filmed and edited the work, I would show
it to my participants and discuss the direction and themes of my broader research project.
Fieldwork across disciplines relies on encounters with people, things and environments to pro-
duce different kinds of knowledge. As Isabelle Rivoal and Noel B. Salazar (2013) note,
serendipity alongside reflexivity and openness are often quoted as the defining characteristics
of anthropological fieldwork. Many classical stories of excellent anthropological findings de-
pended on chance encounters, unsought observations and submitting oneself to the rhythms of
the lives of those you hope to understand. This approach embodies Anthropology’s tendency
to be the discipline of being undisciplined, which although romantic, can also prove difficult
to justify in institutional settings or across disciplines. Yet, this approach provided me with a
wealth of data that fed into observations about young Chinese and Japanese lives which might
have been otherwise inaccessible.
In the classical field sites of Anthropology, such as the Trobriand Islands in Papua New
Guinea (Malinowski 2013), the excesses of this approach were often curtailed through the
limits of scale. The populations they worked with were smaller and typically covered shorter
geographic distances. In urban Japan, it is difficult to find contexts that naturally lend them-
selves to this kind of research. As Matei Candea (2007) has argued though, the importance of
setting limits to one’s field site, while recognising that you yourself set those limits as an ‘arbi-
trary location’, are incredibly important. I would characterise this kind of research design as a
way of fostering ‘contained serendipity’.
So how might we build contained serendipity into fieldwork research design in urban contexts
such as Tokyo? My advice is to start from a clearly defined, but relatively small field site.
Recognising the somewhat ‘arbitrary’ nature of this location, I would then combine practices
of both mobile and immobile participant observation to find differing sites of ‘contained
93
Jamie Coates
serendipity’. This approach to research corresponds well with urban Japanese contexts such as
Tokyo, Osaka or Kyoto, where life takes place in a series of interconnected spaces and sites
that each have their own unique qualities. It also complements other modes of data collection,
from visual ethnography, to structured interviews and perhaps event quantitative methods.
94
3.3 The universe of cases: Agricultural cooperatives in Japan as a
case study
Kay Shimizu
This essay draws on research concerning institutional changes to agriculture cooperatives in

Japan to address the issue of research design in Political Science in general and in Japan in par-
ticular. The examples come from the book Cultivating institutional change: Economic liberal-
ization, demographic decline, and the reform of Japan agricultural cooperatives, which I co-
authored with Patricia Maclachlan and is forthcoming from Cornell University Press. I will
discuss our research design, its development, characteristics and levels of analysis, and address
its drawbacks and (possible) solutions to them.
Research project: Studying institutional change in Japan through the lens of

agricultural cooperatives
While some research tests existing theories in new settings to better understand their explana-
tory power or discover their limits, our research aims to build on existing theory—in this case,
theories of institutional change—by examining institutional change in one country, Japan. Un-
like previous studies which have focused on the national level (i.e. studies of democracy) or
those that have examined individuals within an organisation, this study focuses on a relatively
homogenous set of organisations, that is, Japanese agricultural cooperatives known collective-
ly as JA. JA has a national organisation, prefectural level offices and local (municipal level)
branches. Our study mainly focuses on the latter.
In the Japanese setting, agricultural cooperatives (co-ops) are organisations that strive to serve
their members through a broad range of services including the provision of agricultural inputs
and the marketing of agricultural outputs, along with a myriad of peripheral services such as
banking and insurance. Historically, these co-ops have also served as vote-gathering machines
for politicians who support policies favourable to agriculture (George Mulgan 2000). The
study examines how these more than 600 organisations, which are spread nationwide, have
adapted to the changing environment surrounding the Japanese agricultural industry and
pushed for institutional change. We find that while some co-ops have embraced market com-
petition and the pursuit of greater profits for their member farmers, other co-ops have failed
to adapt to changing consumer demands or are struggling with ageing and depopulation. This
comparative research design within a single country allows us to hold many factors constant,
especially national level features that may be of concern in cross-border comparative studies,
such as regime type or trade openness.
Beyond its structural characteristics where the co-ops are of equal rank in the nationally hier-
archical organisation of JA, the research subject of agriculture in Japan proved attractive for
95
Kay Shimizu
several reasons. First, the politics of agriculture is a growing concern in many parts of the
world, both in developed and developing countries. How agriculture is practised and regulated
directly influences many of the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals including the
protection of life on land and the goal of zero hunger. Second, agriculture in Japan has been in
crisis mode for over two decades. Japan’s ageing and decreasing population and its evolving
dietary habits have dramatically changed food consumption patterns, greatly decreasing over-
all demand, especially for the country’s staple food, rice. Consequently, agricultural produc-
tion has had to adjust to these changing demands, but has seen limited success. Third, the
global market for agricultural goods has become more open and fluid, exposing Japan to in-
creasing imports and the pressure to export. The evolution of Japanese agricultural coopera-
tives, and how they are reacting to the challenges facing agriculture in Japan, makes a com-
pelling area for research.
One of the most intriguing aspects of Japan’s agricultural system and the norms and institu-
tions that govern its practices is that they were last overhauled during the postwar years in the
shadow of the U.S. occupation and still assume the family farm (nōka) to be the only legiti-
mate producer of agricultural goods. As such, corporate participation in agricultural produc-
tion remains extremely limited. At the same time, both the national and local governments
play an oversized role in the governance of agriculture and its institutions. JA lies at the centre
of this web of institutions that govern agriculture in Japan and its evolution reflects many of
the ongoing changes in agriculture and the context in which it operates. Thus, our research
project concerns JA itself, how it has evolved and what it might say about institutional change
more broadly.
Research design
One of the first things to consider in research design is the unit of analysis—at what level
should we study the issue at hand? JA as an organisation lends itself to a multilevel design due
to its hierarchical nature. As mentioned above, JA has a national organisation, prefectural lev-
el offices and local (municipal level) chapters. As such, we are able to study its organisational
change at all three levels. Furthermore, nearly every rural and peri-urban area with agricultur-
al activity falls under JA rule. These local chapters each preside over several municipalities. To
the extent that quantitative data on JA activity, for example the yen amount of agricultural
products sent to market, is available, we wanted to examine all the local chapters in our analy-
sis. Thus, we tried to cover the universe of cases, and thereby eliminated the need for random
sampling or attempting its approximation.
One caveat to this approach is that complete data for the universe of cases may not always be
available. Nearly all of the data necessary for this study can be found on the websites of indi-
vidual JA chapters or in the statistical yearbooks of the Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and
Fisheries (MAFF). However, some JA chapters do not make their annual data available online.
In this case, a simple phone call can sometimes give you access to the missing data via postal
mail. Occasionally, smaller organisations, in this case very small JAs, will not have collected
the necessary data or will not want to share their data in order to hide perceived deficiencies.
These smaller co-ops may need to be dropped even though this means acknowledging the bias
that is introduced into the analysis when this occurs.
96
Another important consideration is the comparability of individual local cases. In our re-
search, the very nature of agriculture and agricultural markets in Japan had to be carefully
considered. First, differences in climate and topography make each region suitable for a wide
range of agricultural products, and no two are the same. In Japan, the biggest difference lies in
those areas dedicated to rice farming using rice paddies and those areas that are more focused
on fruit and vegetables, some of which use greenhouses. Rice is in many respects the most im-
portant agricultural product in Japan, but it is also losing its influence both in volume and
price. Second, recent mergers of JAs have decreased the number of JA chapters and increased
the size of individual JA chapters, but not in a uniform manner. As such, the variation in geo-
graphic size of JA chapters has grown. In the most extreme case, four prefectures have just one
JA chapter for the entire prefecture. In the end, the study retained the analysis of the universe
of cases, supplemented by paired qualitative case studies based on more rigorous criteria for
comparability.
In short, studying the universe of cases has its share of drawbacks and is not always necessary or
desirable. In our study, we complemented quantitative data from all local JA chapters with an in-
depth qualitative study of a handful of cases (see Hommerich/Kottmann, Ch. 10 on mixed meth-
ods). Understanding how to measure the extent to which JA chapters have embraced pro-farmer
activities required extensive background research and interviews. We interviewed a wide range of
people involved in multiple aspects of farming including farmers, JA officials, wholesalers, local
government officials, scholars, national level politicians and MAFF bureaucrats (see Yamaguchi,
Ch. 7.2). Retirees provided some of the best sources of information.
These interviews also provided the detailed information used in our in-depth case studies. We
selected our cases based on several criteria that were important in building our hypotheses but
were not easily measured equally across the entire population of JAs. For example, one case
study was based in a rice growing area, while another was based in a vegetable and fruit grow-
ing area. In each instance, we sought our ideal locations, but also planned for backup loca-
tions. Incidents (like sudden bankruptcies in our case) do occur, so it is always good to have a
contingency plan!
Problems and potential solutions
Two issues emerged from the research design of this project. First, we encountered the vexing
problem of missing data. This research was designed to examine the entire universe of cases so
missing data, such as the lack of financial data from some of the smaller agricultural co-ops,
was bound to emerge, but several characteristics of our research topic made locating the miss-
ing data particularly challenging. In this case, the missing data tended to be from the more re-
mote and smaller co-ops with few dedicated staff members. As such, they did not have some of
the data we sought, even though their national organisations required them. Some co-ops were
also reluctant to share their data, as JAs have come under increasing scrutiny in recent years.
In such cases, an affiliation with a local organisation (such as a school or library) or an intro-
duction from the local government was able to open some doors. Finally, in more rural areas
of Japan, where elderly farmers kept the books, using the telephone worked much better than
email. Of course, there are multiple ways to compute missing data using statistical methods,
but we went to the original source.
97
Kay Shimizu
Second, the selection of case studies was, as is often the case, limited by our access to our cho-
sen subjects. Ideally, cases are selected according to strict criteria of where the cases lie along a
spectrum. However, when working in rural, more conservative areas, establishing a relation-
ship with an agricultural community was not always straightforward. One way to overcome
such problems is to ask for introductions early in the research and to cultivate relationships
over time. We visited some of our cases multiple times over several years. Diet members can
also provide valuable connections and introductions to their home prefectures. Bureaucrats (in
this case from MAFF) in local offices can also be helpful.
General advice
As scholars studying Japan, it is easy to lose sight of the rest of the world. Our work focuses
on telling stories about Japan, rather than a more generalisable phenomenon. This greatly lim-
its our audience and prevents us from participating in broader discussions about political or
social behaviour. When designing our research, we can move beyond Japan by placing our
questions into broader categories that are not country or region-specific. The research design
does not necessarily need to be comparative across countries, but it can be helpful to keep po-
tential comparisons in mind. In our case, comparisons included co-ops in other industries such
as fishing as well as agricultural co-ops from other countries.
Additionally, Japan occupies an ambiguous space in Political Science scholarship that can shed
a different light on studies which are often conducted in more ‘typical’ regions such as Western
Europe or the Asian continent. For example, it is a democracy long dominated by a single par-
ty (see McElwain, Ch. 2.2). It is also a market economy in a centralised, regulatory state.
These features of Japan can be used to test the limits and explanatory power of existing theo-
ries that have been established elsewhere.
Lastly, deep familiarity with a country or region allows for more creative and precise research
designs. For political scientists, a highly centralised system like Japan generates rich sources of
data at multiple levels of governance. Digitisation of data is lacking, especially in areas beyond
Tokyo, but new technologies such as optical character recognition (OCR) and machine learn-
ing can help to overcome this hurdle by quickly turning printed documents into digital data
that can be machine analysed. Official affiliation with a local institution, such as a school or
research centre, can also facilitate greater access to information.
Sitting at the frontlines of many important social phenomena such as ageing and post-industri-
al development, Japan is rich in sources for Social Science research. Findings from Japan can
serve as a strong foundation for building theories which can then be tested beyond its borders.
98
Further reading
Baxter, Pamela/Jack, Susan (2008): Qualitative case study methodology: Study design and implementation
for novice researchers. In: The Qualitative Report 13, No. 4, pp. 544–559.
Creswell, John W./Poth, Cheryl (2017): Qualitative inquiry and research design: Choosing among five ap-
proaches. London: Sage.
De Vaus, David A. (2001): Research design in social research. London: Sage.
George, Alexander/Bennett, George L. (2005): Case studies and theory development in the Social Sciences.
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Gerring, John (2007): Case study research: Principles and practices. New York, NY: Cambridge University
Press.
Stake, Robert E. (1995): The art of case study research. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
Tight, Malcolm (2017): Understanding case study research: Small-scale research with meaning. Los Ange-
les, CA: Sage.
Yin, Robert K. (2018): Case study research and applications: Design and methods. London: Sage.
References
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Chapter 4
How to identify relevant scholarly debates:
Reviewing the literature
1. Introduction
Why should I bother with what other people have to say on my subject? Can’t I just start with
the raw data and work my way from there through analysis towards the finished dissertation?
Conversely, others may ask: there is so much stuff already written. How can I stand on the
shoulders of giants and produce something new at all? Should I not limit myself to just taking
stock of what knowledge there is already and venture, at best, a modest interpretation thereof?
These are doubts that trouble many scholars at varying stages of their career. As a historian of
modern Japan, I wrote my doctoral dissertation on Sino-Japanese relations in the late Meiji
period. At first glance, there seemed to be so much literature out there that it was hard to see
how I could produce something new and relevant on top of this (after a while, it turned out
there was still lots to find out). My second book on Japan’s engagement with international law
was exactly the opposite: although there was an abundance of primary sources, little research
had been done on this subject. This was not an ideal situation either, because in unmarked ter-
ritory, one easily wanders astray. It turned out, however, that many Japanese legal scholars
took a strong interest in the subject and were able to point me in the right direction.
This dilemma of too much or too little scholarship on one’s research subject is, of course, a
fundamental one. In his Analects, Confucius had already observed that studying without
thinking makes one stupid and thinking without studying is dangerous. To paraphrase this in
the context of the above questions and the subject of this chapter: Relying solely on previous
scholarship without any research and analysis of your own brings no progress at all, but re-
search and analysis without consulting previous scholarship is even more dangerous (also for
your career). Professional science is a rational process of incremental knowledge production
based on a division of labour. Ideally, you climb the communal edifice of knowledge and add a
well-designed and functional building block of your own. At times, you might tear something
down that does not fit in this edifice and replace it with something better (see Gerteis, Ch.
16.3). What you must not do is ignore previous scholarship and build your own little tower, as
this is neither rational nor practical. There is a life and a career waiting for you beyond the
PhD. But equally, you do not just want to paint the tiles yellow instead of brown because you
found the edifice too intimidating to add something new to.
This chapter and the following essays intend to help navigate your course through the sea of
literature towards a completed literature review and towards writing up the dissertation itself.
Here, I take the PhD research and writing process as the default situation, but what follows is
102
Chapter 4 How to identify relevant scholarly debates
applicable to a master’s thesis or a second book as well. I will first introduce the differences
between reviewing literature as a process and a literature review as part of a thesis or other
publications. I will then discuss different kinds of sources and elaborate on how to find sec-
ondary literature in general, and finally give some guidance on writing a literature review.
2. Reviewing literature: Two kinds of review
When we speak about reviewing literature, we often mean two different things, which should
be kept apart because they vary significantly in their respective processes, scopes and purposes.
Two kinds of review

1. Reviewing literature as a continuous process throughout your research, which is
finished only when your thesis is submitted.
• Process: a continuous, iterative and circular (see below) search and evaluation
of material
• Scope: comprehensive, includes all primary sources and secondary literature,
even search tools (bibliographies, indices, etc.)
• Purpose: to find all material that you need for further research and writing
your thesis
2. The literature review as a critical narrative account of ‘what has been done and
what needs to be done’ in your research field with a focus on the main debates
and recent trends (Department of Sociology 2012, p. 18).
• Process: a written partial result of reviewing literature, done and redone at
different stages during your PhD and part of the final dissertation (see below)
• Scope: selective, uses only such literature that answers the above questions
and serves the following
• Purpose: to explain to readers what motivates your research, the ‘puzzle’ that
has remained unsolved by previous scholarship; to situate your own work
within the recent debates and trends and thereby explain its relevance
Reviewing literature is a comprehensive process that will accompany you from conceiving an
idea until submitting your thesis. It is not a straightforward process, but takes a circular, itera-
tive course (see this chapter, Liu-Farrer, Ch. 4.3). As you progress with your research, you will
tweak your research question, pivot into a somewhat different direction or modify your theo-
retical framework or methods along the way. You will then start reviewing the literature again,
bearing these changes in mind, find more and more items to add on your subject and ideally
develop a better understanding of how your subject relates to cognate subjects in and outside
your field as well. This, in turn, will inform your research question, theory and method in a
circular motion.
A literature review, on the other hand, is only a partial, selective result of the process of re-
viewing literature, which becomes part of the finished PhD thesis. In practice, you are often
103
required to write an increasingly refined literature review at different stages of your PhD pro-
cess. When preparing a proposal to apply for a particular PhD programme, you already have
to make a case for what you do and how this relates to what has been done in your field and
to current debates and trends. This is also true for applications to scholarships and other kinds
of funding. Most often, writing a literature review is part of the first-year review that decides
whether you can progress with your project or not. So you will have a fair number of chances
to improve your writing skills in this genre.
3. Getting started: The scope of searching for secondary literature
When starting to review literature, you should be comprehensive. This means not just looking
for literature on the topic itself and the field it is situated in, but also that on methods and
theories and on related studies in different fields. The rationale of this is 1. that you should not
narrow your search down too quickly and miss the context, and 2. that you want to situate
your research in a broader field and speak to audiences beyond the confines of your direct
field of research. Gracia Liu-Farrer (see this chapter, Ch. 4.3) has described this oscillating
movement of the scope of your search as ‘zoning in’ and ‘zoning out’. It is only after you have
done a comprehensive search that you whittle down the results in terms of relevance, quality,
etc. as described below. Throughout your research, I advise you to keep two records—an an-
notated bibliography and a research journal (see text box below)—and constantly add to
them.
Keep the following records throughout your research

1. An annotated bibliography (required): Keep a structured list of the literature you
find, divided into primary sources and secondary literature (see below) and suit-
able thematic subsections (the most intuitive structure would mirror the structure
of your PhD, with variations and additions as necessary). For this, use reference
management software like EndNote or Citavi, or just a simple Word file. In any
case, each entry should contain:
• the full bibliographic data,
• the main arguments, findings and method of the item and
• your personal evaluation as to the relevance and usefulness of the source.
This annotated bibliography will be a steady companion during your research and
will provide the backbone for your literature review at the beginning of your PhD
as well as at the end when you finalise your reference list.
2. A research journal (recommended): Keeping a research journal (preferable in ana-
logue form) is also most useful in order to jot down notes and ideas on your dis-
sertation in general. Apart from the memory function, keeping a journal gives a
sense of continuity and progress, which is sometimes badly needed in those three
to four years. Plus, it is excellent writing practice (Kolmer/Rob-Santer 2006, pp.
93–94).
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4. Basic types of sources and their general ambivalence
In reviewing literature, you have to make a clear distinction between ‘primary sources’ and
‘secondary literature’. These two categories should be kept apart in the bibliography and
sometimes in the references in your dissertation (depending on your discipline).
Primary sources are any stable body of information that is the original (primary) object
of your analysis, e.g. written texts, archaeological or contemporary objects, material or
digital images, statistical data or recorded and transcribed interviews.
Secondary literature, in contrast, is everything that is written about this body of infor-
mation and your research topic in general. It typically contains explicit analysis or in-
terpretation of it. It is secondary in the sense that it is layered on top of the primary
source as the interpretive icing on the cake.
4.1 Primary sources
Traditionally, the division was not between primary sources and secondary literature but be-
tween primary and secondary literature, assuming that the main object of your study would be
found in written sources. This certainly applied to heavily text-oriented, traditional philologi-
cal and humanistic fields of Japanese Studies such as literature or philosophy that dealt (and
deal) with texts, such as the Man’yōshū or a Buddhist treatise like Dōgen’s Shōbōgenzō. With
the general diversification of the field of Japanese Studies (see Goodmann, Ch. 1), the emer-
gence of Social Science research on primary sources on Japan today particularly has diversi-
fied. In general, any material or immaterial element of information can constitute a primary
source. This includes, but is not limited to, written texts, objects like archaeological artefacts
or contemporary material culture or even such intangible information as observed rituals and
practices in certain social settings or interviews (Kühmstedt 2013, pp. 19–21).
The precondition for being a source is, of course, that it is manifested as a stable body of in-
formation that can to some degree be stored, reproduced and referenced in research. In some
cases, the process of turning something into a workable source already leads to a certain subtle
gap between ‘the real thing’ and the source itself, of which one has to be acutely aware. If we
study gagaku, Japanese court music, our source is not the music and the performance itself,
but recordings of it. We have to be aware of the mediality of the sources that, as mere repre-
sentation, makes them one step removed from reality and subject to (inadvertent) distortion
and we also need to maintain a healthy critical distance towards them. This is also the reason
why, with written texts, one should use the critical, authoritative edition. This is mostly the
collected works of an author (zenshū).1 As the collection and analysis of primary sources is
discussed in chapters 5–14, in the following sections, I will focus on secondary literature.
1 However, vigilance is useful here as well, because not all editions are as critical and thorough as they pretend
to be.
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4.2 Secondary literature
In contrast to primary sources, secondary literature is invariably just that: written texts. This
body of sources comprises the previous research on your topic and constitutes the main bulk
of your literature review. However, the boundary between primary and secondary sources/
literature is porous (see this chapter, Ganseforth, Ch. 4.2). Thus, at times, secondary literature
too can and should become the object of analysis and interpretation, and therefore those
works should become primary sources in their own right. This is particularly true with sec-
ondary literature informed by a certain political and ideological position or literature which
reflects certain power asymmetries and thus becomes part of a specific discourse. A classic ex-
ample of such fluidity is Ruth Benedict’s book The chrysanthemum and the sword (1946),
which, at the time of its writing during wartime, was an anthropological study of the Japanese
people. Today, this book is considered a seminal primary source for the genre of the so-called
nihonjinron, the essentialist discourse on ‘the nature of the Japanese people’.2 These examples
show that one has to be aware of the fluidity of the division of works into primary and sec-
ondary sources/literature.
5. Finding secondary literature
But what is the best way to find secondary literature? There exists a multi-pronged approach
of different search strategies, which you should pursue routinely and simultaneously through-
out your research. In the following, I provide a checklist of common and useful strategies.
Finding secondary sources

1. When doing general bibliographic research
• Search the OPAC of the university library you are affiliated with;
• search several other OPACs of big research universities and institutions (e.g.
Bibliothèque Nationale, Harvard University or Library of Congress) and re-
gional aggregated or global catalogues (WorldCat);
• use bibliographies such as the Bibliography of Asian Studies (BAS) and other
more specialised bibliographies in your field (online and print);
• ask librarians at your institution, particularly Asian languages librarians, for
advice;
• browse review sections of journals in your field and reviews in dedicated mail-
ing lists (e.g. EAJS; H-Japan; SSJJ);
• go into the stacks, if you can, and have a look at what is physically there (you
will find more and unexpected things).
2 The same is true for Nakane Chie’s Tate-shakai no ningen kankei (1967) or Takeo Doi’s Anatomy of dependence
(1973).
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2. When searching Japanese sources in particular

• Again, search several OPACs of big Japanese research libraries and institu-
tions (National Diet Library, Keio University, Tokyo University, Waseda Uni-
versity);
• use bibliographic databases like CiNii or, if you have access, CrossAsia;
• use online repositories of publications and documents, such as the Japan Cen-
ter for Asian Historical Records (JACAR) or the National Diet Library Digital
Collections;
• ask your mentors or peers at Japanese universities for bibliographic advice;
• browse review sections of Japanese language journals in your field;
• if you are in Japan, again, go into the stacks, and see what you can discover
there and visit well-stocked bookshops, either new or antiquarian (see below).
Some of the above strategies need some explanation: when using OPACs, make liberal use of
advanced search tools, as otherwise you will be hit with a deluge of results that, despite what
it says, often do not come with the most relevant on top. Librarians, particularly those work-
ing in your regional field, are mostly very happy to advise you on your research; and so are
your supervisors, mentors and peers. But do your homework first and consult them only when
you have done some substantial digging yourself. Ask your librarian also whether there are
courses on bibliographic search tools available at your university. More and more institutions
put their content online. I have only given two examples (NDL and JACAR), but there are of
course many, many more.
For access to Japanese university libraries, it is of course best to have an affiliation, e.g. as a
guest researcher (kyakuin kenkyūin), at a university with an extensive research library. I, for
example, spent blissful weeks and months in the stacks of Waseda, Keio and Tokyo University
libraries. But if you are there only for a short time so that an affiliation seems impractical, the
easiest way is to use the library of a public university or institution, as you can show up on the
day and do not need a special letter of introduction. Tokyo University Central Library (Sōgō
Toshokan), for example, will issue you a day pass if you can demonstrate an affiliation with
your home university; take business cards (meishi) with you (see Tagsold/Ullmann, Ch. 8) and
name a source in their holdings you want to consult. And then there is, of course, always the
National Diet Library as a last resort: the NDL has fantastic holdings, but it takes time to
make use of them (see Peucker/Schmidtpott/Wagner, Ch. 9).
To search for and buy old or used books, use Nihon no Kosho-ya, the centralised online
search tool for all used and antiquarian bookstores in Japan. Some also deliver overseas, but
most require an address in Japan (but you can also just check online and then go there person-
ally, of course). The same network also organises book fairs (furuhon matsuri), frequently held
at the Tokyo Kosho Kaikan in Kanda. This area is also famous for its many specialised anti-
quarian and second-hand bookstores (see this chapter, Maclachlan, Ch. 4.1), where you will
most certainly find many books in your field that are out of print.
I would like to make one final remark: in the same way as there are Western-language manuals
for searching for literature, there are of course similar manuals and bibliographies in Japanese
for the same purpose (for example Fujita 2020; Hamada 2020; Hiraoka et al. 2013; Satō
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2000). Be sure to consult these, too, if you need more inspiration and guidance on finding
Japanese literature.
6. Cultivating a sense for the ‘best source’
As already indicated in the previous section, it is important to be discriminating in your selec-

tion of secondary literature from among the deluge of possible results. This is particularly so
since we increasingly use electronic search tools that yield a huge number of hits if we do not
teach them to narrow down the search with a number of criteria. These criteria and the culti-
vation of a sense and intuition help us to find the best source for our research. With ‘best
source’ I generally mean that you should prefer a source that is 1. specifically targeted at your
topic in scope, 2. the original source of information and analysis, and 3. likely to be the most
reliable source in terms of academic quality. Let me explain these criteria in the following.
Specifically targeted at your topic in scope is literature which specifically addresses the particu-
lar subject that you are writing about at any given time, not in a general way, but already by
title (mostly; see below) and, of course, content. To give you just one example: suppose your
dissertation is about late Meiji Japanese–Chinese relations. In your historical background
chapter, you want to write about their premodern trajectories and, at this particular point in
writing, about their relations during the Tokugawa period. You have a choice between Marius
B. Jansen’s China in the Tokugawa world (1992) and Mikiso Hane and Louis Perez’ Premod-
ern Japan: A historical survey (2015). In this case, Jansen’s work is the ‘best source’, because it
is a specialised study that, in title and content, addresses the specific topic you are writing
about. Hane and Perez’ general history textbook may have excellent passages on Japan’s for-
eign relations at the time and even contain information or analysis that may not be found in
Jansen’s study. But in this case, Hane and Perez took it most likely from a third source, such as
Ronald P. Toby’s State and diplomacy in early modern Japan (1984), which in turn is also the
‘best source’ (just not as obvious in the title, so the title’s recommendation has to be taken
with a pinch of salt). In any case, the more specific literature always trumps the more general
overview.
The above example also brings us to the next criterion: use the original source of information
and analysis. You should avoid all ‘second-hand’ literature that, in turn, only references back
to another, the original locus of information. Check the original source as the ‘best source’,
and reference this in your footnotes and bibliography. The original source-rule also often ex-
cludes, most importantly, Internet sources that take their information and analysis from pub-
lished sources (whether explicitly or without references). Here, again, the published source is
the one that should be used. Of course, this does not exclude Internet sources per se as long as
these are, in turn, the original site where the particular information or analysis can be ob-
tained (i.e. published studies may reference statistics from the Ministry of Health, Labour and
Welfare website; in this case, the website is the best because it is the original source). As a rule
of thumb, the use of Internet sources as the best source increases the more contemporary the
subject is.
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The final criterion, the most reliable source in terms of academic quality, is somewhat delicate
because, as one should not ‘judge a book by its cover’, one cannot gauge the academic quality
of a work without actually having read it. But with the deluge mentioned above, we cannot
read everything (even if we try skimming) and we have to develop some strategies and an intu-
ition that allows us, maybe not to exclude, but to order the literature in terms of what to read
first and later. Here are some recommendations.
How to select reliable scholarly literature

Generally, as a rule-of-thumb, the best scholarly source
1. is published in a professional academic publication venue (either print or online)
as an article or (E-)book;
2. has an identified author (i.e. is not anonymous);
3. if it is a monograph, it will be published with a good academic or commercial
publisher:
• a university-associated press (e.g. Cambridge, Columbia, Cornell, Edinburgh,
Harvard, Oxford, Tokyo University);
• some international commercial presses (e.g. Brill, Palgrave, Routledge, Sage);
• established national academic and commercial publishers (e.g. Beck and
Nomos in Germany, Presses universitaires de France, CNRS Éditions and
Flammarion in France or Einaudi and Skira in Italy);
• Japanese publishing houses like Chikuma shobō, Iwanami, or Kōdansha.
4. If it is an article, it is published in
• a peer-reviewed journal in Area Studies (ASIEN, Contemporary Japan, Japan
Forum, Journal of Asian Studies, Journal of Japanese Studies, Monumenta
Nipponica, Social Science Japan Journal);
• or the discipline(s) you are working in (e.g. American Anthropologist, Ameri-
can Historical Review, Gaikō Forum, Shigaku Zasshi, Shirin, Sociology, etc.).
The main rationale in favour of the publication venues listed above actually follows from the
first stipulation, namely that these are professional publication venues which have, as such, in-
built quality assurance mechanisms, ideally a strict peer review process (with commercial pub-
lishers, quality assurance can be a bit patchy, though). Which means that other people, experts
in your field, will have already pre-screened these publications for you and rejected some or
required substantial improvements to them before publication.
As cautioned above, this does not mean that one should ignore publications in ‘esoteric’ or un-
likely publication venues (e.g. in journals that otherwise do not have any track record with
Japan or the discipline you are working in). But often enough there is a reason why someone
chose to publish there and not in an established academic journal that is central to the field.
This is not snobbery but, considering the flood of sources one has to deal with, pure practicali-
ty. However, there is one exception to be made for Japanese language articles: Japanese col-
leagues often publish excellent articles in university-associated smaller venues, particularly bul-
letins (kiyō) or faculty-related periodicals. These should be taken into full consideration, de-
spite all rules of thumb.
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7. An inclusive approach to literature: Literature in Japanese and other

languages
Now that we have discussed means of whittling down the bulk of available literature by scope
and quality, this section follows the other direction and encourages you to be as inclusive as
possible when it comes to languages, and particularly regarding Japanese language literature.
Although it is often said that 90% of literature in Japanese Studies is produced in English, this
is actually not true. The vast majority of literature on Japan and on any Japan-related subject
is written in Japanese. This should be a self-evident fact just from statistics: the number of au-
thors as well as the number of readers who write and read about Japan-related topics are, of
course, biggest in Japan itself. This simple calculation applies to Japan-related topics even
more so than to other national academic communities, as Japanese colleagues still tend to
write more exclusively in Japanese than other academics. It is therefore paramount to consider
all the Japanese language literature that is relevant to your topic (see this chapter, Liu-Farrer,
Ch. 4.3; Maclachlan, Ch. 4.1). At least in Japanese Studies, you as a scholar and your publica-
tions will not be taken seriously if you have not included the relevant Japanese language litera-
ture on your subject in your work.
As a non-native speaker, this requires more linguistic effort on your part. Unfortunately, this
does not mean that you may read less literature just because it is written in Japanese. Nor
should it be a fig leaf exercise, i.e. including Japanese language literature in a superficial way
so that you have ticked this box, too. You should engage with Japanese language material as
seriously as with literature in English or other languages. Consequently, previous scholarship
on your topic in Japanese also sets the height of the bar over which you have to jump in order
to arrive at new findings. At times this bar seems awfully high. But this does not mean that
you should mystify Japanese sources. As Liu-Farrer (see this chapter, Ch. 4.3) argues, Japanese
colleagues have a more intimate relationship with their subject, enjoy more sustained access to
Japanese sources and profit from linguistic and cultural advantages. However, good scholar-
ship is the product of hard work in all languages. For example, Japanese students of History
have to learn to read premodern or even Meiji sources in the same hard way as Western stu-
dents do. Also, an intimate relationship and cultural proximity can be a double-edged sword
for a scholar. Similarly, unlimited access to sources is not always a blessing (a hard-earned per-
sonal insight after one year in the Waseda University stacks). And although it is often argued
that Japanese scholarship can offer different insights to Western scholarship, this goes both
ways. Thus, as a non-Japanese scholar, one should not feel intimidated by Japanese sources ei-
ther, or accord them with a special status of being naturally more authoritative. But, of course,
the sheer number of Japanese scholars doing research in a particular Japan-related field is
much higher than elsewhere, and therefore it is likely that there exist more very good studies
in Japanese than in other languages.
When dealing with Japanese secondary sources, beware of another Western-centric bias that
values Japanese language sources predominantly as a ‘data mine’. Some scholars appreciate it
for its richness in factual detail and information, but otherwise see Japanese scholarship as
lacking in analysis, theoretical contextualisation and methodological rigour. Ironically, this at-
titude among many Western scholars in Japanese Studies mirrors the attitude with which they,
in turn, are treated by their colleagues in ‘hard disciplines’ (Cheah 2001). They use the materi-
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al diligently accumulated by Japanese scholars/Japanese Studies scholars for the ‘real’ rigorous
analysis done in Japanese Studies or/and Social Science or the Humanities. But often enough,
this seeming lack is a matter of representation and of differences in academic cultures. In
Japanese scholarship, analysis and methodology are often more implicit, but still present.
However, with regard to languages other than Japanese and English, one could argue that all
relevant literature should be included in your study. Depending on the topic of your research,
a multilingual approach is even ingrained into your research design (see this chapter, Ganse-
forth, Ch. 4.2). This universal approach may seem impractical for languages you do not speak
(although you could ask someone or use rough translation software for a start). But at least
you should include the literature in languages you do speak, particularly when you submit
your thesis in a non-English speaking country (colleagues get very disappointed when their re-
search is overlooked just because it is not written in English). This has the practical conse-
quence that you should always search OPAC with keywords in various languages (the lan-
guage button on the side often does not work properly).
8. Reading secondary literature: Some practical advice
An important part of reviewing literature is, of course, reading it. However, do not try to read
‘everything’ before starting to write. I suggest the following: During your orientation phase
(usually the first year of your PhD), do several rounds of literature reviewing. After the first
round, skim lightly what you have found (see this chapter, Maclachlan, Ch. 4.1) and note in
your bibliography the main arguments, findings and methodological approaches of the work
in question as well as your own valuation of it. Then pick out a handful of publications that
you deem the most relevant and important and read them thoroughly, before starting the next
round of research. Reading literature thoroughly means that you read it with absolute concen-
tration, while taking copious notes. Without concentration, nothing good can be accomplished
in research. So, develop a set routine of when and where to work, create an environment as
disturbance-free as possible and, most importantly, lock away your mobile phone, shut down
the email browser and cut off the Internet. Do not try to multitask and take up one source at a
time.
An important routine while reading is taking notes. For each piece of literature, create a sepa-
rate file in which to store your notes (you can do this with Citavi, EndNote or just a simple
Word file; file them in a structure that mirrors your bibliography). In these notes, jot down a
summary of the book, notable quotes you want to use and also your own observations on
how the arguments, findings, theory and method relate to your topic. This has several purpos-
es: three to four years is a long time, and just scribbling in the margins will not help to find
things when you need them most—when writing. Also, taking notes in an organised way will
help you develop your own thoughts in conversation with what you read and, thus, is good
preparation for easing into writing. Finally, and also importantly, carefully taking notes helps
you to avoid inadvertent plagiarism (Massengill 2012, p. 18; see also Reiher/Wagner, Ch. 16).
When you read so much, the lines between your own thoughts and other people’s get blurred
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if you do not take notes. Consequently, when taking notes, distinguish between direct quotes,
paraphrases and your own observations!
A final note on the general mindset while reading secondary literature: Academics often say
that one should read critically. But, to paraphrase Bertrand Russell (1946/2004, p. 47), it
would be better to start with an attitude of hypothetical or detached sympathy that first and
foremost seeks to really understand what the author is driving at (even if it is only imperfectly
presented or evidenced) and only then start criticising it. This way, your reading will be much
more fruitful and balanced.
9. Identifying relevant debates and situating one’s own research
The two main purposes of reviewing literature are 1. to identify the relevant debates in your
field, both in Area Studies and the discipline you work in, and 2. to situate your own work in
relation to it. Also, it is quite dangerous (and not very motivating either) to ‘go it all alone’
and pursue your research in the isolation of your library carrel, your office or your desk at
home. The best way to get on top of recent debates is—while doing your literature review and
continuing to work at it—to embed yourself in and engage with different scholarly communi-
ties. In the following, I offer some advice on how to do this.
Efficient ways to get an overview of recent trends in academic debates

1. Reading
• Consult up-to-date handbooks (e.g. Brill, Routledge, SAGE) (both in Area Stud-
ies and your discipline(s));
• look for recent edited volumes and particularly screen the introductions which
are supposed to outline the state of research (both in Area Studies and your dis-
cipline(s));
• look for special issues of relevant journals;
• study book reviews as they usually contextualise findings in the current trends
and debates.
2. Communicating with peers and senior scholars in your field
• Ask senior scholars in your field for advice and introductions;
• sign up to relevant mailing lists and academic fora (e.g. EAJS-L, H-Net, J-Studi-
en);
• apply to and attend as many PhD workshops as possible (e.g. EAJS PhD work-
shops);
• apply to and attend postgraduate and regular conferences in Area Studies (e.g.
Association for Asian Studies, British Association of Japanese Studies, Euro-
pean Association of Japanese Studies, Japanologentag) and in your discipline(s)
(e.g. American Anthropological Association, American Historical Association,
International Sociological Association, etc.). Note that there are often travel
grants for PhD students.
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3. When staying in Japan

• Ask senior scholars in your field for advice and introductions.
• If possible, attend a zemi (a regular ‘seminar’ or colloquium of postgraduate
students under the same supervisor) run by a senior scholar working in your
field; participate actively and present your research in Japanese. It is perfectly
fine to read from a manuscript and distribute it among participants for them to
read along (Hiraoka et al. 2013).
• If possible, attend one or several kenkyūkai (regular meetings of national or lo-
cal research networks) in your field; if asked (do not venture to do so by your-
self but wait until asked), present your research in Japanese; also make sure you
attend the konshinkai, the social gathering, after the workshop.
When you present at conferences, workshops or kenkyūkai, people are often eager to point out
relevant literature and to contextualise your research in the relevant debates. This is also very
motivating and makes you realise that research is not a solitary fight with the material, but a
living debate about ideas. Even negative or muted feedback, as much as it stings at first, is ex-
tremely helpful in the long run. Just do not let it get under your skin or demotivate you (see
Farrer/Liu-Farrer Ch. 17). When presenting at disciplinary (non-Japan-specific) conferences,
be prepared to get other or fewer questions than you are used to from Japanese Studies confer-
ences, or even harsher and methodologically more fundamental questions than you might be
used to from Japanese Studies conferences. Finally, let me make a remark on time manage-
ment: As interesting and aspiring as it is to attend conferences and workshops to discuss issues
and meet people, it also takes a lot of (often underestimated) time to prepare and can be dis-
ruptive to your research routine. Keep in mind that a conference paper is not your disserta-
tion. So, when presenting, go for quality, not for quantity, and find the right balance between
presenting papers and writing your dissertation.
10. Writing the literature review
The literature review is a critical narrative account in a section at the beginning of your PhD
thesis (and proposal(s) leading towards it). I use the word ‘narrative’ to stress the purpose-
driven nature of the literature review, which is to explain what you do by way of what has
been done, or not. It is therefore not the bibliography you have compiled, nor a report on the
state of the field in general. It is a much more selective and purposeful narrative that always
has the same ending to its tale: ‘And that is why what has been done is not enough and why
what I am doing is important.’ Its general content, purpose and structure are always as fol-
lows.
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Content, purpose and structure of the literature review

Every literature review contains the same narrative elements that answer the following
questions
• What has been done by previous research in the field regarding your topic?
What are the main findings, arguments and debates in previous scholarship?
• Why is previous scholarship not enough to solve the ‘puzzle’ from which your
research question arises? What contradictions or gaps does this research con-
tain that create your puzzle in the first place?
• How does your own research contribute to debates and recent trends in your
field in terms of topic, theory and method?
The scientific purpose is, of course, to situate your project in the edifice of professional
science (see introduction). Invariably, however, a literature review also serves
• to demonstrate your grasp of the most important arguments, debates and
trends in research regarding your topic;
• to clear space for your own contribution and to showcase its importance;
• to relate your research to peers and predecessors in Area Studies and disciplines
in which you intend to pursue an academic career.
The general structure of the narrative follows from these elements and purposes
• Its narrative clusters around larger debates and trends rather than single contri-
butions of scholars.
• The order in which you present the narrative can be 1. chronological (How has
the field evolved in terms of theoretical or methodological trends? How has the
debate evolved?) or 2. thematic (What are the main arguments relating to the
topic? How can they be broken down?).
• In any case, the presentation usually follows a dialectical sequence (while A ar-
gued x, B contended -x, upon which C suggested y…).
• Participants in the debates are introduced with their main findings, arguments
and theoretical or methodological contributions, not a description of book or
article contents.
• The relevance of all sub-fields and approaches to your project must be ad-
dressed (and vice versa).
In terms of the flow of presentation, it is useful to imagine a metaphorical dinner party (Kam-
ler/Thomson 2006, pp. 37–38; Lloyd 2017/18) or, if you like, to visualise Raffael’s fresco The
School of Athens, in which groups and factions of people lead lively debates. Imagine them to
be your peers and predecessors who are discussing the research in your field regarding your
topic. You are right in the middle, holding forth why this is not good enough and why some-
thing has to be done about it (see McMorran, Ch. 15)! But, of course, keep your tone civil in
your counterarguments. Just like reading (see above), write your literature review with de-
tached sympathy.
However, there is no simple fit-for-all template for a literature review, as every discipline has
its own style. Each sub-field of Japanese Studies takes its rules from the respective discipline
(see this chapter, Maclachlan, Ch. 4.1). To get a better idea of what a literature review can
114
look like in your field, my suggestion is that you dig up the original PhD theses of the books
most relevant to your topic (not the published book itself, because that contains only a much-
abridged version) and take a look at the literature review.
This might also help to answer the following two questions: When do I have enough litera-
ture? When do I start writing? Reviewing literature can be overwhelming. You might think
that there is so much material out there that you cannot cope. Keep calm and do not let the
seeming immensity of the task overwhelm you. Take one quick step back and reconsider it in
the greater scheme of your research. Generally speaking, a ‘perfect’ or ‘comprehensive’ litera-
ture review is the enemy of a very good one. As you should not aspire to write a masterpiece
with your dissertation (although you might certainly produce one), you should also not aim
for perfection in reviewing literature. These things serve a purpose and are not ends in them-
selves. So, what you should aim for is a thorough literature review at first that is good enough
for you to continue with the next steps in your research.
11. When to start writing
Do not try to read ‘everything’ before you start writing. This takes too much time and can re-
sult in massive writer’s block. Of course, during the first year of your PhD, you mainly read
and search without producing much (except your notes, and your entries in the bibliography
and journal). But during the second year, you will see the fog clear and get a feeling for the lay
of the land. You can start drawing up a final marching route for the dissertation and for the
particular chapters with a sense of where the whole thesis and each of the chapters are heading
(a rough narrative). When you have reached this point, I suggest that you start writing while
continuing to read. Writing, as much as researching, is a circular process, so when you reach
the end of your thesis/of each chapter, you will have to go through it/them from the beginning
and add to where there is something missing. Once you have acquired a general sense of direc-
tion, follow the guide below.
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When you roughly know your direction, start writing (and continue to read)
1. Do not try to read ‘everything’ before starting to write, but read as much as you
need in order to orient yourself in a certain direction (a general ‘marching route’)
in order to get going and then read along the way, filling in the gaps.
2. When starting on a particular chapter or section
• First, review the necessary literature (primary and secondary) and skim
through what you find.
• Pick the most important and promising works (say five or eight) and work
through them thoroughly.
• Draw up a general outline of the chapter with the particular points and as-
pects you want to address and the sequence in which to do so (a ‘storyboard’
or ‘marching route’, as it were).
• Then start writing in line with this, working the rest of the literature into the
various aspects while writing.
• Naturally, this being a circular process, you might have to start from the be-
ginning and readjust the chapters, etc. somewhat until the end.
12. Summary
Naturally, people have different writing strategies and habits. However, I think the general
principle is that you have to find a balance between reading and writing. In figurative terms,
imagine research is like growing a tree. Nature does it incrementally and iteratively. The trunk,
roots and some main branches come first, then the whole is strengthened and more detail
(branches, leaves, etc.) is added. Nature does not make jumps and, similarly, you should grow
your literature review as an important part of your dissertation with patience and tenacity.
Safe journey and good luck!
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4.1 Looking for sources in all the right places
Searching for good primary, secondary and tertiary sources in Japan Studies can be a daunting
task. While Japan offers a cornucopia of riches for scholars in search of the printed and elec-
tronic word, it can be hard for the foreign researcher to fully access that information. In this
chapter, I draw from my own—often trial-and-error—experiences to offer some tips on how to
navigate these challenges and opportunities.
Definitions
Before progressing, I will provide some definitions. Primary sources are accounts of some
event or phenomenon written by someone who experienced it first-hand. They include autobi-
ographies, interviews, photographs and newspaper accounts that are contemporaneous with
the event in question. Also included in this category are government policy statements and sur-
vey data, and in Cultural Studies and other Humanities fields, original literary, theatrical and
other artistic works. Secondary sources, by contrast, are works that interpret those events or
artistic works; books and edited volumes, journal articles, newspaper editorials, television doc-
umentaries, literary criticisms and the like. Finally, tertiary sources are compilations of prima-
ry and/or secondary sources, and can include bibliographies, online databases and indexes,
and so on. Depending on the topic, researchers should expect to work extensively with all
three types of sources.
Secondary sources
When launching a new research project, start by perusing the available secondary literature.
This essential step in the research process will give you general background information, pos-
ition you to write a literature review and help you identify your own distinctive contributions
to your topic. Fortunately, the Japan Studies field has grown so much over the last half-centu-
ry that there should be no shortage of materials on your chosen topic in your native language.
When searching for secondary sources, pay close attention to recently published articles in
peer-reviewed disciplinary and Area Studies journals and books from reputable university and
commercial publishers, as these will alert you to the latest scholarly contributions to your top-
ic.
The rapid digitisation of scholarly work over the last decade or so will allow you to access
most secondary sources from your desk. You can locate most major journals via databases
provided by your university library. Be sure to try out the Bibliography of Asian Studies, a
comprehensive catalogue of not only books and journal articles in Japan Studies and related
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fields but also chapters in edited volumes. When searching for journal articles, it is important
to consult several databases, since many journals will contract with only one of them. As for
books, many—but by no means all—are now available electronically. Figure out which titles
you need by consulting the citations and bibliographies of other key works and searching your
university library’s holdings. If you are in the U.S. and need a print version of a book that your
university does not own, you can borrow a copy via your library’s interlibrary loan (ILL) ser-
vice. Locate the volume on WorldCat—a bibliographic database covering tens of thousands of
libraries around the world—and take note of the volume’s bibliographic information, includ-
ing the all-important ‘OCLC number’, and record that information on your library’s ILL re-
quest form. While you’re on WorldCat, remember to search for other sources as well. ILL ser-
vices can also be used to access journal articles located beyond your library’s immediate reach;
these are normally delivered to the user electronically.
All of us are understandably most comfortable working with sources in our native language,
but it is essential that you master the relevant Japanese secondary literature as well. And this is
where the research process can get tricky. Many university libraries in North America and Eu-
rope have substantial holdings in Japanese, but many more do not; once again, ILL will help
you fill in any gaps. Some ILL services borrow hard-to-find Japanese-language sources directly
from Japan via the National Diet Library (NDL), although this service is still a work-in-
progress. The NDL has been gradually digitising its collections, which is promising news for
foreign users, but as of the time of my writing this paper, those digitised versions are only ac-
cessible in Japan at either the NDL’s headquarters in the Chiyoda ward of Tokyo or one of its
branches. You can, however, search the library’s excellent online databases while still abroad.
First-time visitors to the NDL must present their passports in order to receive a registered user
card. The card is good for three years and can be renewed online.
Needless to say, students affiliated with a Japanese university have access to that university’s
library. If you wish to search a particular library’s specialised holdings without an affiliation,
be prepared to provide a letter of introduction from a librarian at your home institution that
includes a list of the sources you wish to consult. Letters of introduction are also helpful when
requesting access to corporate, museum and government archives (see Peucker/Schmidtpott/
Wagner, Ch. 9). For a list of Japanese, American and European libraries and archives of specif-
ic interest to Japan Studies scholars, you can consult the website of the North America Coor-
dinating Council of Japanese Library Resources (NCC).
Once you have located your secondary sources, the next challenge is reading them. Many
Japanese scholarly books lack indexes, which means you will have to skim them to find what
you need. This is easier said than done when you are researching a new topic with specialised
vocabulary. But with a little time and patience, you will soon master that terminology and re-
alise that ‘skimming’ in Japanese has its advantages, since topics can often be gleaned just by
glancing at a few key characters.
Primary sources
Primary sources are essential to the research process, and many of those materials can now be
obtained online. Government White Papers (hakusho), press releases, and advisory committee
(shingikai) minutes and reports can be retrieved directly from the websites of the government
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organs that produce the information, and some of it is in English as well as Japanese (see Aiza-
wa/Watanabe, Ch. 9.3). The NDL website includes links to the minutes and other information
relating to Diet deliberations since the early Meiji era. Newspaper articles can be accessed di-
rectly from newspaper websites (e.g., The Japan Times, Mainichi Shimbun), although a small
subscription fee may be required for extensive searching. Also helpful are subscription-sup-
ported newspaper databases (e.g. Kikuzō bijuaru: Asahi shimbun kiji dētabēsu, Nikkei Tele-
com), each of which offers access to a variety of different news sources. And then there is the
wealth of hard data that is now available online—not all of it easy to navigate. Sometimes the
problem is conceptual or related to measurement. Many social scientists, for example, find out
the hard way that the data provided by some government ministries are inconsistent over time,
which thus complicates longitudinal analysis. Other statistical sources are simply out of reach.
Every seasoned researcher tells stories about learning of the existence of a dataset that seems
integral to their work, only to discover that the notion of ‘open access’ has yet to take firm
root in Japan (see Reiher/Wagner, Ch. 16). If you find yourself in this position, be persistent.
Visit the organisation that owns the data. If possible, arrive armed with a letter of introduction
from someone who has a close connection to that organisation. Provide the powers-that-be
with a detailed explanation of exactly how you plan to use and disseminate that data. And
make follow-up visits, if necessary.
Locating qualitative primary sources comes with a different set of challenges, particularly if
you are researching a topic that few scholars know anything about. Brace yourself for false
starts and roadblocks, but know that once you locate one or two good sources, other discover-
ies will soon follow. As a PhD student working on the impact of Japanese consumer organisa-
tions on the legislative process (Maclachlan 2002), I spent the first few weeks of a lengthy re-
search stint in Japan spinning my wheels. But I soon snared a great interview, which led to sev-
eral more. One of my interviewees invited me to attend a symposium for consumer activists,
which led to invitations to attend more symposia, consumer rallies and even a few demonstra-
tions. Another interviewee introduced me to an archive on consumer-related topics (Kokumin
Seikatsu Sentā) close to Tokyo’s Shinagawa Station, where I discovered a treasure trove of
back issues of consumer-related newspapers, the in-house histories and newsletters of con-
sumer organisations, memoirs of consumer activists and the like. And repeated interviews with
the wonderful activists at the Japan Housewives Association (Shufuren) eventually led to an
open invitation to explore the organisation’s in-house archive.
Years later, as a student of the history and politics of the Japanese postal system (Maclachlan
2011), I spent dozens of hours in a small archive at the Communications Museum (Tei Park)
in the Ōtemachi district of Tokyo. Like many other specialised archives in Japan, this one had
yet to electronically catalogue its holdings. Locating relevant material meant searching
through printed catalogues and filling out request forms by hand. The work was tedious but
well worth the effort. I found invaluable sources that were unavailable through the NDL. And
much to my surprise, I got to know many of the other ‘regulars’ at the archive, some of whom
turned out to be scholars and retired postmasters who generously agreed to be interviewed.
One last point about primary sources: the value of memoirs. While researching the politics of
the postal system, I struggled to piece together the storyline of how local postmasters partici-
pated in the electoral process; since these activities were illegal, no postmaster would divulge
the details to me during interviews. I then happened upon two ‘kiss-and-tell’ memoirs written
by disgruntled former postmasters that included extraordinary accounts of the political inner
119
workings of the profession. Based on those memoirs, which corroborated both one another
and newspaper sources, I was able to construct a detailed chronology and analysis of an other-
wise obscure topic. More recently, during a hunt for materials on Japanese agricultural cooper-
atives, a Japanese expert on the topic alerted me to the out-of-print autobiography of a co-op
leader published during the early 1990s. The memoir filled gaping holes in my knowledge and
offered a revealing glimpse into how local co-ops operated a generation ago.
Bookstores in Japan: Some concluding thoughts
Finally, every Japan Studies scholar should spend some quality time in Japanese bookstores.
Virtually every town and urban shopping street (shōtengai) has a small bookshop that sells the
latest issues of news magazines and recent bestsellers on a variety of subjects. Large cities
boast of multi-story book meccas the size of small department stores that can take hours to
navigate. And there is no shortage of used bookstores, most notably in the fabled Jimbōchō
neighbourhood of Tokyo, where history buffs can find all manner of out-of-print multi-vol-
ume sets and other rare gems on topics both mainstream and obscure. Visit these bookstores
and do it regularly. Find the weekly or monthly news magazines that are relevant to your re-
search interests and read as much as you want while standing in the aisles. Locate the sections
that stock the sorts of primary and secondary sources that are relevant to you, and be on the
lookout for new acquisitions. If your research budget precludes a purchase, worry not; you
can take note of the bibliographic information and locate the volumes at a library. If you can
make a purchase, take your acquisition to the bookstore café, dive into it over a cup of tea or
coffee and revel in your life as a scholar!
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4.2 Ambiguity and blurred boundaries:
Contextualising and evaluating heterogeneous sources
Sonja Ganseforth
In my work on Japanese development policies in Palestine (Ganseforth 2016), I conducted a

discourse analysis to examine how different actors tried to frame development policies and to
leverage different aspects of an industrial park project according to their respective interests.
Looking for sources and information for my research, I mainly encountered challenges in three
areas: first, situating my own research in scholarly discussions; second, finding relevant
sources in different languages to inform my analysis; and third, identifying relevant discourses
and dealing with ambiguous and politicised sources.
Beyond disciplinarity: Positioning one’s own research
Having studied two Area Studies, namely Japanese Studies and Arab Studies, but no ‘core dis-
cipline’, I had received a comprehensive education encompassing the histories, politics, soci-
eties, economies, literatures and languages of my regions of specialisation. My own interests as
well as academic courses and advisor choices had led me to some degree of specialisation in
Human Geography, discourse analysis and qualitative fieldwork methods. I had also partici-
pated in some optional methodological courses and a longer field research expedition, but I
was far from the security—or constraints—a traditional disciplinary determination might have
given me. There was no obvious choice of theoretical model or methodological approach for
me, and all such decisions were in need of prior deliberation, explanation and legitimisation—
possibly more than in narrower disciplinary contexts.
On location in Palestine, I had found the research topic for my dissertation rather quickly after
reading and hearing about a contentious large-scale Japanese development project in the West
Bank. However, I needed to identify the theoretical and methodological framework to guide
my research as well as the scholarly discourses I wanted to contribute to with my work. After
drawing on some introductory works on development theories and consulting with my doctor-
al advisor, I found the ideas of so-called post-developmentalist thinkers to be the most interest-
ing and promising. Extending Michel Foucault’s discourse analysis (1977), one of the most
prominent exponents, Arturo Escobar (1995), criticises development discourses as political
constructs, and emulates Edward Said’s (2003) criticism of Western Orientalism in proposing
that ‘development’ creates its own ‘other’: the ‘underdeveloped’. He contends that ‘develop-
ment’ has become a hegemonic discourse in the 20th century and the dominating interpretative
framework that allows control over countries and peoples conceived as ‘underdeveloped’ and
in need of salvation by Western technology and expertise. This idea of discourses legitimising
far-reaching policy interventions, while at the same time depoliticising social and political dis-
parities through technical and economist language, is particularly relevant in the Palestinian
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Sonja Ganseforth
context. Here, the international community has started massive development programmes
since the 1990s, and many different truths and narratives justify very diverse political position-
alities and programmes.
A second major conceptual influence came from my doctoral programme in a structured re-
search training group, which brought together research on issues of globalisation from differ-
ent disciplinary backgrounds, albeit focusing on perspectives integrating ideas of the so-called
spatial turn in the Social Sciences since the late 1980s. Conceptualising space as a contingent
product of social, political and cultural construction and constant renegotiation, rather than as
a fixed, homogeneous container or arena of events and relations (Massey 2005), offered me a
fruitful perspective from which to analyse how spaces are being appropriated by different ac-
tors during and by means of a Japanese development project in Palestine.
Even if you think that an Area Studies audience is the most likely readership for many of your
publications, it is nevertheless important to contribute to scholarly and theoretical discussions
that are relevant beyond the regional frame. In order to reach an audience beyond Area Studies,
it is therefore advisable to aim for publications in disciplinary journals as well. Treating ‘Japan’
as a case in the study of universal political, social, cultural, economic or historical questions can
avoid the pitfalls of solipsistic specialisation without relevance beyond a very specific case—a
case that might appear quite exotic, such as a Japanese development project in the Palestinian
West Bank.
Literature research: Hunting for relevant multilingual sources
Even if I would argue strongly against this apparent exoticism, and even if Japanese development
cooperation has constituted a major influence in the Middle East in recent decades, finding and
choosing the appropriate sources on Japanese policies in Palestine sometimes proved challenging.
While there is certainly no scarcity of literature on development cooperation in general, the
sources on Japanese official development policies in the Middle East were very limited. Local case
studies mostly focused on Southeast Asia, and there was virtually no research on Japanese aid in
Palestine. Of course, this lack of specialised secondary sources was not only a challenge, but also
an opportunity for me to fill a considerable research gap with my own work.
The first rounds of literature research unearthed mainly English language texts and were limi-
ted to the range of possibilities offered by access to a library at a European university as well
as various online repositories. I did find an array of studies on more general fields, such as
Japanese development cooperation on the one hand, and the problematic aspects of interna-
tional development and aid in Palestine on the other. However, it was important for me to go
beyond the English literature and include Arabic and Japanese language sources. Otherwise, I
was bound to ignore crucial parts of the scholarship and some of the discourses probably most
relevant to those involved in the process I was studying, even if I also conducted quite a few
interviews with Japanese- and Arabic-speaking actors.
Obviously, there were language hurdles and long office hours spent cursing two non-European
writing systems, but accessibility of sources also proved difficult on a more practical level.
Sometimes I asked travelling colleagues and friends to bring back home certain publications
that were not available in Germany. Japanese sources—even grey literature and primary
sources—were often well accessible via the usual means of libraries, online catalogues, Internet
122
repositories, organisations’ websites or media outlets. However, it was not so easy for Arabic
language material. In some cases, it proved most useful to personally visit some of the research
and activist organisations in Palestine and Israel. They often publish their own research and
have additional collections on regional issues for sale in their information centres. Pertinent
bookshops in the region were another good resource for some of the relevant publications. I
also received a lot of material as well as recommendations directly from people I contacted for
interviews or information and advice, which was extremely helpful. In this way, the search for
literature became a form of field research as well.
The politics of research: Blurred boundaries and ambiguous sources
The overlap of field and literature research correlated with blurred boundaries between prima-
ry and secondary sources at times. Occasionally, I had to rely on primary sources such as ac-
tivists’ reports or official policy statements for information, while at the same time some of the
scholarly literature, the secondary sources, had a rather politically charged character. While it
would be a fallacy to assume there is an objective, neutral and detached author behind aca-
demic publications, I felt that particular care was necessary in evaluating many of the writings
I had collected. Analyses by leftist activist organisations from Palestine and Israel, sometimes
bordering on the polemic and highly critical of Israel’s occupation and international develop-
ment policies in the West Bank, painted a very different picture of the industrial park project
than studies by semi-independent research institutes from Japan or Israel. Such publications
were, of course, important primary sources for my discourse analysis of the power struggle to
interpret and frame development policies. At the same time, I sometimes depended on them for
information and contextualisation, so it became crucial to verify their depictions as much as
possible and never to take them at face value.
The problem, however, was not limited to primary sources. The political character of sec-
ondary sources became most obvious in analyses of the—still ongoing—Palestinian-Israeli con-
flict. Studies of international development cooperation in Palestine also tended to be highly
critical of either international donors or the Palestinian leadership. At the same time, polemic
language and idiosyncratic Palestinian expressions, such as speaking of Israeli settlements in
the West Bank only as ‘colonies’ or of Israel as ‘the occupier’ as well as usage of the term
‘apartheid’, occasionally disguised solid academic analyses by Palestinian authors and con-
tributed to their disqualification in international academia—an interesting aspect of discourse
politics in itself. It was therefore indispensable to critically scrutinise my sources for their sci-
entific integrity and to consider their respective backgrounds when trying to evaluate the sig-
nificance of their findings to inform my own research.
There were also a number of rather judgemental and biased accounts of Japanese development
politics, especially those by some North American scholars since the 1970s. The literature was
often limited in its sources, e.g. hardly drawing on any Japanese sources, and some texts
seemed to be highly influenced by the growing economic prowess of Japan and the intensifying
trade frictions with the United States of America since the 1980s. They focused on critiques of
policies that mainly seemed to aid the promotion of Japan’s own export industries, whereas
Japanese positions since that time often seemed to take a defensive stance towards these criti-
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Sonja Ganseforth
cal tendencies. It is, of course, imperative to always be aware of the contextuality and histori-
cal contingency of academic literature and examine its validity as thoroughly as possible.
As it happens, detecting these nuances and overtones proved quite interesting and fruitful for my
actual study. I found that many of these secondary sources contributed to discourses that became
the object of my analysis, for example the discourse on the self-interest of Japanese aid, or the dis-
course on apolitical economic cooperation between Israelis and Palestinians as a prerequisite to
peace—as well as the fierce rejection of this idea. This way, the literature assumed an ambiguous
role: it was still an important source of information, contextualisation and analytical framework,
but at the same time some of the secondary literature became a form of primary source for dis-
course analysis. In the beginning, I worried about the lack of a neat division into primary and sec-
ondary sources as I had learned in basic academic education. However, I came to the conclusion
that this ambiguity was inevitable and tolerable as long as I was aware of it and dealt with the
sources in a transparent and reproducible manner. In putting the results of my research on paper,
I therefore felt it was important to make explicit at every point whether I was drawing on a study
in order to gain analytical insights and critically engage with their findings on the one hand, or
whether I was treating a source as material for discourse analysis on the other.
Engaged scholarship
The ambiguous character of some secondary sources had me pondering the positionality of my
own writing, especially as my research dealt with highly contentious and sometimes unsettling
issues. While assuming ‘objectivity’ or ‘neutrality’ in one’s own work might be as problematic
as in other authors’ works, it is of course crucial to adhere to academic standards in terms of
rigour, reflexivity, transparency, reproducibility and verifiability and not to sacrifice ethical re-
search for political aims. Nevertheless, I would strongly argue the case for engaged scholarship
(see Slater et al., Ch. 16.2) and the responsibility of academics to highlight problematic find-
ings such as social grievances or political injustice, as science is in a potentially powerful posi-
tion of knowledge production. In fact, many salient researchers and theorists—like the geogra-
pher Doreen Massey and the anthropologist Escobar—do not limit themselves to academic au-
diences, but become vocal advocates of social and political causes. The blurring of roles, ac-
tivist engagement and collaboration with activist groups does not automatically blur the clari-
ty of academic analysis as long as it is transparent. Good academic research can be interested
and engaged.
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4.3 Doing migration research in Japan:
The roles of scholarly literature
Gracia Liu-Farrer
This essay shares my experiences of using different types of literature in the process of my re-
search about immigration into Japan. I broadly categorise the relationship between literature
review and research as a three-step process of ‘zoning in’, ‘reorienting’ and ‘zoning out’. In ad-
dition, I highlight the importance of drawing on scholarly literature in Japanese. Qualitative
research is often used for studying emergent social phenomena, for understanding the subjec-
tive meanings of particular practices and for investigating the processes of how some events
are unravelled. The underlying assumption of qualitative research is that not all concepts per-
taining to a given phenomenon have been identified, are fully developed or are sufficiently un-
derstood, and further exploration on a topic is therefore necessary to increase understanding
(Corbin/Strauss 2008). Our statements about why and how such situations exist or events take
place contribute to both the empirical understanding of the phenomenon and theoretical de-
velopment in the related fields. In other words, qualitative research is often employed to inves-
tigate phenomena that we know very little or do not yet have a reliable theoretical statement
about. In such a process, literature review recurs at different stages of the research. It provides
the initial direction of our research, is used to inform the next stage of data gathering, and of-
fers tools for interpreting our findings and debates to situate our findings in.
Zoning in: Localising the research
Since our research interest is often kindled by curiosity or concerns about an emergent phe-
nomenon, an ongoing crisis or intriguing situations, a starting point of one’s research is to find
out how much has already been done on the specific subjects and phenomenon. Without sur-
veying the field, it is difficult to know where and how to start, let alone identify gaps in re-
search. The literature one needs to be familiar with needs to cover several areas: the theoretical
and conceptual discussions in this field and the research that has been done on a specific topic.
In other words, a study needs both theoretical and empirical literature to provide a road map.
Some researchers might start from the specific issues and subjects, and work outward to more
general conceptual and theoretical discussions. I usually do these different types of literature
review simultaneously because empirical case studies allude to different theoretical discussions.
Each field has its key questions as well as concepts and theories that are aimed at addressing
such questions. That is why one needs to educate oneself about the broader field of one’s
study. In my field of international migration studies, some key questions have been: why and
how people move; why and how they move to a specific place; how people are related to both
the new environment and the places they depart from; and what migration does or means to
migrants, those who receive them and those who are left behind. Different disciplines tend to
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Gracia Liu-Farrer
have different issue focuses. After numerous empirical studies in different contexts, a large
number of concepts and theories have been developed to answer these questions. This theoreti-
cal background might not directly enter into one’s literature review section in the end, but it
informs the initial questions of one’s research.
Issue and context specific literature, i.e. empirical literature, is an essential part of a literature
review. The specific literature for my research is migration into Japan. Since the mid-1980s,
increasing contemporary migration into Japan has stimulated interest in this social trend.
When I started my research in the early 2000s, there was already a substantial amount of liter-
ature in English on immigration into Japan. For example, several anthropological studies had
researched ethnic Japanese who were brokered from Latin American countries to be manual
labour in the name of ethnic return (Linger 2001; Roth 2002; Tsuda 2003). Studies about Fil-
ipino entertainers and marriage migration emerged in the 1990s (Ballescas 1992; Suzuki
2003). There was also a group of Japanese sociologists that, working in the urban sociological
tradition, studied immigrant communities and the neighbourhoods they dwelled in. While
there was practically no English literature on Chinese people in Japan when I started my re-
search project, Japanese scholars had already produced a number of scholarly publications in
Japanese, delineating their migratory trends and describing their life in Japan (Tajima 1998).
This body of literature brought me closer to the field. I could see that some of the key issues in
immigration in Japan have to do with the dilemma created by a need to import labour and the
conservative stance the government took on immigration, which created many informal chan-
nels for migration. The nature of Japan as an ethno-nationalist receiving context and the par-
ticular migration channels it created necessarily produced different sets of research questions.
With the key questions provided by general migration theories and a knowledge of the specific
migration conditions in Japan, as a sociologist, I entered my field with a broad interest in un-
derstanding how networks play a role in Chinese migration into Japan, and whether and how
immigrant communities are formed in Japan, and how the migratory trajectories into a non-
immigrant country unfold. These questions remained the guiding questions throughout my lat-
er research, but the specific fieldwork findings produced more specific research outputs.
Reorienting: Continued literature review in the field
Qualitative research is such that as soon as we enter the field, we are immediately inundated
with new information and unexpected findings. Where we do our research and whom we ap-
proach influence what we find out. Although I did not plan to focus on international students
initially, I found that among my interviewees the majority of them came as students. Their nar-
ratives presented discernibly patterned mobility trajectories. Most noticeable was their double
identity as both students and migrant labour. In order to understand such an interesting trend
of migration and make sense of my findings, I had to look for literature that specifically exam-
ined international students. A quick survey of the existing literature revealed to me that most
of the studies about international students before the early 2000s fell within the purview of
education research, and were limited mostly to their life on university campus and their educa-
tion outcomes. At the same time, international migration studies then were primarily about
labour migrants. Skilled labour migration had emerged as a trend and attracted concerns
about the issues of brain drain. Policymakers and researchers in countries such as Australia
126
had begun to treat international students as potential skilled labour migrants. No literature
had yet discussed this group as simple migrant labour. However, doing lowskilled labour was
an integral part of being international students in Japan. This revelation was exciting because
it showed the importance of merging the fields of international education and labour migra-
tion.
Meanwhile, looking at Chinese student migrants’ career trajectories, I noticed their particular
locations in the transnational businesses between China and Japan, and that their activities of-
ten involved transnational movements. Another round of focused reviewing of immigrant
transnational practices and theoretical discussions about transnationalism necessitated me
putting more effort into observing and identifying various patterns of Chinese student mi-
grants’ transnational behaviour. With these newly gained conceptual insights and such empiri-
cal evidence, my research focuses therefore shifted to examining patterns of Chinese student
migrants’ transnational practices, asking why such phenomena emerged in the context of im-
migration into Japan (Liu-Farrer 2011).
Because of its role in reorienting one’s research and shaping one’s approaches and ultimately
findings, the literature one draws on in the process of actual research is the most pertinent to
one’s study, and therefore often ends up in the literature review section of one’s academic out-
put.
Zoning out: Situating your study
After one has immersed oneself in the field and accumulated many empirical findings, one’s
next step is to think about how to reconnect the case study to the literature and situate one’s
study in a broader academic field. Aside from offering more knowledge on the specific group
and topic in this particular context, one’s research findings should also speak to the larger con-
cerns of the field. In other words, who do you have in mind as your readers and interlocutors
beyond the researchers who might be doing the same study? My study obviously added to the
research about Chinese student migration into Japan and more broadly about migration in
Japan, so anybody who wanted to carry out such studies, I hoped, would read it. At the same
time, I saw my study as having broader relatability in the field of Migration Studies, both the
topical area of student migration and migrant transnationalism—the two sub-fields of Migra-
tion Studies that I had to read up on while doing research in the field. They therefore became
the broader literature that I situated my project in.
Though I emphasise the need of ‘zoning in’ from and ‘zoning out’ to the larger theoretical con-
versation, it does not mean that our study is merely an empirical case to substantiate existing
theories. For example, transnationalism as a framework with which to examine migrant
practices has fundamentally changed how we approach migrant subjects and what we will
eventually find out. But our study does not aim to prove that yes, migrants in Japan are indeed
transnational and this is the proof. Instead, we want to identify the specific characteristics and
patterns of transnational practices migrants in Japan are engaged in, and ask whether they are
conditioned by the specific institutional, social and cultural contexts Japan presents; how our
case study modifies the theory; and whether and how our findings can be generalised in other
contexts.
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Gracia Liu-Farrer
One pitfall of social scientific research, particularly in Migration Studies on Japan, is to im-
pose a concept or theory derived from very different social contexts onto the observations in
Japan. Social theories are created out of concrete social contexts. More than other social scien-
tific topics, Migration Studies were borne out of Western, especially traditional settler soci-
eties. Some concepts and theories, for example those positing and describing community for-
mations, do not necessarily apply in a Japanese context. One important task for research, and
the reason to engage with literature, is not to find a case that fits a particular concept, but to
critically engage with the concepts and see in what way our own research, out of particular
contexts, might help shape and modify the existing conceptualisation in the field.
Drawing on publications in Japanese
Researching events taking place in Japan, one cannot ignore contributions by scholars in
Japan and publications in the Japanese language. This is because scholars who are based in
Japanese institutions often have more intimate relationships with the subjects they investigate.
They have more access to them or better knowledge of the social contexts into which our sub-
jects enter. Overall, Japanese scholars also tend to have more linguistic and cultural advan-
tages in doing such research, and can offer different perspectives.
In the field of Migration Studies, Japanese researchers, or researchers who write in Japanese,
have accumulated a large body of literature and are particularly prolific in the following sub-
jects:
• immigration and integration-related policy analysis;
• case studies on international education/international students, including students’ career
aspirations and post-graduate mobilities;
• in-depth anthropological and sociological studies on specific immigrant communities and
family formations;
• neighbourhood research, especially done by urban sociologists, geographers and anthro-
pologists;
• immigrant children’s educational mobilities;
• immigrants’ economic practices, including entrepreneurship;
• Japanese people’s reaction to immigration and immigrants.
Japanese scholarship is a rich source of information and empirical insights. Aside from in-
depth and sometimes longitudinal qualitative research, Japanese scholars often conduct social
surveys of different scopes, something non-Japanese scholars and scholars who are not based
in Japanese institutions have difficulty doing. For example, my recent work (Liu-Farrer 2020)
draws heavily on Japanese literature on migrant children’s educational situations in Japan (Ka-
ji 2007; Sakuma 2006; Takaya et al. 2015).
In addition, social scientists from outside Japan sometimes bring with them concepts and theo-
ries that might not apply in Japanese contexts. By looking into Japanese scholarship, one can
understand how the real situations are and what concerns the people within Japan. Although
it is understood that not all researchers can read Japanese proficiently, ignoring this body of
literature is not only a missed opportunity for mining important research outputs, but also im-
pairs the credibility of a ‘Japan Studies’ project. Finally, researchers who write in other lan-
128
guages bear the responsibility of introducing such scholarship. By presenting Japanese research
outputs through our non-Japanese publications, we are helping to build a more substantial
scholarly foundation for research on Japan.
Concluding remarks
This essay shares some of my own experiences with academic literature in the process of doing
qualitative research on migration in Japan. One needs to be equipped with an understanding
of the key questions, main concepts and theoretical debates in this field as well as specific dis-
ciplinary approaches. This will be the foundation one continuously builds on throughout one’s
research career. However, specific projects tend to draw on more specific empirical literature.
The relationship between research and literature review is a cyclical process, continuing
throughout the course of a project, broadly analogised as ‘zoning in’—localising the research,
‘reorienting’—finding theoretical constructs that help you fine-tune your ongoing research and
provide interpretive frameworks, and ‘zoning out’—situating your study in a broader range of
literature. This essay also emphasises the importance of drawing on the research output of
scholarship in Japanese, because there is often more research done in Japan and published in
Japanese on the topic we research. Works in Japanese are an indispensable part of scholarly
output which we should reference and utilise. However, although other scholars’ research
serves as signposts for the terrain one is treading on, one needs to contour one’s own research
trajectories.
129
Further reading
Callahan, Jamie L. (2014): Writing literature reviews: A reprise and update. In: Human Resource Develop-
ment Review 13, No. 3, pp. 271–275.
Kamler, Barbara/Thomson, Pat (2006): Helping doctoral students write: Pedagogies for supervision. Lon-
don: Routledge.
Oliver, Paul (2012): Succeeding with your literature review: A handbook for students. Maidenhead: Mc-
Graw-Hill Education.
Onwuegbuzie, Anthony J./Frels, Rebecca (2016): Seven steps to a comprehensive literature review: A mul-
timodal & cultural approach. Los Angeles, CA: Sage.
Turabian, Kate L. (2018): A manual for writers of research papers, theses, and dissertations: Chicago style
for students and researchers. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press.
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Chapter 5
How to collect data: An introduction to qualitative Social Science
methods
Akiko Yoshida
1. Introduction
This chapter provides an overview of qualitative data collection methods used in Social Sci-
ence research primarily for undergraduate students with a limited knowledge of research
methods. I first explain different types of methods and discuss what each method is useful for,
with a focus on fieldwork, qualitative interviews and observational research. I then present
what researchers should consider in selecting data collection methods for their research. I close
this chapter by discussing anecdotally what other things should be considered in preparing for
qualitative research, drawing on the accounts shared by experienced researchers in the three
essays included in this chapter as well as my own experience as a sociologist who conducted
interviews for my doctoral dissertation research in Japan.
2. What qualitative data collection methods are there?
There are different types of data collection methods within qualitative Social Science research.
The most commonly employed methods, which are the focus of this book, are fieldwork,
qualitative interviews, observational research and archival research (see Ch. 6–9). These meth-
ods are not necessarily mutually exclusive, meaning that there are significant overlaps among
them. Researchers may employ just one or multiple data collection methods in their study;
they may also combine qualitative methods with quantitative methods or use some other form
of mixed methods research or triangulation (see Hommerich/Kottmann, Ch. 10).
Fieldwork (see McLaughlin, Ch. 6), or field research, is generally understood as research in
which researchers immerse themselves in their research sites, making observations in natural
settings, interacting with research participants and interviewing or just talking with them. De-
spite the fact that fieldwork has been commonly employed by qualitative researchers for over
a century, meanings and applications of this concept are not shared among all social scientists
(Berg 2007). In this chapter, I keep the conceptual definition of fieldwork rather loose and
general and treat it as a combination of qualitative interviews (see Kottmann/Reiher, Ch. 7)
and observational research (see Tagsold/Ullmann, Ch. 8).
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Chapter 5 How to collect data
Qualitative interviewing, which may also be called in-depth interviewing, involves asking
open-ended questions to research participants in which participants choose their own words in
answering the questions or, for example, elaborate on their answers. Researchers ask follow-
up questions to participants to clarify, elaborate or explain their answers. Researchers often
make observations on participants’ facial expressions, body language, speed of speech, use of
pauses, tone of voice and other non-verbal expressions. This contrasts with survey question-
naires, which typically ask sets of prepared closed-ended questions with prepared answer cat-
egories, from which research participants choose answers. Though questionnaires can include
open-ended questions, what differentiates qualitative interviewing from questionnaire research
is that it aims to obtain in-depth accounts instead of direct answers to particular questions.
The driving force behind qualitative interviewing is therefore ‘an interest in understanding the
lived experience of other people and the meaning they make of that experience’ (Seidman
2006, p. 9). Another difference from questionnaire research is that researchers may accidental-
ly encounter new themes that were not previously anticipated.
As discussed in more detail in Chapter 7, there are different types of qualitative interviews
based on the nature of questions (e.g. structured, semi-structured, unstructured and life story/
history interviews), the method of interviews (e.g. face-to-face, via phone, via the Internet) and
the number of interviewees (i.e. one-on-one, couple/small group or focus group interviews).
Semi-structured interviewing, which utilises a prepared set of open-ended questions called an
interview guide, is probably the most common method. Life story/history interviewing, in
which researchers ask questions regarding participants’ life experiences or prompt them to tell
stories about their lives in the past, is also common (see Kinoshita, Ch. 13.2). These can be
semi-structured or unstructured interviews, the latter of which does not involve any prepared
questions. Tomoko Hidaka (2010), for example, conducted life history interviews with
Japanese elite white-collar salarymen of a large age range—those born between 1925 and
1984—and found interesting differences and commonalities in childhood experiences accord-
ing to age group.
One-on-one interviews, in which a researcher interviews one participant at a time, are the
most common forms (see Kottmann/Reiher, Ch. 7). Although couple/small group interviews
and focus group interviews are less common, they are nonetheless suited to certain research
questions and so worth mentioning here. To study the patterns of and reasoning for the div-
ision of household labour among Japanese married couples, Scott North (2009) interviewed
married couples together. Couple interview research could inhibit individuals from sharing
honest accounts in the presence of the other. In his research, however, most couples ‘used the
interview to proclaim, and at times, negotiate, feelings about family, the division of family
work, their marriages and self-identity’ (North 2009, p. 31), which generated valuable and
rich data for his research. North was also able to observe how married couples interacted with
each other, which added more nuance to his data. The ‘couples’ in couple interviews need not
be pairs of intimate partners. In her study of care work for elderly parents in Japan, Kristen
Schultz Lee (2010) interviewed an 88-year-old mother and her 66-year-old daughter together.
The interview of this pair helped Schultz Lee conceptualise the ambiguous sentiments shared
among adult daughters: many harboured resentments towards their mothers and had conflict-
ual relationships with them, yet they held a desire to provide care for their parents (Schultz
Lee 2010).
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Akiko Yoshida
Focus group interviewing (see Yamaguchi, Ch. 7.2) was originally developed by marketing re-
searchers (e.g. to obtain consumer feedback on products) and adopted by social scientists.
Time efficiency is a definite appeal as researchers can interview a fairly large number of partic-
ipants at once. This method, however, poses challenges such as keeping track of who said
what, needing additional staff and possibly video cameras (which can conflict with confiden-
tiality promises) or group dynamics to influence people’s accounts, to list a few. Group set-
tings, however, may facilitate conversations among otherwise reserved individuals. Yoshie
Moriki (2017) successfully obtained interesting accounts on sexless marriages and family co-
sleeping through two focus group interviews with 83 Japanese married women and men.
Observational research is a method in which researchers make observations on social process-
es in natural settings, as little disturbed by researchers as possible. Chapter 8 provides details
on what might be called overt participation, in which researchers participate in group activi-
ties, communicate openly about their research and build a rapport with the people they ob-
serve. Researchers, however, may assume a covert observer role, which means that they do not
participate in any activities or reveal to participants that they are observing for a research pur-
pose. You may do research, for instance, by systematically observing public spaces such as ani-
me conventions, restaurants, train stations, protests and baseball games without explicitly in-
teracting with any participants. You are unlikely to learn what these participants feel or think
about what they do, but you might gain some understanding of norms, rituals, roles or pro-
cesses by observing their normal activities as undisturbed by the presence of the researcher as
possible.
In some cases, researchers may assume a covert participatory role, but participate in activities
without disclosing that they are doing research. The researcher can gain richer data in this
case, but this approach raises ethical concerns. Researchers should be honest and respectful.
Alternatively, researchers may tell the truth, or debrief, during the research or after completing
the fieldwork. Whether this role can be carried out ethically is for researchers to consider and
for the review board of researchers’ institutions to determine prior to data collection (see Rei-
her/Wagner, Ch. 16). Yuko Ogasawara (1998), in her study of a Japanese bank, did not dis-
close her research purpose. She entered the site as a temporary clerical worker instead of a so-
ciology student doing research because Japanese corporations would not have hired her if she
had told them her purpose. During her research, she faced a psychological dilemma. Some of
the female clerical workers of Japanese companies, or so-called ‘OLs’ or Office Ladies, began
to share their dreams and problems with her, but she was unable to reciprocate by sharing her
own. In the end, however, she was happy with her decision, as her role as a female employee
tremendously helped her gain insights into power and gender dynamics within the Japanese
white-collar corporate world (Ogasawara 1989). She used pseudonyms for the bank and indi-
viduals to protect their privacy and reputation. Her book aimed for women’s empowerment;
thus the OLs would probably have appreciated her work. Whether her choice was ethical,
however, is debatable.
Other qualitative data collection methods include, but are not limited to, archival research,
content analysis, action research, visual ethnography and autoethnography. Archival research
(see Peucker/Schmidtpott/Wagner, Ch. 9) entails examining archival records to assess human
traces. This is one of a few examples of an unobtrusive strategy—a method that does not in-
trude into people’s lives—in qualitative data collection methods. Another unobtrusive method
—which at the same time is a tool for data analysis (see Chiavacci, Ch. 11)—is content analy-
134
sis (see Arrington, Ch. 13), which involves a systematic examination of recorded communica-
tion (Babbie 2014; Berg 2007), such as written and/or visual materials in newspapers, books,
magazines, advertisements, websites, songs, letters, e-mails, speeches, TV shows and more.
Ayami Nakatani (2006) used magazines, newspapers and government reports to analyse the
emerging concept of ‘nurturing fathers’ around the turn of century in Japan. Justin Charlebois
(2013) examined discourses on ‘herbivore masculinity’ in literature on herbivores published in
the late 2000s and early 2010s (see Schad-Seifert, Ch. 14.1).
Action research is a unique way of conducting research in that research participants actively
collaborate in the process of doing research (Berg 2007). Visual ethnography or visual sociolo-
gy utilises visual images such as photography, video and other media. Photographs or videos
can be the data to analyse (Dowdall/Golden 1989; Pink 2007; see also Slater et al., Ch. 16.2).
Researchers may also use visual images (e.g. showing old photographs) to solicit responses
from participants (Schwartz 1989; Walker/Moulton 1989). In autoethnography, researchers
produce ‘accounts that draw upon the experience of the author/researcher for the purposes of
extending sociological understanding’ (Sparkes 2000, p.21). This postmodern method chal-
lenges traditional scientific methods (Wall 2008) and has been questioned due to its lack of
objectivity, for example, but I think it would be interesting if non-Japanese scholars recorded
their perceptions, experiences and so forth of living in Japan. I encourage readers interested in
this subject to consult the literature on these innovative methods.
Thus far, I have used the term data without specifying what it means. Most people think of
‘data’ in relation to numbers, and in quantitative research data collected are indeed numeric or
converted into numbers (such as 1 = strongly agree) and analysed statistically (see Hommerich/
Kottmann, Ch. 10). In qualitative research, on the other hand, data is anything but numbers
(although, theoretically, numbers can also be part of qualitative research to some degree).
Words, stories told in interviews, descriptions of scenes written by researchers, visual images,
news articles or diaries, among others, are the data. Qualitative researchers transcribe inter-
views and write up field notes based on their observations. These are the data to analyse (see
Ch. 11–14).
Qualitative data collection methods include fieldwork (ethnography, field research), quali-
tative (in-depth) interviewing, observational research, archival research, content analysis,
action research, visual ethnography (visual sociology) and autoethnography.
3. What is each method useful for?
Qualitative data collection methods are generally suited to, and excellent for, gaining a deeper,
fuller understanding of the social phenomena under study (Babbie 2014). By directly observing
natural behaviour/settings and/or asking questions in depth, researchers can, among other
things, capture social life as experienced by participants, witness and record how certain
events unfold, examine individual behaviour in relation to social contexts, gain insights into
reasons for certain actions and behaviour, identify subtle nuances of attitudes, and better un-
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Akiko Yoshida
derstand human subjectivity and meanings attached to words, acts or events (Babbie 2014;
Berg 2007; Schutt 2012).
The units of social settings appropriate for fieldwork are: 1. practices, 2. episodes, 3. encoun-
ters, 4. roles and social types, 5. social and personal relationships, 6. groups and cliques, 7.
organisations, 8. settlements and habitats, and 9. subcultures and lifestyles (Lofland et al.
2006). Because qualitative research typically takes an inductive approach (i.e. not to collect
data for hypothesis testing), researchers can use this method for exploratory research or dive
into areas that are understudied (Schutt 2012; see also Hommerich/Kottmann, Ch. 10). Anne
Allison (1994) and Akiko Takeyama (2016) wanted to understand the unknown worlds of, re-
spectively, hostess and host clubs in Japan. In her ethnographic research, Allison (1994)
worked as a hostess at a high-class hostess club in Tokyo for four months. Takeyama (2016)
visited numerous host clubs and conducted interviews with hosts, managers, owners and
clients of clubs over the course of ten years. They obtained rich data on routine practices
among hostesses/hosts, patterns of host(ess)–client encounters, roles played on the front stage
and their lives behind it, and more.
Of course, not everything in human behaviour is physically observable. Researchers may wish
to understand what people think, feel, perceive, remember, reason, justify, experienced in the
past and so forth. Qualitative interviewing is suited to such purposes. By gaining access to sub-
jective understanding/reasoning, perceptions, sentiments, lived experiences or life stories/histo-
ries as told/expressed by research participants, researchers can identify, for instance, the rea-
sons behind people’s actions and life choices (or lack thereof). Ekaterina Hertog (2009) con-
ducted qualitative interviews with unwed mothers in Japan. Her study provides a great insight
into why and how these women made the ‘tough choices’—the title of her book—of bearing
and rearing children out of wedlock in the Japanese cultural context, which stigmatises unwed
mothers. While qualitative interviewing appears to focus on micro-level human interaction/
behaviour, data collected could help identify structural and cultural problems as well. My in-
terview research on singlehood aimed to identify structural constraints that kept many women
in Japan from marrying. Never-married women cannot pinpoint the structural causes of their
single status, of course. So instead of asking why they remained unmarried, I conducted life
history interviews. In other words, by learning about these women’s subjective lived experi-
ences, especially during the prime marrying age, I reconstructed the social and cultural struc-
ture they had lived through. Their life stories indicated that, among other things, many em-
ployees were spatially segregated by gender and age (which inhibited romantic encounters at
workplaces), and that the 1980s economic boom and the 1990s recession had significant im-
pacts on their life paths (Yoshida 2017).
When conducting qualitative interviews, researchers do not have to predefine concepts (where-
as operationalisation of concepts is crucial prior to data collection in quantitative research).
For instance, Barbara Holthus and Wolfram Manzenreiter (see this chapter, Ch. 5.3) ques-
tioned the operationalisation of ‘happiness’ in widely used international surveys that rank
Japan very low. They conducted interview research in rural Japan using a creative way to as-
sess the sense of well-being. Similarly, concepts such as ‘social class’ are not easy to opera-
tionalise and quantify. Years/level of education and household income, which are commonly
used as measures of social class in quantitative research, are far from accurate measures. Social
class encompasses cultural practices and identity, for example (Bourdieu 1987). To gain a bet-
ter understanding of the association between social class and reproductive practices in Japan,
136
Aya Ezawa (2010) conducted qualitative interviews with divorced single mothers of various
social and class backgrounds. By doing so, she identified different strategies for and percep-
tions of mothering depending on women’s class origin. Limitation in quantitative data—avail-
ability, inadequacy in measurements (see Hommerich/Kottmann, Ch. 10)—is another good
reason for conducting qualitative interviews. One example is given by Karen Shire (see this
chapter, Ch. 5.2). Her research question on Japanese corporations’ practices of recruitment
and employment of transnational workers could not be answered by government statistics, as
they were severely limited.
Observational research is an excellent method for researchers interested in studying social pro-
cesses as they happen. Ayumi Sasagawa (2006) observed, as a participant, various community
and self-organised mother–preschooler groups. Her data explain how young mothers, in the
era of low birth rates, were shaped into ‘good’ mothers through the practices of these groups,
some of which were funded by local governments. Ogasawara’s aforementioned study (1998)
of a Japanese bank provides detailed (and even humorous) accounts of how OLs expressed
their resentment towards undesirable male supervisors through the use of Valentine’s Day
chocolate-giving. Her observations challenged the notion of passivity among female clerical
workers in Japan. Yet their resistance was certainly not to challenge the power structure. In
other words, power dynamics were much more nuanced than male dominance–female subor-
dinance, which was captured thanks to her observational research.
One should, however, be aware of the limitations of qualitative methods. The flip side of the
advantage of rich data is the limitation in sample size, sample representativeness and, hence,
generalisability. The reliability and validity of interviewee accounts and researcher observa-
tions can also be questioned, as interviewees may lie, rationalise or remember things inaccu-
rately. Similarly, researchers’ biases or moods (which change) may affect their observations.
(There are, however, ways to manage reliability and validity, as subsequent chapters discuss.)
Furthermore, ethics guidelines may inhibit data collection and the dissemination of research
findings (see Reiher/Wagner, Ch. 16). This being said, rich data collected from qualitative re-
search can outperform these limitations, and its significance in enhancing our understanding
of the human social world cannot be overstated. Additionally, it can truly be a rewarding ex-
perience to enter a community—the lifeworlds of people—and become connected through the
means of conducting research. We just need to keep it in mind, as good social scientists, that
our research is never perfect.
Key issues
Qualitative research allows researchers to explore understudied areas, gain access to people’s
thoughts, feelings, life experiences, etc., and observe social processes so that researchers gain
a deeper and fuller understanding of the human social world.
4. Which data collection method should you select for your research?
The first thing to consider when selecting your data collection method is which methods best
answer your research question. The above section should already have given you some tips in
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Akiko Yoshida
this respect. There are other things to consider, such as time and budget, disciplinary norms or
‘personality and personal comfort’ (see this chapter, Cook, Ch. 5.1). Time and budget are de-
termining factors for most researchers. Few researchers can afford to allocate time and other
resources, or even have such opportunities, to conduct extensive participant observation re-
search like the aforementioned Allison (1994) and Ogasawara (1989) did. Indeed, these stud-
ies are typically doctoral research or research generously funded by fellowships and grants.
Your personality and preference also matter. Are you a good listener? Are you observant? Are
you patient? These are important factors to take into consideration when selecting your data
collection method.
Even when researchers attain funding, other factors such as employment or family status can
constrain the length and location of research (see McMorran, Ch. 15). This is especially the
case for researchers who wish to conduct research in another country. As a Japanese national
living and working in the U.S., I do not have the option of doing fieldwork in Japan most of
the time. For my singlehood study, which I conducted when I was a doctoral student, I was
fortunate because I was able to stay at my parents’ house in Tokyo (with a mother who
cooked meals for me!). But I could not stay longer than two months, leaving my young child
behind in the U.S. My parents’ residence in Tokyo also meant my research site was limited to
the Greater Tokyo Area. In an ideal world, I would have conducted interviews in other urban
centres and rural regions, and also with men. With the advent of social media and video call-
ing services, however, qualitative interviews can be conducted from a long distance (see
Kottmann/Reiher, Ch. 7).
Table 5.1: What to consider in choosing data collection methods
Research question Which method best answers your research question?

Time How much time can you spend on data collection?
How much money can you allocate to data collection?
Budget
Can you obtain funding for your research?
Discipline Which methods are considered appropriate in your discipline?
Personality Are you observant, a good listener/communicator?
Access Do you have access to research sites, interviewees, etc.?
5. How to prepare your research?
Once you select your data collection methods, you need to consider and make plans for other
things, such as how to choose your interviewees and/or research sites, when and where to meet
your interviewees or what to ask or observe. These are discussed in detail in the subsequent
chapters for each method. Here, I share some anecdotal episodes on this matter, addressed in
the chapter’s three essays and also drawing from my own research experience.
Your choice of samples (i.e. your interviewees, sites for fieldwork/observation, etc.) can be the-
oretical—e.g. should you interview both married and never-married women for your single-
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hood research? How about divorced singles? But it can also be made for practical reasons (e.g.
my choice to interview women living in the Greater Tokyo Area) or even dictated by factors
outside a researcher’s control. Emma Cook (see this chapter, Ch. 5.1) illustrates the latter point
well: whereas the selection in her first research (on young men in irregular employment) was
relatively easy, her more recent project (on food allergies) was first inhibited by a lack of coop-
eration from relevant support groups. She eventually turned to one of her colleagues for help,
which ended up expanding her research opportunities. Her essay demonstrates not only how
research is an evolving process and can be affected by luck, but also how important it is for
researchers to build and maintain good social networks.
I have already discussed how the time and resources available to researchers may constrain
their research projects. Researchers also need to consider such constraints imposed on research
participants as well. For instance, it was a big challenge for me to interview women in full-
time career occupations in Japan because they worked incredibly long hours every day! They
were often unable to keep promises regarding when they could be available on weekday
nights. I am forever grateful to them for sparing their precious weekend hours for my research.
I also had to cram in two or more interviews per weekend day despite the undesirability of
being unable to take extensive fieldnotes right after each interview.
The importance of expressing gratitude for study participation cannot be understated in the
cultural context of Japan. Generally speaking, you should prepare a token gift—souvenirs
from your country, gift certificates, etc.—and plan to pick up the bills for meals, coffee, etc.
consumed at interviews (see McLaughlin, Ch. 6). But depending on the research sites, research
participants may feel it is they who should be hospitable to the researcher. Nora Kottmann
and Cornelia Reiher (see Kottmann/Reiher, Ch. 7) discuss that research participants may invite
the researcher to stay for dinner after having interviews at their home. Kottmann and Reiher
recommend accepting such invitations. But as a Japanese native, I have mixed feelings about
this. I think acceptance of such invitations is probably appropriate for non-Japanese re-
searchers as they are perceived as ‘guests’ (in Japan). But for Japanese nationals like me, hav-
ing received such an invitation when I interviewed a married woman at her home, I saw it as a
polite and obligated offer—the Japanese feel they should not kick out their guests just before
mealtime. I turned it down, and she appeared relieved. This was, however, a different story
when an unmarried interviewee suggested we could go out for a drink after the interview. The
difference here was that I did not want to inconvenience the first woman. This is quite tricky
to navigate, even for a Japanese native like me who is well-versed in Japanese culture. My rule
of thumb is to apply the old-fashioned norm: you turn down the offer three times. If they in-
sist after you politely say ‘No’ three times, they must really mean they want you to stay.
When interviewing in Japan or with Japanese nationals, which language to use is an important
consideration for researchers who are not native Japanese speakers (see Kottmann/Reiher, Ch.
7). Additionally, researchers should be aware that within the Japanese language, there are vari-
ations in language according to region (i.e. dialects), gender, ethnicity and social class. If possi-
ble and appropriate, it is best to use the language of the people researched, although it is not
always appropriate to do so. For instance, it is simply strange if a male researcher uses the
feminine form of Japanese when interviewing a woman! If it is not possible to use the same
language or dialect, I strongly urge that researchers carefully consider the implications of this.
Power structures are embedded in language, and researchers can easily offend or alienate the
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Akiko Yoshida
people researched by using language of a higher status than that used by their research sub-
jects.
One of the challenges in conducting qualitative interviews in Japan may be to open up the
‘closed lips’ of the Japanese, who are culturally expected to be humble and suppress their hon-
est feelings. Holthus and Manzenreiter (see this chapter, Ch. 5.3) discuss the effective use of
props. I had a similar experience in my research, in which I used cards for different life courses
(e.g. married and work full-time, lifetime singlehood, unwed motherhood, etc.). The use of
props set up a game-like atmosphere and relaxed the interviewees, which facilitated conversa-
tions on a very light note. Easy-to-answer warm-up questions also help. At the beginning of
interviews, many of my interviewees said they were just ordinary (futsū) and had little to tell
me. After answering the many questions that I posed, they were pleasantly surprised to learn
they had plenty to tell about their lives.
Key issues
When preparing your research, consider the choice of samples, time and resources available,
expressing gratitude, language issues and strategies like the use of props or warm-up ques-
tions to make people talk.
6. How to position yourself when collecting data?
As mentioned earlier and discussed more in subsequent chapters, researchers need to be cog-
nisant of their positions in relation to their study participants, or reflexibility/positionality.
Western scholars may take the importance of age hierarchy too lightly (though foreigners may
be excused for it). As a Japanese native, this was extremely important to me, especially be-
cause I was older than most of my interviewees. I did not want younger interviewees to speak
to me in the polite form of Japanese (and establish too formal an atmosphere) and feel pres-
sured to answer all my questions because of my seniority. I managed the situation by deliber-
ately dressing younger and by joking (Yoshida 2017).
Inequalities based on other attributes (and their intersection) of course matter as well. Of par-
ticular relevance to Japanese (and Area) Studies is the impact of nationality, gender, race and
ethnicity. In Japan, Westerners, especially of white race, are regarded as ‘higher’, while other
races and ethnicities, including (non-Japanese) Asians, are often placed ‘lower’ in social strata
(Yamashiro 2013). In her study of Filipina women in rural Japan, Lieba Faier (2009) discusses
her struggle. Filipina women were discriminated against in rural Japan, and there were ten-
sions between the two groups of her interviewees: Filipina women and Japanese nationals. Her
whiteness and U.S. nationality (along with her affiliations to prestigious universities) were re-
ceived with respect by the Japanese participants, but this positioned her in a different status
from Filipina women. Some of her Filipina participants questioned her openness towards Filip-
ina women (Faier 2009). Furthermore, researchers’ outsider status (i.e. non-Japanese) could
inhibit them from gaining entry to research sites. Yet some researchers may discover their out-
sider status to be rather advantageous, because Japanese participants may feel more relaxed
140
about sharing their honest feelings with researchers who are not part of their community
(Yoshida 2017; see also this chapter, Holthus/Manzenreiter, Ch. 5.3).
All of these issues discussed above lead to one important conclusion: qualitative researchers
cannot anticipate everything necessary to design research perfectly in advance. In fact, one of
the most important guidelines in qualitative research is that researchers remain flexible and go
with the flow. Research agendas and designs may change as time passes and researchers gain
trust, as Cook points out (see this chapter, Ch. 5.1). Interview questions may be added, modi-
fied or dropped based on interviewees’ accounts (Yoshida 2017). Shire (see this chapter, Ch.
5.2) discusses how her research project carried out by a team of researchers with various back-
grounds evolved against the backdrop of legal constraints. They had to be flexible and to re-
frame their research question. This flexibility, however, is an exciting thing about qualitative
data collection.
Key issues
Researchers always have to be aware of their reflexibility and positionality. This includes
being mindful of inequalities based on age, gender, nationality, race, ethnicity, etc. Most im-
portantly, researchers have to remain flexible and go with the flow.
7. Summary
This chapter has provided an overview of various qualitative data collection methods, focusing
on fieldwork, qualitative interviewing and observational research. These methods allow re-
searchers to directly observe natural settings and/or learn about people’s views. Thus, they are
suited to gaining a deeper understanding of the subjects under study. Which method best an-
swers the research question should be the most important criterion for choosing the data col-
lection method, but availability of time, resources, access to sites/interviewees and other things
such as one’s own personality should be taken into consideration. When collecting data, re-
searchers should remain flexible and be aware of the impact of their own position on the peo-
ple they are researching.
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5.1 Participant observation and interviews:
Going with the flow and dipping in and out
Emma E. Cook
[R]igorous anthropological inquiry [involves] … long-term and open-ended commitment,

generous attentiveness, relational depth, and sensitivity to context.
(Ingold 2014, p. 384)
Fieldwork is a technique of gathering research material by subjecting the self—body, be-

lief, personality, emotions, cognitions—to a set of contingencies […] such that over time
—usually a long time—one can more or less see, hear, feel, and come to understand the
kinds of responses others display (and withhold) in particular social situations.
(Van Maanen 2011, p. 151)
[E]thnography […] does not claim to produce an objective or truthful account of reality,
but should aim to offer versions of ethnographers’ experiences of reality that are as loyal
as possible to the context, negotiations and intersubjectivities through which the knowl-
edge was produced.
(Pink 2007, p. 22)
Take a look at any qualitative methods research book and you might be overwhelmed at the
possibilities on display. Perusing just one book’s table of contents, we are provided with chap-
ters on: interviews, oral history, biographical research, focus groups, narrative research, con-
versation analysis, participant observation and action research, to name just a few (Seale et al.
2007). This chapter is not an overview of the different methodologies that you could poten-
tially use in your project; it’s not a how-to guide. Instead, I aim to provide some insight into
the actual choice and use of methods within my two main research projects to date. The meth-
ods we choose are, of course, fundamentally designed to help us answer particular research
questions, yet they are also more than that. They are chosen for disciplinary reasons, time and
money constraints, as well as personality and personal comfort, among others. As a social an-
thropologist my go-to methods always involve extensive interaction with people through par-
ticipant observation and semi-structured and unstructured conversations. As Tim Ingold
(2014, p. 386) argues, ‘in the conduct of our research, we meet people. We talk with them, we
ask them questions, we listen to their stories and we watch what they do. In so far as we are
deemed competent and capable, we join in.’ As you can imagine, the ways in which we do this
are contingent: on the locations we choose, the people we meet, the reception we get, and on
our gender, age, ethnicity and class, to name just a few (see Goodman, Ch. 1; Kottmann/
Reiher, Ch. 7). These are also circumscribed by the project itself, the research questions and
142
also the amount of time we can spend in any one place at any one time. In this chapter, I will
briefly explain the methods I’ve used in two research projects, the reasoning underlying my
choices and some of the limitations that have arisen.
Project methods
In my PhD research, I set out to explore masculinities and part-time labour in Japan. In partic-
ular, I was interested in how men who are not working in a normative way—as salaried full-
time workers—understood, lived and constructed their masculinities. To do this, I had to first
ask, what is masculinity? How is it produced, experienced, negotiated and lived? How are
labour and masculinities linked in the Japanese context? Why were young men working in the
irregular labour market (‘freeters’) regarded so critically in wider society? These are just some
of the questions that directed my PhD research and informed the methods I chose. It is quite
difficult to ask people directly about their masculinities and the links with their labour
practices because such questions are individual and inherently social (Cook 2019). I therefore
decided that I needed to come at it from a variety of different angles by engaging primarily in
participant observation and semi-structured interviews.
Before starting the fieldwork, I made a list of all the possible places that I thought would give
me a good chance of meeting and working with a number of freeters: coffee shops, bars (iza-
kaya) or the multi-screen cinema, for example. Having arrived in the city, I also began to look
for any support organisations that existed to help young people into work. Ultimately, I did
participant observation at two places: a cinema where I worked three to four days a week and
a non-profit organisation which helped young people build confidence and find work. After
building relationships, I also conducted semi-structured interviews with male irregular work-
ers, asking about their personal histories, experiences, lives and aspirations. Semi-structured
interviews were done with people I worked with, and through some limited snowballing (for
an in-depth discussion of the methods used Cook 2016, p. 16–22). As the fieldwork pro-
gressed, I realised that to understand the moral panic about young male labour practices it
was also important to talk more deeply with people who were not working in the irregular
labour sector. I therefore began speaking to a range of other people of different ages, genders
and occupations that I met through friends and acquaintances.
My most recent project on socio-cultural aspects of food allergies in Japan and the U.K. is
more methodologically challenging than my PhD research on a number of fronts. It is a cross-
cultural project that explores experiences of food allergies in Japan and the U.K. Moreover, it
explores the experiences of two different groups: specifically, parents of children with food al-
lergies as well as adult individuals who have food allergies. As I am working in a full-time pos-
ition in Japan, there are constraints on the amount of time and uninterrupted participant ob-
servation I can do. Instead, I have to dip in and out of the field.
Finding my fields took time and is ongoing. It takes patience and perseverance. I had originally
planned to do the Japanese side of the research primarily in Hokkaido where I’m based, and
so I reached out to a support group that had an informative website as a starting point. In late
2013, I emailed the representative of the group, explaining my interest. In response to my
email, the representative wanted to talk on the telephone, so I gave her my number. When she
called she asked about my research, my allergies to fish and nuts, and if I had children (I
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Emma E. Cook
don’t). It was plain throughout the conversation that she didn’t want me to join, and she
wasn’t interested in meeting in person. Her last comment was ‘well, if you birth a child you
can join (maa, kodomo undara sanka dekimasu)’.
After casting around looking for other groups—and struggling to find any—I decided to con-
tact a fellow anthropologist who had done work in Japan on an allergic disease. She very
kindly mentioned my research to the director and CEO of the non-profit organisation that she
had worked with, and they invited me to attend their summer camp for children with atopic
eczema, asthma and food allergies. There began a working relationship with the NPO that
lasts to this day. Finding places willing to accept an anthropologist entails a certain amount of
luck and the willingness to reach out to others. Having someone to speak on your behalf is
also important (Bestor et al. 2003; see Hendry, Ch. 1.3). My colleague was someone who had
volunteered and worked with the NPO for years for her research, and she was liked and trust-
ed. Moreover, the director of the NPO has a degree in Sociology and is interested in—and sees
the value of—qualitative research. Working with them has also opened up the project in many
different directions. For example, they are members of—and represent Japan—at the Interna-
tional Food Allergy and Anaphylaxis Alliance (IFAAA), which brings together the heads of or-
ganisations from 21 countries each year. Since 2015, I have been able to attend the meetings
with them, meeting the heads of organisations from around the world, and hearing about the
various issues and solutions that different groups in different countries have been working on.
This has helped me develop relationships with the two charities that work on allergy and ana-
phylaxis in the U.K., who have allowed me to post information on their social media sites and
put out a call for interviewees for each summer that I’m in the U.K. However, it also allows me
to begin to trace the ways in which scientific and received knowledge is transmitted in differ-
ent cultural contexts. In addition to such kinds of participant observation, I have done a range
of informal and semi-structured interviews with people who have food allergies and those who
are parents of children with food allergies in Japan and the U.K.
Problems and ongoing problem-solving
Unlike in my doctoral research—where the bulk of my time was spent on research—working

in a full-time position puts constraints on methodologies because of time, research budgets
and location. Whilst I originally intended the food allergy research to be a cross-cultural com-
parative project, the comparison aspect has, to an extent, taken a back seat for the present
moment. With time in the U.K. limited to a month of research in the summer, it has not been
possible to undertake extended participant observation in addition to travelling around con-
ducting semi-structured interviews. I have therefore focused my attention so far on meeting
with, and interviewing, individuals and families. Time issues are solvable by understanding
that it’s not possible to do everything at once and by planning methodologies accordingly.
There are also logistical elements to consider: the locations of allergy charities in the U.K. are
not in major cities, and public transport is expensive and not always particularly reliable. This
is solvable by renting an Airbnb close by or a car, but this also depends on finances. In con-
trast, in Japan I have done more participant observation than interviewing. With advance no-
tice of events and meetings, I can secure lower priced tickets using low-cost air carriers to trav-
el or I can travel by train.
144
The methods I currently use—whilst ostensibly similar on the surface to what I did in my PhD
research: participant observation and semi-structured interviews—are different from when I
was doing my doctoral research. In that case, I worked alongside irregular labourers three or
four days a week in one location, and I interviewed people primarily in the local area. Now I
dip in and out throughout the year, attending events when and where I can. Work circum-
stances, research funding, time and the ability to travel or live in the areas where the research
is conducted are thus just as much a factor in the kinds of methods we choose as the research
questions we are trying to answer. Moreover, the methodologies themselves are carried out
quite differently depending on these factors. It is necessary to remain aware and reflexive of
these issues (see Coates, Ch. 3.2), and how this affects the kinds of research and data being
collected. Moreover, as time progresses, as trust increases and as the research moves on, meth-
ods change. Staying open, flexible and reflexive is therefore important.
General advice
Think about what is doable given the time—and research budget, if relevant—that you have.
Be patient, reach out to people you know and those you don’t yet know, and don’t give up
when the door is closed on you: there will be other ways to do the research. And don’t be
afraid for your project, research questions and methodologies to change. Research is a dynam-
ic process that we don’t do alone, so be confident to go with the flow whilst remaining alert
and reflexive to what you’re doing and how you’re doing it.
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5.2 Transnational research in Japan Studies—an oxymoron?
Studying cross-border labour mobility in globalising Japanese
production organisations
Karen Shire
Social surveys and official statistics define their units of analysis as located within specific na-
tional state territories. If statistical methods generate data on internationally mobile popula-
tions, it is usually in relation to their presence within rather than their mobility between na-
tional contexts. Data gathered on an international scale by organisations like the OECD or the
UN are mainly compilations of nationally generated statistics and serve a comparative purpose
at best. Even in the European Union, where the institutionalisation of a supra-national polity
would seem to meet a fundamental condition for the generation of world regional data, Euro-
stat relies almost exclusively on compiling country-level reports. ‘Methodological nationalism’
continues to infiltrate the world of social indicators, despite almost twenty years of research
about transnational mobility. Within this broader scientific situation, a transnational form of
Japan Studies would seem to be an oxymoron.
The tendency of Area and Regional Studies to focus on a specific country, almost by defini-
tion, favours research designs bounded by the national container of a single society. John Urry
in his research programme on horizontal mobilities defined the task of transnational research
as one of investigating ‘the respective and uneven reach of diverse networks and flows as they
move within and across societal borders’ (Urry 2000, p. 18). In this essay, I recount the experi-
ence of studying employment practices which extend ‘above and between’ the scale of nation
states (Djelic/Quack 2003, p. 305). The focus is on how national Japanese labour market insti-
tutions are increasingly reconstituted across Japanese borders, thus linking labour markets in
Japan, including those for migrant labour, with supplies of labour and organisations of pro-
duction in East and Southeast Asia.
The project Cross-Border Temporary Agency Work: The Construction of Markets and
Transnational Regulation in International Comparison funded by the German Research Foun-
dation (DFG, SH/82/5–1, 2013–2016) aimed to understand how supplies and demands for
foreign labour were linked through the employment of migrants in Japan and the mobility of
Japanese transnational enterprises abroad in search of labour supplies, especially technical and
skilled labour. Developing a multi-site, actor-centred and qualitative research design, the
project focused on the role of temporary staffing firms as agents driving the making of cross-
border labour markets, and their interactions with local states and regulatory requirements,
Japanese client firms and local workers to develop new patterns of transnational labour mobil-
ity. In this way, the research questioned whether the Japanese labour market exists as a nation-
ally contained exchange of labour or, at least in part, was developing as a transnational insti-
tution.
146
Transnational research design: Following the staffing agencies and tracing mobility
patterns
In developing the research design, we found that two sets of national quantitative indicators
were important in sketching out the spatial scope and longer-term changes—Japanese immi-
gration statistics and data on Japanese foreign direct investments (FDI). Immigration statistics
lent some insight into the increasing dependence of the Japanese domestic labour market on
migrant labour (a fact that the secondary literature on migration in Japan has now well estab-
lished). FDI statistics, however, hardly paid attention to foreign labour forces, local labour re-
cruitment and employment practices, or to how Japanese transnational enterprises structured
careers for local foreign labour. The research strategy was to investigate the links between for-
eign labour in Japan and in their home countries in relation to the globalisation of Japanese
production organisations. Our previous research on Japanese temporary staffing agencies sug-
gested that agency recruitment and employment practices were at least one important mecha-
nism of cross-border labour market linkage.
The consequence of this research strategy for the research design was the adoption of a multi-
site approach focusing on the activity of market making. We conceptualised staffing firms as
cross-border market makers, and defined the basic research concern as following Japanese
temporary staffing firms and documenting their recruitment and placement practices within
and outside Japan. Interviews with staffing industry representatives in headquarters in Tokyo
revealed a dense network of Japanese temporary staffing firms in all of the major urban cen-
tres of countries where Japanese FDI was located in East and Southeast Asia. Vietnam, though
not among the countries named in the research proposal, was named early on by staffing firms
in Tokyo as an especially important case, leading us to add Vietnamese labour in Japanese en-
terprises at home and abroad to our research activities.
An important prerequisite for implementing research about the transnational practices of pri-
vate enterprises is gaining research access to the same enterprises in multiple countries. Gain-
ing access was also a challenge in relation to foreign actors in multi-site designs, including ex-
perts in foreign governments and the labour movement. The author had long studied Japanese
staffing agency employment and could enter into a research collaboration with two scholars
based in Japan (Steffen Heinrich and Jun Imai), both of whom had excellent contacts in the
industry. A third researcher from Taiwan with quantitative research skills (Chih-Chieh Wang)
allowed us to draw on Chinese language sources, to better analyse available official statistics
in all the destination countries, and to conduct additional interviews in Taiwan. Finally, a doc-
toral researcher following up on the study (Aimi Muranaka) extended the research design to
study the motivations of Vietnamese workers moving between Tokyo, Hanoi and Ho Chi
Minh City. These contours of the research design and the constitution of the research team
underline how transnational research requires an international network of researchers and a
combination of linguistic and methodological competencies.
Following the staffing firms abroad, we soon learned that a number of legal constraints on the
industry meant that it could not operate in the same way as in Japan. Only China has a legal
framework for temporary agency work, requiring all foreign agencies to enter into joint ven-
tures with Chinese agencies. To work around legal constraints, Japanese staffing agencies
abroad changed their business model to what they called shōkai, or introducing labour to
clients, rather than dispatching to clients, as they do in Japan. This discovery led the research
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Karen Shire
team to readjust the research approach again, to focus on how staffing firms invented new
practices for organising mobility in the context of foreign national legal constraints.
Qualitative interviewing methods
The main method for the field study was semi-structured interviews (see Kottmann/Reiher, Ch.
7) with operational managers at branches of temporary staffing firms, with a focus on two
specific leading firms with branches in Beijing, Shanghai, Hanoi, Ho Chi Minh City and
Bangkok. Starting with corporate headquarters in Tokyo, we obtained contact to the branches
in each of these cities. Japanese enterprises abroad are notorious for continuing to do most of
their business in the Japanese language. For Japan Studies scholars, this was of course an ad-
vantage. Nearly all interviews in China, Vietnam and Thailand were conducted in Japanese.
The research design also involved understanding the different sets of national regulatory con-
straints and how these affected mobility and employment practices. In many cases, the staffing
firms could supply us with information, but in Vietnam and Taiwan, it became necessary to
gain access to experts in the Labour Ministries. The Vietnamese Labour Ministry staff over the
past decade have received policy advice and support from a number of international (for ex-
ample, the ILO) and foreign government aid organisations, so that an interview could be con-
ducted with some effort in English. Transcripts were completed in the original language by na-
tive speakers. Since the research was designed as an inter-regional comparison, with the same
research conducted in the European Union, transcripts were eventually summarised as memos
in English to support broader comparative analyses of the data.
In designing the interviews with staffing agency managers in Japan and abroad, we structured
our questions around three main types of horizontal labour mobility—staffing firm recruit-
ment of foreign labour to Japan, their cross-border recruitment from Japan to foreign-based
clients, and movements back and forth, including evidence of intra-company transfers. A short
project description was sent with each request to interview, where we also named the contact
person in Tokyo (or in some cases, other Asian locations). Making our networks of contacts
transparent to potential interview partners was a key factor in gaining access. In most cases, it
became evident that the contacts checked up on us before accepting our requests for inter-
views. In one case, where we contacted a trade union organisation in Hong Kong, the contact
checked back with organisations close to trade unions in Germany to assess the neutrality of
the principle investigator. In Taiwan, the government official contacted for an interview knew
of the prior research activities of the Taiwanese team member, and told him when they met
that she agreed to the interview because she had heard he was a serious researcher. Research
networks and reputations have a very long reach.
The interviews always began with a brief description of our research activities and with open-
ended questions about the staffing business in the specific context (What is your business here?
How does it compare to what you do in Japan?). Some questions were always repeated, for
example, what the interviewees would like to see changed in the regulatory environments in
which they operated (in this way, we could gather information on dealing with legal con-
straints). Towards the end of each interview we asked about the interviewees’ own work biog-
raphy and, in most cases, these questions generated individual cases of cross-border labour
mobility—one of which is presented in the following.
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Patterns of cross-border labour mobility: The case of JiaIi Kobayashi
We received the contact to Jiali Kobayashi, the operating manager of a major Japanese staffing
firm in Beijing, from her colleagues in Shanghai (whose contact we had received from head-
quarters in Tokyo; here and in all our publications, persons and organisations are
anonymised). Jiali is a Chinese citizen, who studied in Japan and is married to a Japanese busi-
nessman. She relocated to Beijing with her two children when her husband’s employer, a
Japanese automaker, transferred him to China. Unlike many Japanese women, Jiali continued
to work full-time after the birth of her son. When her husband’s company announced he
would be transferred to Beijing, they also expressed their expectation that Jiali would quit her
job and go with him. She agreed, expecting to find a job in Beijing. The company, however,
refused to allow this. Instead, they enrolled her in a training programme for wives, to prepare
her and the other wives for supporting their husbands’ careers. For the first year, Jiali describes
having enjoyed the break from work, but soon began to worry about the effects of a long in-
terruption on her future employability back in Tokyo. Though a Chinese citizen, being from a
rural area, she had no idea about how to find a job in Beijing. For that reason, she visited the
Japanese staffing company for advice and ended up being employed by them. Within two
years, she was promoted to manage the branch. She expected to continue to work for the
staffing firm when she and her husband eventually return to Tokyo.
Nearly all of Jiali’s clients were Japanese manufacturing firms and trading companies, who
wished to employ Chinese citizens who could speak Japanese. Jiali’s biography represented ex-
actly this pattern of mobility. Her work consisted of organising job fairs in cities back in Japan
where Chinese students were known to enrol in Japanese universities. Many Chinese students
in Japan, like Jiali, are originally from rural regions in China. For the students, finding a job
before moving back home to China allows them to exchange their rural hukou (registration)
for an urban one, and in this way re-enter China as part of the urban workforce. The problem,
however, for Japanese staffing firms was that their Japanese clients were notorious for paying
lower wages than Chinese competitors. Jiali recounted how she and her Japanese clients were
losing her Chinese recruits to Chinese enterprises. She and others in the industry, however, no-
ticed that Chinese enterprises were beginning to establish branches in Japan (even citing lower
labour costs of young college-educated labour in Japan). For the Japanese staffing firm in Chi-
na, this opened a new opportunity to recruit Chinese with Japanese language skills in China
and return them back to Tokyo to work for Chinese rather than Japanese clients. Japanese
client enterprises in China, facing high labour turnover (as well as geopolitical uncertainties)
were, as a result, beginning to move out of China and into Vietnam. What began as recruit-
ment for foreign invested Japanese enterprises in China evolved, in our observations, into a
cross-border labour market.
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Karen Shire
Conclusion
The research experience reported above demonstrates that transnational Japanese Studies is
not an oxymoron, if research is designed to move beyond the comfort zone of the ‘national
container’ we call Japan, and to follow activities and processes of Japanese people, organisa-
tions and institutions across borders. Moreover, without available statistical data at present,
transnational research is strongly dependent on qualitative research designs and international
collaborations, but also on language-based research skills in Japan Studies.
150
5.3 ‘Bullseye view on happiness’:
A qualitative interview survey method*
Since 2014, we have been trying to decipher the social DNA of happiness in Japan. The con-
ference of the same title in 2014 was the starting point for a joint research project focusing on
the current state of well-being in Japan, in time developing into a focus on regional differences
in well-being, particularly in rural Japan. Even though happiness research has been burgeon-
ing, a comprehensive understanding of the underlying impact factors of subjective happiness is
still wanting. The same is true for the definitions and conceptualisations of the terms happi-
ness, life satisfaction and well-being. There also exists a fuzziness in the use of the terms, both
in everyday life as well as academic works (Holthus/Manzenreiter 2017; Izquierdo/Mathews
2009; Manzenreiter/Holthus 2017). The relevant literature in this respect is often inconclusive
and contradictory.
Different disciplinary approaches do not simply highlight different aspects of happiness; they
generate different data and draw diverging conclusions. This is all the more the case for happi-
ness research that has been dominated by Psychology and Economics. And quantitative sur-
veys all too often gloss over the cultural particularities of respondents. Large-scale internation-
al surveys on happiness that present Japan as unhappy in comparison to other highly de-
veloped societies often rely on a single-item measurement of overall happiness or overall well-
being. The meaning of happiness and its importance in human life as a universal standard is
hardly ever questioned. Qualitative studies, which by contrast do indeed take context into
consideration, focus on specific sub-groups or singular factors, such as ageing, the workplace,
parenthood or political participation, to name but a few. A comprehensive study of Japan that
investigates the multidimensionality of happiness and pays tribute to a culture-sensitive under-
standing of happiness is still lacking.
Our interest in rural happiness derives from conflicting views on rural life in contemporary
Japan, oscillating between the dystopian vision of the countryside in irreversible economic de-
cline and the nostalgic romanticisation of rural Japan as the repository of traditional values
and institutions or an alternative space for individual self-realisation. We have good reason to
believe that well-being and life satisfaction are not lower in rural Japan than in urban Japan,
but instead that rural life offers a distinctive set of factors that influence residents’ happiness.
Our research objective is to find out how these factors account for the subjective sense of well-
being among types of residents in rural Japan. Because we can access happiness only in terms
of conscious reflection and verbal expressions, we were looking for appropriate interview
* This chapter is a shortened version of Holthus, Barbara/Manzenreiter, Wolfram (2019): Bullseye view:
Developing a sociological method for studying happiness. Tokyo: DIJ Working Paper Series 19/3 and Holthus,
Barbara/Manzenreiter, Wolfram (2020): A gameboard approach to studying the multidimensionality of life
satisfaction. In: Cieslik, Mark/Hyman, Laura (eds.): Researching happiness: Qualitative, biographical and critical
perspectives, Bristol: Bristol University Press.
151
methods in order to address the diversity of factors that rural residents deem to be of signifi-
cance.
Access to the field and the interviewees
A common hurdle in social research is to get access to the field, which is potentially even more
pronounced in the case of rural communities and in the case of happiness research, by dealing
with the highly private aspects of individual emotions and subjective experiences. What con-
siderably helped us to gain access to people in rural Japan was the extensive ethnographic re-
search history of former members of the Japanese Studies section at the University of Vienna,
where we both worked. This research history in the Aso area in central Kyushu dates back
half a century. Since 2015, we have carefully rebuilt relations at different levels (with locals,
officials, governments and scholars) in the area; numerous visits considerably eased our access
to individuals in the region and lay the foundations of trust relationships.
Trust and respect are crucial prerequisites of any research method that relies on self-reporting.
In that regard, we believe the local population’s familiarity with us through our recurrent pres-
ence in the field was advantageous. In addition, our outsider position as visible foreigners was
surprisingly helpful. No matter which culture, most people naturally feel reluctant to reveal
their feelings about happiness and life satisfaction to strangers in a face-to-face interview. Yet
the threshold at which one feels willing to reveal personal sentiments to complete outsiders is
actually lower, and we as foreigners were allowed to act naively and address issues that native
researchers seem more hesitant to ask. At the time of writing, we have interviewed 30 people
from a small rural settlement of about 60 households and the nearby town, with a population
below 10,000. In fairly equal measure, we have spoken with newcomers and lifelong residents
and with young, middle-aged and elderly men and women. The interviews usually took place
at the homes or shops of our interviewees.
Experimental design: Coming to terms with happiness
We began our one to 1.5-hour interviews with a short word association part as a warm-up,
naming seven terms: happiness (shiawase), sadness (kanashimi), worries (nayami), hope (kibō),
success (seikō), anxiety (fuan) and failure (shippai). Our interviewees were asked to talk about
anything that came to their minds associated with these terms or how they would define them.
A few mentioned at the outset that they had never really thought about happiness, before try-
ing to formulate definitions or providing us with stories of their experiences of happiness.
These concrete examples of moments in which they feel or felt happy, sad or worried range
from large issues to small incidents. ‘Large’ happiness often appears to be tied to the interrelat-
edness of the self, in many instances to the well-being of the family. One example of ‘small’
happiness is the appreciation of ‘the sensation in May when rice seedlings are just protruding
from the water surface of paddy fields under a clear early morning sky.’ Such an attitude was
occasionally summarised as futsū no shiawase, which either signified ‘the usual happiness’ or
‘happiness due to everything being normal.’ This opening to the interview demonstrated that
152
happiness is very much an interpretative process, embedded in social networks and across per-
sonal biographies.
During the main part of the interviews, we worked with a two-coloured bullseye-shaped chart
and tokens to be placed on the board, which to our knowledge is a unique contribution to
happiness research (see Figure 5.1). The idea of designing an interactive tool came out of our
desire 1. to make the interviews less abstract for the interviewees, 2. to have a hands-on ap-
proach as a starting point for detailed questions to follow thereafter, 3. to be able to cover the
multidimensionality of happiness and life satisfaction in a comparably short period of inter-
view time, 4. to understand the importance of some elements in people’s lives in relation to
other elements in their lives and 5. to make visible and understand clusters of elements, name-
ly how some elements are clustered together on the chart by the interviewees, whereas others
were placed on the board at a distance from each other.
The chart is divided into a blue and red part, the blue representing the things one is dissatisfied
with, red the things one is satisfied with. Circles radiating from the centre weight the signifi-
cance of the factors, here in the form of round tokens that we provided. The interviewees were
instructed to first place a board game figure representing one’s self on the bullseye, and then to
arrange the tokens on the board. By selecting and placing tokens on the chart, the interviewees
revealed which aspects they think to be important for living a good life, how important these
are—also in relation to other factors—and if they are currently satisfied or not with them. To-
kens identified as irrelevant were omitted from the board, those for which interviewees felt
both satisfaction and dissatisfaction were placed on the dividing line between the red and blue
halves. We chose the content of tokens in accordance with our understanding of the state of
happiness research. The 30+ terms cover a wide range of aspects between politics, nature, so-
cial relations, media usage, work and cultural life. In addition, we offered the interviewees the
chance to label blank tokens with other terms. Once all the tokens had been placed, we em-
barked on an in-depth conversation about the tokens to learn more about the meaning at-
tached to them, the reasons for their placement and their specific realisation in the lives of our
interviewees.
In wrapping up the interviews, we handed the interviewees a piece of paper, featuring three
quantitative survey questions on happiness. All three questions offer the same answer option,
a Likert-scale from 0 to 10. We used smileys instead of words to identify the extremes of the
scales. Question 1 on the general state of happiness is posed in the same wording as most
large-scale surveys in Japan, asking ‘These days, all things considered, how happy do you
feel?’ (see Hommerich/Kottmann, Ch. 10). The single-item measurement enables us to tie in
with quantitative research, as well as to understand how interviewees rate their state of happi-
ness in comparison to others. It helps us put the overall view of life satisfaction, as extrapolat-
ed from the chart and the conversation in the main part of the interview, into perspective.
Question 2 ‘In your opinion, what is the ideal level of happiness?’ is important in light of our
understanding that Japanese do not universally subscribe to the Western concept of ‘the happi-
er, the better’, but rather to an idea of happiness as fluctuating in a cyclical, sine-wave fashion,
in which happiness is a transitory experience and rather based on interpersonal connectedness
and balance between the self and others (Uchida et al. 2015). Question 3 ‘How important is it
to be happy?’ is an additional attempt to make a cultural argument. While many studies tacitly
presuppose the desire for happiness to be universal, and happiness to seemingly be the ulti-
mate goal in life, cultural anthropological as well as cultural psychological research has
153
Figure 5.1: Bullseye chart in practice, three examples
Copyright: authors
demonstrated that happiness is far from being an unquestionable good in every cultural con-
text and, under certain conditions, is even seen as socially undesirable. We found for our re-
spondents levels of happiness throughout the scale of 0 to 10. The majority chose either 5 or 8
or a number between these values. Some chose a 10, and only one person, who was outspo-
kenly unhappy, chose a 0. As much as we see great variability in happiness levels, we also see a
wider range of what people consider ideal levels.
Reflections
Evaluating the benefits of the methodological approach, we find the quality of our findings as
well as the ease of conducting the interviews exceeded our expectations by far. The bullseye
chart made our interviewees alive and talkative. Interviewees accepted the outcome as a visual-
isation of a current slice of their life, and in more than one case they thanked us, saying that
they experienced the interviews as enjoyable and a kind of a psychoanalytic session.
The visual tool allowed us to get into the complexities of the different aspects and their inter-
relatedness, which would have otherwise been extraordinarily difficult to extrapolate from our
respondents in such comparably short interview times. The visual aid of the chart provides
stimulation for high-quality conversation. It displays the different factors in relation to each
other and evaluates the strength of these indicators, also in relation to each other. This com-
plexity could not be grasped without any visual tool. The instructions for the exercise are ex-
traordinarily simple, which makes it appealing to many different types of interviewees. We be-
lieve this method is applicable and easily adaptable to different social groups, cultural contexts
and different research topics. Therefore, we hope that our method will be tried out in many
different ways and with different types of interviewees, beyond rural areas or even Japan.
154
Further reading
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methods. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
Amelina, Anna/Nergiz, Derrimsel D./Faist, Thomas/Glick Schiller, Nina (eds.) (2012): Beyond method-
ological nationalism: Research methodologies for cross-border studies. New York, NY: Routledge.
Denzin Norman K./Lincoln, Yvonna S. (eds.) (2005): The SAGE handbook of qualitative research. Thou-
sand Oaks, CA: Sage.
Leavy, Patricia (ed.) (2014): The Oxford handbook of qualitative research. Oxford: Oxford University
Press.
Savin-Baden, Maggi/Major, Claire Howell (2013): Qualitative research: The essential guide to theory and
practice. London: Routledge.
Silverman, David (2000): Doing qualitative research: A practical handbook. London: Sage.
Sprague, Joey/Zimmerman, Mary K. (1989): Quality and quantity: Reconstructing feminist methodology.
In: The American Sociologist 20, No. 1, pp. 71–86. DOI: 10.1007/BF02697788.
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Chapter 6
How to do fieldwork: Studying Japan in and outside of Japan
Levi McLaughlin
1. Introduction
All research necessitates fieldwork, to some degree. Even the most archive-dependent scholar
must forge interpersonal connections within hierarchical academic communities in order to
gain access to resources (see Schmidtpott/Schölz, Ch. 9.1). The same certainly applies to re-
searchers who are intent on producing original data through participation, observation and in-
terviews. Major fellowships frequently require an introductory letter or statement of support
from a Japanese professor, and researchers who spend an extended period of time in Japan
may seek a visiting position within a Japanese university, a government agency or a private in-
stitution. Ethnographers must gain a place in a Japanese community and build relationships
based on trust that they can rely on, potentially for their entire careers. All introductions, no
matter the researcher, require careful attention to Japanese conventions.
This chapter provides guidelines on how to begin and sustain fieldwork. Ambiguity necessarily
surrounds the topic, not least because ‘fieldwork’ and ‘ethnography’ are often treated as syn-
onyms. This is partly due to the fact that, thanks to our social media-saturated world, the clas-
sic division between going ‘into the field’ and returning ‘home’ to write up results tends to no
longer apply, to the extent that it ever did. The ‘field’ persists as an active presence in the re-
searcher’s life, no matter her location. It remains essential to carry out ethnography in person
in Japan to most fully learn about people’s lives, but the researcher will also construct a digital
persona to perpetuate ethnography while she is not physically present. Ongoing fieldwork re-
lationships generate exciting possibilities. They also accrue heavy responsibilities.
In this chapter, I lay out strategies for initiating new fieldwork projects, ways to keep field-
work going when you are travelling back and forth to Japan, how the researcher’s identity and
disposition shape projects, and ethical concerns. Throughout the chapter, I make general
points that apply at all stages. The chapter serves primarily as a how-to guide; please read the
essays by Nana Okura Gagné, James Farrer and Hanno Jentzsch in this section for examples
of fieldwork in action (see this chapter, Ch. 6.1; 6.2; 6.3).1
1 In a 2010 essay for the Asia Pacific Journal: Japan Focus, I made detailed suggestions on how to begin fieldwork
in Japan (McLaughlin 2010), which I update here. For further Japan-specific fieldwork advice, I recommend es-
says in a 2007 special issue of Critical Asian Studies in which Japan researchers reflect on ethical dimensions of
their ethnography (Robertson 2007), and the appendix of the 2019 book Intimate Japan, edited by Allison Alexy
and Emma E. Cook, in which the volume’s authors break down difficulties they encountered in the field (Alexy/
Cook 2019; see also Cook, Ch. 5.1; Alexy, Ch. 7.3). Theodore C. Bestor, Patricia Steinhoff and Victoria Lyon-
Bestor’s Doing Fieldwork in Japan remains useful (Bestor et al. 2003b).
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Levi McLaughlin
2. Getting started: Connecting with a Japanese university
For novice researchers, the most fruitful introductions to universities are forged via personal
relations between their advisors and faculty in Japan. Politely request that your academic advi-
sor write on your behalf to top researchers in Japan who are pursuing projects related to your
own. If these connections do not exist, identify leading researchers in your speciality and con-
tact them yourself. You should be familiar with who is publishing the most useful material in
your field, but do not be shy about reaching out to knowledgeable scholars for advice on who
to approach. Even if your potential Japanese advisor understands English, or another lan-
guage, it is best to initiate your connection in Japanese. You will most likely need to operate in
Japanese in order to carry out your research, and the advisor will need to know that you can
function comfortably in her institution.2 Write a message with appropriately formal openings
and closings and phrase your requests in honorific language. It is best to ask a native speaker
to edit your initial messages to a potential advisor.
From your initial introductory email to a prospective academic advisor to your most recent
correspondence with a fieldwork interlocutor, ensure that the other person is the focus. By
making other people’s priorities your priority, you make yourself their priority. In his pitch for
transforming Asian Studies into Asian Humanities, Donald R. Davis (2015) places ‘care first’
as the starting point for scholarly enquiry. Following Emmanuel Levinas (1969), he stresses
that because the knowable forever exceeds the known, humility should drive personal rela-
tions. Put aside an instrumental approach and instead focus on what you owe as you interact
with the people from whom you wish to learn. Before you ask for support, familiarise yourself
with the other person’s work by reading at least one of her recent articles and/or books. Ask
about this work in your introductory message (see below for written self-introductions and the
‘elevator pitch’).
The best possible place to land is in a vibrant seminar (zemi) in which enthusiastic graduate
students learn from an engaged professor as they publish and present papers on topics con-
nected to your own. In your correspondence with the professor, do not be afraid to ask about
her zemi and what her students research. In the future, these students will be your colleagues,
to whom you will send your own grad students and to whom you will owe obligations. Do
not alienate them. Turn to them for help. The professor herself will most likely be too busy to
spend much time with you, so your fellow students will be key. Again, make the other person
your focus. In exchange for their aid, help fellow students by offering to edit English-language
abstracts for their articles. Help them identify resources outside Japan by introducing them to
conferences and study abroad opportunities, and by making them aware of publications out-
2 There are numerous, ever-updating blogs and social media-based guides for writing formal messages; search for
‘writing letters in Japanese’ for the latest versions. Writing Letters in Japanese, which was published for The In-
ter-University Center for Japanese Language Studies and is now out of print, remains an invaluable guide (Tatem-
atsu 1993).
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Chapter 6 How to do fieldwork
side Japan. Involve them in your own publications and panel presentations. Be a consistently
relevant presence for them.
General point #1: Your primary focus should always be the other person.
3. Forging new ties in Japan
You learn from people by creating sincere human connections. This requires building relation-
ships based on trust and care. I call the people I spend time with ‘friends’, and I avoid the term
‘informant’. It projects a disingenuous impression of impartial objectivity, and it creates the
sense that you are using people simply as data dispensers. Recent decades have seen the Ameri-
can Anthropological Association and other professional organisations adopt the term ‘research
participants’.3 In all fieldwork, there is a mutuality to interactions, so ‘participant’, ’interlocu-
tor’, or preferably ‘friend’ serve as honest descriptors. An interlocutor who is initially separat-
ed from the researcher by one degree provides an ideal balance of trust and distance. This per-
son will not suffer severe social costs from dealing with you and will therefore be more liable
to share information. At the same time, because your relationship was facilitated by a mutual
friend, you are sufficiently trustworthy and obligation-laden to deserve the interlocutor’s atten-
tion.
General point #2: The best interlocutors are often a friend of a friend.
How do you meet people who are part of the social group you want to study? You can ap-
proach people yourself, but the best way in is to be introduced by someone else. Seek intro-
ductions from people you know, or from friends of friends. Introductions are relatively
straightforward: contact the person by phone, email or social media. Mention your friends in
common, if you have them. Optimally, you will be introduced in person or via message by
your mutual acquaintance. Sometimes, even these introductions do not work. Make this your
mantra: ‘the worst thing that happens is nothing.’ If you get a negative response, or no re-
sponse, move on to the next person.
It is imperative to remember that every introduction to an individual is necessarily an intro-
duction to a social group. The individual you meet will report on your conduct to other poten-
tial research participants. Be very careful: behave well as you learn where this individual is sit-
uated within her group, to whom the individual is beholden and how the person’s network op-
erates. Some researchers seek to spend time with politicians and others who are accustomed to
scholarly attention. Much of the time, you will be introducing yourself to someone who is not
a public person. You may be the first academic they have met. You may even be the first non-
Japanese person they have ever spoken with. Meeting you will be a big deal for them, just as
3 ‘Informant’ remains common parlance among fieldworkers, but ‘research participant’ has been official conven-
tion for over two decades. See, for example, the Association of Social Anthropologists of the UK and the Com-
monwealth’s Ethical guidelines for good research practice (1999) and the American Anthropological Association’s
Statement on ethnography and institutional review boards (2004).
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Levi McLaughlin
meeting them might be a big deal for you. You must respect this experience by making your
research relevant to them.
General point #3: An introduction to one person is always an introduction

to a social network.
Starting out by connecting with someone in a leadership position may yield important insights,
but leaders are liable to issue demands downwards to underlings, who may subsequently re-
gard interactions with you as following orders rather than fostering friendly interpersonal rela-
tions. Be enterprising: seek to become acquainted with people who carry out the day-to-day
operation of what you intend to study and ask them to introduce you to others in their circles.
General point #4: Your best contacts are at the bottom or middle of a hierarchy.
4. Pitches
You never know when you may meet someone who could be vital to your research. Always be
prepared with 1. memorised pitches and 2. written descriptions. Imagine that you are standing
next to someone in an elevator going from the twentieth floor to the lobby. This person is vital
to your research. You have approximately one minute to introduce yourself and explain what
you research in advance of asking for this person’s contact information. Memorise two ver-
sions of a Japanese-language ‘elevator pitch’ about your work that you are ready to deliver to
anyone who will listen. Each pitch should be three sentences long.
• Version 1 should address an academic audience. Sentence 1: Who you are and the topic of
your research. Sentence 2: Why the topic is relevant. Sentence 3: Which resources you re-
quire to carry out this work. This introduction can segue smoothly into requests for help
accessing the resources you named.
• Version 2 should be pitched at a non-academic audience. Sentence 1: Who you are and
where you are from. Sentence 2: What you study, explained in accessible terms. Sentence 3:
Why this study is relevant to the person to whom you are speaking. Remember the first
general point: the other person comes first. This is particularly important in your relations
with non-academics. A fellow researcher will understand that you need resources to carry
out your work. A non-academic needs to know why what you do is important, and why it
will be beneficial for her to help you.4
General point #5: Always be ready to discuss your research.
4 See also Booth et al. (2016) for advice on crafting elevator pitches.
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5. Written self-introductions
Prepare two versions of an approximately one-page-long Japanese-language written self-intro-

duction (jiko shōkaisho). Have them ready for dispatch into messages to potential interlocu-
tors. These will be slightly extended versions of your elevator pitches. The first version should
suit an academic audience by addressing three main points: 1. Your driving research questions
and the contexts in which they emerge. 2. Anticipation of the ever-present ‘so what?’ question
by discussing how your work is relevant to your sub-field and to broader scholarly enquiry. 3.
Which resources you require to carry out your work. Use this document as a template for mes-
sages to potential academic advisors or collaborators. Rework this document as your research
develops.
The second jiko shōkaisho should be suited to potential interviewees or other parties who may
grant you fieldwork opportunities. Non-academic recipients will need to know about you in
personal terms. Three points you must address: 1. Who you are, where you came from and
why you study Japan. 2. The specific topic you want to learn about and why you became in-
terested in this. 3. Dilemmas you face as you seek to pursue your research and how the person
to whom you are writing can help you. Most importantly, you must make your study relevant
to the recipient. It is only through making your work personally relevant that you can ask for
help.
General point #6: Always be ready to introduce yourself in a way that suits your interlocutor.
6. Who you are matters
Given the deep social conservatism that prevails in Japan, initiation costs are not evenly dis-
tributed. Who the researcher is exerts an inevitable impact on how she makes inroads. I am an
able, married, white cisgender male. Because of this, I have not suffered as much as many of
my colleagues have from Japan’s innate prejudices—notably its misogyny. If you are young, fe-
male, not white, not married, not cisgender, disabled or otherwise do not satisfy a stereotypi-
cal foreign professor image, you will most likely confront significant roadblocks. Japan is cer-
tainly not unique in this regard, but it is measurably worse than many other places when it
comes to prejudicial attitudes towards ethnic, sexual and other minorities.5
However, you will always be able to gain insights others cannot access by virtue of who you
are. When it comes to fieldwork, what can you observe that others ignore? Who can you
spend time with that the majority of researchers cannot access? What, or who, can you advo-
cate for that others have overlooked or purposefully silenced? Listing entry points you can ac-
cess thanks to who you are creates a productive to-do list for your research.
5 Numerous measures could be cited, but that Japan ranked 164th in the world in 2019 for numbers of women
elected to the national parliament (Inter-Parliamentary Union 2020) and that women occupy fewer than 10% of
management positions in Japanese corporations (Kajimoto 2018) indicates a dispiriting imbalance.
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7. Go for the ask
People are busy. Japanese academics spend absurd amounts of time in boring committee meet-
ings when they are not teaching too many courses or striving to meet daunting writing dead-
lines. Anyone you seek to interview or spend time with, academic or not, will almost certainly
have a packed schedule. As you introduce yourself, you need to move quickly to specific re-
quests. Do your homework. If you are looking for a place in an academic setting, learn as
much as you can about the research in the institutions you are contacting. The same goes for
non-academic settings: find out what you can about what the people you seek to learn from
do, along with their backgrounds and present-day contexts. Preparing this way allows you to
put forward a specific request. Most importantly, be clear about time. Specify when you wish
to meet and how much time you will require. Be clear about what you want to ask and why
your enquiry is relevant—to them and to a reading public. Specify names of documents you
wish to read, people you wish to meet, the topics you wish to discuss, activities you wish to
observe or join, and other clear-cut information. The more relevant detail you can supply, the
clearer your objectives will be. If you are vague about what you want, you will make a new
interlocutor nervous; she will have difficulty vouching for you within her hierarchy, and this
may compromise her position. Put her at ease by giving your request sharp, easy-to-compre-
hend contours. Overly ambitious requests may still be refused, but you are more likely to get
yes as an answer if your ‘ask’ is unambiguous and well-informed.
General point #7: The more specific your request is, the bigger it can be.
8. Fieldwork stuff: Practical considerations
Once you have made initial contact and have arranged to meet, prepare the following:
• Meishi: People in Japan are increasingly likely to share social media contact informa-
tion, but exchanging meishi, the ubiquitous ‘name cards’, is still standard practice.
Have cards printed on high-quality paper stock with English on one side and Japanese
on the other. Have a native speaker check your translations and katakana renderings.
Include your social media contact information. Kinko’s print centres in Japan have
many pleasing meishi templates.
• Notebooks: You will collect data through sound and video recordings, paper and elec-
tronic documents, and other means, but handwritten notes are often your most vivid
record. When you are starting to write up, and whenever you are unsure of where to go
in your research, return to the notes you took by hand. Always have an extra notebook
with you, and never lose your notes!
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• Phone/data: You will need to stay in touch with your interlocutors via LINE, Facebook
and other messaging systems they prefer. You will exchange contact information when
you meet new people, and you will need to navigate to unfamiliar locations for inter-
views and participant observation. Purchase a phone, either before you leave for Japan
or from a Japanese provider when you arrive. Purchase an external battery pack. If you
are not going to be in Japan for long, rent a pocket Wi-Fi device. If you are in Japan
for a year or longer, purchase a contract as soon as you receive your alien registration
card.
• Recorder: Some fieldworkers use their smartphones to record, sometimes with an exter-
nal microphone. I prefer to keep my phone free to exchange contact information, show
or take photos, or look things up. Purchase a separate digital high-quality recorder,
and always check the battery.
• Camera: Carry a small digital camera that is separate from your phone. They are
preferable for taking shots of documents—you may need to record an entire book on
the fly—or for capturing details that phone cameras tend to miss. Photos that make it
into publications need to be very high resolution, so non-phone camera shots are often
preferable.
• The omiyage: Do not show up empty-handed to a first meeting. Even if you are visiting
a large institution, it can be appropriate to bring an omiyage, or a small gift (see Yoshi-
da, Ch. 5; Kottmann/Reiher, Ch. 7). It is essential that you do so if you are visiting
someone’s home. Do not overthink the omiyage. People will tend to prefer food and
drink as gifts; avoid burdening them with non-perishable stuff. There may be sweets or
other foods from your home country that will work well as omiyage, but it is generally
best to err on the side of the familiar. Purchase a pre-wrapped gift in the basement of a
well-appointed department or grocery store. Avoid giving alcohol unless you are cer-
tain it is appropriate.
9. Fieldwork tips
Once you have forged introductions and are ensconced in a fieldwork setting, there is no one-
size-fits-all way to carry out your work. However, there are dispositions you should foster, no
matter what you study. Even if you are just listening, you should cultivate the understanding
that you are there to be useful to the people from whom you are learning. If your role is limi-
ted, by choice or necessity, to observing without participating, you must still consider how re-
taining information about what is happening is useful to your interlocutors.
You will learn the most by making yourself a student. Be proactive about this by seeking an
apprenticeship role. Volunteer to take on mundane tasks that provide chances for you to spend
time with people. Take advantage of skills you possess to join ongoing activities, and treat
fieldwork as an opportunity to learn new skills. If you are a student, the people in the society
you are learning about will (hopefully) offer straightforward explanations. Do not be afraid to
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ask obvious or even stupid-sounding questions. If you take on an apprenticeship-type role,

these questions are appropriate.
General point #8: Always be useful.
Asking questions is how we learn. However, the veteran Japan ethnographer Jennifer Robert-
son put it best: when you are doing fieldwork, try to be Hello Kitty—big ears, no mouth.6
Remember that when you are talking, you are losing a chance to hear what your interlocutors
have to say. Ask brief questions when you are lost, but otherwise shut your mouth and listen.
Anything you think to ask will be less informative than what the people you spend time with
bring up themselves. Be silent, let pauses build and let others fill them (for details on inter-
viewing, see Kottmann/Reiher, Ch. 7).
General point #9: Let others do the talking.
Because the people you meet are most likely not familiar with scholarly scrutiny, they are not
accustomed to being interviewed. This means that if you ask someone if you can interview
them, they are liable to refuse outright or offer inhibited responses. Instead, simply ask if you
can speak with them. If you suggest that ukagaitai koto ga arimasu ga (‘there are things I
would like to enquire about’) and ask for permission to record the conversation, ethical guide-
lines on interviews still apply (see Reiher/Wagner, Ch. 16), but the conversation will flow more
naturally. Seek to record the interview. Explain that you are not a native speaker, that you
have difficulty retaining detailed information, or other plausible reasons why you need a
recording. Explain that the recording is for your exclusive use and that no one else will hear it,
barring a research assistant who may transcribe or translate the interview. Never lie about this.
General point #10: Be honest about your research, but do not use the word ‘interview’.
10. Strategies for notetaking and storing data
If no one else is writing in a notebook, it may be inappropriate for you to take notes while
events are unfolding around you. Employ the principle of kūki o yomeru—‘reading the air’, or
going with the flow—to determine if it is all right for you to pull out a notebook. Whether or
not you can take notes, turn yourself into an all-senses recording device. Strive to remember
every sight, sound, smell and other sensation. As soon as you can, sit down at the computer or
with your notebook and record as much as you possibly can of what you remember. If you
have time restraints, first take down ‘head notes’, or keywords and phrases—what Robert
Emerson, Rachel Fretz and Linda Shaw (2011) call ‘jottings’—that serve as mnemonic triggers
for detailed recollections.7 Do your best to write out complete fieldnotes before another bout
of fieldwork overwhelms your memory. You will sacrifice sleep to make this possible. Note-
taking can serve as a strategy to learn from research participants. Offer your notebook to
them to ask them to write the kanji for unfamiliar words, or to sketch maps, institutional hier-
6 Personal communication, December 6, 2019.

7 See also Van Maanen (2011) and Hammersley/Atkinson (2019) for practical fieldnote-taking advice.
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archies or other information. Make your notes interactive, and they will become relevant and
familiar to the people you spend time with (see Kottmann/Reiher, Ch. 7; Tagsold/Ullmann, Ch.
8).
At regular intervals, scan your notebooks at convenience stores, or anywhere you can, and
save the scans in at least three places: your computer, on a separate hard drive and in a cloud
account. Subscribe to an online backup service that keeps your data safe even if your equip-
ment is lost or destroyed. Compulsively save all of your recorded interviews, documents and
every scrap of other digital data in the same three places. Save photos of all the meishi you
receive, along with other ephemera.
General point #11: Cultivate paranoia about your data.
11. The all-important thank you
Invest in the long-term health of your fieldwork by always thanking people for their time (see
this chapter, Gagné, Ch. 6.1). At bare minimum, after an interview or meeting people in a
fieldwork setting, send them a thank-you message via email or social media. This is one impor-
tant reason to keep meishi. Consult the aforementioned Writing Letters in Japanese and search
online for up-to-date online examples of thank-you messages. Better than electronic messages
are printed letters, especially on university or other institutional letterhead. The best thank you
is a handwritten letter in Japanese. However, you may not have every person’s mailing address,
and time and energy are always limited. No matter what, always make the effort to write a
message or phone people to thank them. The arigatō denwa, the ‘thank-you phone call’, will
be reported positively. Be confident that the sincerity of your thanks is always more important
than how well it is executed in Japanese.
12. Ethnography in and outside Japan via social media
As a fieldworker, you create the primary sources you analyse in your academic writing. To en-
able maximal access for primary source creation, you must create and maintain an online pres-
ence. People in Japan are busy, so face-to-face meetings are often difficult to organise, while
online discussions remain robust. You will need to join social media interactions. These con-
nections will be all the more crucial when you leave Japan.
Social media platforms shift, but at the time of writing the three essential platforms for a
Japan researcher are LINE, Facebook and Twitter. These are not simply data caches you can
pull from; they are extensions of the people you research. As online ethnographer Kaitlyn
Ugoretz (2017) notes, considerable re-evaluation of fieldwork ethics is now underway to deter-
mine how researchers should take part in online communities. For some researchers, even
lurking in chat groups or otherwise observing online conversations demands privacy consider-
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ations (King 1996; Roberts 2015). Some advocate for proactive co-creation of online content
with interlocutors (Kozinets 2015). In all cases, let the best interests of your interlocutors
guide how you interact online.8
LINE groups are topic-specific, subgroup-specific, family-specific—you name it. Request to
join them and contribute judiciously, if at all, to ongoing interlocutor conversations. Overall,
the stakes for communicating via LINE can remain comparatively low. It essentially functions
as a message service akin to WhatsApp, which your fieldwork communities may also use.
Your community members will also create Facebook groups in which vigorous discussion is
likely to play out. Facebook will become a sensitive platform for many researchers. Friends in
Japan will pay close attention to what you post and how people comment on your posts. For
your own sake, and to help anonymise people who appear in your writing, adjust your privacy
settings so that no one but you can see who your Facebook friends are. Depending on the sen-
sitivity of your research topics, you may choose to prevent people from posting on your wall.
Understand that everything you do on Facebook will be observed and that you will be held
accountable by interlocutors for what you post. Topics of interest to your research community
will flow through Twitter feeds, so keeping up with them will keep you up to speed in your
online and in-person conversations.
Twitter and Facebook commentary on the topics you research will guide what you read and
how you write; this will simply happen, consciously or unconsciously, so you should gird your-
self to accept it. Just as you necessarily develop a persona in the field, you will cultivate an
online persona. Your online and physically in-person personas will shape one another and nav-
igating between them will become part of your long-term fieldwork. You are a different person
online, and it is essential to remember that this is also true of your research participants. Keep-
ing up with digital and in-person versions of the people you spend time with is hugely infor-
mative. In terms of your online conduct, a good principle to maintain is less is more. Just as
you will do your best work in person shutting your mouth and letting others speak, so too
should you think twice before offering opinions online.
To retain long-term online connections, offer to take up conversations on more developed or
controversial ideas through private messages rather than public posts; your conversation part-
ners will feel more comfortable responding, and you will learn more. Anonymity, already a
fraught issue before the advent of social media, has been seriously compromised by digital
platforms. There is no reasonable way to keep one’s fieldwork engagements separate from
one’s online presence. When it comes to concerns for your research community, you will be the
one to make adjustments that best protect them. Keep discussions about your interlocutors
within private posts, to the extent that you can. Do not be afraid to erase posts on your pages
that may compromise the people to whom you are responsible. If things get too heated, limit
your connections to personal messages. This will require more work at your end to keep con-
versations going but may be worth it when it comes to protecting the people you research, and
your own mental health. When it comes time to write up, keep in mind how you have been
corresponding on social media platforms. Adjust how you characterise your interlocutors in
print in light of how readers may trawl through your posts looking for identity clues. In per-
son and online, as you spend extended periods of time with your interlocutors, you will run up
against opinions and activities you find objectionable. People you care about may speak and
8 See also Przybylski (2020) for tips on ‘hybrid ethnography’.
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act in ways that clash radically with your own values. You will need to devise personal coping
mechanisms in order to learn from people on their own terms. Enormous research benefits
await those of us who keep our egos in check. A mantra to repeat is: This research is not
about me. It is about the people I’m learning from (see general point #1). Remaining task-ori-
ented will prove to be a useful strategy in assessing the costs and benefits of personally chal-
lenging fieldwork situations. Ask yourself: What will I gain from continuing to spend time
with people whose views challenge mine? What are the personal costs I will accrue in persist-
ing with this work? Are they worth it? You will discover your own threshold. It is likely that
this threshold will move during the time you spend with a community.
General point #12: Develop compartmentalising strategies.
13. Ethical concerns
If the field comes with you, no matter your physical location, so do its ethical obligations.
Many institutions require its affiliated researchers to uphold mandated ethical practices, such
as the Institutional Review Board (IRB) in the United States. Even if your institution does not
maintain formal requirements, you must always keep a final general point in mind: the person
you interview is not a document for you to cite. People’s lives will be profoundly affected by
your field research. Your presence in their lives makes them highly vulnerable, particularly
when it becomes time for you to write up, and you have no way of knowing just how much
even a seemingly token interaction may affect them. This means that you must maintain rigor-
ous ethical principles at all times. Here are three principles that should never leave your mind:
• Always anonymise. Unless the person you are interviewing or learning from has published
under her own name or is otherwise a prominent public person, you must change her name
in your publications. In particularly sensitive cases, mask her location. Even if your inter-
locutor declares that she is proud to be known by her own name, anonymise her for her
own protection.
• Never misrepresent yourself. There should never be a situation in which you misrepresent
who you are or why you are carrying out your work. In cases where you are confronted
with opinions or actions that run contrary to your own principles, you may respond by
emphasising the fundamental questions that drive your research. These may include why
you wish to understand people who are not well understood, or the importance of a group
or practice that has not received sufficient academic attention.
• Always act with extreme kindness and caution. You cannot know the consequences of your
actions. Even if you do everything right, you may be unprepared for the outcome.
General point #13: People are not your data.
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14. Conclusion
To end, I supply an illustrative fieldwork vignette from my research in Japan in 2019 to em-
phasise that people are not your data.
Friday, January 25, 2019: I had an important lesson reinforced for me in Fukushima. I was
fortunate to meet up with an interlocutor I will call Mister Arimoto, someone I had met once
before. He is a resident of Iwaki, a city on Fukushima’s coast that was devastated by the tsuna-
mi on March 11, 2011. Arimoto is a hero. His house was steps from the water, and it was
completely destroyed when the waves hit. Knowing that some of his neighbours were elderly
and physically disabled, Arimoto waded back into the wreckage repeatedly to carry out those
he knew could not make it to safety on their own. He went back and forth for hours and car-
ried out five people. He is justly celebrated in Fukushima.
When we met, Arimoto brought with him a large file folder; it is not rare for me to meet peo-
ple who are eager to show me documentary records of their lives. As he spoke, he pulled out
paper after cutting after flyer after paper, creating a mound on the low table before us that
flowed onto the floor. What he wanted to show me most was a letter I had sent him in the
summer of 2013. After I had returned to the U.S. following my visit to this region, I sent let-
ters on North Carolina State University letterhead to people who were kind enough to meet
with me, as a means of expressing my thanks. Arimoto told me that my letter was an impor-
tant reason he was still alive. He had lost his job as an electrician when the company he
worked for collapsed in 2014. He spoke hesitantly and elliptically, but it appears as if he had
contemplated suicide after this. He stressed to me repeatedly that, in his lowest moments, he
would reread my letter, which was a fairly short but sincere expression of my thanks to him
for sharing his experiences and of my commitment to relaying his account beyond Japan.
He found a new job in 2016, working on the lighting rig for a hospital helicopter pad, among
other meaningful projects, and things had improved for him over the last couple of years.
Shortly after the New Year in 2019, Arimoto had a heart attack. He received surgery to clear a
ventricle and was urged by doctors to remain in hospital, but he pushed against this, driven by
a commitment to meet with me again, knowing I was coming back through Iwaki. He was
cleared to leave hospital this past Tuesday, and we met today. He seemed fit, energetic. Driven.
The hospital stay had led him to quit smoking, which he seemed particularly grateful for. He
was very happy to see me. We spoke for hours.
You have to be very, very careful about how you treat people. A casual word or action by you
can be treated as a life-or-death matter by the person you intersect with. This is true for all of
us. But it is really, really important for those of us who do fieldwork. Some who received a
thank-you letter from me may have simply thought it was a nice note and tossed it aside. Ari-
moto clung to it. Online connections attenuate and enhance these responsibilities, but they are
not the only determining factors, or even the most important ones, necessarily, as Arimoto
demonstrates. You may have published your book, and your grant funding may have elapsed,
but you remain responsible to the people with whom you have forged a relationship. You must
live with that commitment.
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6.1 The cosmology of fieldwork: Relationship building,
theoretical engagement and knowledge production in Japan
Anthropology
Nana Okura Gagné
What is ‘fieldwork’? What is ‘successful’ fieldwork? What does it mean to do fieldwork in

Japanese society? Although all fieldworkers encounter unexpected challenges as well as gratifi-
cation in the field, there is little discussion about what fieldwork actually entails. This chapter
aims to demystify this experience by introducing the concept of fieldwork and analysing the
question: Why is fieldwork particularly important for those who study Japanese society?
Fieldwork is, by definition, ‘working in the field’. Fieldwork in the anthropological sense con-
sists of ‘participant observation’. The core of fieldwork is its function of ‘contextualisation’
and ‘binding’. It contextualises structures/systems and daily routines, as well as your infor-
mants and the delicate human relationships and dynamics of power in the field. Fieldwork can
also bind you to your informants and the space itself. This can be done through ‘real’ partici-
pation by ‘working on the ground,’ immersing oneself fully in participating just as your infor-
mants do (Roberson 1998; Roberts 1994; Roth 2002), or being in situations where ‘real’ par-
ticipation is not possible (e.g. Bestor 2004; Raz 1999; Robertson 1998). This can be conduct-
ed through what Theodore D. Bestor variously calls ‘inquisitive observation’, ‘self-consciously
work[ing] on a technique for gaining access to people’, ‘parachuting’, ‘dropping into the midst
of things from multiple entry points’ (2003, p. 319) and ‘engaging in […] unstructured inter-
views’ (2003, p. 320). Crucially, such active participation is invaluable for anthropologists to
offer grounded knowledge for contextualising and cross-checking other research methodolo-
gies such as surveys, formal interviews and archival research, as well as to reveal new avenues
of research (Bestor 2003, p. 333).
The practice of fieldwork
First, identifying what kind of field site is relevant for examining the particular research ques-
tions that you aim to answer is crucial to conducting good fieldwork. Scholars have expressed
the importance of ‘serendipity’ as well as well-thought out plans; thus, flexibility in the field is
very important. In the course of fieldwork, your research questions may guide you to do re-
search across multiple field sites. Just as your informants are not confined to one space or one
institution, researchers now conduct comparative research across different groups or spaces
(comparative fieldwork), or follow informants as their lives criss-cross through multiple sites
(multi-sited fieldwork).
In my own research, to analyse the changing dominant ideologies and the impact of corporate
restructuring on Japanese workers, I chose to conduct my fieldwork in three different spaces:
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corporations, after-work leisure spaces and the weekend space of hobby activities. I chose
these venues in order to fill the gaps in the previous works that had examined either corporate
or leisure spheres exclusively. This way, while it was time-consuming and labour-intensive, I
was able to understand individual employees more holistically as they moved through different
contexts and crafted themselves by navigating through varying spheres and ideologies (Gagné
2010; 2015; 2019, 2020).
Moreover, it is hard to understand sensitive corporate tensions and office politics as well as
personal desires and life experiences only through corporate contexts (e.g. by working togeth-
er in the office). This was especially true toward the end of the first decade of the new century,
when many corporations had implemented various forms of restructuring. Resonating with
Glenda Roberts’ (1994) research on female factory workers and Joshua Hotaka Roth’s (2002)
research on Brazilian nikkei migrant workers, in which they pursued intense participant obser-
vation as workers themselves, I was also challenged by the actual limited time of interacting
with informants when at work. Instead, lunch breaks as well as after work or non-work con-
texts became indispensable to understanding office politics. At the same time, if I focused only
on the leisure spaces of after-work or weekend activities, I would have missed the larger con-
texts behind individuals’ leisure participation and desires, as work and leisure co-construct
each other for many of my informants. As many scholars have pointed out, informants use dif-
ferent contexts to express the various sides of their selves (Kondo 1990), and the power of
shifting social contexts can influence the manners in which they present themselves to others
(Lebra 2004). Therefore, the venues that one chooses and the ways in which one conducts
fieldwork greatly influence the kind of data one may collect.
In my own research, getting into corporate sites was the most difficult part. No companies
were interested in having a researcher inside their walls, especially during this period of corpo-
rate restructuring. Thus, I ended up using a bottom-up approach. I became a volunteer assis-
tant for Company A, while I was introduced to Company B and C through former informants
I had gotten to know. For the leisure spaces, I was introduced to different types of hostess
clubs by my corporate informants. While the mama-san, the heads of these clubs, were scepti-
cal about my request to do fieldwork, after I had submitted my research proposal and ex-
plained my reasons, they accepted having me there. At the same time, getting accepted by fel-
low hostesses was a completely different matter. At hostess clubs, where I was introduced as a
researcher, many hostesses did not think of me favourably, and developing good relationships
was challenging. However, it was long-term participant observation at the same site that en-
abled me to be accepted. We shared late nights together, helping each other through entertain-
ing customers when they felt sick and overly drunk; other times we were harshly scolded by
the mama-san. Altogether, this gradual bonding helped to reduce the distance between us. For
the communal hobby and volunteer spaces, I was introduced by corporate informants who
were participants in those activities and so access was relatively easier. At the same time, in
such spaces, participants deliberately avoid talking about private matters, such as corporate
affiliation and their occupations, because they were seen as differentiating participants and
thus as taboo topics related to the ‘opposing’ corporate spaces. This once again makes it clear
how each space has benefits and limits as a field site.
Finally, another strength of fieldwork is familiarising oneself with the field and with infor-
mants, which can refine your knowledge and understanding about what is most important to
your informants. Some of the information can be elicited from interviews, but seeing them in
170
action in particular spaces or networks offers deeper insights and holistic understanding. Also,
‘good’ fieldwork can lead to fruitful interviews in later stages, as individuals become familiar
with you as a person in the same field and networks. In my field study of hostess clubs, for the
first four months I wrestled with the question of male to female tensions and gendered con-
sumption. However, after my long-term involvement, I came to realise what issues were really
important for participants, especially for hostesses as this was fundamentally a workplace for
them. In this way, informants in the field will often teach you what is at stake through their
actions (as opposed to in interviews). In this sense, fieldwork is not just about knowledge pro-
duction, but it can also redirect and rewrite our research questions and agenda in the field.
Maintaining relationships
Bestor (2003) highlights the importance of cultivating and expanding ‘networks’. Therefore, it
is important to immerse oneself in networks and human relations consciously and continuous-
ly, which can also speak to post-fieldwork relationships. This leads to an important challenge:
How can we maintain relationships with informants? And why might this be particularly im-
portant for those who do research on Japanese society?
Many fieldworkers have emphasised the importance of visiting sites after long-term fieldwork
to correct their early misconceptions, deepening understanding and identifying continuities
and changes over time (Bestor et al. 2003a, p. 16). For example, Roger Goodman’s (2003, p.
184) long-term research reveals how the once problematised concept of kikoku shijo (returnee
children) underwent a dramatic transformation between the 1960s and the 1980s, and these
individuals even became appreciated as an ‘international elite’ due to the larger socio-econo-
mic changes of globalisation in Japan. I also found it important to visit the sites in the years
after, as I was able to see first-hand the long-term effects of corporate restructuring. In addi-
tion, some of my informants’ lives and worldviews greatly changed after being directly affect-
ed by corporate restructuring and family medical problems, as well as due to the triple disas-
ters of March 11, 2011. As many research phenomena are constantly subject to change, it is
important for researchers to be aware of this and follow up on their field sites and informants
in order to avoid being trapped in synchronic and essentialist theorisations.
While essentialism is certainly a caveat, there is something particular about ‘doing fieldwork in
Japan’. Several scholars have demonstrated the importance of ‘maintaining good relations in
the long term’ and ‘the practice of gift-giving’. While this is true for any fieldwork elsewhere,
Hardacre (2003, p. 85) calls this ‘one of the obligations’ of doing fieldwork in Japan. Gift-giv-
ing is also a marked feature of doing fieldwork, not only for anthropologists but also for his-
torians and Religious Studies scholars. Moreover, having some third person introduce you to
your field site can help open doors for your research. However, it is important to note that this
involves gratitude as well as obligation, as ‘such introductions involve the standard Japanese
cultural practice of borrowing trust from other people’ (Bestor et al. 2003a, p. 14, emphasis
added). Thus, researchers should be aware of how their behaviour in the field affects both the
researcher’s relationships with their informants as well as impacts on the person who made the
initial introduction.
To understand the importance of reciprocal and reflexive relations as well as the complexity
and ambivalence toward these practices among Japanese people themselves, Katherine Rupp’s
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(2003) fieldwork provides valuable insights into how relations within Japanese society are de-
veloped and maintained. What undergirds gift-giving practices in Japan is the strength of rela-
tionships, gratitude and hierarchy (2003, p. 50). Thus gift-giving is not a practice conducted
on a purely ad hoc and case-by-case basis, but rather it is underwritten by ‘symbolic systems’
that integrate it within social life. For instance, through gift-giving, a receiver can discern the
depth and commitment of one’s relationship with a giver by understanding the time, effort and
monetary value that one puts it into exchanges and the giver’s perception of the strength of the
relationship with the other person. Thus, Rupp pushes us to acknowledge that interpersonal
exchanges create and perpetuate social relationships, just as rituals work to create and perpet-
uate social worlds.
Moreover, researchers who have conducted fieldwork in Japan can relate how many infor-
mants are ‘responsive’: individuals will come to meetings at agreed times, or once institutions
grant you access they will prepare well for your visit. However, as ‘reciprocity goes hand in
hand with the process of getting along’ (Roberts 2003, p. 311), this also entails reciprocal ex-
pectations and responsibilities for the fieldworker. While this can be constraining to a re-
searcher who deals with multiple responsibilities across various groups (Roth 2003, p. 349), it
is important for the fieldworker to be aware that they are also becoming part of such cosmo-
logical relationships, as well as to recognise the meaning of such involvement in terms of trust
and responsibility.
The cosmology of fieldwork
The opportunity to do fieldwork is a very rare and special chance for researchers. To take
fieldwork seriously, you must place value ‘on a holistic approach to the entities that are the
subject of this form of knowledge’, which form ‘the constitution of anthropological theory’
(Stocking 1992, p. 284). Moreover, the time and effort you put into your fieldwork will direct-
ly impact the subsequent stages of your research, analysis and writing. As fieldwork in Japan
entails becoming part of the cosmology of your informants, complete with its own challenges,
responsibilities and gratification, it is a long-term endeavour that can lead to long-lasting and
life-changing engagements for you and your informants, as well as to anthropological knowl-
edge and theory production that may shape your personal and professional life for years to
come.
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6.2 A mobilities approach to ‘Japan’ fieldwork
James Farrer
I once remarked to a famous ethnographer of Japanese foodways that my project, in contrast

to his own, applied a ‘Sinocentric perspective’ to Japanese cuisine, a tongue-in-cheek com-
ment, but also one meant as a challenge to traditional Japanese Food Studies. Historically, not
only has China impacted many aspects of Japanese society, including foodways (Cwiertka
2006; Solt 2014), but so have other Asian countries. Beyond considering historical influences,
however, my comment about a Sinocentric perspective points to a broader issue in the ethnog-
raphy of Japan, which is how we capture the cross-border mobility that is inherent in modern
society in our fieldwork practice, without giving up on the advantages of traditional place-
based or site-based fieldwork. First of all, as a migrant in Japan myself, I see it as important to
incorporate the viewpoints of migrants in Japan, especially if we remember that Asian mi-
grants are the majority, with the Chinese the most numerous (Liu-Farrer 2020). However, the
mobility intrinsic to modern Japanese society goes far beyond traditional inbound migration
stories, and includes the multiple forms of mobilities of Japanese themselves as well as the mo-
bilities of Japanese cultural artefacts and ideas around the world, many of which are not creat-
ed by Japanese people. A mobilities perspective (Urry 2016), which takes movement as the
norm in human societies, therefore represents exciting opportunities, as well as challenges, for
conceptualising fieldwork on Japan, including my own studies of Japanese foodways (Farrer et
al. 2017).
A Sinocentric perspective comes naturally enough to me. I began working in Japan after years
of fieldwork in Shanghai, a very cosmopolitan city in China, and this experience has shaped
my take on mobilities. First, my study of Shanghai sensitised me to the outsize role a small
number of migrants can play in forming a city’s larger identity. Secondly, there was my direct
observation of how deeply Chinese people were involved in the spread of Japanese culture.
This is evident in Japanese gastronomy around the world. Where would people in Europe,
Africa and the Americas get their sushi rolls without all those Chinese and other Asian mi-
grant restaurateurs? A lesser-known story is the boom in Japanese food in China, including
Shanghai (Farrer et al. 2017).
Here, I use my experiences to discuss some challenges of incorporating a mobilities perspective
—especially an Asian centred one—into two fieldwork projects on Japan. The first is an
ethnography of a Tokyo culinary community (Farrer n.d.). It documents foodways in a single
neighbourhood with a focus on the people who make food and their relationships to cus-
tomers. On the surface, this is an example of old-fashioned, place-based ethnography of
Tokyo, one emphasising the rootedness and particularities of local foodways. Moreover, there
is nothing fancy about the methodology, just going from door to door, entering as many places
as I can, eating, drinking, observing, interviewing and writing up. For young social scientists, I
still recommend this kind of ‘pedestrian’ fieldwork, which though time-consuming allows
ethnographers to orient themselves to a scene, to become themselves a local expert. Place-
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James Farrer
based research is the best way to ground oneself empirically and to learn basic skills of obser-
vation and conversation. My traditional approach to gathering data, however, does make use
of modern technology. I post most of the interviews I conduct as articles on my website (see
above), a practice aimed at reaching a broader audience beyond academia. It also forces me to
continually analyse and reflect upon the data I am gathering, generating feedback from infor-
mants and readers, but also from the process of writing itself (see Farrer/Liu-Farrer, Ch. 17).
My point here is that a mobilities perspective can still inform traditional place-based fieldwork
practice. In my door-to-door fieldwork in Tokyo, I learned that many businesses, including
izakaya, bars or convenience stores, are run by migrants, even if they are not owned by them.
Many are Chinese, though I would not have known this from looking at the shops’ marketing.
A more selective sampling of ‘migrant restaurants’ might have missed these assimilated mi-
grant workers in nondescript locales. Every Tokyo neighbourhood is already a migrant neigh-
bourhood (Coates 2015; Liu-Farrer 2020), and we should include these migrant voices in the
design of ethnographic fieldwork, through consideration of systematic inclusion of different
voices and even interviewing in multiple languages, not only Japanese.
Mobility has many faces beyond inbound migration, however. While I was learning about mi-
grants making local Tokyo spaces, I also was learning about Japanese creating Chinese culi-
nary spaces in Japan. One of the most popular types of restaurants in urban Japan is the
‘neighbourhood Chinese’ restaurant. My study revealed a parallel between rural Japanese who
migrated to Tokyo to make a living by running Chinese restaurants in the immediate postwar
era and Chinese who migrated to Japan as students and opened quite similar establishments
serving the daily needs of local residents. Sometimes these migration trends intertwined, as
when the son of a Japanese restaurant owner married a Chinese migrant, who continues to
work with the son in the Chinese restaurant business. These are migrant businesses, but the
more common Japanese-run places would likely be ignored in a study of ‘migrant’ or ‘ethnic’
restaurants. The Chinese-run places conversely might not be considered local Japanese spaces.
So the ‘neighbourhood Chinese restaurant’ is an anomalous space that represents two migrant
trends, one internal and one international, yet both are also very much part of the local com-
munity (Farrer 2018). They are also declining because both types of migrant flows are declin-
ing. The new culinary trend in urban Japan may be Nepali-run curry restaurants, and it is a
phenomenon driven by the migration industry, not necessarily by changing consumer demands
(Kharel 2016).
As a fieldworker in Japan, it is not necessary to speak other Asian languages to study such
spaces, but it certainly helps. It is advisable to work jointly with people who do, since one
fieldworker cannot be expected to do all things well. Language difficulties are endemic to mo-
bility, in fieldwork as in life, and no one should be shy about getting help. I work with my
former Japanese teacher, who transcribes and edits the Japanese interviews we do. But I have
also had Chinese students work on the project to transcribe Chinese interviews. I do the Eng-
lish translations (and participate in nearly all the interviews). As a graduate student, I did al-
most all the transcription myself (a good practice), but a benefit of research funding is afford-
ing transcription and editorial help. For students without funding, other forms of collabora-
tion are advisable, including co-authoring with other students with compatible skills.
In short, there is often a Chinese—or Vietnamese or Nepali—story to tell about Tokyo neigh-
bourhood scenes. Mobility, however, not only concerns the Chinese, Nepalese and Vietnamese,
but also the Japanese working in Japan. Indeed, even now, most of the ‘ethnic restaurants’ in
174
my neighbourhood are run by Japanese who make ‘Asian’ cuisine. Many are multiple mi-
grants, some having grown up in other parts of Japan, others having lived abroad for years,
either to study cooking or for other reasons. We share their mobility stories on our webpage.
In short, a mobilities perspective on Japanese society will be sensitive to the role migrants play
in producing Japanese cuisine, and also to the role of migration, travel and overseas study
among Japanese producers. A singular focus on ‘migrant cuisine’ in the traditional sense
would miss out on these complex stories of mobility and food, which are now part of every-
day Japanese life. As in other areas of social life, we need to capture how Japan is a multiply
mobile society.
A mobilities perspective is even more central to my second ongoing project, a study of the
global spread of Japanese cuisine. It is designed as a Global Studies project based largely on
ethnographic fieldwork, involving six main members and several research assistants, conduct-
ing fieldwork on Japanese cuisine in cities on every inhabited continent. We are looking at the
movement of people, foods, recipes, design elements and the media images that accompany
modern culinary culture. Our main focus, however, is on the people who make the food, in-
cluding their mobility paths (Farrer at al. 2017).
One thing that became quite apparent to us when we began is that the traditional Japanese
Studies approach to Japanese culinary culture had radically undervalued, indeed largely dis-
missed or ignored, the contributions of non-Japanese actors in producing and recreating
Japanese cuisine around the world. This bias is apparent in both the Japanese and Western
language writings on the globalisation of Japanese cuisine. There are undoubtedly many rea-
sons for this, but one is that Japanese Studies is simply too focused on Japanese actors. In our
research project, we want to focus on the Asians, Europeans, North and South Americans, and
Australians who are also producing, transforming and consuming Japanese cuisine. This is
their story too. The point is a simple one, but has radical implications for redefining the prac-
tice of fieldwork about Japan. Even when studying the spread of Japanese cultural forms
around the world, we need to equally examine these ethnically diverse producers and purvey-
ors of Japanese culture and not simply expose them or criticise them for not selling the ‘gen-
uine article’. This approach to fieldwork requires radical rethinking, not only of the basics of
demographic sampling in our fieldwork, but also of what ‘Japan’ really is. For us, Japanese
cuisine—and by extension ‘Japaneseness’—is now a global cultural product, and not simply
the product of Japanese people. We let our informants and their advertising tell us what
‘Japanese food’ is. Ethnographers should not police the boundaries of authentic Japanese cul-
ture, though the attempts to do by others are part of what we study. Japan is now itself a glob-
al product, and fieldwork about Japan can now happen anywhere.
The challenges of doing this type of multi-site fieldwork are large, and I don’t generally recom-
mend multi-city fieldwork to lone young scholars, because one can very easily end up with too
little information about too many places. Sometimes, however, such an approach may be fruit-
ful. For me, a very important practical element has been to find expert informants in each lo-
cation who can not only provide data about a single site—e.g. their own restaurant—but also
about the larger context that one is trying to understand but will not have enough time to un-
derstand on one’s own. Collaboration with local scholars can also be helpful, though strong
relationships with informants in the field are far more important than those with academics.
Overall, the mobilities approach to fieldwork lends itself to teamwork, and effective teamwork
requires much more than a conference leading to an edited volume. Frequent meetings within
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James Farrer
the group and joint fieldwork with multiple members are essential to make teamwork func-
tion. Fieldwork and interviewing together with other team members produces insights that
weave together the multi-sited ethnography (see Tagsold/Ullmann, Ch. 8). Writing as a group
takes time, but the journey is also the destination.
176
6.3 Building arguments on national policies from everyday
observations
Hanno Jentzsch
A political scientist by training, I have been interested in the rules, norms and practices that
shape social, political and economic life in Japan, and how these rules change over time. But I
have always felt particularly vulnerable to the criticism that qualitative researchers are often
exposed to in the field of Political Science: How can you build an entire argument on the per-
sonal observations and accounts you gathered in a small number of field sites? While I have
almost always collected my empirical data locally, i.e. on the municipal level or below, the ar-
guments I have used this data for are mostly aimed at understanding changes to and the stabil-
ity of broader institutional arrangements operating at the level of the nation state, or even ad-
dressed the logic of institutional change in general. The distance between the field site and the
analytical objective, however, is a methodological challenge. But as a non-Japanese political
scientist working on Japan, another challenge comes up almost inevitably: How can re-
searchers collect reliable qualitative data despite their socio-cultural, linguistic and—given that
research stays are probably limited—spatial distance? I want to address both of these potential
sources of insecurity with some examples from my own experience.
Studying national policies on the local level
First, I want to emphasise the value of frequent, everyday observations in a particular locality
and over extended periods of time as opposed to the use of brief field trips and interviews
alone. When I collected data for my dissertation on institutional change in the Japanese agri-
cultural sector, I relied on interviews (both semi-structured and unstructured), informal con-
versations and participatory observation in two main field sites for three months and three
and a half months respectively. While this may appear like two brief visits from an anthropol-
ogist’s viewpoint, it was a long and ethnographic engagement with the field sites from a Politi-
cal Science perspective. I went into the field to understand the local manifestations of the agri-
cultural reform process in Japan and—in a more abstract sense—the trajectories of Japan’s ex-
tensive agricultural support and protection regime, a multi-faceted arrangement of formal and
informal institutions.
The opportunity to collect data during two research periods helped to offset the rookie mis-
takes I made during interviews, particularly in the first research period. For example, the way I
asked farmers to explain local rules and practices and their relations with their hamlet or their
local cooperative were far too direct and too abstract to yield useful information. Moreover,
my questions were based on the academic literature I had read on rural social organisation in
Japan, some of which were written decades ago and typically derived from research in rice-
growing localities (Dore 1978; Fukutake 1980). In my first field site, however, the Kōfu Basin
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Hanno Jentzsch
in Yamanashi Prefecture, rice cultivation played virtually no role. During my second research
stay, this time in a rice-growing locality in Shimane Prefecture, I learned to ask less directly,
and I did actually encounter elements of traditional social organisation. Moreover, I realised
(in hindsight) an issue that linked both sites despite their differences, namely the role of social
ties and certain unwritten rules and practices for exchanging farmland. The finding that farm-
land exchange was organised very differently in both field sites later became a cornerstone of
my thesis’s first argument. I argued that the pace and the direction of structural change in the
Japanese agricultural sector are crucially shaped by the way in which local social ties, norms
and practices are integrated into distinct local manifestations of farmland governance.
Brief research trips for interviews with local stakeholders, the collection of (official) docu-
ments and expert interviews with policymakers at the national level could not have yielded the
same results. Far more important than the respective administrative techniques that were em-
ployed to govern the exchange of land in each field site or than statistics on how much land
was obtained by professional farms were factors less visible at first sight. They included per-
sonal ties between certain farms and the administration, actual practices underlying the ex-
change of land (sometimes quite different from what the formal contract would stipulate) or
the spatial boundaries of local social networks. In my second research period, for example, I
lived in one part of the city and commuted to another part, which was my actual field site.
Although both localities are only separated by a river and have belonged to the same munici-
pality since 2011, the organisation of farmland exchange was (and still is) very different. Over
the three and a half months of my stay, I realised that every morning I would cross the bridge
into a distinct social world. In this world, every interviewee knew everybody I had interviewed
so far, and everybody I was going to interview in the future. I did not find this density of social
ties on the other side of the river. This experience became the foundation of my second argu-
ment that the Japanese agricultural support and protection regimes consist of a multitude of
distinct local agricultural regimes, in which national policies intersect with local social ties and
norms in ways that produce very different local interpretations of the same national reform
process.
This does not mean that interviews with local officials and the collection of statistics, docu-
ments or presentations were not useful—they were, and so was studying the details of the na-
tional policy process. It means, however, that political scientists can profit from immersion to
build arguments on abstract social phenomena such as institutional change: getting to know
faces and family ties, oral local history, attending drinking parties and regular visits to the lo-
cal bar; this is all fieldwork. The very mundane act of ‘being around’ has practical benefits: I
found out which festivals to attend, what stakeholders I could meet there or where I could get
myself a car over drinks and snacks in the local bar. But more importantly, these practical
benefits can quickly turn into crucial building blocks for actual research. Informal conversa-
tions are immensely useful for finding out what the critical issues are in a certain place: which
topics come up routinely, and which topics tend to be avoided? Casual conversations can also
be helpful in order to double-check issues that came up in more formal interview situations.
The information local officials present during formal interviews on a certain local policy will
likely become far more colourful when discussed with random strangers over a beer. Even if
the information sourced at the bar might be flawed, it provides the raw material for better,
more grounded interview questions.
178
Thus, although political scientists have often been sceptical towards immersion and ethno-
graphic methods and rather adhere to the positivist notion of keeping maximum distance from
the ‘object’ under study (Schatz 2009), I have found ethnographic methods to be immensely
useful for understanding how local actors translate abstract policies into practice. The flour-
ishing discourse on practice theory also highlights the value of studying local practices as a
means to understand large social phenomena, such as organisations or institutional arrange-
ments (Nicolini 2017). The empirical focus on the emergence and reproduction of certain
practices does not imply that the arguments derived from these micro-level observations have
to get stuck in ‘localism’—i.e. the descriptive study of local social phenomena with no inten-
tion to analytically connect them to other phenomena across time and space (Nicolini 2016).
Much to the contrary, the ‘interest for the mundane and often unsung details of organisational
life’ can—when carefully contextualised—very much become the foundations from which to
‘explain social matters’, and how they change over time through practice (Nicolini 2017,
pp. 22–23).
Open-ended field research
When a researcher is applying qualitative methods of data collection, fieldwork never ends,
and certainly not after the interview is over. Yet, fieldwork in Japan often ends quite abruptly,
when the research funding runs out or the semester starts. Leaving the field site, however, is
only the beginning of other equally important tasks: contextualising the data and keeping in
touch with research participants. In fact, I did substantial parts of my work on local agricul-
tural regimes on my desk. After I had established farmland exchange as a crucial process, na-
tional statistical data helped me to put the diverging outcomes of farmland exchange in my
field research sites in context. Moreover, the perspective on land exchange (as opposed to the
broader topic of agricultural reform) unlocked a new batch of policies that I had only touched
on superficially before. Some of the most important details on my field sites—for example,
changes regarding their administrative and cooperative boundaries—were easily accessible on-
line, but only once I knew what to look for. Such contextualisation helped to reduce the dis-
tance between the local field sites and the analytical objective of studying the trajectory of the
agricultural regime as a whole. Moreover, it shaped the profile of so-called ‘small cases’ to
strengthen the empirical data and helped me to identify these additional cases, including the
right interview partners, and to formulate questions. The foundation of previous ethnographic
field research has allowed me to conduct short field trips to additional locations in a much
more productive way, since I could rely on a concrete set of questions focused on certain topics
and stakeholders. While there will rarely be the time again for longer periods of field research
once a dissertation is finished, such additional research trips and revisiting the original re-
search sites whenever possible (including, of course, the bar) help to keep the data alive.
Beyond occasional visits, little gaps and statistical details can be asked about via email, Face-
book or text messages. I found that all of these channels were important ways to stay in touch
with the field site—whether to ask if everybody is OK after the area was hit by an earthquake,
or to quickly follow up on a particular detail you need to know right now to write up an arti-
cle. Not least, keeping in touch via various channels helps to build stronger arguments on
change. Every abstract policy change at the national level becomes easier to understand when
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Hanno Jentzsch
traced down to the local context of a familiar field site, and an email to the right person
among your local contacts can be sufficient to unlock this specific knowledge. In that sense, to
paraphrase Levi McLaughlin (2010), not only is all research in Japan fieldwork—keeping in
touch with your field site is also the foundation for continuing research on Japan from abroad.
180
Further reading
Alexy, Allison/Cook, Emma (2019): Reflections on fieldwork: Exploring intimacy. In: Alexy, Allison/Cook,
Emma (eds.): Intimate Japan: Ethnographies of closeness and conflict. Honolulu, HI: University of
Bestor, Theodore C./Steinhoff, Patricia G./Lyon-Bestor, Victoria (eds.) (2003): Doing fieldwork in Japan.
eign researcher. In: The Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus 8, No. 30. https://apjjf.org/-Levi-McLaughlin/
3388/article.html, [Accessed 14 August 2020].
Robben, Antonius/Sluka, Jeffry A. (eds.) (2012): Ethnographic fieldwork: An anthropological reader.
Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell.
Robertson, Jennifer et al. (eds.) (2007): Politics and pitfalls of Japan ethnography: Reflexivity, responsibili-
ty, and anthropological ethics (Special Issue). In: Critical Asian Studies 39, No. 4.
Reiher, Cornelia (ed.) (2018): Fieldwork in Japan: New trends and challenges (Special Issue). In: ASIEN—
The German Journal on Contemporary Asia 149.
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Chapter 7
How to interview people: Qualitative interviews
1. Introduction
Scholars researching Japan from across the Social Science spectrum rely on qualitative inter-
views with a variety of actors to learn about their lifeworlds, experiences, practices and per-
spectives on a range of issues. These include, for example, residents in a specific neighbour-
hood, local government officials, parents, married and divorced couples and farmers (see this
chapter, Alexy, Ch. 7.3; Brumann, Ch. 7.1; Yamaguchi, Ch. 7.2). In this chapter, we examine
what qualitative interviews are and what insights researchers can gain from interviews in gen-
eral, as well as from interviews both in and outside of Japan. We detail decisions a researcher
should make before conducting interviews to ensure the data produced addresses the research
question. We then introduce different types of interviews, elicit the process of selecting and
contacting interviewees and give practical advice on preparing for the actual interviews. This is
followed by in-depth discussion on the practice of interviewing: specifically language issues,
the process of interviewing, dealing with (non-)verbal expressions, negotiating interviewer–in-
terviewee relations and recording. The chapter concludes with reflections on interview follow-
ups, particularly in regard to the transcription of interviews, and how and why to stay in
touch with informants.
2. Qualitative interviews
Qualitative interviews range from the ‘traditional’ question and answer type to more open-
ended and spontaneous ‘conversations’. Interviews are probably the most frequently used tool
in qualitative research (Keddi/Stich 2008, p. 2) and are utilised in the Humanities and Social
Sciences to enable the researcher to ‘elicit views and opinions from the participants’ (Creswell
2014, p. 190), to learn about the interviewees’ experiences (Rubin/Rubin 2005, p. 2) and to
obtain descriptions of their lifeworlds in order to understand how an interviewee interprets the
meaning of phenomena they describe (Brinkmann 2014, pp. 277, 286–289). In contrast to sur-
veying through questionnaires, interviewing people directly enables researchers to ask ques-
tions, listen to stories and respond to unexpected issues and opinions immediately. In addition,
when meeting informants in their homes or coffee shops, or when following them through
their paddy fields, researchers can catch a glimpse of the environments the informants live in.
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Chapter 7 How to interview people
Although differences in the definition of the qualitative interview types exist across disciplines,
most scholars agree on three basic strategies to produce verbal data: asking individuals more
or less fixed questions, listening to stories and talking with couples or groups (Flick 2006, p.
149). Depending on a researcher’s discipline, the boundaries between interviews and ‘normal’
conversations can be blurred. In Anthropology, for example, ‘questioning and/or just listening
take place within everyday conversation’ (O’Reilly 2005, p. 116; see this chapter, Alexy, Ch.
7.3). This approach stands in contrast to more formalised interview settings where researchers
and informants might meet for the first (and sometimes only) time in order to ask and answer
questions for a fixed period of time.
Qualitative interviews, regardless of their specific definition, always involve explicit rules con-
cerning their content, duration and setting. These rules and practices may differ according to
disciplinary conventions, but foremost according to the research topic, context and intervie-
wees. This also applies to ethical rules ‘concerning consent for the interview, for recording and
for preserving the subject’s anonymity and the confidentiality of the respondent’ (Hammond/
Wellington 2013, p. 91; see Slater et al., Ch. 16.2). Because of the plurality of approaches to
interviews, it is important to familiarise oneself with how interviews are conceptualised within
one’s discipline, as well as best practices for how they are to be conducted, documented and
analysed.
Key issues
Qualitative interviews are a method to find out how people characterise and view their lives,
to identify what they find important and to understand their perceptions and interpretations
of the topic a researcher is interested in. Therefore, it is people’s perspectives and not ‘objec-
tive facts’ researchers can find out.
3. Choosing the ‘right’ type of interview and questions
Once a researcher decides on interviews as a suitable tool to answer her research question(s),
two intertwined decisions must be made: how to interview, and how and what to ask. There
exist different interview types that can be distinguished between based on 1. their degree of
structure, 2. the number of interviewees (individuals, couples or groups) and 3. the interview
method (face-to-face, via phone or online). Deciding which interview type to use is primarily
dependent on whether the data ‘made’ through interviews will be used as evidence to answer
the research question (Hammond/Wellington 2013, p. 92). Other factors that influence the
choice of interview type include the researchers’ abilities with regard to the local language, her
personal as well as professional experience, available funding, time and staff, structural cir-
cumstances such as access to informants, geographical distance, and the abilities and needs of
the interviewees in terms of health or privacy.
The most obvious distinction between interview types is in their structure (see this chapter, Ya-
maguchi, Ch. 7.2). Interviews are commonly divided into structured, unstructured and semi-
structured types. In reality, however, this distinction is more of ‘a continuum ranging from rel-
atively structured to relatively unstructured formats’ (Brinkmann 2014, p. 285). Although in
185
the literature on research methods, the various interview types appear as neatly separated, in
practice their use is more intertwined (Helfferich 2004, p. 11). Generally speaking, unstruc-
tured interviews, such as narrative (often biographical), episodic or ethnographic interviews,
strongly focus on subjective meanings or the interviewee’s perspective and system of relevance.
They often evolve around a ‘generative narrative question’ as in the case of narrative or
episodic interviews (Flick 2006, pp. 173–188) or often develop spontaneously out of a ‘nor-
mal’ conversation in the field.
In contrast, more structured interviews mainly aim to refute or confirm a hypothesis and cen-
tre around questions the researcher has decided on before the interview(s) (Brinkmann 2014,
p. 286). Most researchers in qualitative Social Science research use semi-structured interviews
(ibid.). Their intent is to identify individual views, but they are based on a (loose) interview
guide a researcher can use for orientation. Sticking to the guide is not, however, obligatory,
and the researcher can ask various additional questions or include a new topic whenever she
feels it is appropriate to do so. Mixing different degrees of openness in interviews can be nec-
essary for collecting different kinds of information (demographic information and individual
perceptions) or when researchers need to flexibly adjust their (theoretical) plans to the actual
interview situation or the ‘flow’ of the conversation (Rubin/Rubin 2006, p. 35). The level of
structure of an interview can change anytime during the interview process. While unstructured
interviews are particularly helpful in exploratory phases of a research project, a more struc-
tured interview format is often better suited to later phases of a project, to follow up on specif-
ic issues or to test a hypothesis that derived from earlier exploratory and unstructured inter-
views (Froschauer/Lueger 2003, p. 35).
Different interview forms: focused interview, semi-standardised interview, problem-

centred interview, expert interview, ethnographic interview, narrative interview,
episodic interview, couple interview, group interview, group discussion, focus group1
Questions asked during interviews may differ significantly based on the interview approach.
However, regardless of the interview type, researchers should produce ‘a set of questions that
are meaningful for the interviewee’ (Hammond/Wellington 2013, p. 92) and ask the ‘right’
questions in order to get answers that help her to answer the research question. In semi- and
unstructured interviews, the questions should ‘invite interviewees to give descriptions’
(Brinkmann 2014, p. 287), as interviewees are expected to answer ‘as freely and as extensively
as they wish’ (Flick 2011, p. 112). Hammond/Wellington (2013, p. 92) stress careful use of
language, such as avoiding jargon, striving for clarity in phrasing and asking open-ended ques-
tions that relate to the expertise of the informants. Flick (2011, p. 113) suggests that questions
should ‘allow room for the specific, personal views of the interviewees’ and should not influ-
ence them. Questions that refer to abstract theoretical concepts like ‘globalisation’ or ‘hyper-
gamy’ or questions that imply a certain understanding of a term or concept like, for example,
‘love’ should also be avoided.
1 For differently structured overviews on interview forms, corresponding questions and possible research goals, see
Cresswell 2014; Flick 2006; Rubin/Rubin 2006. For detailed information on couple interviews, see Yoshida,
Ch. 5.
186
Key issues
Consider whether the data produced through a specific interview type is best suited to your
research topic and will help you answer your research question. Take available resources
and practical issues like access to the field or the needs of informants into account. Mixing
different interview formats in one interview or across interviews might be helpful or even
necessary.
4. Selecting and finding interviewees
The research question and topic are key factors in deciding on appropriate interviewees, just
as they are in determining the optimal interview format. When selecting interview partners, a
researcher should keep in mind the practical considerations discussed in section 3, but also
consciously reflect on sampling strategies and determining what expertise interviewees need in
order to produce meaningful data. Sampling refers to the process of selecting whom you will
interview (case sampling) (Flick 2006, p. 122). In order to produce reliable and valid research,
it is important to reflect on the criteria according to which you have selected the interviewees
and make this process transparent to the audience. For some research projects, it might be use-
ful to choose the interviewees before going to the field (a priori sampling) based on certain cri-
teria: for example, age, occupation or gender (statistical sampling, Flick 2006, p. 123). In oth-
er projects, sampling can occur during the process of collecting and interpreting interview (and
other) data (theoretical sampling, Flick 2006, pp. 125–131). Theoretical sampling is derived
from grounded theory (Glaser/Strauss 2005; see Meagher, Ch. 12), but has become widely ac-
cepted in qualitative research. The gradual selection of cases and material is based on criteria
concerning content and relevance rather than representativeness (Flick 2006, p. 128).
The ideal informant is ‘experienced and knowledgeable’ and contributes ‘a variety of perspec-
tives’ (Rubin/Rubin 2006, p. 64) on the researcher’s topic of interest. When you are selecting
interviewees, it is best to think of all informants as experts in their respective lifeworlds, expe-
riences and opinions. Different types of expertise exist, however. These experts derive their sta-
tus from being part of a certain group (intra-systematic knowledge), from possessing knowl-
edge of several systems in a larger field (intra-field expertise) or from external expertise (theo-
retical knowledge). Examples of such experts are scholars or journalists, who are often target-
ed for ‘expert interviews’ (Froschauer/Lueger 2003, pp. 37–38).
In Japan, social networks, introductions and trust relations are crucial in order to identify and
connect with informants who are willing to be interviewed (Bestor et al. 2003a, p. 14). For-
eign researchers in Japan often obtain access by affiliating with a Japanese host institution
(McLaughlin 2010). Although in some cases researchers prefer not to mention their affiliation
(Steinhoff 2003), Japanese supervisors and colleagues can introduce researchers to potential
informants and thus become important gatekeepers. Some scholars rely on snowball sampling
to access ‘informants through contact information that is provided by other informants’ (Noy
2008, p. 330). But being introduced to informants by only one gatekeeper can result in a bi-
ased perspective on the research topic. Thus, to find interviewees, creative and plural modes of
access via different gatekeepers are crucial (McLaughlin 2010, p. 8–9), as are reflecting on the
187
influence of gatekeepers and sampling strategies on the findings of research projects (see
Gagné, Ch. 6.1).
Contacting people to make an appointment for interviews with or without the help of gate-
keepers might demand the use of different media. While in some cases an email with an intro-
ductory letter from a scholar’s home or host institution and an outline of their research is nec-
essary to set up a connection, in other cases all that is required to gain access is a phone call or
a visit to the person’s shop or farm. Sometimes social media can be the most efficient tool with
which to arrange an interview. In her research on local culture in post-disaster Tōhoku, Julia
Gerster (2018) arranged almost all her interviews via Facebook and Line. How to best contact
interviewees after you identify them as knowledgeable depends on the people one would like
to interview and demands creativity, patience and often involves a lot of trial and error.
Key issues
In order to decide whom to interview, you should consider different kinds of sampling meth-
ods and reflect on the kind of knowledge the ‘ideal interviewee’ should possess to answer
your research question. Try plural modes of access to interviewees and don’t rely on only
one gatekeeper. Different media can be helpful when contacting informants to arrange inter-
views.
5. Preparing interviews: Location, timing and things to bring
Once a researcher has (roughly) decided how and whom to interview, the appropriate prepara-
tion is crucial. The first step is to find a location to conduct the interview. Interviews can take
place at people’s homes, favourite restaurants, cheap fast-food chains, parks, coffee shops or
workplaces. When possible, it is preferable to leave the decision about the location to the in-
terviewees so they can choose a place that is convenient and comfortable for them. This has
the added benefits of both giving researchers an insight into the life of the respondents, espe-
cially if they are invited into their home or one of their favourite local hangouts, as well as
freeing the researcher from having to search for an appropriate location, which can prove
rather difficult in a city like Tokyo. Sometimes researchers have to select locations themselves.
Public spaces like coffee shops can be a good choice, even for interviews on sensitive topics. If
the interviews are going to be recorded, it is crucial to consider all the sources of environmen-
tal noise and seek ways to limit it as much as possible. Nothing is more disheartening than
discovering that hours of audio are ruined due to background noise (as we both know from
experience). Once the meeting place for the interview is set, it is best to visit the location and
confirm its opening hours.
When a face-to-face interview is not possible, there are other good options, such as sending
questionnaires or conducting phone or online interviews (Flick 2006, pp. 254–260). These
techniques of producing verbal, written, audio and/or video data enable the researcher to carry
out ‘both asynchronous and synchronous online interviews’ (Hammond/Wellington 2013, p.
92) and to widen the scope of her research. (Written) online interviewing can be less intrusive,
can produce more reflective answers, and can help people feel more comfortable (ibid.). How-
188
ever, the responses might be less spontaneous and the relationship between the researcher and
the interlocutor less familiar (Flick 2006, pp. 256–260).
It is also important to take sufficient time to conduct interviews and, if possible, to have a cof-
fee or dinner with the interlocutor afterwards (see this chapter, Alexy, Ch. 7.3).2 The length of
an interview depends on the interviewee’s available time, the topic, the number of people in-
volved, the type of interview and the overall atmosphere. We have conducted interviews rang-
ing from thirty minutes up to around four hours and experienced interviews to last longer
when invited to individuals’ homes, as interviewees showed us personal belongings and even
invited us for dinner. Nora usually writes in a first email to possible interviewees that the inter-
view will take ‘approximately one hour’ because a longer time span seems to be a deterrent,
especially to working people. Before the interview starts, she also asks the interviewee again
how much time she has in order to adjust the interview guide (if there is one), to plan the in-
terview and to frame the situation.
Finally, there are several things the researcher should bring to the interview. Apart from items
like a recording device that help the researcher with organisational matters, we recommend
bringing name cards (meishi) and a gift (McLaughlin 2010). Gifts create a pleasant atmo-
sphere and show gratitude for the interviewees’ help and efforts. They don’t need to be expen-
sive and can be something from the researchers’ home country or some sweets bought in
Japan. We recommend always bringing extra gifts in case one is met by more people than ex-
pected or gifts are presented to the researcher.
Key issues
Ask the interviewee where she wants to meet for the interview. In case they leave the deci-
sion up to you, suggest convenient locations and bear topics like privacy, noise or opening
hours in mind, and always check the location beforehand. Take enough time, but also think
about the interviewee’s needs and constraints. Always bring name cards (meishi) and a small
gift. Bring more than you think you will need.
6. Deciding on the language
When you are conducting interviews in Japan or with Japanese interlocutors outside of Japan,
language is of paramount importance. Usually researchers contact their interviewees in ad-
vance via email or phone in the language the interview will most likely be conducted in. In
cases where contacts were established through a third person, the question of language has to
be explicitly discussed. Ideally, interviews should be conducted in the language informants feel
most comfortable with, so they can express their opinions and feelings. In most cases, this is
Japanese. Therefore, ‘advanced reading and comprehension skills are a prerequisite to doing
research in Japan’ (Smith 2003, p. 161). However, researchers should not fear conducting in-
terviews in Japanese due to anxiety about their language skills as ‘doing fieldwork is in itself a
powerful language-learning opportunity’ (Bestor et al. 2003a, p. 9).
2 For a different opinion on this topic, see Yoshida, Ch. 5.
189
Even with fluency in Japanese, there will likely be many new specialised terms to master
(Smith 2003, p. 162). Therefore, it is important to study the specialised vocabulary necessary
to conduct interviews on your research topic. In Cornelia’s (Reiher 2014) project on porcelain
production in Kyushu, she learned the special terms for different types of kilns and glazes in
advance. In addition, interviews in multicultural communities may also demand fluency in sev-
eral languages. In Chaline Timmerarens’ (2018) project on Brazilians in Hamamatsu, for ex-
ample, she conducted interviews in Japanese and Portuguese. Using multiple languages when
researching Japan increases the ‘burden of checking and double-checking that we have inter-
preted meaning correctly’ (Smith 2003, p. 161). Thus, the interviewer must not be afraid to
ask for explanations of unfamiliar Japanese terms while conducting the interview. When in
doubt, one should always consult Japanese colleagues and friends for help or contact research
participants to clarify what they meant by a certain term. Although most interlocutors will
prefer to speak Japanese, some Japanese interviewees will insist on ‘speaking “impoverished”
English’ to foreign researchers (Johnson 2003, p. 146). In transnational settings where inter-
viewees are bilingual or multilingual, researchers are likely to encounter a language-mix in in-
terviews, as Nora encountered in some interviews during her research on marriage decisions
and relationship worlds (Kottmann 2016; 2019).
Key issues
Conduct the interview in the language the interviewee is most comfortable with. Study spe-
cialised terms related to your research topic. Don’t be afraid to ask your interviewee if you
don’t understand what she is saying during the interview or to get help from native speakers.
Reflect on the language(-mix) used in the interviews.
7. The process of interviewing: Listening, contradictions and

(non-)verbal expressions
The interview process can be roughly divided into an introductory, main and final part (Hopf
2007, p. 356). Before the interview starts, the researcher should briefly explain the interview’s
goal and procedure, and talk about ethical norms, such as anonymity and how the data will be
used. After some small talk, she should ask if she can turn on the recording device and start
with more general introductory questions (see McLaughlin, Ch. 6). In case the interviewee has
asked for the questions to be sent in advance of the interview, going over the questionnaire is a
good place to start. Be transparent and create a pleasant atmosphere to get interviewees to talk
more freely. We usually start an interview by asking informants for a brief self-introduction
(jiko shōkai) or to talk about an item related to the topic. Cornelia, for example, brought fair-
trade chocolate from Germany to interviews about food labelling. In all interview approaches,
it is important to begin and proceed with an interview in a way ‘that makes the conversational
partner feel comfortable, [the researcher] obtains [the] needed information, and [that] is com-
patible with the researcher’s [and the interviewees] personality’ (Rubin/Rubin 2006, p. 31).
After the introduction, researchers then ask main questions, follow-up questions and probes
(Rubin/Rubin 2006, pp. 134–139). In the main part of the interview, it can be helpful to con-
190
tribute one’s own thoughts and experiences on the subject matter to establish ‘conversational
partnerships’ (Rubin/Rubin 2006, p. 79). These contributions should be limited so as to not
influence the interlocutor or direct the narrative. Regardless of the interview type, it is impor-
tant to listen to the interview partner and not interrupt her. Similarly, a researcher should also
‘listen’ for the stories that have not been told. This may require accepting moments of silence,
ambiguities and contradictions. Both researcher and interlocutor might feel uncomfortable
with silences, but not interrupting the ‘flow’ of thinking and talking can also offer insights.
The same is true for evasive replies, when there is no response and when the interviewee does
not address salient topics—one can gain insights from what is not said. In addition, it is im-
portant to pay attention to body language, tone of voice, speech rhythm and the overall atmo-
sphere, as well as one’s own immediate feelings as they are meaningful and can be understood
as commentaries on the verbal data (Kaufmann 1999, p. 117).
Possible ways to handle contradictions in interviews that can be seen as ‘normal’ ‘internal con-
flicts in narratives and descriptions’ (Brinkmann 2014, p. 288) are to either ask follow-up
questions or to simply continue conducting the interview as planned. This also applies to ‘un-
true’ narrations. One of Nora’s informants told a life story that significantly differed from in-
formation about the interviewee that was obtained from other informants (including her mari-
tal status). Despite the interviewee deflecting questions, Nora still decided to continue with the
interview, which later provided enlightening material with regard to the research question. It
also demonstrated that instead of asking if stories are ‘true’ or not, it is important to reflect on
how is what (not) being told and ‘what truth did [the interviewee] tell’ (North 2009, p. 31).
The final part of an interview is often devoted to enquiries on specific topics that came up dur-
ing the interview. To be able to ask these follow-up questions, Cornelia recommends taking
notes during the interview. Before ending an interview, we usually include some open questions
that allow further room for the interviewees to reflect on their interpretation of the topic (‘Is
there anything you would like to add?’) (see Sternsdorff-Cisterna, Ch. 2.1). After you have ob-
tained all the necessary information or if the interviewee starts checking the time, thanking
them and switching off the recording device is a practical way to end the interview (see be-
low). For further valuable insights and out of politeness, we recommend accepting invitations
for a joint meal after the interview (see this chapter, Alexy, Ch. 7.3). Akiko Yoshida (see Ch.
5), on the other hand, is reluctant to accept invitations due to concerns about bothering the
interviewees. In any case, a researcher should always carefully consider the situation before ac-
cepting an invitation.
Key issues
Creating a pleasant atmosphere and asking introductory questions are a good way to break
the ice at the start of an interview. Don’t interrupt your interviewees and listen to the stories
that are (and are not) told. Endure silence and contradictions, and also take non-verbal ex-
pressions into account. End the interview with open questions that invite the interviewee to
bring up their own questions on the topic and possibly add issues.
191
8. Negotiating interviewer–interviewee relations and reflexivity
Just as it is important to create a comfortable atmosphere during an interview, it is also crucial

to create a comfortable relationship between the interviewer and interviewee. This is greatly
influenced by the interview approach. In ethnographic interviews—in contrast to more struc-
tured interviews—the relationship tends to be more ‘equal’ and the roles are more blurred.
However, regardless of the interview form, the relationship has to constantly be negotiated—
as do mutual expectations, aims and interests. The researcher, therefore, has to face the diffi-
culty of balancing proximity and distance, strangeness and familiarity, being an insider and an
outsider, being empathetic or not, as well as being active and passive (Flick 2006, p. 118, 120;
Rubin/Rubin 2006, pp. 81, 86–89). Negotiating these balances can be particularly difficult in
interviews on sensitive issues, such as illness and death (Spoden 2015). The expectations of the
interviewee(s) may also differ significantly: they might expect the interviewer to adopt their
perspective (and support them) or they might regard the interviewer as an ‘expert’ who can
give ‘objective’ advice on various matters.
These topics are closely connected to a researcher’s positionality and reflexivity: that is, being
aware of one’s implicit assumptions, questioning them and being conscious of the impact or
influence of the researcher on the research in general, and the interview specifically (Brayda/
Boyce 2014). The importance of reflexivity is widely acknowledged. Yet, researchers refer to
this process with different terms, such as ‘being self-aware’ (Rubin/Rubin 2006, p. 31f.) or do-
ing ‘backyard research’ (Creswell 2014, p. 87f.). Reflexivity also refers to a researcher’s socio-
demographic factors, like age, gender, nationality and marital, familial or occupational status.
Certainly, the interview and stories the interviewees tell depend significantly on the researcher
(Takeda 2013). Genaro Castro-Vázquez, for example, experienced in his research on intimacy
and reproduction in Japan that his interlocutors—all of them married women between the
ages of 29 and 45—‘found conversation on intimacy […] challenging’; especially in front of a
single, childless, middle-aged, non-Japanese male scholar (Castro-Vázquez 2017, p. 66, 186).
Being a non-native, obviously not Japanese researcher also has significant (often positive) im-
pacts on the interviews. Nora, for example, experienced the situation of her interlocutors ex-
plaining many things in great detail that they assumed she didn’t know as a non-Japanese.
Considering reflexivity is also important when working with research assistants, as James Far-
rer (2013) elaborates on in his research on sexual stories of Chinese women in Shanghai.
Key issues
When negotiating interviewee–interviewer relationships, reflexivity is important. It is essen-
tial to be aware of one’s own implicit assumptions, to question them and to be conscious of
the impact or influence of the researcher on the research in general, and the interview specif-
ically.
192
9. Recording, taking notes and (not) transcribing
During interviews, many researchers record their interviews as audio files via a voice recorder
or smartphone. Others create videos or take pictures. It is important to always ask for permis-
sion to record before the interview begins. Some researchers and ethics boards demand written
consent for you to record an interview on audio and video files (see Slater et al., Ch. 16.2),
and always bring a form to sign to the interview. Others ask for permission by email prior to
the interview. Some scholars recommend taking notes, even if the interview is recorded, as
there are cases when audio files are incomprehensible. If one does take notes during an inter-
view, it also helps to pick up on topics your interview partner mentions and to grasp non-ver-
bal expressions.
As soon as one leaves the interview site, it is helpful to find a place to sit down and write up
everything one remembers from the interview: describe the situation, number of people, the
vibe, maybe even draw a map of the room and where everyone was seated during group inter-
views (see this chapter, Yamaguchi, Ch. 7.2). This is important even when recording, but espe-
cially when taking notes during the interview is not possible, as Patricia Steinhoff (2003) expe-
rienced when conducting interviews in prisons. After such interviews, we recommend jotting
down quick notes before writing a longer report. Last but not least, make sure you store your
audio files and notes. McLaughlin (2010, pp. 17– 18) advises researchers to ‘save everything
in at least three places’ such as one’s computer, a flash memory, an external hard drive or on-
line.
In the likely case that a researcher records her interviews, she has to decide after the interview
whether to transcribe the audio material and, if so, which method to use. While some re-
searchers see transcribing as a ‘necessary step on the way to […] interpretation’ (Flick 2006, p.
288), others are resistant to making a full transcription as they argue that the nature of the
raw material changes in the process and loses its depths and complexities, which are inherent
in speech rhythm, tone of voice and breaks of silence. Jean-Claude Kaufmann (1999, p. 117),
for example, recommends only transcribing important parts of the interviews, while constantly
relistening to the whole audio data.
If the researcher decides to transcribe (some parts of) the interview, she also has to decide on
the level of detail of the transcription: from notes to written versions of the interviews up to
extremely precise transcriptions that include stalling words, as well as their pronunciation. As
transcription can be extremely time-consuming, it might be helpful to get (paid) assistance
when a detailed full transcript is required and/or use a transcribing device operated by a food
pedal and/or transcription programs.3 For most projects, however, transcripts do not have to
be perfect. Decisions on the level of detail should be based on the level of analysis and ‘include
any information that might influence the interpretation, such as laughter or gestures of empha-
sis, [breaks of silence] or puzzlement’ (Rubin/Rubin 2005, p. 204). Regardless of the level of
detail, it is important to create a table in which important abbreviations and characters are in-
troduced and explained. It is especially necessary (and vital for analysis and writing) to clearly
mark direct citations and parts which are summaries of what was heard (Kottmann 2016, pp.
117–119).
3 See, for example, FOLKER (free of charge).
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Key issues
Always take notes, even when you record the interview. Sometimes the most interesting
things are said after you have turned the voice recorder off. Document all information about
the interview, the interview situation and your informants immediately after the interview
and store them in different places. We recommend transcribing at least part of the interview.
Transcriptions do not have to be perfect but should include non-verbal expressions. A table
with abbreviations and a clear mark-up of direct citations is helpful.
10. Following up and keeping in touch
Scholars writing about fieldwork in Japan advise researchers to ‘follow up every interview
with a thank you, either in writing or by phone’ and suggest writing ‘thank you letters on
high-quality paper’ (McLaughlin 2010, p. 13). This is not only because of the importance of
trust, social networks and reciprocity for fieldwork in Japan (see Gagné, Ch. 6.1), but also be-
cause one might want to contact sources again for questions that arise during data analysis or
to ask them for follow-up interviews. Recently, social media has become an equally important
means for expressing gratitude and maintaining long-term relations with informants. In addi-
tion to writing thank you notes, Gerster (2018) also likes the informant’s personal social me-
dia profile and shares pictures via Facebook and Line. Through social media, Skype or emails,
a researcher can stay in touch easily with informants to ask follow-up questions or to ask for
help in gaining access to informants for a new research project. When Cornelia (Reiher 2012;
2017) started a new project on food safety in Japan, she first contacted farmers she knew from
her previous fieldwork in rural Japan. Many researchers even maintain life-long relations with
their informants, particularly when they have conducted fieldwork over a longer period of
time (see Gagné, Ch. 6.1).
Interviewees and gatekeepers might ask the researcher for favours as well. Although ideally in-
formants will collaborate in research projects voluntarily (Sluka und Robben 2012), reci-
procity in the research process means that researchers should return favours to informants and
gatekeepers to thank them for their support and efforts (McLaughlin 2010, p. 7). Cornelia, for
example, regularly meets with consumer advocates and bureaucrats from Japan who come to
Berlin to study the German food system. Sometimes informants also expect researchers to take
sides, represent their views and advocate for them. After Japan’s 3.11 triple disaster, for exam-
ple, some called for enhanced political engagement and scholar activism and raised questions
about researchers’ responsibility towards those being studied (Yamashita 2012). Particularly in
Anthropology, reciprocity also refers to ‘reciprocal processes with tangible benefit for local
communities, if ethnographic work is to continue’ (lewallen 2007, p. 509). This might also in-
clude presenting one’s findings to informants before and after the research is finished (Gerster
2018). In some cases, however, it is impossible to maintain relations with informants. Some-
times this is due to sensitive research topics, but in other cases research participants can no
longer be located (Steinhoff 2003, p. 39, 40), are simply too busy or are not interested in re-
maining in touch.
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Key issues
Thank your interlocutors for the interview and try to maintain relations with them. You
might have follow-up questions or want to conduct follow-up interviews. Reciprocity means
that interviewees may also ask you for favours, which should be reasonable.
11. Summary
In this chapter, we have provided an overview of qualitative interviews used in research on

Japan. Qualitative interviews should be conducted in a reliable and ethical way. This requires
researchers to actively reflect on the entire interviewing process and make the process trans-
parent to their audience. Reading the literature on interviews from specific disciplines is a
good first step to prepare for conducting interviews in Japan. But it is important to bear in
mind that conducting interviews in a different cultural setting presents specific challenges, es-
pecially in regard to language and getting access to informants. Therefore, reading about inter-
viewing in Japan, reviewing literature on methodology in Japanese and asking your Japanese
colleagues for advice are all helpful before getting started. We found interviews to be a won-
derful way to study people’s lifeworlds, opinions, experiences, values and beliefs in and outside
of Japan. Meeting informants in person at a variety of places, listening to their always interest-
ing stories and experiencing their kindness has been a great experience for us. We encourage
you to give it a try in order to gain one more perspective on Japan.
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7.1 The empire of interviews: Asking my way through Japan
Christoph Brumann
Quite a few Japanese have told me that their culture does not encourage self-expression, but in
my ethnographic research in the country, I have never managed to confirm this stereotype. On
the contrary, and in a play on Roland Barthes (1970), I consider Japan the empire of inter-
views: many Japanese are familiar with this kind of interaction, even if only from the mass me-
dia, and are sufficiently polite, patient and curious to try and subject themselves to the exercise
even when it is for the first time in their lives. Interviews can therefore be a valuable tool for
social research in Japan. In the following, I will reflect on my experiences with this method,
hoping that this will provide ideas and encouragement for the reader’s own practice.
As a social anthropologist, I have used interviews in all my ethnographic research projects, be

it on Japanese utopian communes and their histories and current conditions (Brumann 1996),
the gift-giving practices of my former landlord in Tokyo (Brumann 2000), the conflicts about
heritage conservation and urban development in Kyoto (Brumann 2012) and the decision pro-
cesses of the World Heritage Committee (Brumann 2021), where my broad set of interlocutors
included Japanese nationals. In 2016, I also used interviews for a yet unpublished study of
Buddhist temples in Kyoto. The first Kyoto study in particular included over a hundred formal
interviews, and I must have spent months of my life asking Japanese individuals questions and
listening to their answers. Most of the time, I enjoyed myself—when interesting people open
up about a topic one is interested in, this can be a stimulating experience.
I am a dilettante in the sense that beyond some reading in methods handbooks, I have never
been formally taught how to do interviews, proceeding in a more or less intuitive way most of
the time. This is certainly easier with the ‘open-ended’, narrative type of interviews I conduct-
ed most often: in these cases, I had no rigid questionnaire to be ticked off but only a laundry
list of items to be covered, often on just one or two pages. These could include fairly precise
questions but also more vaguely delineated topics. Such an open methodology has the advan-
tage of allowing for discoveries: often enough, my interlocutors revealed facts, views and con-
nections I had not expected. Beyond this, open-ended interviews are good for exploring worlds
of thought and feelings and the chains of reasoning and association in people’s minds.
Interviews are better suited to retrieving stories than to checking isolated facts. Quite often,
the people I met were involved in some sort of structured activity I was interested in, repre-
senting a specific cause or the organisation set up to pursue it (such as, for example, an NGO
engaged in saving traditional houses). This meant that upon meeting them for the first time, I
was regularly presented with a stack of brochures, leaflets and press clippings that would often
explain basic facts and positions at least as well as the most structured conversation. Where
possible, this might speak for a brief previous meeting in order to obtain and process such in-
formation, so that precious interview time can be reserved for what cannot be gathered other-
wise. Interviews are particularly good for uncovering the informal side of formal facts: a can-
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did conversation can reveal quite a bit about what official self-presentation really means or
what it actively tries to hide, which is important in a society where appearances count.
Interview strategies
Interviews are contingent social interactions, and I think that it is prudent not to see them as
opening a tap out of which pre-formed pieces of information then flow freely. Rather, an inter-
view is a not very closely controlled experiment in which a researcher and those researched co-
produce something that, at least to some degree, is unique to the encounter and might not
have arisen under different circumstances. Obviously, social scientific research pursues general
insights and therefore aims to control this effect, rather than embellish it (different from, say, a
late-night show host questioning a celebrity guest). Yet still, it is advisable to face the fact of
co-creation, rather than to ignore or conceal it (see Gagné, Ch. 16.2; Klien, Ch. 8.1).
This means that the personality of the interviewer and their way of conveying empathy and
understanding have a bearing. The ability to think (and feel) along is important to keep an in-
terviewee interested and engaged. There are a lot of verbal and non-verbal ways to signal that
one is following what an interviewee says. Beyond this, I talk quite a bit myself in my inter-
views, such as by summarising an important or surprising point and making comments, just as
I would in an everyday conversation. This no doubt increases my impact on what happens,
but I tend to think that it helps to maintain the intellectual and emotional flow, and since not
influencing what the interlocutor utters is impossible (see above), I prefer such a dialogic ap-
proach to reading out a question and then falling silent, come what may. What I still have to
learn, however, is to resist the temptation to finish sentences in the interviewees’ stead, such as
when they are groping for words or prefer not to express the obvious—I am sure that this has
cost me a number of interesting quotes, and tolerating a moment of silence until the intervie-
wees finish a sentence in their own words can have its advantages.
When asked for an interview, quite a few people will offer one hour even when they often end
up talking longer than initially intended. After one and a half hours or two, concentration of-
ten starts to drop on one or both sides, but I have also had rewarding interviews of double
that length. It may then be preferable to meet more than once, however, and in my Kyoto re-
search, I interviewed some individuals half a dozen times or more. Staggering the encounters
in this way also allows the prior ones to be digested and new questions to be built on the in-
sights gained.
Interviews do not prescribe a one-on-one format, and it was sometimes the interlocutors them-
selves who preferred to meet me together with their married partner, their colleagues or anoth-
er researcher intent on questioning them. I myself brought the person who had provided the
contact or my own colleague in a number of cases. In Kyoto, I did a whole series of interviews
with a circle of elderly female friends who regaled me with their reminiscences of the social
mores of their youth. Here, the control I exerted over the encounter diminished greatly—the
animated conversation took leaps and bounds, making systematic coverage of any given topic
difficult, but the joint excavation of memories brought up things that each lady might not
have thought of on her own. Group interviews can also ease the stress of simultaneously lis-
tening, taking notes and thinking about the next question, given that the flow of conversation
depends less on one’s own input.
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Christoph Brumann
For some projects, systematic comparison across a number of interviews is a possibility, and I
did interview series with all the members of a citizens’ group I observed in Kyoto or most
households in the neighbourhood where I had followed the Gion festival (Brumann 2012, pp.
15–45, 156–208). This might require a different approach to interview questions. In my case,
many of my questions were identical and a comparison was intended. For strict comparability,
however, a written questionnaire is often the better choice, as it exposes all individuals to the
questions in the same way. Integrating a not too arduous survey in an interview can lighten the
mood, and I used one in a number of my interviews (see Holthus/Manzenreiter, Ch. 5.3;
Yoshida, Ch. 5). For example, I included a test where I asked Kyotoites to sort photos of
buildings according to their personal likes and dislikes (Brumann 2012, pp. 211–219). This
yielded both a numerical data set and the live comments the interviewees made when fulfilling
the task.
In the course of long-term fieldwork, interviews often grow out of prior social encounters and
are followed by further ones. This usually makes for more relevant and suitable questions and
more trust. Interviews can become intimate occasions—encouraged by the flattering interest in
their personality and views, quite a few interlocutors end up revealing more than they initially
intended, and mutual understanding makes people feel closer. This can increase trust and sup-
port in subsequent encounters, and the choice of interview partners might reflect this hope,
not only what they might have to say in the specific interview.
Recording and ethics
Strategising should not involve deception, however. Research ethics require disclosing one’s
own identity and purpose at the outset, and in line with common anthropological practice, I
assure my interlocutors that they will remain anonymous in my writings. Sharing the contents
or recordings of an interview with others requires explicit consent. Depending on the topic,
individuals may not be worried about being named or even insist on it. Such demands should
be treated with circumspection but, where possible, with the interviewee’s wishes as a guide-
line.
If interviewees agree—and a number of times, I was overly cautious in asking—audio record-
ing an interview is an option. Some interlocutors refused to be recorded and others became
perceptibly nervous, but most Japanese I met did not mind and seemed not to adjust their can-
didness greatly. I share Ellis S. Krauss’s observation (2003, pp. 182–183) that the device is of-
ten completely forgotten—it sometimes came back to mind only when I stopped the recording
in the end, prompting the occasional sceptical remark and my reconfirmation of confidentiali-
ty. I usually offer to send my interlocutors the sound file of the interview, which some of them
accept.
A recording is, of course, a more faithful rendition than taking notes and allows for repeated
listening, including also of passages one failed to grasp initially. When the precise wording of
longer passages is not an issue, however—and in much research, it is not—one can also jot
down notes (in my own case, often in a mix of Japanese and my native language German). To
avoid long pauses, it is advisable to be brief here, writing just enough to jog one’s memory
when typing or dictating a full version of what was being said. Time should be set aside for
198
this purpose immediately after the interview, and I was often surprised how much detail I
could still remember then.
Sound quality is important: most current smartphones make good recordings but particularly
in noisy environments such as cafes, an external microphone can be advisable, and stereo
recording makes it easier to filter out the interlocutor’s voice from background chatter.
Scratching and knocking on tables can produce disturbing sounds when a device is placed on
them without cushioning. For outdoor situations, the device or microphone must have wind
protection (I lost a good part of one interview by not paying attention to this). It is best to test
the equipment beforehand or use earphones to assess conditions.
Recordings are a blessing and a curse, given that in order to be useful, they must be processed.
I generally discourage full transcriptions. It is better to type summaries of what was being said,
including the occasional verbatim quote, but even that takes many times longer than the inter-
view itself and has kept me busy for months on end. So unless one has help, it might be best to
devise an indexing system with keywords under which hyperlinks lead directly to the respec-
tive interview passages. Text analysis software such as MAXQDA allows for this option, and I
am sure there are other possibilities. In this way, analysis can precede the selection of telling
passages that are worth writing down and translating. To analysis the interviews must lead:
gratifying as they might be, they are not an end in itself but just a step towards a result. Exces-
sive quotations—down to ethnographies consisting almost entirely of raw interview passages
(Dwyer 1982)—can be taxing for the reader, whose main interest is often the researcher’s
voice.
In closing, I stress that much of what I do in interviews I learnt on the job and I have perhaps
not reflected too deeply on it. The reader should take this as encouragement not to shy away
from trying interviews themselves, starting perhaps with those interlocutors who are least like-
ly to be estranged and most open to a second attempt if things do not work out as planned.
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7.2 The art of interviewing: A Japanese perspective
Tomiko Yamaguchi
In recent academic discussions in Japan, the value of qualitative research methods has been in-
creasingly appreciated across a wide range of disciplines, from Sociology and Anthropology to
Public Policy, Nursing Science and more. While ‘qualitative research’ encompasses a variety of
techniques, including participant observation and text analysis, the focus of this chapter is
qualitative interviews: in particular, guiding principles and practical aspects of carrying out
qualitative interviews in Japan. I will address here what qualitative interviews are and what we
can learn from them, as well as the art of interviewing in Japan.
What are qualitative interviews?
A qualitative interview is a research method whereby a researcher seeks answers to an estab-

lished research question by eliciting people’s thoughts, opinions and attitudes. Put simply,
qualitative interviewing is ‘a conversation with a purpose’ (Berg/Howard 2007, p. 105). There
are various ways that qualitative interviews are carried out, such as in-depth interviews, which
are usually done one-on-one, and focus group discussions. While in-depth interviews are used
to gather data on individuals’ perspectives and experiences, focus group discussions use group
dynamics to elicit data on the cultural norms and practices of the group and to gain overviews
of issues. My own rule of thumb, when a project is relatively new and I am not yet familiar
with the topic, is to use the group discussion method to learn who is who in the field and their
relationships. My own project that examined nanotechnology in food was new to me in the
sense that I did not know key people in the field, so I chose the focus group discussion method
(Yamaguchi 2011). The method helped me greatly to learn who is who and identify important
issues on the topic. Similar types of information gathering can also take place by attending
programmes such as public forums, conferences and seminars; that information can later be
used to make an appointment for in-depth interviews. I attempt to do ‘homework’ thoroughly
when carrying out a project in Japan, because the fact that I am Japanese and a professional
researcher means that there are expectations that I have a decent knowledge about the subject
and have maturity of judgement regarding the situation; maturity means knowing what to ask
and what not to ask.
When dealing with a topic some of whose elements are familiar (e.g. issues problematised
within that community, technical words used by informants, or acquaintanceship with at least
one or two key informants) and when I feel confident, I choose to use in-depth interviews right
away. As the idea of ‘the active interview’ (Holstein/Gubrium 1995) suggests, an interview not
only functions as a form of dynamic social interaction between the researcher and the respon-
dent, but also involves the active participation of the respondent in shaping the meaning of the
200
social phenomena studied. Therefore, I try to pay close attention to the timing of carrying out
interviews so as to carefully cultivate field relations.
What can we learn from qualitative interviews?
First, interviews are a good method to help the voices of marginalised people to be heard, pro-
vided that we listen carefully to what they say in order to learn from the perspectives of the
people interviewed (see Ganseforth, Ch. 4.2; Slater et al., Ch. 16.2). For example, using a life
history approach, Yukiko Araragi (2017) carried out a study of people with leprosy, explicat-
ing the experience of people who were forced to live in a sanatorium. Through careful conver-
sation and listening, Araragi built trustful relations over a period of years with people suffer-
ing from social discrimination, and thus gathered and reported on stories which otherwise
would not have been known by the majority of people. Similarly, by listening and observing
carefully, Christopher Bondy (2015) explored the question of what it is like to grow up as
burakumin (Japan’s largest minority group and an outcast group) in contemporary Japan.
Again, the perspectives of burakumin are rarely heard. My own project that dealt with Latino
organic farmers in California was an attempt to understand the livelihood of immigrant or-
ganic farmers who are minorities in the organic sector in the U.S. (Yamaguchi 2016a). What
these studies demonstrate is that qualitative interviewing can be a powerful tool with which to
uncover personal experiences that individuals have hidden, either willingly or unwillingly, of-
ten because they are at odds with the dominant norms, values and beliefs of wider society.
Second, qualitative interviewing can also enable researchers to understand complex and con-
tradictory social phenomena. Complex problems are often multifaceted; thus it would be use-
ful to carefully unpack the experiences of varying stakeholders situated in differing sociocul-
tural, economic or political contexts. For instance, by examining radiation contamination of
food and farms in Japan, some researchers have shed light on the experience of organic farm-
ers after the Fukushima accident (Kimura/Katano 2014; Yamaguchi 2016b), while another
looked at the experience of mothers in Fukushima (Sternsdorff-Cisterna 2015), and yet anoth-
er carried out interviews with public policymakers, scientific experts and consumers (Reiher
2017). We learn from these studies that, for farmers, the major issue has been whether and
how to continue farming; on the other hand, for mothers, or more broadly for consumers, the
issue has been about the safety of food for their children. Differing takes on the problem sug-
gest multiple and contradictory social agendas, which raises difficult issues for public policy-
makers who are responsible for finding a way that is agreeable to most people. An interview
method which stands on the premise that none of these perspectives is privileged is useful for
unpacking complex social reality.
Third, qualitative interviewing allows one to go beyond current incidents and to gain insights
into past events. Studying a political riot involving Korean Japanese in Osaka in the 1950s, for
instance, Sara Pak (2010) interviewed people who were involved in the riot and asked them to
reconstruct incidents from their point of view. In short, qualitative interviews enable the re-
searcher to explicate the complexity of the real world by shedding light on matters that are
unnoticed or hidden, and by unpacking things that are complexly entangled.
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Tomiko Yamaguchi
The art of interviewing
When carrying out interviews in countries outside one’s own, one may encounter new chal-
lenges. Some are practical, such as conducting interviews in a foreign language or with an in-
terpreter, and others have to do with cultural logic and how to navigate interview dynamics in
order to overcome cultural differences. I will delve into the latter.
To gain access to interview subjects, introductions from someone who knows the people are
key (see this chapter, Alexy, Ch. 7.3; McLaughlin, Ch. 6; Yoshida, Ch. 5). This is the case with
any fieldwork situation but is especially so in Japan, as noted by a number of U.S. scholars
with experience (Bestor et al. 2003b). Many overseas researchers who have carried out studies
in Japan indicate that people know ‘how to avoid a substantive response’ if an interviewee is
uncomfortable with a researcher (Bestor et al. 2003a, p. 14). One may thus spend hours ask-
ing questions, but get practically no answers, or interviewees may give socially acceptable but
insincere replies. I almost always look for someone who can introduce me to an interviewee;
through that person an interviewee has a chance to find out about me and my intentions be-
yond what it says in a formal letter of request. Providing this background information before I
am physically present helps to set the tone for our eventual conversation. This will be seen as
my attentiveness or thoughtfulness (kiokikasu) or even my respect for the interviewee. The
other reason that I go through someone is that I deal with socially contentious issues such as
the use of genetically modified food and social conflicts over food safety; society is often divid-
ed on these issues (Yamaguchi 2014; Yamaguchi/Suda 2010). Therefore, people generally tend
to be on guard. Going through someone may ease tensions, and also makes it easier and less
embarrassing for an interviewee to decline the interview request if they are not comfortable
being interviewed. After all, qualitative interviews are carried out in a conversational style; in-
evitably they are entangled with cultural norms, and thus paying close attention to what is ex-
pected culturally is important.
Once an appointment is made, the question is how to conduct the interview. Unfortunately,
there is not one perfect way of dealing with interviews because each interview situation is
unique and grounded in a particular context. Upon exchanging name cards with you, intervie-
wees will obviously have some sense of your social position, expect that you have done some
homework (studying the subject), and expect you to know and respect appropriate social
norms, though often this sense of ‘appropriateness’ varies from individual to individual. So
you will need to figure things out each step of the way by carefully observing interactions with
interviewees. What is required resembles an art—a practice and a habit that reflects connected
ideas. There are four pieces of advice I would like to give based on my experience.
First, even if you might not be fully confident with your Japanese language proficiency, do not
be afraid. Foreign researchers may have an easier time than native Japanese in getting people
to open up to them (see Holthus/Manzenreiter, Ch. 5.3). Why is this? In Japan (and in Asia
more broadly), if one is ‘a visitor’ or ‘an outsider’, people tend to be more generous and cour-
teous, which frequently translates into willingness to share stories and information with a visi-
tor. When I carried out fieldwork in India during my graduate school days, even without an
introduction, I was given opportunities to meet and interview key informants such as farmer
leaders and high-profile scientists, and was even invited to their homes to carry on conversa-
tions, etc. but my graduate colleagues who were Indian natives were not granted the same op-
portunities. I have heard similar stories in Japan.
202
Second, it is typical for a researcher to encounter reluctance on the part of interviewees when
it comes to openly sharing their thoughts with people they have just met for the first time. Do
not be discouraged by such an encounter. As you make progress with your project, it almost
always gets easier and faster to establish rapport with an interviewee.
Third, when asking questions, start by asking for facts, then gradually move to the questions
that seek people’s opinions and ideas. Factual questions are easier to answer than requests for
opinions. When a person is not directly responding to your question, it could be an indication
that you have infringed on the logic of the individual, or you might have asked something cul-
turally inappropriate. Be thoughtful and respectful, but do not be afraid; even if you make a
blunder, native Japanese are likely to assume that, as a foreigner, you were not well-versed in
their cultural expectations. As long as you apologise and give the interviewee an opportunity
to avoid answering an uncomfortable question, you should be able to part on good terms. You
can always try out that question with other interviewees if the question is important, because
different people will have different reactions to the same question.
Fourth, striking a balance between talking and not talking on the interviewer’s side is impor-
tant. While it may be useful if you tell people about yourself, your ideas on the subject or
about your country throughout an interview, too much talking on the part of the researcher
will generate insufficient and sometimes poor data, so remind yourself that you are there to
listen. In my experience, when responses are long and story-like, it is an indication that people
are comfortable with you. When I hear a comment such as, ‘I’m not sure if I’ve given you the
information you need, but it was fun talking to you,’ at the end of an interview, it is a sign that
the interview has gone well.
Qualitative interviewing is more than meeting people and collecting information about Japan.
It is a medium through which to build relations, gain insights and learn from the experience
and perspectives of others. What you learn through this method will not only change the way
you see and experience the world, but it may also change the people you have interviewed. An
interview is an encounter where your ideas and their ideas come together.
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7.3 Talking through difficult topics
Allison Alexy
Although my research includes many methodologies, ethnographic interviews play a key role
in how I understand and represent contemporary Japan. I am a sociocultural anthropologist
and have conducted two major research projects in Japan. My first project explores divorce in
contemporary Japan, or how people decide what makes a marriage worth ending (Alexy
2020). My second project examines ‘parental abductions’, when one parent takes their own
child and prevents the other parent from having access to it. Broadly, both of these projects
investigate how intimate relationships are shaped by, expressed through and are resistant to
legal categories and changing social norms in contemporary Japan. I analyse the ideologies
and methodologies that people use to imagine, build, critique and dissolve romantic and fami-
ly relationships at a moment when both the heteronormative marriage system, and the post-
war cultural practices that have sustained it, are increasingly under stress. In my research, I
often talk with people about deeply traumatic, difficult or personal topics. In this brief reflec-
tion, I describe why and how I use ethnographic interviews as a fundamental element of my
analysis.
In any humanistic research, the researcher’s own positionality shapes the project, basic as-
sumptions underlying it and people’s willingness to participate in the research (see this chapter,
Brumann, Ch. 7.1; see also Klien, Ch. 8.1; Yoshida, Ch. 5). In this way, it matters that I am a
white American woman who started learning Japanese in high school. I am not a native speak-
er of Japanese, nor do I look phenotypically Japanese. I believe that my visible foreignness is
helpful in my research because it provides a bit of distance for those worried about sharing
personal or potentially stigmatising stories. Multiple people have told me that they imagine a
Japanese researcher might judge them more harshly (see Yamaguchi, Ch. 7.2). While I do not
believe that to be true, their perception shapes my work and what I am able to learn.
In addition to the identifying attributes over which I have no control, during fieldwork I main-
tain a strict perspective of non-judgement. As people tell me about terrible family conflicts or
custody fights, I focus on understanding how they understand the world, responding to what
they think is important. Moreover, all my research is structured by my conviction that every-
one is constantly interpreting and analysing the world. Throughout my participatory research
and interviews, I know the people with whom I am conducting research are smart and
thoughtful about their own lives. They do just as much analysis as I do, if through slightly dif-
ferent lenses and with different goals in mind. In my writing, I work hard to represent people’s
own interpretations in parallel with mine. In the research moment, this means I am always in-
terested in whatever people want to share with me and I am grateful if they want to correct or
redirect my interests.
Ethnographic interviews occur, in my work, within a broader context of participant observa-
tion. I spent most of my research time hanging out with people and participating in their lives
or special events. For any anthropologist, everyday life is just as interesting and important as
204
particular activities. If I really want to understand how divorce changes families, for instance, I
need to have a good understanding of people’s regular lives. I know this volume includes other
chapters more directly focused on participant observation, but it is impossible for me to think
about research interviews outside of that broader context. I can count on one hand the num-
ber of people with whom I only recorded an interview and did not spend any additional time.
Like other ethnographers, my general rule is to accept any invitation; following this logic, my
research has included going to movies, sharing meals, discussing politics and gossiping while
watching TV, among many other mundane activities (see Yoshida, Ch. 5). So when I ask some-
one to participate in an interview, rather than being a one-off interaction, it is often a recorded
conversation interposed within our longer relationship. These interviews regularly include ref-
erence to shared experiences or mutual acquaintances, or are bookended with their direct re-
quests for my assistance or questions about my life. These relationships enable me to meet po-
tential interlocutors through networks of connection.
When I conduct a research interview, I use a format that is intentionally designed to be ex-
tremely flexible. I type and print out the questions I would like to ask during the interview,
clustering them into broad categories. I bring this printed copy of the questions to the inter-
view and physically put them on the table, facing the other person, so interlocutors can see
what I plan to ask. After all, being interviewed by an anthropologist is not a common experi-
ence and people feel more comfortable when they know what is coming. Because anyone who
agrees to be interviewed is likely interested in helping a research project, I have found that
many interview subjects are very concerned about providing me with what I ‘want’ or ‘need’.
While I appreciate their enthusiasm, I have developed techniques to convince them that I have
no particular goals in mind and am genuinely interested in whatever they want to share.
Throughout the interview, I follow their narrative and respond positively to any digressions.
For instance, in my divorce research, the first cluster of questions was gathered under the
heading ‘marriage’ and included questions like ‘When did you meet your (former) spouse?’
and ‘Why did you decide to get married?’ In many cases, when I asked either of these initial
questions, my interlocutor’s response could last more than an hour. These are broad questions
that get people talking about the categories of experience my research explores. When they say
something surprising or confusing, I probe gently on that question to make sure I understand
what they intend to convey. Sometimes my inquiries reflect genuine questions I have—things I
am trying to figure out—and sometimes they instead reflect my attempts to confirm something
I have already been wondering. For instance, see the exchange between Fujita-san and myself
(Alexy 2019, p. 104), an example published in a volume available through Open Access. In
that conversation, he uses the term ‘love like air’ and I respond by asking him what that
means. At that point in my research, I had heard this phrase a lot and literally knew what it
meant, but I needed to confirm my increasing suspicion that this was a key measure some peo-
ple used to judge their intimate relationships. Mr. Fujita’s answer helped me concretise why
intimacy metaphorically described as ‘like air’ was suddenly a flashpoint of tension in the
mid-2000s. Stated another way: sometimes, it is important to play a little dumb in interviews,
both to make sure you do not push your views on your interlocutor and to get independent
confirmation that your ideas hold water.
After asking permission, I record all my interviews using a relatively unobtrusive audio
recorder that I place clearly on the table, pointing towards the other person. I simultaneously
take notes and jot down the time when they say anything of particular interest. This makes it
205
Allison Alexy
easier to quickly find choice quotes later in the process. I never, ever look at my own watch
because that makes people immediately stop talking, thinking you are bored or out of time.
Instead, I always schedule interviews in a very long block of time, so they can go as long as
needed. I have also learned that I cannot be hungry going into an interview; even if I am con-
ducting the interview in a restaurant or cafe, I make sure to arrive with a full stomach so I can
focus entirely on the conversation, rather than shovelling food into my mouth. I bring a small
gift to every interview and offer it after the conversation is over. In Japan, I most typically buy
gift boxes of crackers (senbei), figuring that people either will enjoy it themselves or can easily
re-gift it. In a nice department store, these typically cost about JPY 2,000, and seem like a
small but appropriate gesture of my gratitude.
Towards the end of each interview, I always ask a series of questions that have substantially
helped me expand my research topics and gather richer data. First, I ask if my interlocutor has
any questions for me, and they almost always do. People are legitimately curious about my
background and motivations, and I answer honestly. Second, I ask my interlocutor what they
would focus on if they were doing this research. This question often prompts excellent ideas
that did not come up earlier because I had not thought to ask about them (those pesky un-
known unknowns). Finally, I make a point of waiting as long as possible to turn off my
recorder because the most interesting comments can come at the very end of a conversation,
when everyone is packing up to leave. I always recommend letting the recorder run as long as
possible. After the interview, I pay native speakers to transcribe the recordings. When I am
analysing and writing from these interviews, I work with the Japanese versions and selectively
translate any parts I want to publish in English.
When first mentioning your research to people, it can be helpful to use different phrases to de-
scribe your project, trying out different options to see how people react. For instance, in my
first project, I started by telling people that I was studying ‘divorce’ (rikon) and asking for
their thoughts or reactions. While this provoked interesting reflections, after some months, I
realised that it was too on the nose and therefore had the social effect of alienating people. If,
say, a woman was in an abusive marriage and starting to think seriously about how to address
it, she might not immediately identify herself with the word ‘divorce’, even if that might even-
tually be in her future. Moreover, by introducing my project with that relatively specific term,
I unintentionally excluded all sorts of unhappy but ongoing marriages, and all the people who
might want to divorce but had not yet done so. In the course of my research, I began to use
more inclusive terminology to introduce my project, shifting from framing it as exploring ‘di-
vorce’ to ‘family issues’ (kazoku mondai, which also has the connotation of ‘family problems’
in Japanese). This small shift had the effect of including many more people who were willing
to share their experiences with me. I learned a lot from happily married spouses who ex-
plained what made their relationships ‘good’ and single people who were willing to share their
worries about what was not successful with their parents’ relationship, among others. I am not
sure these people would have been as willing to talk with me if I had more narrowly framed
my project as only about ‘divorce’. Simply broadening my initial introduction to my project
shifted how people responded to it, who was willing to talk with me and the data I was able to
gather.
In English and Japanese, I am a person who thinks through conversation. My research
projects, and indeed my professional identity as an anthropologist, build on this personality
trait. Of course, there are many ways to be a successful researcher, but my final recommenda-
206
tion is to find methods that correspond best to your own tendencies. No matter the topics you
hope to explore, and the discipline(s) in which you are working, there are ways to gather inter-
esting data. As this volume makes clear, no singularly ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ method exists for re-
search and instead should reflect the researcher’s own positionality, personality and interests.
207
Further reading
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CA: Left Coast Press.
Gubrium, Jaber F./Holstein, James A./Marvasti, Amir B./McKinney, Karyn D. (2012): The SAGE hand-
book of interview research. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
Kvale, Steinar/Brinkmann, Svend (2008): InterViews: Learning the craft of qualitative research interview-
ing. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
Rubin, Herbert J./Rubin, Irene S. (2012): Qualitative interviewing: The art of hearing data. Thousand
Oaks, CA: Sage.
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Alexy, Allison. 2020: Intimate disconnections: Divorce and the romance of independence in contemporary
Japan, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
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Japan. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center.
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Brumann, Christoph (2012): Tradition, democracy and the townscape of Kyoto: Claiming a right to the
past. London: Routledge.
Brumann, Christoph (2021): The best we share: Nation, culture and world-making in the UNESCO World
Heritage arena. New York: Berghahn Books.
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Chapter 8
How to observe people and their environment: Participant
observation
1. Introduction
Participant observation is one of the main methods of conducting fieldwork. It helps us gener-
ate new topics, ideas and even theories in a unique way. But being in the field is often hard
work. It takes time, patience and courage to become part of surroundings that the researcher
is probably unfamiliar with, not to mention a great deal of effort to understand their specifics,
rules and challenges. Nonetheless, we want to emphasise that fieldwork is still a lot of fun and
you can get a lot out of it. Fieldwork gets us ‘irritated and stimulated’ (Bergmann 2006, p. 16)
at the same time by giving new insights into daily routines and procedures that we simply
could not examine without being ‘out there’ (see this chapter, Ho, Ch. 8.3; Klien, Ch. 8.1;
Takeyama, Ch. 8.2). By walking through a specific area, speaking to its inhabitants and
dwelling in one place for a prolonged period of time, fieldworkers gain new perspectives,
which would not have been possible if they had not left their comfort zones and shed their
convictions. Participant observation is about becoming a part of an unknown—often at first
glance ‘strange’—culture, milieu or scene. At the same time, we are researchers and have to
stick to some important rules when conducting participant observation.
Our chapter will give a short introduction to conducting fieldwork and participant observa-
tion by discussing its history with a focus on Japan, its theoretical assumptions and its practi-
cal requirements. We will discuss how to select a field—which at times is facilitated by coinci-
dences and surprise—and how to gain or maintain access to it. In addition, we will highlight
why it is so important to think about positioning ourselves as researchers in the field, and how
our decisions during fieldwork affect our research. We are both Westerners and non-native
speakers, a fact that influences our approach. Researchers with a Japanese or even an Asian
background might find that some of our advice does not apply to them. This certainly is a first
indication that fieldwork is not only about ‘others’ but also about ourselves situated in the
field. We will give practical advice on how to conduct participant observation and how to doc-
ument it by taking notes and pictures, using smartphones or recording sounds. We also ad-
dress ethical considerations when participating, observing and interacting in and with the
field.
211
2. What is participant observation all about?
Participant observation requires a specific frame of mind and lots of practice. While this is true
for every method introduced in this volume, participant observation most likely stands out as
a case with special needs. Even though the term participant observation seems to be self-ex-
planatory—being there, observing and taking part—it can raise tricky questions. To what ex-
tent should we participate? Does our involvement not run counter to science as we ourselves
get involved in the field and, as a consequence, alter events? As we mentioned before, partici-
pant observation is about dwelling, about making contact and establishing a rapport. We aim
to gain access to a field in a way that enables us to participate, indeed without disturbing the
setting inappropriately. Participant observation is thus related to daily life experiences in vari-
ous ways. However, without us being visible, people in the field would not react to us and we
would have a hard time finding out what they are thinking by just looking at their actions. In
contrast, being visible will help us to establish rapport, which in turn will also give us access to
the underlying logic of actions. But how can one fit into unknown surroundings while being a
curious, yet informed outsider at the same time?
H. Russell Bernard (2011) has stressed two very important skills which participant observers
have to train: explicit awareness and memory. Explicit awareness, a term he has borrowed
from Bernhard Spradley, refers to the ability to focus on the ‘little details of life’. We usually
tend to ignore such nuances, since they do not seem important for everyday life. As anthropol-
ogists, however, we have to notice these small details. As Clifford Geertz (1987, p. 9) puts it,
our research is about understanding culture as ‘webs of significance’ spun by people, in which
social interaction takes place. To that end, we have to create ‘thick descriptions’. For example,
when someone moves their eyelids very quickly, we cannot be sure whether the reason for this
is because something is irritating their eye or whether it is a cultural way to signal or parody
something (ibid., pp. 10–15). As a researcher doing fieldwork in a novel setting, it is important
to note these details and reflect on them: What is happening? Which questions do we have to
pursue? How are these actions significant in a wider context and can thus be part of a thick
description? And at what point do our own cultural codes and ideas influence our interpreta-
tions? Therefore, participant observation is also a hermeneutic technique about sense-making,
recognising, interpreting and understanding signs (Illius 2012, p. 76). Yet, the ability to notice
subtleties does not suffice. We have to memorise what we discern in order to document it. This
is the first step towards making sense of our observations and fitting them into the bigger pic-
ture of culture. A good researcher should be able to memorise a short sentence verbatim and
write it down ten minutes later, when the time and situation finally allow for it, without dis-
torting an informant’s words. In formal interviews, recording devices perform this task, but in
many instances of fieldwork we have to rely on our faculty of memory.
Explicit awareness and memory are best trained by actually doing fieldwork. Empathy, curios-
ity, a sense for formal frames, etc. are all necessary. Once again, practice and self-reflection are
the path to better fieldwork. In other words, a good participant observer not only observes
others, but also herself! All these points and requirements may sound intimidating for a neo-
phyte, but it all comes down to practice. Going into the field will teach you what locals expect
from you in this very specific situation. This cannot be generalised or gleaned from even the
best manuals. Learning about these expectations and catering to them in the field is the first
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Chapter 8 How to observe people and their environment
step in collecting valuable data. We recommend training your professional awareness in daily
life situations and observing, for example, routines, habits and communications while waiting
for an appointment, travelling by train or other moments when you can watch and learn to be
a precise observer. Try to memorise as much as possible without taking notes and without
guessing (see below).
Becoming a good fieldworker means accepting errors as part of the game. Not every conversa-
tion or participant observation will immediately yield great results and lead to new theories.
Wasting time, getting ill, forgetting about important questions, losing contact to a key infor-
mant—all this can and will happen from time to time. However, such mishaps are quite nor-
mal and part of the process. Entering the field is not laboratory work and can sometimes be
chaotic (Ehn/Löfgren 2012, p. 273); therefore, one should distinguish between the often-ide-
alised descriptions from handbooks and the ‘messy’ practice of actual research in the field.
Key issues
Participant observation requires a specific frame of mind and lots of practice. Explicit
awareness, i.e. the ability to focus on small details and changes, is important for giving good
interpretations and recognising structures. Empathy, patience and learning from mistakes in
the field are important. Participant observation is essential for good fieldwork because it can
add information to your research that your informants may not be aware of themselves and
that you can only gain by observing, reflecting and being out there.
3. Participant observations in Japan: From the 16th to the 21st century
Writing on Japan based on participant observation actually has a long history. When Euro-
peans first reached Kyushu in the mid-16 th century, Jesuit missionaries started to send back let-
ters to their order, in which they assessed the chances of converting the Japanese. Jesuits were
keen observers who tried to understand others, albeit with the strategic goal of conversion
(Rubiès 2017). In the case of Japan, Francisco de Xavier’s letters are an excellent example of
this. Late 19th century travel reports often published as books also used participant observa-
tion (see for example Schliemann 1995).
As many introductions to Anthropology have noted, participant observation first started off as
an acknowledged method of Cultural and Social Anthropology with Bronisław Malinowski’s
book Argonauts of the Western Pacific (1922) Because of World War I, Malinowski got stuck
in the Papua region in 1914. The region was controlled by the British, who did not allow him
to return to Europe. Malinowski made a virtue out of necessity and studied the islanders of
the region in-depth. The ideal of staying in the field for at least a whole year –four seasons!–
to understand the full cycle of rural activities partly originates from his work.
Nonetheless, much of current anthropological research is no longer tied to agriculture. Even

though it still makes sense to stay in the field for prolonged periods in order to fully under-
stand foreign lifestyles, values and beliefs, the ideal of four seasons has lost its meaning. For a
long time, fieldwork based on participant observation in Japan was often tied to rural regions
213
(Hannerz 1980, p. 1). Yet Akiko Takeyama and Swee-Lin Ho’s accounts prove that the div-
ision of cities for sociologists and rural regions for anthropologists is severely outdated. Re-
search today does not have to focus on ‘foreign’ cultures; research just ‘around the corner’
might also yield new insights. Participant observation is no longer bound to a specific spatial
setting. While Ho, Takeyama and Susanne Klien have done their research in rather well-de-
fined places and settings, such as among urban employees, northern Japan or host clubs, fields
are often threaded together by specific questions. For example, Christian’s research (Tagsold
2017) on Japanese gardens in the West spanned three continents and included fieldwork in
more than eighty gardens. It even extended to unlikely places such as a factory, where a tem-
porary stone garden was employed by a laminate company to impress customers with the end-
less possibilities of designing flooring patterns (Tagsold 2016, pp. 293, 294).
In his seminal paper Ethnography in/of the world system: The emergence of multi-sited ehnog-
raphy (1995), George Marcus proposed that anthropologists follow certain concepts rather
than stick to a specific place. He gives a couple of threads to take up when suggesting that one
could follow ‘the people’, ‘the thing’, ‘the metaphor’, ‘the plot, story, allegory’, ‘life or biogra-
phy’, or ‘the conflict’ (Marcus 1995, pp. 90–94). A focus on researching concepts, specific mo-
bile groups and challenges instead of places allows the researcher to deal with the complex
conditions of the intertwined globalised world we live in today. Global flows of people, ideas,
goods, capital, technologies and media, and their unequal distribution, demand fluid, flexible
and mobile research methods (Inda/Rosaldo 2008, p. 4; Welz 1998). The development of digi-
tal communications technologies made it necessary to open up to a form of research that can
cross borders and act in different, but connected places. As a consequence, ethnography be-
comes multi-sited and fit for the 21st century. Multi-sited, mobile and even virtual ethnography
needs to reflect on its methods and fields like every other kind of ethnography. Sometimes it
can also be useful to use autoethnography, that is, the observation of oneself and one’s own
culture.
Key issues
Participant observation in Japan has a long history that began in the 16th century. However,
it only turned into a well-established method in the 20th century. Today, fields of participant
observation are no longer defined solely in terms of place, but rather by the questions that
thread them together. New mobile research practices have arisen. They are able to connect
different places, follow mobilities or/and add to information that is raised in virtual spaces.
4. Selecting field sites
Before we can commence engaging in participant observation, we need to select a field site as a
starting point. ‘Field’ has become the term used for the site we want to observe. A field was
once a well-defined place like a village. Nowadays, we need to think much more about the
boundaries of our fields, as they can actually extend over the entire globe. Yet field sites do
have meaningful boundaries, and it is up to us to define them cleverly—otherwise we would
lose ourselves. Choosing a geographical field for research can be based on a very pragmatic
214
decision, for example when a junior researcher has a scholarship for a year abroad in one spe-
cific area. But settling for a field that relates to a specific research question can be a very de-
manding task, while following a research topic through space is often a complex challenge in
terms of logistics. This is because fieldworkers do not just study books, but real-life situations
that tend to be messy. Sophisticated plans and theories may turn out to be inappropriate when
the reality of the field and the practices explored differ from presumptions or there is a lack of
access to the field. However, coincidences may offer surprising new paths to follow, and a
skilled observer will exploit such situations to find out much more than she could have imag-
ined beforehand. This is why the ideas of lingering, patience and serendipity are so crucial for
fieldwork (Ehn/Löfgren 2012, pp. 273–285; Illius 2012, p. 85; see also this chapter, Klien, Ch.
8.1).
As Paul Rabinow (1977, pp. 125–126) puts it, significant processes of understanding will
sometimes occur when the researcher is waiting and feeling bored or stuck: ‘Slowly and spo-
radically, I was moving in the kind of understanding I was seeking.’ In fact, just staying some-
where and being alert to unfolding events can open up fresh perspectives. In this way, surprise,
chance and attentiveness often lead to new fields and consequently to new findings. Klien (see
this chapter, Ch. 8.1) provided an example of the importance of serendipity from her research
in Japan. When she as a female was not allowed access to sacred events while researching the
Shinto mountain festival, this was not a setback in the end as it turned into a chance to gener-
ate fresh research opportunities.
In his attempt to do research about the social strategies of young people in a neighbourhood
of Chicago's South Side in 1988, French anthropologist Loïc Wacquant (2010, p. 9) joined a
boxing gym and became an accepted member of the local boxing community. After 16 months
of practice, he changed his original research topic into a ‘sociology of boxing’ (ibid., p. 11).
With the approval of the boxing community, he turned into a fully fledged boxer fighting in
the ring. Wacquant then made the best use of his own bodily experience, the thrill of being a
boxer and all the insider information he was able to gain. He turned his data gleaned through
‘observant participation’ (ibid., p. 12) into an impressive book and thus proved that coinciden-
tal access to fields can lead to deepened theoretical understanding if a fieldworker stays alert
and open to any kind of new information. These examples prove that being open, flexible and
most of all attentive are core skills in successful fieldwork.
Of course, being open and attentive does not mean going into a field entirely unprepared; you
still have to do your homework. Fieldworkers should certainly acquire language skills and
knowledge about political, social and economic conditions, while also keeping in mind social
and cultural rules, habits and taboos. In addition, pre-existing research on the region/field will
yield valuable insights and help to avoid conflicts. However, being open to surprises and ques-
tioning pre-existing knowledge concerning the field are indispensable. Ho’s research on
Tokyo’s working life and nightlife and its influence on gender roles as well as Takeyama’s
fieldwork in Tokyo’s host clubs and her findings about affective sensations are excellent exam-
ples of such an attitude (see this chapter, Ch. 8.2; Ch. 8.3).
Openness and (self-)reflexivity in specifying the field as something that does not exist ‘beyond
the imagination of the ethnographer’ (Madden 2017, p. 38) have become even more crucial
since the postcolonial and postmodern turns in Anthropology led to a heightened awareness of
often stereotyped ‘localization of “natives”’ (Clifford 1997, p. 78). Reproducing cultural
stereotypes and established power relations must be avoided (ibid.; Robben/Sluka 2012, pp.
215
18–20). If we follow this train of thought, participant observation is not concerned with
dreams of investigating as yet undiscovered and isolated fields. Rather, our task is to generate
a useful construct that helps us hone the research as a defined ‘synthesis of concrete space and
investigative space’ (Madden 2017, p. 39). Furthermore, we must document the processes of
construction in the most transparent way possible (see Reiher/Wagner, Ch. 16).
Key issues
The selection of a field is about finding a good point to start from in terms of place and top-
ic. Although there is a lot of preparation to be done in advance, it is important to note that
even the best plans will have to be adapted at some point. Being open to coincidences and
serendipities helps to refine research topics and reshape the field. (Self-)reflection is impor-
tant because choosing and defining an appropriate field might otherwise reproduce cultural
stereotypes and established power relations.
5. Gaining access
The next step after identifying a field where you can begin to search for answers to your re-
search questions is gaining access. If, for example, you want to research how cosplayers organ-
ise their conventions in urban Tokyo, simply going to one of these events is the most obvious
way to start. In many fields, being non-Japanese will be enough to attract some basic curiosity
from the people involved and give you a head start in establishing a deeper rapport. Rapport
has long been a keyword for good access to the field. The term describes the ability to connect
to locals, show empathy and gain trust. Only then will a researcher be able to elicit the infor-
mation and feelings that lead to new insights.
However, some fields are not as accessible as a public convention and require more developed
skills to be accessed. People you encounter in the field may not be interested in you at all or
may even distrust you. Luckily, from the various experiences of Christian’s fieldwork, Japanese
people’s interest in foreigners is usually substantial enough to overcome initial thresholds. But
bureaucratic fields can be quite different. Often enough, you will need to identify yourself and
persuade gatekeepers, as we call people who control access to the field, to grant you access. In
these cases—and generally in Japan—having well-printed business cards (meishi) with a thor-
ough Japanese translation on the reverse side is an important precondition for building up
professional credibility. Furthermore, a letter of recommendation in Japanese can be very help-
ful in overcoming obstacles. Knowing people with good networks is important everywhere
around the world. But this is especially relevant in Japan, since being introduced by a trusted
business partner, advisor or friend usually opens up almost any field. Thus, kindly ask profes-
sors at home and in Japan to help with networking. Obviously, in these cases preparing some
sort of interesting omiyage is a good way to show gratitude and will facilitate conversation in
the beginning (see Alexy, Ch. 7.3; Kottmann/Reiher, Ch. 7; McLaughlin, Ch. 6).
Finally, the obvious inroad is having skills and knowledge connected to the field. When one of
us, Christian, was visiting a residential care home for elderly people suffering from dementia,
he first gained access through a colleague. However, his ability to bake a German cake togeth-
216
er with the elderly patients enhanced his contact to the caregivers considerably. Still, fields can
ask for skills you do not have! Studying in rural areas often entails talking to people with a
strong dialect, which will limit the degree of your communication skills considerably, even for
those of you who speak Japanese very well. Here, the best solution is to spend time and learn
the dialect as much as possible—and this, by the way, is what the classic anthropologists did,
who often did not even speak the language of the field at all before going there. Often though,
teaming up with an informant who is well versed in both the dialect and standard Japanese
can help as she can translate for you. In general, it is a good idea to look for one privileged
contact, someone whom you get along with well and who understands your research goals.
This is also a typical strategy of experienced anthropologists in the field.
Key issues
Rapport describes the necessary ability to connect to locals, show empathy and gain trust. It
is very important to bring in your personality and skills to be able to connect to people and
encourage them to spend time with you. Think about who you are and what you can offer
to the field. Whom do you know who could help you to gain access or have valuable con-
tacts to the area, the topic, etc.? Recommendations, mediation and credits are valuable.
How does the field you want to enter work? What can help you gain credibility?
6. Ethical implications
In the wake of postmodern and postcolonial critiques of fieldwork, important debates on

‘writing culture’ and a new awareness of power relations, the notions of ethics, fieldwork and
participant observation have shifted considerably in recent decades (Clifford/Marcus 1986;
Robben/Sluka 2012, pp. 18–23). As a consequence, professional standards for conducting
fieldwork were established: from making prior decisions about field investigation itself to writ-
ing and communicating the findings later on. The American Anthropological Association
(AAA) regularly publishes a Code of Ethics, which states the core ideas about the professional
responsibility of anthropologists (AAA 2012). Obviously, the AAA standards are valuable for
everyone who engages in fieldwork and employs participant observation as a method (see Rei-
her/Wagner, Ch. 16).
The points regarding a researcher’s responsibility towards informants and the fields of research
are particularly relevant. The AAA (2012) reminds us to be ‘sensitive to the power differen-
tials, constraints, interests and expectations characteristic of all relationships’. This requires re-
flection on the potential consequences and impacts research may have for and on the individu-
als, communities, identities, institutions and environments involved. Furthermore, we are re-
minded to be aware of ‘possible ways that the research might cause harm’ (ibid.). Therefore, it
is important to disclose the general aims of one’s research and protect those who participate in
it. Participants should be informed about ‘the purpose, methods, outcomes and potential spon-
sors’ of the investigation and be able to consent with clarity to their participation (ibid.). Rules
of anonymity and credits should be negotiated in advance and renegotiated during the re-
search process if necessary. The informants’ privacy should be protected through the use of
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pseudonyms (ibid.). In her chapter, Ho states that ‘[a]ccess is both a privilege and a responsi-
bility.’ To sum up, participant observation and fieldwork can be considered interrelated pro-
cesses that involve social relations to others and therefore need to be conducted in an ethical
and responsible way. Japan is probably not the most complex case for applying the standards
of the AAA—for example, PR China poses much more pressing questions, especially in regions
with minorities such as Uygur. Yet we can easily think of fields in Japan which need extra care
too. Doing research with people like the homeless or sex workers can quickly lead to conflict
with official institutions and cause harm to research participants if you do not take care (see
McLaughlin, Ch. 6).
This responsibility towards our research partners is closely intertwined with the idea of reci-
procity. Reciprocity means that researchers have to give something back to their research part-
ners for the data they acquire. This can include drawing public attention to a specific problem
as well as (financial) compensation for informants (AAA 2012, p. 22ff.). Fieldwork may also
entail some sort of collaboration and partnership with informants (see Ganseforth, Ch. 4.2;
Slater et al., Ch. 16.2). In many cases, the lives of potential informants are not strictly separat-
ed from the researcher’s own life. The informants will often be able to access our publications,
for example through the Internet. While the latter can be a great form of reciprocity, it also
demands careful anonymisation in order to protect research participants’ privacy. For the pro-
tection of their privacy, responsible storage of research data is also essential (see Reiher/Wagn-
er, Ch. 16).
Key issues
Assumptions and attitudes towards fieldwork have changed over recent decades. In this pro-
cess, ethical questions have become central. We should reflect carefully on our responsibili-
ties to informants as well as the field during the whole research process. This includes trans-
parency about our research as well as considering compensation for the informants’ time
and expenses. The protection of data and anonymity, and the possible impact of our field-
work have to be taken into account.
7. Positioning oneself in the field
When entering a field site, researchers learn a lot about their new environment. But in order to
do so, they have to become visible as people themselves (Bourdieu 2005, p. 404; Schlehe 2008,
p. 139). The idea of the neutral observer who invisibly studies ‘the other’ while adding nothing
to the field is a futile ideal. Such an approach will not invite others to open up and feel com-
fortable (ibid.). Apart from that, hiding oneself is simply impossible over an extended period
of time—especially as a Westerner in a country like Japan. The Swedish movie Kitchen Stories
(Hamer 2003) convincingly and comically narrates the story of a completely failed non-partic-
ipant observation project and is worthwhile for anyone who wants to understand why this
seemingly neutral approach does not work.
Fieldwork does not take place under laboratory conditions. As a consequence, fieldworkers
have to bring in their own personality. Furthermore, and even more importantly, they are at-
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tributed to and perceived by different, intersectional, intertwined settings that influence the
way they are addressed and accepted by potential informants. This can entail freedoms or re-
strictions in terms of the way they are able to explore or even access the field they wish to en-
ter and examine. At that point, we have to reflect on our own status and personality in rela-
tion to the fieldwork at hand. For example, doing research on marriage in Japan as a married
woman puts the researcher in a specific relation to the (un)married informants (Kottmann
2016). Likewise, conducting research on the love lives of employees in Tokyo will yield differ-
ent results depending on the researcher. Ho’s fieldwork (see this chapter, Ho, Ch. 8.3) vividly
proves this point. Thus, our gender, race, power and educational background, profession, na-
tionality, age, etc. all influence how others in the field will deal with us and, consequently, im-
pact our findings.
A focus on power relations during a study, for example, can help disclose our status and pos-
ition to the field and our informants. Possible forms of relations are:
1. Studying down denotes research relations where informants are typically less educated or
empowered than the researcher. An example is Stephanie Osawa’s (2018) research on de-
viant students in a school in Tokyo. Osawa’s position as a researcher employed at a Ger-
man university and as an adult obviously entailed more power than the position of her in-
formants. This was underlined by the teachers introducing Osawa to her informants.
2. Studying up works the other way around. Here, the researcher has less power and influ-
ence, for example in research on political or economic elites (Gusterson 1997; Nader
1972). Studying up is not that rare in Japan, though it has been rather untypical in conven-
tional Anthropology, which can usually be considered as studying down. In the Japanese
case, studying up also raises problems of language. Usually, we would have to use very po-
lite forms to address our informants, not only because we are outsiders, but also because
of status differences. However, seeming too clever and native might have the adverse affect,
because Japanese usually do not expect foreigners to be fluent in grammatical politeness.
3. Studying sideways means that the researcher and the informant in the field have a compa-
rable status (Hannerz 1998, p. 109; Marcus 2006, p. 21; Rao 2006, p. 27). One of this
chapter’s authors, Katrin, conducted participant observation studying sideways. She want-
ed to study members of the mostly well-educated, widely travelled, transnational back-
packer scene. Therefore, it was necessary for her to represent similar experiences in travel
to gain accepted status among her target group (Ullmann 2017).1
As a consequence, it is essential for us to reflect on our major traits, which people will per-
ceive and maybe react to when facing us as a fieldworker. Reflecting on our position is not
only valuable for collecting data. It is also part of our analysis later on as it helps us to
evaluate social relations in the field (Robben/Sluka 2012, p. 2). Former fears of ‘going na-
tive’, meaning that the researcher loses her professional distance and gets taken in by the
field, are often contested today. Without getting temporarily lost, deeper insights will be
hard to gain. In order to write about ‘commodified romance’ in host clubs in Tokyo,
Takeyama, for example (see this chapter, Ch. 8.2), let herself be seduced emotionally and
sensorially while developing ‘affective ethnography’. Even though this is not a research
practice that we would recommend for beginners, it shows what is possible without losing
1 There exist a number of other terms and concepts to describe the way research is done, e.g. ‘studying through’
(Hannerz 2010).
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focus when you are an experienced and self-aware researcher. In most situations, less in-
volvement is sufficient and appropriate. ‘Selective authenticity’, a term from counselling
(Amendt-Lyon 2000, p. 55), might be helpful here. For fieldwork, it means that you should
be fully yourself while doing fieldwork, but like in every human relationship you can
choose which aspect of your personality you actively want to involve in a relationship and
the field. How much you get involved of course depends on you, your subject, and your
ability to stay focused as a researcher and to protect yourself and the people involved.
Key Issues
Getting involved is essential to get any useful information. Fieldwork does not take place
under laboratory conditions. People will reacting to you anyway; when you hide as a person
they will not open up. Think about the (power) relations involved and how to deal with
them. Reflecting on your position in the field will help you to collect better data and to do
better analysis.
8. Cell phones, writing pads and field notes
Traditionally, participant observation has been documented in field notes collected in a field
diary, and this practice still holds up today. Of course, we now use cell phones to make notes
or record voice memos and laptops to write our diaries. Nonetheless, field notes should be
written immediately after finishing the observation process. Memories and other notes can be
backed up by jottings from the field. Carrying a small notepad to instantly jot down an im-
pression, a quote or a sketch is highly beneficial and can be expanded into more extensive field
notes afterwards. In some fields – if, for example, we wanted to know how Japanese behave in
public libraries – it is completely natural to use a laptop from the start. In other settings, even
a traditional pen and notepad might be disturbing, and we have to rely on our memory (see
Kottmann/Reiher, Ch. 7; McLaughlin, Ch. 6).
As a rule of thumb, taking down field notes after observation takes as long as observing itself.
We should be prepared to roughly spend another hour on writing field notes based on observ-
ing an NGO meeting for one hour. Sometimes observing takes the whole day, because our role
in the field does not allow us to leave and start documenting our observations right away. In
these cases, it is wise to focus on specific moments and events because it is simply impossible
to remember everything after a full day of work.
In any case, our field notes should be rich in detail and add a sense of how we came to conclu-
sions on the spot. Noting that ‘the old man looked puzzled’ is unlikely to be very helpful half-
a-year later when you start writing your thesis. Instead, recording more details about what
made you think that this man was puzzled – raised eyebrows or a comment to his wife – will
provide much welcomed information when carving out the significance of this moment at a
later stage. A better description of how you came to the conclusion that this was an old man –
roughly how old? – will also be very valuable in the end. Going into detail can be quite tiring
at times, but without the discipline to write down our observations accurately, participant ob-
servation will not yield good data.
220
Personal feelings are an important part of field notes. We should make the best use of our own
subjective views and emotions, as illustrated by Takeyama’s account (see this chapter, Ch. 8.2)
of ‘affective ethnography’ (Robben/Sluka 2012, pp. 20–23). Your own relation to a situation is
not entirely objective, but it may be useless, or even disturbing, if you do not learn to observe
yourself. It is important to take down what, for example, made you ‘irritated’, and how this
feeling came about and affected you. Otherwise, this bit of information is likely to be of no
worth in the future.
When you are documenting spatial settings, photos are an important supplement to traditional
sketches. Indeed, not using a cell phone to take photos or short movies will often enough mark
you as an outsider today, especially in high-tech countries like Japan! Owing to modern media
we are able to take the field with us in various ways and, for example, learn about changes in
a community via social media or call an important informant when we realise that we forgot
to ask a crucial question. In contrast to the early days of ethnography, these extended connec-
tions demand researchers to think carefully about how they want to go on with the relations
they have formed during their fieldwork (see McLaughlin, Ch. 6).
Key issues
Fields and fieldwork change along with technology. This can be helpful when jotting down
notes, as notepads and laptops are nowadays used nearly everywhere and thus can be em-
ployed without causing confusion in the field. Social media is helpful for staying in contact
after the end of fieldwork, though we have to take care to what degree we want to let the
field intrude into our daily life as researchers at home and how much time we can devote to
staying in touch.
9. Summary
Participant observation can be a lot of fun—and sometimes one even has to be careful about
becoming too immersed in it! Documenting the process and taking field notes certainly feels
more demanding and tedious, but they are extremely important steps in transforming observa-
tions into useful data. And participant observation quite often yields data which could not
have been attained through other methods, thus producing rich and lively examples of ethnog-
raphy.
Students often assume that participant observation is too subjective and introduces too much
bias into research, since we get directly involved with our informants and even affect their
lives while in the field. But it is precisely this kind of immersion and reciprocity that helps us
to see and understand things which may otherwise remain concealed. The great potential of
participant observation and fieldwork is that there will be surprises which will inevitably lead
to new results and findings.
Furthermore, personal experience and its detailed codification in field notes make excellent
material for presentations, papers and theses. Anthropologists usually quote their own field
notes in well polished papers and books in order to add lively impressions. Field notes can also
221
give a vivid account of the researcher’s own problems in grasping the meaning of situations
and coming to terms with local sense-making.
Examples of this writing strategy abound. Sometimes writers are more concerned with estab-
lishing their authority in relation to their readership and sometimes they just aim at conveying
data. But when employed mindfully, field notes can be extremely convincing. Wacquant’s
above-mentioned book Body & soul: Notebooks of an apprentice boxer (2006) is one such
powerful account that uses field notes to a rich and intoxicating effect. Wacquant succeeded in
demonstrating his own, occasionally painful conversion into a boxer in Chicago through many
excerpts from his field diary. His textual strategy certainly is debatable, but that is precisely
why his book offers a good starting point for reflection on field notes as part of a finished
text.
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8.1 Of serendipities, success and failure and insider/outsider
status in participant observation
Susanne Klien
‘You are female, aren’t you?’ I will never forget that question asked by the local government
representative I was talking to on the phone back in 2009 in order to inquire about permission
to conduct fieldwork during a renowned local Shinto mountain festival in Okinoshima, Shi-
mane Prefecture. It turned out that I could not actively participate in the festivities as it was a
sacred Shinto event, with women only taking part in backstage preparatory roles. I remember
my initial frustration, thinking that this was a major setback for my research. In hindsight,
however, I found out that I was fortunate. My partner (who hardly spoke any Japanese but
actively participated) ended up with black and blue knees and aching muscles all over as he
had joined the team that did the two-day preparatory work for the festivities. I, on the other
hand, accompanied the team throughout, but was not actively involved and focused on ob-
serving, gaining important insights in the process. This episode shows that what may be per-
ceived as a setback may eventually turn out to be a merit. Similarly, Thomas Hylland Eriksen
has observed that ‘…Even unsuccessful is rarely entirely unsuccessful, and it is often stressed
that the notorious ability of anthropologists to make fools of themselves in the field […] can
actually be a methodological advantage’ (2009, p. 54).
The above episode also highlights the broad range of roles that participant observation may
entail. Being actively involved is usually perceived as a key feature of fieldwork; yet, external
circumstances may limit the scope of participation. Evidently, being a member of the team
preparing the festivities is bound to give you insights that cannot be obtained by being a mere
observer. Spending extensive periods of time with the group one is researching; sweating and
downing sake together with locals creates a level of visceral rapport that is beyond reach for
armchair researchers. However, ‘simply hanging out’, lingering at the site may in fact give you
a larger analytical sense of the site and its people. It may in fact yield valuable insights into
how people relate to one another, communication patterns, power relations and other key fea-
tures of social life. Thus, the next section is concerned with the concrete process of observa-
tion.
How to observe
Few ethnographers would contest Eriksen’s description of fieldwork as a ‘time-intensive enter-

prise’ (2009, p. 49). After all, researchers spend months, if not years, at their sites. Compared
to other research methods, fieldwork involves large amounts of individual time spent research-
ing a relatively small sample of interviewees. Whereas sociologists and other researchers rely-
ing on quantitative methods regularly criticise this small sample, this constellation has afford-
ed ethnographers the leeway of implementing in-depth observation of their chosen sites (see
223
Susanne Klien
Jentzsch, Ch. 6.1). Ethnography is an effective research tool that facilitates systemic observa-
tion, which does not rely on first (or second) impressions, but combines the researchers’ exten-
sive observations with interviewees’ narratives, often blending these multiple layers of meaning
into an incisive analysis. Once you enter the field, many things that you observe as a re-
searcher may strike you as odd. At this stage, I would say that the key to turning your field-
work into a success is to sharpen your sense of your own view and its limitations—‘seeing
one’s seeing’ (jibun no mie o miru), as Fumitoshi Kato (2009, p. 51) incisively puts it. Certain
assumptions that we take for granted may not be valid in the field; expanding your self-reflec-
tive skills is essential.
Bronislaw Malinowski (1922, p. 2) famously pointed out that ‘foreshadowed problems’
should be a key feature of fieldwork, yet ethnographers are bound to encounter unanticipated
occurrences, phenomena and events. From my own experience, it is these serendipities that of-
ten, literally, open doors to new networks, interviewees and insights. I vividly remember stand-
ing on a square in Ishinomaki, Miyagi Prefecture, during lunchtime, wondering where I could
get a bite to eat. Just then, three elderly local women appeared, opening a door to a place that
looked like a private house. I seized this opportunity to ask them whether that place was a
restaurant; they nodded and asked me to join them. This moment eventually resulted in me
eating a large part of the ladies’ lunch and befriending the restaurant owner, who became a
key interlocutor and, incidentally, my home stay host in later phases of my fieldwork. This
episode indicates that during fieldwork, acting on the spot, behaving a tad beyond what is
considered socially appropriate is often productive. It does not need to be emphasised that re-
specting the local community (or the group of your interlocutors) should be accorded the high-
est priority at all times during fieldwork. In order to seize such moments effectively, however,
we need to sharpen our sense of visceral instinct, something we have often unlearned in aca-
demic contexts.
I generally recommend lingering around wider rather than smaller groups of people, especially
in the initial stages of your fieldwork, but starting with a clearly bounded group may be help-
ful. After some time spent in the field, more specific sets of questions and issues will emerge
that strike your research interest so that you can narrow down your themes. For example, dur-
ing my ethnographic research into disaster volunteers after the Great East Japan Earthquake in
March 2011, I started by signing up as a disaster volunteer myself. First, I mostly spent time
with other disaster volunteers, but later expanded my fieldwork to disaster volunteer coordi-
nators, local government representatives, local residents supporting disaster volunteers and lo-
cal residents who had no personal relations with volunteers. Engaging with diverse groups of
interlocutors gave me a more comprehensive view of the phenomenon I was researching, i.e.
the motives of disaster volunteers to embark on altruistic work. In a similar vein, Roth ob-
serves about his fieldwork among Japanese and Japanese Brazilian workers in Japan that ‘[b]y
talking to as many of these workers, bureaucrats, and other intermediary cultural brokers as I
could early on in my research, I was able to get my bearings in the field site more quickly than
I could have on my own’ (Roth 2003, pp. 343–344; see Goodman, Ch. 1).
224
Challenges during preparation and implementation
As emphasised by numerous other researchers, the way ethnographers enter the field consider-
ably shapes the research to come. The position of the person introducing the researcher to oth-
ers in the field, the gatekeeper, must not be underestimated. For example, during my recent
fieldwork with hip-hop practitioners in Hokkaido, northern Japan, one of my key interlocu-
tors and gatekeeper was a local male who had previously been a DJ in the club that was my
key field site. On the one hand, the fact that he was a veteran practitioner gave me access to
events and parties that were only open to members of the scene, as such events were dissemi-
nated by word-of-mouth (Klien 2020). However, at the same time, the fact that I attended
many events together with him placed me in a special segment of the scene. In other words, I
recommend making informed choices when choosing gatekeepers and keeping in mind that
there are always downsides, regardless of what choice you make. I believe that we can min-
imise such downsides by behaving in an accessible (i.e. open and amicable) manner when
hanging out and encountering members of the site that we are researching, although we have
to accept downsides as facts of life.
Related to this, from my own ethnographic experience, I would like to argue that the most in-
sightful fieldwork results from a balance between the researcher’s insider and outsider status.
As Ian Reader (2003, p. 103) has previously argued: ‘By contrast, my outsider position
worked to my advantage, as my Japanese academic colleague recognized, I had been able to
make a suggestion and get away with what could have been an indecorous request’. Laura
Dales and Beverly Anne Yamamoto similarly note that some of their interviewees ‘would not
have felt comfortable sharing certain stories with us had we been Japanese’ (2018, p. 242). Ev-
idently, being an outsider does entail numerous advantages that we need to work with in order
to obtain incisive results as fieldworkers. During my fieldwork into the hip-hop scene, I aimed
for a balance between inconspicuousness and out-of-the-box questions. My gender turned out
to be more of a merit than a disadvantage as male practitioners seemed eager to share their
thoughts with a female outsider unrelated to the scene—something I had not anticipated at the
beginning of my fieldwork.
General recommendations
To sum up, I will provide four pieces of advice for a smooth fieldwork experience. First, as
previously indicated by Joy Hendry (2003, p. 69), seizing chance encounters is key to success-
ful ethnographic research. I encourage all fieldworkers, especially neophytes, to overcome in-
hibitions to talk to strangers. As outlined in my episode with the senior ladies in Ishinomaki, I
would not have met my long-term host and gatekeeper there had I not followed them on the
spur of the moment (Klien 2016a, p. 44).
Second, verbal statements by interlocutors need to be taken with a grain of salt. Carla Free-
man emphasises the importance of ‘the ways in which they spoke, the timbre and lilt of their
voices, the intensity of their expression, and the look in their eyes’ (2014, p. 135). Make sure
that you do not focus too much on oral narratives, but also observe people’s facial expressions
and body language (see Kottmann/Reiher, Ch. 7). I remember a group interview in northeast
Japan after the Great East Japan Earthquake in March 2011 that I was conducting with two
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Susanne Klien
colleagues, one of whom did not speak a word of Japanese. Sharing our impressions after the
interview was a real eye-opener since the colleague with no Japanese language skills was
forced to focus on facial expressions and body language.
Thirdly and related to that, I highly recommend talking to key interviewees several times and
arranging meetings with them outside the field, if possible (Klien 2016b, p. 362). The field
shapes interlocutors’ statements to a larger extent than we assume, especially in rural commu-
nities. During my fieldwork with lifestyle migrants in Tokushima Prefecture in 2017, a female
settler described her life in her newly chosen community in overly positive terms, although she
did refer to some challenges. Six months later, we met again in Hokkaido. It turned out that
she had decided to leave the community soon after our meeting as she generally disliked rural
life. In a small rural town, she felt that she could not talk freely about her real thoughts. In
other words, talking to interlocutors outside the field may provide more nuanced insights. Last
but not least, listening well is a skill that is usually taken for granted, but is the key to gaining
in-depth insights during fieldwork.
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8.2 Doing and writing affective ethnography
Akiko Takeyama
A splendid wonderland awaits at the bottom of a long staircase as I descend from the mid-
night darkness. On the dance floor, well-dressed men and women hold each other closely as a
romantic melody plays. Under dim light, mildly intoxicated couples flirt. At one particularly
lively table, a handful of young men surround a woman to entertain her. A man kneels down
with a lighter on his palm waiting for a woman to put a cigarette in her mouth. Another man
with a steaming towel in hand waits next to the powder room for a lady’s return. This is a
scene in a Tokyo host club.
The men serving the women are called hosts, or hosuto in Japanese. Their job is to sell love,
romance, companionship and sometimes sex to women for exorbitant sums of money. Deploy-
ing stylised masculinity—feathered fringes, polished nails and fine European suits—they serve
women attentively and seek their fortunes assiduously. Women of a wide range of ages visit the
club to escape from their everyday lives and indulge themselves in fantasy. In and outside the
club, these men and women mutually seduce one another to foster a commodified form of ro-
mance.
I closely studied the art of ‘love business’ for my book Staged Seduction: Selling Dreams in a
Tokyo Host Club (Takeyama 2016). I asked: What does it mean for these actors to engage in
commodified romance? What are the hosts and their female clients getting out of the seeming-
ly feminised labour and apparently fake love, respectively? What does it say about the chang-
ing gender dynamics, lifestyle consumption and market economy in contemporary Japan? To
answer these questions, I conducted ethnographic fieldwork in Tokyo for 36 months. My re-
search methods included participant observation (observing and analysing social events and
activities), in-depth interviews and extensive ‘hanging out’ with my informants in order to see
things from their perspective.
Through my fieldwork, I have found that romance, which evokes anticipation, is intertwined
with the future-oriented aspiration of not only individuals but also of the hosting business
and, by extension, Japanese society at large. The aspiration process itself is capitalised on in
post-industrial society: seducing people out of the present and into a future where hopes and
dreams are imaginable.
Some might ask: How can you study something as vague and undefined as the art of seduction
in future-oriented aspiration? What does it look like? What kind of fieldwork does it entail?
How do you write about the findings? My answer is to do and write what I call ‘affective
ethnography’. Affective ethnography is a tool to invoke one’s own feelings to sense and study
the often invisible dimensions of human experience. It is about vicariously experiencing what
it is like to be seduced by, and seducing, another person into acting out for one’s own, as well
as the other’s, ends.
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Akiko Takeyama
Let me share how I was seduced into a host club in the field. One late Saturday night in
September 2004, I walked alone into Tokyo’s Kabuki-chō red-light district, the bustling centre
of Japan’s sex and entertainment industry. When I arrived, I was hit by the lively sounds of
hundreds of people on the streets, solicitors shouting, computer games and the colourful ar-
rays of billboards and neon signs. It was getting late and I was feeling a bit fatigued by it all,
yet a strange excitement kept me awake.
‘Hey lady, interested in a host club?’ a young man in a black designer suit addressed me off
guard. Across the district, men in such suits attempt to lure salarymen and other passers-by
into hostess clubs and pornographic peep shows. This man, however, was different. He was a
host who advertised both himself and his club to passing women. I became nervous. I did not
intend on visiting a host club that night. I planned to observe the street scene only as an entry
point to my future study. Why did he approach me? I need to be cautious around men like
him. But then again, this would be a great opportunity to learn more about the hosting busi-
ness. Should I just walk away or ask where he works at least?
Up close, he looked different from other hosts, who wore gaudy accessories and had bleached
hair. He was very polite. ‘Well, I am researching host clubs. I came here tonight…’ ‘Why don’t
you come over and see my host club? It’s only 5,000 yen for the first visit.’ ‘Where do you
work?’ I asked. ‘I work for club Orion.’ ‘I have heard of it! It’s a famous one, isn’t it?’ ‘Yes, it
is a long-standing club and known for its fair business practices. You can trust us.’ I decided to
follow him.
His congeniality and openness about his life put me at ease immediately. His host name was
Shin. Passing several clubs and bars on the way to Orion, Shin and I got to know each other.
We learned that we both grew up outside of Tokyo and sought alternatives to conventional sex
roles—salaryman and housewife—in Japanese society. With our growing rapport, the district’s
night scene no longer felt alien to me.
Opening Orion’s heavy door, I felt as if a theatre curtain had been lifted. As I walked in, a
couple of hosts welcomed me with deep bows. Once I was seated, Shin swiftly sat down next
to me. His three ‘helper hosts’ followed to assemble beside us. One carefully laid a lace napkin
on my lap. Another started to make drinks. The other handed me a steaming hand towel and
asked, ‘What is your name?’ ‘Akiko.’ ‘No wonder you are so pretty! There are statistics show-
ing that women named Akiko tend to be beautiful.’ I doubted there were such statistics. The
helper who was making drinks jumped in, ‘Haven’t you ever been told that you look like a TV
announcer?’ ‘Um… no, not really,’ I said. ‘You know, the kind of announcer at a local station
who is lovable … but not quite sophisticated!’ I could not help bursting into laughter. So did
everyone at the table. ‘Cheers!’ They gave me a toast.
At this point, I explained my intention to conduct participant observation and obtained in-
formed consent for my research (see Slater et al, Ch. 16.2). As both a researcher and a client, I
tried to observe the club scene and examine the hosts’ art of seduction as much as possible. I
devoted my initial attention to the space’s theatrical effect and the minutiae of people’s flirta-
tious interactions. While making mental notes, I noticed my knee was slightly touching Shin’s.
I straightened myself and slid my leg away. As I was drawn back into the conversation at our
table, my trouser leg once again rubbed against his. Shortly after, Shin inched slightly closer
and leaned over to me. ‘Are you having a good time?’ he murmured into my ear. His whisper
left a ticklish sensation and the sweet fragrance of his cologne that entranced me. The subtle
228
interaction dramatically transformed the club’s open space into an intimate fantasy world,
wherein Shin’s move, accidental or not, seemed deliberate. This experience allowed me to see
questions I would ask of women who engaged in this service, such as, did it matter whether
every aspect of their experience was motivated by money or not? Thus, my own affective expe-
rience, and my later reflections on it, fed into the interviews and analysis in later stages of the
research.
Intimacy aroused because of—not despite—the presence of others who noted our secrecy but
left us alone. In the imaginary world, my sensual experience and cognitive interpretation felt
all-encompassing. While I tried to make a distinction between what is performed and what is
not, that line became blurry. In this circumstance, nothing seemed clear-cut. There was no way
to solicit the hosts’ real intentions behind their bodily and speech acts and test their truthful-
ness. Affective ethnography, unlike the more traditional approach that prizes objective knowl-
edge, ponders what is unknowable—the territory that is somewhat like the experience of an
eclipse blocking out the light of clear sight. The unknowable territory of ‘eclipse’, however, did
not keep me from seeking further. Instead, it fuelled my pondering about the possibilities of
my future research-and-adventure.
This research experience is, by no means, universal. It is not even a typical one in my own ca-
reer. The experience, especially a sensory one, is contingent on who you interact with, when,
where and how. I would not have visited any club if Shin had not approached me that night.
And even if I had ended up visiting one, I would have had a totally different experience with
another host. These contingencies play an important role in the shaping of our sensory experi-
ence and the determining of its significance.
There was a time, however, when there was little room for ethnographers to reflexively take
into account their sensory experience. The premise in the discipline of Anthropology and So-
cial Sciences at large was the production of objective and impartial knowledge. The positivist
approaches not only suppress anything subjective, including sensory experience, but also erase
it to safeguard objective truth. But, how could I really have elicited anything meaningful about
commodified intimacy from clinical-style interviews and observation at a distance?
Doing and writing affective ethnography was thus central. The sensory experience I shared
above, after all, allowed me to understand commodified romance and theorise the commercial-
isation of hopes, dreams and future-oriented aspiration in Japan’s service-centred economy.
Some might see the importance of affective ethnography but wonder how it is done. The an-
swer is that there is no one right way. There are, however, some principles that affective ethno-
graphers can draw from. Being open-minded and non-judgmental is first and foremost vital.
Allow yourself to believe in your own sensory experiences as part of the fieldwork experience.
You also need to be aware that you do not always know where you are headed before your
actual interactions in the field, even if you have developed solid research questions. There are
multiple possibilities that constantly appear and disappear while you decide which lead to fol-
low.
Affective ethnographers also need to be self-reflexively responsible for their projects. We
recognise that ethnographers are human beings who are situated in a society and whose access
to information is never entirely objective (Pink 2009). Instead of conveniently removing the re-
searcher-self from what is written, affective ethnographers should be honest and self-reflexive-
ly critical about their positionality in the field. In other words, the affective ethnographer’s job
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Akiko Takeyama
is not just to study others but also to question their own positionality and potential bias (see
Ho, Ch. 8.2). They should also be aware of the privilege of producing ethnographic knowl-
edge.
To sum up, traditional ethnographers rarely discuss in print how they might have been, for ex-
ample, attracted to some subjects of study or seduced into building a rapport with particular
individuals (Kulick/Wilson 1995). However, it is time to rethink the research premise that af-
fects are separable from human experience in the doing and writing of ethnography. Feminist
scholars have long argued that the body, emotion and care have been largely associated with
feminine traits and systematically excluded from scientific research (Haraway 1988; Jagger
1989). In this sense, affective ethnography is a feminist approach to challenge what has been
traditionally dismissed in the masculinist enterprise of Social Sciences. It is not so much about
seeking the truth. It is rather an alternative mode of knowing which affective ethnographers
use to prise doors open and to shed light on things behind, beneath and beside observable real-
ities.
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8.3 Reflections on fieldwork in post-bubble Japan:
Gender, work and urban space
Swee-Lin Ho
Framing the fields
I first lived in Japan in 2002 when my then employer, a multinational corporation, sent me to
supervise the restructuring of an ailing subsidiary in Tokyo for a year. I was out most evenings
drinking with colleagues to understand the local work culture, and to get to know one another
better in informal settings when conversations were candid and spontaneous. The drinking of-
ten extended beyond the first round to a second, third or fourth, even on weeknights. I had
initially thought the nocturnal merriment would be short-lived, since my stay coincided with
the FIFA World Cup co-hosted by Japan and South Korea, but I gradually realised that social
drinking after hours was very much a part of the daily routine for working adults in Japan.
Everywhere I went—from Shinjuku, Shibuya and Akasaka, to Roppongi, Ginza and Shina-
gawa—bars and restaurants were thronging with office workers, both male and female. As the
evening progressed, the group’s size shrank, venues changed, conversation topics shifted away
from work and some late-night entertainment activities became more playful. When a night
out ended long after public transport services had ended, some of my co-workers would grab
several hours of sleep in a love hotel, which I realised were plentiful across Japan, and were
hardly sleazy establishments for illicit sexual activities.
Most certainly, I was quite flummoxed by my encounters. ‘Are drinking and late-night enter-
tainment no longer socially unacceptable for women in Japan?’ I wondered. Many establish-
ments had menus listing alcoholic beverages exclusively for ‘ladies,’ while advertisements past-
ed in drinking venues, commuter trains and public billboards portrayed women drinking tradi-
tionally masculine drinks such as beer, sake and whisky. There were also small bars, strip clubs
and host clubs serving only a female clientele. What has effected these commercial changes?
Having met many female corporate managers, lawyers and bankers, I also wondered if better
work opportunities had enabled women to negotiate themselves out of their gender roles.
I thus began to frame my research interest to focus on the lives of women, work and the urban
night-time economy in post-bubble Japan. When I returned to Tokyo in 2003 as a graduate
student, large numbers of housewives and female office workers of all ages swarming airports,
stadiums and various venues to attend events and catch a glimpse of actors, male singers and
popular music bands from South Korea confounded me. The Korean Wave reinforced my
interest in understanding women’s lives and the public space, as well as the role played by
commercial processes in enabling women to actively affirm themselves as subjects of their own
desire, and not as mere objects of the male gaze and men’s pleasure.
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Swee-Lin Ho
Selecting sites and sampling subjects
I have so far interviewed more than 500 Japanese men and women for various related studies
on processes of change that affect women’s work patterns, family formations, consumption
practices, leisure activities and various social relations, in the hope of broadening the scope of
existing studies by dispelling some myths about the uniqueness or exoticness of Japanese soci-
ety that many have depicted. My field sites are mostly places and spaces pertaining to the ac-
tivities of my subjects of study, which encompassed the private sphere of the home, and the
public spheres of work and play.
For my first project, I had gathered a considerable amount of data from one year of employ-
ment in a Japanese company when I started studying women managers (Ho 2018). The daily
notes I took from observing and interacting with co-workers helped me understand the corpo-
rate environment in which women managers work: corporate policies on hiring, promotion
and remuneration; assignment of duties; lines of reporting; allocation of authority and power
of decision-making. Other field sites included public places where my subjects spent their time
eating, drinking and engaging in playful activities. To understand the various institutional
structures that affect how women work, I also interviewed male workers, and gathered infor-
mation about companies—small and large—before I requested interviews with corporate exec-
utives. I also conducted interviews with government employees to understand the implementa-
tion and management of state policies on labour, family and health, as well as with labour
union representatives and legal advisors, non-governmental organisations, and several support
groups dedicated to helping workers seek redress for unfair dismissal and various work-related
problems.
Studying female fans of the Korean Wave took me to concerts, fan meetings, product endorse-
ment events, filming sites, airports and birthday parties in Japan and South Korea (Ho 2011).
To examine the production, distribution and marketing processes driving the popularity of Ko-
rean popular music, television dramas and movies—my second project—I spent several years
in South Korea interviewing actors, actresses, singers, instructors, directors, scriptwriters, pro-
moters and distributors. I also made observations at training academies, auditions, filming lo-
cations, recording studios and broadcasting stations. To understand how Japanese women’s
fan activities might affect their daily life, I followed my informants to neighbourhood and
community events, and observed some women in their homes.
Using the methodology of snowball sampling offers a useful chain of referrals by people who
share or know of others with similar interests and experiences, but it could potentially narrow
the research scope, since each chain of referrals tends to offer specific perspectives on a given
practice. When studying women’s extramarital experiences—a third project (Ho 2012)—for
example, one chain of referrals led me to ten women who were once full-time housewives, and
explained their extramarital activities as provoked by their husband’s infidelity. As I searched
for informants with different marital and extramarital experiences, I found some who agreed
to be interviewed after months of private messaging through Internet chatrooms and blogs
hosting discussions on the extramarital experiences of women. Several others came from a
speed dating agency that arranged ‘extramarital adventures’ for men and women, who had re-
sponded to my interview request, which the agency had circulated. I met others through the
owner of a cable television company that broadcast many channels of adult programmes, who
also disseminated my request to its subscribers and helped me obtain several responses.
232
Similarly, for another research project on love hotels (Ho 2008), I spoke to people using these
establishments as my main subjects, and others who could help me understand commercial
and legal change. These comprised cleaners, receptionists and managers of love hotels; em-
ployees of Japan’s Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism; and project con-
sultants at advertising companies which had contributed to marketing assignments to change
the image of love hotels.
Ethics and positioning in the field
Selecting sites and subjects for diversity is not easy, and that is only the start. Managing field-
work over a long duration of time is far more challenging. Over the years, I have come to ap-
preciate the importance of positioning in the field with an ethical code of practice by which
my subjects would define me as an ethnographer. I had once thought about ethics in the field
in terms of do’s and don’ts. Nearly two decades of fieldwork in Japan taught me that it is
about the constant management and negotiation of the perceptions and positions of both the
ethnographer and research subjects. I would like to think of this as the process of subject–ob-
ject reorientation, which involves the delicate balancing of proximity and distance, to allow
for more egalitarian, reciprocal and dynamic interactions between ethnographers and subjects.
I might have the privilege of knowing a few women in each of the two friendship networks of
women managers (Ho 2018), but having initial access by positioning myself as ‘one of them’—
I was once a corporate executive myself—only gave me opportunities to meet with the women.
Careful about protecting their respective circles and meticulous in selecting individuals to in-
clude, the women gradually shared more about their lives after several years of careful nego-
tiation of my identity and character, as I made continual efforts to understand their needs,
wants and concerns.
Access is both a privilege and a responsibility. It is a form of trust given to an ethnographer to
respect the behaviour and thoughts of research subjects (see McLaughlin, Ch. 6; Reiher/Wag-
ner, Ch. 16). Far from being an entitlement, access is an obligation to protect the confidentiali-
ty of the information gathered, and a responsibility to not adversely alter the lives and activi-
ties of informants. Researchers and informants often asked me about my studies of women’s
late-night drinking, voyeuristic play in host clubs and various entertainment venues, sexual en-
counters, marital issues, intimate feelings and workplace difficulties, all of which are sensitive,
morally contentious issues with serious implications on individuals’ lives. Breaching an infor-
mant’s trust could have serious repercussions for many parties. As the ethnographer’s subjec-
tivity is an inherent part of our research (Madison 2005, p. 9), we risk discrediting our cultur-
al and academic communities.
It is also important to tread carefully between the polar ends of sympathy and apathy in inter-
acting with informants. While documenting the changes to Japan’s urban night-time economy
that promote drinking among women (Ho 2015), I often checked the interview questions I
posed to informants working in drinking and entertainment venues, regardless of whether they
worked as bartenders, waiters, waitresses, supervisors, managers, public relations corporate
executives, hosts, hostesses, strippers or government officials responsible for urban zoning
laws and licencing. For my research on love hotels too, I tried to understand the perspectives
of cleaning workers, receptionists, janitors, and suppliers of drinks and products to vending
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Swee-Lin Ho
machines in love hotels. These individuals may represent the institutional structures whose
practices are often portrayed negatively, but they are also workers with real lives, whose jobs
could be equally susceptible to broader controlling processes that affect the lives of my main
subjects.
In conclusion: Going native is extremely difficult. The best that ethnographers can do is to
minimise the tendency of othering our subjects so that they are not treated as mere objects of
scrutiny. Negotiating shifts in position by becoming objects of inquiry for field subjects at
times helps build trust and respect in our interactions with research subjects, who may at times
be equally curious about and interested in our own experiences. Doing fieldwork in Japan—as
cross-cultural studies elsewhere are doing—can be particularly trying due to the plethora of
stereotypes many have formed about the people and their social practices. But one’s field expe-
rience will be meaningful, enriching and rewarding—as mine has been—if due care and respect
are exercised in our engagement with and representation of our research subjects.
234
Further reading
Bernard, H. Russell (2011): Research methods in Anthropology. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield.
Clifford, James/Marcus, George E. (1986): Writing culture: The poetics and politics of ethnography.
Hannerz, Ulf (ed.) (2010): Anthropology’s world: Life in a twenty-first-century discipline. London: Pluto
Press.
Madden, Raymond (2017): Being ethnographic: A guide to the theory and practice of ethnography. Lon-
don: Sage.
Madison, D. Soyini (2005): Critical ethnography: Method, ethics, and performance. Thousand Oaks, CA:
Sage.
Pink, Sarah (2009): Doing sensory ethnography. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
Satō, Tomohisa (2013): Fieldwork 2.0: Gendai sekai wo firudowāku. Tōkyō: Fukyōsha.
Smartt Gullian, Jessica (2016): Writing ethnography. Rotterdam: Sense Publishers.
References
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Chapter 9
How to access written and visual sources:
Archives, libraries and databases
1. Introduction
As a researcher, the hunt for primary and secondary sources will soon lead you to libraries and
archives, both at your local institution as well as in Japan. In this chapter, the authors have
joined forces to provide you with advice on gathering both physical and digital Japan-related
sources in the digital age. This includes hints on developing a general and Japan-specific form
of digital literacy when using libraries and archives. In addition, a selection of important refer-
ence tools for primary and secondary sources will help you to find appropriate sources for
your research project. While all parts of this chapter will be of interest for first-time re-
searchers studying Japan, the sections on digital literacy and archives will also be of relevance
to more experienced researchers. The chapter is divided into three sections and begins with the
first step in the search process: how to approach and operate research infrastructures, especial-
ly search engine-based catalogues. This is followed by a section on where to look for Japan-
related library reference tools and sources. The final section of the chapter is dedicated to
Japanese public archives, many of which hold sources that are yet to be discovered, interpreted
and published.
2. General hints on how to approach and operate library catalogues
The digital transformation of everyday life has profoundly changed the infrastructure frame-
work within which research is conducted, especially in libraries and archives. Easy access to
online catalogues and other sources may lead us to believe that we can find any information
we need at the mere click of a button. However, despite the sheer number of resource discov-
ery tools available to researchers, digital access to overseas Area Studies collections can still
prove difficult (Asato 2013, p. xx; Pitman 2015, pp. 69–80). This is partly because the hold-
ings of some collections are not visible in online catalogue records (‘hidden collections’), partly
because of the way overseas publications in non-Latin scripts are handled in Latin-script-cen-
tric catalogues or discovery tools and partly because libraries license rather than own electron-
ic resources, making them accessible to members of the libraries’ institution only (Pitman
238
Chapter 9 How to access written and visual sources
2015, pp. 69–70). The latter also applies to access to resources in Japan, which on top of that
are often heavily protected by copyright laws or not available in a digital format yet.
Therefore, information literacy and digital literacy are the key to finding and accessing re-
sources for a research project. Both types of literacy involve finding, understanding, critically
evaluating and using information. While information literacy refers to reflectively discovering
information and understanding how it is produced and valued (ACRL 2016, p. 3), digital liter-
acy involves a good command of digital tools and information technologies through which in-
formation is discovered, accessed, analysed, (re)created and communicated (ALA 2013; Becker
2018). Here it is important for students and faculty alike to be aware of the marketplace con-
centration in digital services and the increasing reliance of libraries and other knowledge in-
frastructure providers on ‘closed system’ products, e.g. search algorithms for library cata-
logues and their transformation into discovery systems, which implies an increasing lack of
transparency of how catalogue data is processed (Reimer 2020, p. 5). Therefore, developing
digital literacy enables a deeper and critical understanding of these tools/information technolo-
gies as biased filters through which a search result is produced.1 How to deal with these condi-
tions is the subject of the following sections, where we will look in detail at how bibliographic
information is presented in catalogues in the digital age and at the diverse technologies avail-
able when searching for Japan-related sources (including how to conduct search queries in
Japanese script).
2.1 Where to start your search?
Always begin your search for primary or secondary sources at your local academic library. Al-
most every institution will provide access to an online catalogue. Many library catalogues are
interconnected and provide access to their combined bibliographical data through meta cata-
logues like the Karlsruher Virtueller Katalog (KIT n.d.).2 These can also search for biblio-
graphic data worldwide, including from WorldCat (OCLC n.d.),3 and the Japan-centred
‘Scholarly and Academic Information Navigator’ CiNii catalogues (NII n.d.).4 If you are at the
start of your research in a certain library, we strongly recommend you to contact the Japanese
Studies librarian in charge of the collection that you are interested in. She or he might give you
source-based bibliographic advice that could change your research design (Lyon-Bestor 2003,
p. 370), especially regarding the barriers to accessing hidden collections. Also, check whether
your institution has a subject guide for Japanese Studies.5 This is a collection of thematically
1 Investigating the bias of knowledge infrastructure discovery systems has only just begun. However, a thought-
provoking paper by Sharon Block (2020) on how ‘seemingly racist or sexist topical labeling [...] impedes knowl-
edge discovery’ in the well-known academic data base JSTOR highlights the importance of critical algorithm
studies and encourages academic communities and digital providers to jointly create systems that reflect scholar-
ship better (Block 2020, p. 56).
2 The KVK is provided by the Karlsruher Institut für Technologie (KIT) in Germany at https://kvk.bibliothek.edu.
3 The WorldCat is the world’s largest library catalogue and is provided by the OCLC Online Computer Library
Center, Inc. in the U.S. at https://www.worldcat.org.
4 CiNii is a database aggregating bibliographical data of Japanese academic libraries provided by the National In-
stitute of Informatics (NII) in Japan. You can search for academic articles at https://ci.nii.ac.jp, books at https://ci.
nii.ac.jp/books/en/ or dissertations at https://ci.nii.ac.jp/d/?l=en.
5 Examples of Japan-related subject guides are the ‘Subject Guides Portal’ from the North American Coordinating
Council on Japanese Libraries Resources (NCC) at https://guides.nccjapan.org/subjectguidesportal or the ‘Japan
Studies Subject Guide’ of Leiden University Asian Library at https://www.library.universiteitleiden.nl/subject-guid
es/japanese-studies.
239
sorted resources (databases, catalogues, websites, etc.) carefully curated by the subject librari-
an.
2.2 How to search the library catalogue
Today, most library catalogues look like search engines and operate under a ‘discovery sys-
tem’. Discovery system catalogues are intuitive, can process simple queries and the results are
ranked by relevance algorithms (Böhner 2013, p. 49). The basic search mode tends to resemble
a Google search box and is your first port of call when you are broadly exploring a topic. Be-
fore you start browsing, write down a list of key words that relate to your planned research.
What is your overall research field, what are the subfields and what are the aspects of your
topic (c.f. ULBM 2019)? These words should also include synonyms of your core concepts and
superordinate and subordinate terms (ibid.). If you are planning to read literature in different
languages, include the corresponding translations too. To ensure that you are using the correct
terminology in a foreign language, you can consult Wikipedia, an online thesaurus,6 digital en-
cyclopaedias7 or specialised dictionaries. Note that glossaries at the end of articles or books
might help you enlarge your browsing terms. In doing so, remember that terms related to aca-
demic concepts can change depending on their historic, social and geographical contexts.
When browsing catalogues by topic, note that libraries use classification systems for labelling
the subject of a book. However, classification schemes outside Japan have often been criticised
for their Anglo-American and European bias, paying less attention to coverage of other ge-
ographies (Pitman 2015, p. 74). In Japan, Japanese bibliographic data tends to be classified by
the Nippon Decimal Classification (NDC) (Nihon jisshin bunruihō), and most libraries will
use the NDC to systematically arrange their books on the shelves. Ask for a tailored handout
of the classification scheme at the respective counter. This will help you to orientate yourself
quickly when visiting a library.
If you already have information about the specific primary or secondary source you are look-
ing for, you should switch to the advanced search mode. To use it efficiently, you have to be
familiar with the concept of bibliographical data, which includes categories like author/creator,
title, year/place of publication, publisher, the series a publication might be part of and the edi-
tion. You can search for the majority of these categories (e.g. family name of an author) and
combine them with other categories (e.g. title).
2.3 How to search for Japanese language content in catalogues
Libraries give instructions on their website about bibliographical searching and topical brows-
ing. However, outside Japan you might face difficulties when searching for and retrieving bib-
liographical data in Japanese, Chinese and other non-Latin scripts as well as in transcriptions.
6 Examples of multilingual online thesauri for the academic community are Sowiport hosted by the German Social
Science Infrastructure Services/Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences (GESIS) at http://sowiport.gesis.org/thesaur
us and Skosmos developed by the National Library of Finland at http://skosmos.dev.finto.fi/en/. The so-called
Research Navi (Risāchi nabi) by the National Diet Library provides an online tool for creating a Japanese word
field at https://rnavi.ndl.go.jp/ln-search.
7 For a short overview of digital Japan-related encyclopedias, Weber/Krickel 2018, pp. D.73–14–D.73–15.
240
One reason for this is that the search algorithms in library catalogue software outside Japan
are often not well adapted for non-Latin scripts. Furthermore, library catalogue search results
increasingly come from a wide range of sources, including library-owned resources and li-
censed databases. With the net cast so wide, users can access more resources, but ‘might well
not realise that they are not seeing all the potential hits that they might, because of the wide
range of different standards used in these systems’ (Pitman 2015, p. 76). Hence, searching for
foreign language material with varying transcription standards requires a skilled researcher,
who can find all the resources a library holds (Pitman 2015, p. 77). It is advisable, in addition
to searches in Japanese script, to always run searches in rōmaji (Hepburn/modified Hepburn
system and kunrei romanisation) as well.
In library catalogues based on an algorithmic discovery (search engine) technology, the results
of your search will automatically be ranked by ‘relevance’. ‘Relevance’ is generally determined
by the commercial producer of the software, often a third party, without making the rationale
behind the programming of the ranking algorithms transparent to library staff and users. The
ranking of hits will draw your attention to the data prominently displayed at the top of the
list. This pre-selection of visible bibliographic data takes place unless you actively turn to oth-
er sorting categories like ‘newest/oldest first’. In addition, note that bibliographical data about
book chapters and titles of journal articles might not be indexed in a library catalogue. In
these cases, you have to check the availability of the superordinated entity like an edited vol-
ume or a journal. There are specialised Japan-centred bibliographic databases that focus on in-
corporating these data like the aforementioned CiNii books or CiNii articles. The Bibliogra-
phy of Asian Studies (BAS)8 contains journal articles and book chapters in English. JSTOR9
and Project Muse10 cover journal articles in English. However, be aware that full access to
these databases requires a subscription from your institution.
Use the following criteria to further evaluate your search results:

1. Does the journal match the academic discipline(s), e.g. Japanese Studies or Social
Science you are referring to in your research?
2. Is the quality of the articles ensured by a peer review process? Some library cata-
logues identify these journals.
3. In regard to other publication formats, you might also take into account these
points:
• Is the author known in her field of research?
• Do you know which institution she or he belongs to?
• Is the publisher specialised in the topic of the book?
• Look for reviews of the book and check the journals these reviews have been
published in.
• Check if the criteria for good academic practice (Balzert et al. 2008, pp. 9–47;
see also Reiher/Wagner, Ch. 16) have been fulfilled. This also means taking a
look at the accuracy of the citations and at the references.
8 BAS is hosted by EBSCO at https://www.asianstudies.org/publications/bibliography-of-asian-studies.

9 JSTOR is part of the not-for-profit organisation ITHAKA at https://www.jstor.org.
10 Project MUSE is produced by Johns Hopkins University Press at https://muse.jhu.edu.
241
2.4 Japan-related library reference tools
If we were asked to recommend just one print and one digital meta reference tool for starting
your Japan-related search for sources from outside Japan, we would refer you to the Hand-
book for Asian Studies specialists: A guide to research materials and collection building tools,
edited by Noriko Asato (2013) as the print meta reference tool. This book not only lists the
most common tools for addressing search queries, but also provides a short abstract about
each reference tool. For a digital ‘community hub for the field of Japanese Studies’ (NCC
2020), we would refer you to the Guide to library and information resources (NCC 2017), a
website published by the North American Coordinating Council on Japanese Library Re-
sources.11 Both of these resources will lead you to appropriate starting points for accessing
print or digital sources for your research project and give you ideas about where to look fur-
ther afield.12
But note when discovering special collections or sources not available through your university
library, you do not (always) have to travel to Japan in order to get hold of these items. Many
libraries take part in national and international inter-library loan systems (see Maclachlan, Ch.
4.1). So even if going abroad is out of reach, it is possible to get hold of the literature you
need. Furthermore, many libraries also welcome acquisition requests or provide ‘patron driven
acquisition’ (PDA) schemes in their catalogues. If you study Japanese Studies at a German uni-
versity, you are eligible to use the CrossAsia portal (crossasia.org) managed by the East Asia
department at Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin (SBPK). The CrossAsia search provides access to orig-
inal language bibliographic records in library catalogues from Asia and around the world and
full-texts from licensed databases through its Integrated Text Repository (see Heckel,
Ch. 11.3).13 In order to get access to all licensed content in CrossAsia you have to fill in an
application form, get approval from your institute (stamp) and mail it to the CrossAsia librari-
an team (SBPK 2020). However, there are some resources that can only be accessed in Japan.
In the following two sections, we will introduce you to the general systemic structure of li-
braries (section 3) as well as archives (section 4) in Japan and to ways to approach and make
use of them for your research project.
3. Libraries in Japan
When one is in Japan, it is important to think about the structures and purposes of libraries,
before searching their catalogues and visiting different libraries. According to the National Di-
et Library Law (Kokuritsu Kokkai Toshokanhō), the National Diet Library (NDL, Kokuritsu
Kokkai Toshokan) is in charge of collecting and providing all Japanese publications and ad-
ministering the national bibliography (Ōwa 2018, p. 11). Here the chances are high that any
Japanese books and journals you are searching for will be found. Always prepare for your stay
in Japan by searching the online bibliographic records of the NDL (https://ndlonline.ndl.go.j
11 Check the comprehensive institutional index of international collections on Japan provided by the North Ameri-
can Coordinating Council on Japanese Library Resources at https://guides.nccjapan.org/researchaccess.
12 For an overview of access to digital sources for the field of Japanese history, Weber/Krickel (2018).
13 For more information, see CrossAsia in a nutshell at https://blog.crossasia.org/about/?lang=en.
242
p). As described in detail in the essay by Shinichi Aizawa and Daisuke Watanabe (see this
chapter, Ch. 9.3), the NDL is also a hub for all government-related material (e.g. White Pa-
pers) and statistics. Its ‘Research Navi’ guide14 is a comprehensive starting point for an
overview of the wealth of information on Japan available through the NDL (NDL 2009).
NDL’s WARP (Web Archiving Project) database is an important resource when conducting re-
search on institutions and their representations in the digital space in Japan. Here, the ‘web-
sites of the national, prefectural, and municipal governments, including those of prefectures,
designated cities, cities, and towns as well as committees for municipal mergers, independent
administrative corporations, semi-governmental corporations or agencies, universities, events,
online periodicals, and similar sites’ (NDL 2013) are archived regularly.15
Besides the NDL, the bibliographic databases of prefectural libraries (kenritsu toshokan) may
also be worth consulting. They are part of the public library (kōkyō toshokan or kōritsu
toshokan) sector (NTK 2020) and are charged with collecting resources that are closely related
to the history of their prefecture. Catalogues of public libraries on a city, town and village level
can likewise provide an insight into the collection building of the regional body they are oper-
ated by. In these libraries, expert staff can help you access sources concerning the region, its
history and socio-political structures. Public libraries are social spaces and are actively pro-
moted as a hub for actors from local civil society and for citizen scientists, so they might also
be a good starting point for field research.
If you are doing research on corporate bodies (e.g. firms, museums, NPO/NGO, labour
unions) and their history, keep in mind that they too might have libraries or archives of vary-
ing size, possibly without providing accessible bibliographic data online (see this chapter,
Schmidtpott/Schölz, Ch. 9.1). In contrast to public libraries, they are mainly for internal use
and may hold rare primary and secondary sources. In fact, the collection of resources provided
by a certain institution itself might be an interesting object of research (e.g. which types of lit-
erature are provided for inmates of a certain prison?).
Do not forget to search the catalogues of those university libraries that are home to the experts
you refer to in your research (see Zachmann, Ch. 4). Usually, their interests will be mirrored in
the catalogue or special data archives (see this chapter, Aizawa/Watanabe, Ch. 9.3) of their
home institution. Unfortunately, physical access to Japanese university libraries is also very
likely to be restricted. Many institutions will require a letter of introduction.16 At the same
time, open access publications are gaining momentum in Japan, as they are elsewhere, and you
might look for sources in open access repositories of all universities via the directory of the
Japan Consortium for Open Access Repository (JPCOAR).17 If you are uncertain which uni-
versity library catalogue to head to, turn to the already mentioned meta catalogue and biblio-
graphic database CiNii18 of the NII.
14 Available in English (https://rnavi.ndl.go.jp/rnavi/english.php) or Japanese (https://rnavi.ndl.go.jp/rnavi).

15 WARP website: see http://warp.da.ndl.go.jp.
16 Please refer to the draft for a ‘letter of introduction’ as well as a ‘library materials request form’ incl. an English
translation provided by the NCC (2017).
17 For a list of member institutions, see https://jpcoar.repo.nii.ac.jp/?page_id=40.
18 Note that a new ‘CiNii Research’ next generation discovery platform is under development at the NII Research
Center for Open Science and Data Platform (RCOS), which will not only provide access to academic publica-
tions but also to research data (RCOS 2017).
243
4. Archives in Japan
Although libraries provide you with access to vast amounts of primary and secondary sources,
there are still numerous ‘raw’ primary materials waiting to be uncovered in archives in Japan.
Drawing on the example of transnational history, Sheldon Garon (see this chapter, Ch. 9.2)
has described the joy of ‘serendipitous discoveries in archives’ in his essay and the importance
of archival research not only for the purpose of deepening but also widening one’s research
scope. In addition, Katja Schmidtpott and Tino Schölz (see this chapter, Ch. 9.1) recommend
not only considering written artefacts that are preserved in private (and often secluded)
archives for your research, but also openly accessible objects such as public memorials. Al-
though you might be intimidated by the necessary language proficiency and research experi-
ence required for working in archives and with written/objective archival sources, we would
strongly encourage you to consider archival material for your research projects on Japan. The
following sections will give you a short overview of working with and in archives in Japan
with special consideration of regional public archives and archives in museums, libraries and
universities.
Public archives in Japan can be subdivided into two groups: a small group of archives run by
the central government19 and a larger group of regional public archives, which are run by re-
gional bodies, namely the prefectures and municipalities. National archives are, in general,
easily accessible and parts of their holdings have even been digitalised and are accessible online
free of charge.20
Japanese archival researchers and historians generally complain that in Japan the public inter-
est in the preservation of public records is comparatively weak. They base these complaints,
for instance, on the fact that the first public archives in Japan, the Yamaguchi Prefectural
Archives, were founded only in 1959 and that the National Archives of Japan (Kokuritsu
Kōbunshokan), which were established in Tokyo in 1971, were the result of years of lobbying
by Japanese historians and followed a recommendation by UNESCO (Takayama 2008, p. 51).
The legal framework is also frequently found to be lacking. An extremely short Public
Archives Law (kōbunshokanhō)21 was passed in 1987, but it comprises little more than the du-
ty of the central government and the regional bodies to enact appropriate measures for pre-
serving administrative documents and other materials of historical importance and making
them available for use (Kokuritsu Kōbunshokan 2001, p. 96). In this respect, Japan was trail-
ing in last place behind all other OECD countries (Matsuoka 2011, p. 16). Precise rules for the
proper management of public records were finally laid out in the Public Records and Archives
Management Act (kōbunsho kanrihō) of 2009. However, this legislation only applies to the
19 These include the National Archives of Japan (Kokuritsu Kōbunshokan), the Diplomatic Archives of the Min-
istry of Foreign Affairs of Japan (Gaikō Shiryōkan), the National Institute for Defense Studies of the Ministry of
Defense (Bōei Kenkyūsho Shiryō Etsuranshitsu) and the Archives and Mausolea Department of the Imperial
Household Agency (Kunaichō Shoryōbu).
20 The databank of the Japan Center for Asian Historical Records (JACAR), which encompasses more than 30
million document pages from the National Archives of Japan, the Diplomatic Archives and the National Insti-
tute for Defense Studies, is likely to be already known to those familiar with the field. What is, however, proba-
bly less well-known is that JACAR is progressively starting to include holdings from other archives. Information
about this can be found in the JACAR newsletter (https://www.jacar.go.jp/newsletter).
21 See http://elaws.e-gov.go.jp/search/elawsSearch/elaws_search/lsg0500/detail?lawId=362AC1000000115.
244
National Archives of Japan, whereas the regional public archives are merely required to pay
heed to its core intention.
While the National Archives of Japan are well organised and easily accessible, quite often one
may encounter gaps in their holdings. As a matter of fact, the extent of the holdings is rather
modest when compared internationally: in 2008 they amounted to 48 km as opposed to the
300 km held by the German national archives, the 175 km held in Great Britain and the 930
km in the U.S. Substantial losses were caused by fires, by the Great Kantō Earthquake of
1923, by bombings during World War II as well as the deliberate burning of files in the face of
the impending defeat in 1945. In addition, however, there has been a tendency among public
and private organisations to primarily keep filed materials that presented them favourably,
whilst other materials were often destroyed (Takayama 2008, pp. 49–50). To those trying to
fill the gaps that exist in the National Archives in Tokyo, Japanese colleagues recommend vis-
iting the regional public archives. With a little luck, this is where one might find documents
from the correspondence between the prefectural government and the central government bu-
reaucracy, which may serve to reconstruct, to a large extent, some of what was lost.
4.1 Regional public archives (chihō kōbunshokan)
Most of the 86 regional public archives currently in existence were created after the Public
Archives Law came into force in 1988. So far, 39 of Japan‘s 47 prefectures and 47 of its 1,700
municipalities have public archives.22 Public archives are primarily intended for the preserva-
tion of public records but, in reality, they often also gather a wide range of material from pri-
vate sources, such as private individuals or civil society organisations (Matsuoka 2011, p.
109). Consequently, the regional public archives are of interest for a wide variety of different
research areas. The Amagasaki Municipal Archives (Amagasaki Shiritsu Chiiki Kenkyū
Shiryōkan),23 for instance, house extensive materials about the history of the city’s industriali-
sation, which contains, among others, many private documents and objects from working-
class families. After being expertly advised, visitors will be permitted to access these sources
and to photograph them without any bureaucratic difficulties. Although public archives are
open to the public at large, it might be wise to visit the archives in the company of Japanese
researchers who are already familiar with the archive in question. They will be able to arrange
meetings with staff in advance, which might be very helpful in terms of getting relevant infor-
mation about the specific archive’s holdings. In general, you are recommended to contact
archives prior to visiting them in order to make an appointment. In some archives, it might
happen that you are only allowed to see anonymised material due to staff being anxious not to
violate the provisions of the Personal Data Protection Act (kojin jōhō hogohō), which was in-
troduced in Japan in 2003.
Indeed, the law does not require public archives to hire qualified specialist staff. Article 4 of
the Public Archives Law does make it obligatory to employ specialist staff, but the additional
article No. 2 allows them to dispense with this requirement initially. The reason for this loos-
22 See https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/公文書館#日本国内の公文書館一覧. Another list, which at 74 entries is less

extensive but nonetheless just as up-to-date, having been compiled in 2018, can be found on the website of the
National Archives of Japan at http://www.archives.go.jp/english/links/index.html.
23 See http://www.archives.city.amagasaki.hyogo.jp.
245
ening of the law may be that training for archivists has lagged behind that in Europe, the U.S.
or China (Kokuritsu Kōbunshokan 2001, p. 22) and that, therefore, qualified specialists are
comparatively rare. Since 2013, the Japan Society for Archival Science (Nihon Ākaibuzu
Gakkai), whose aim is to pursue a more academic approach to training archivists, has been
issuing accreditation for academically trained archivists. The professionalisation of archive
staff can therefore be expected for the future.
4.2 Archives and collections of other public institutions: Libraries, museums,

universities
For those of you who are researching the history of a city or region where there are no public
archives, the recommendation is not to give up too quickly but instead to check out other local
institutions. One thing that is important to know about Japanese archives is that many of
them are not called archives since they are part of libraries, museums or universities, and it is
not always visible from the outside that they exist at all. As there is no nationwide directory of
all Japanese archives,24 one will have to rely upon hints and tips from Japanese colleagues to
hunt down these archives. A first port of call should be the approximately 3,000 public li-
braries (Takayama 2008, p. 46). Many of these were founded before 1945 and even back then
already functioned as places for the preservation of historical materials (Aoyama 2003, p. 16),
which means that, in some cases, their tradition as archives goes back much further than that
of the public archives. Museums, too, can house archives or collections and, like libraries, they
are easily accessible to everyone. The Nagasaki Museum of History and Culture (Nagasaki
Rekishi Bunka Hakubutsukan), for example, holds around 81,000 objects and documents
dealing with the history of the foreign trade that was conducted via Nagasaki port.25 Its docu-
ments can be viewed there without any problems and can be photographed upon payment of a
small fee.
Other initiatives like the Knowledgebase of Historical Resources in Institutes (khirin)26 of the
National Museum of Ethnology in Osaka promote open science and aim at forming a cross-
institutional hub for Japanese history sources (written, visual and objective).
Public archives, libraries and museums are often well connected to the local community. Thus,
when chapter co-author Katja Schmidtpott was researching the history of Osaka’s armaments
industry at the Peace Osaka museum (Pīsu Ōsaka), she received valuable pointers towards
archive material held by private individuals and civil society organisations. In addition, you
should not overlook local educational establishments. The Central Library of Kyushu Univer-
sity, for instance, has a huge collection of historical materials related to the history of coal
mining in the region, but also many other sorts of manuscripts and records, some of which
were collected by some of the university’s former history professors in other regions of Japan.
24 An incomplete list is constituted by the member list of the professional body Japan Society of Archives Institu-
tions (Zenkoku Rekishi Shiryō Hozon Riyō Kikan Renraku Kyōgikai), which currently lists 139 institutions as
members, amongst which can be found public archives, historical museums, libraries, university archives and
company archives at http://www.jsai.jp/kikan/index.html (as of May 2018). An overview of the holdings and
particularities of 30 selected public and private archives as well as data material (until 2007) regarding public
archives and libraries can be found in Fujiwara (2008, pp. 223–283).
25 See http://www.nmhc.jp/collection.html.
26 See the catalogue portal at https://khirin-ld.rekihaku.ac.jp.
246
The collection is described online,27 as are other collections in other major universities, but un-
fortunately it is usually not possible to access them without being affiliated to the university in
question, and sometimes even to the faculty of which the library is a part.
Key issues
Away from the central national archives in Tokyo, Japan offers a fertile landscape of public
archives and collections where there is still much left for (foreign) historians to discover. De-
spite growing digitisation and the increasing availability of information online, it seems that
in Japan there is still the need for a relatively strong degree of personal interaction in order
to successfully conduct archival research. Good contacts with Japanese colleagues are im-
portant for gathering information about what institutions house what collections and, in
many cases, also for gaining access to their holdings. Once an archive has been discovered
and accessed, archivists or librarians often turn out to be extremely helpful and are happy to
share their knowledge about where to look for further material. Last but not least, one must
not rely on the assumption that all materials have already been gathered in archives or other
institutions. This is one of the reasons why Japanese historians like to take their students on
exploratory trips to historically interesting sites in order to search for, order and catalogue
materials at family homes, businesses, temples and other local institutions.
5. Final comment
In times of the ubiquity of information available digitally, it might be regarded as untimely to

give advice on how to access Japan-related sources in a written ‘static’ publication like this
handbook. However, with our focus on how to and not only where to and our encouragement
for you to discover sources that are not yet visible digitally, we hope to have contributed to
your understanding of Japanese Studies as well as to your digital literacy and to have enabled
you to track down changed URLs as well as new reference tools by yourself. In the future, we
aim to enhance this book by developing a subject guide website. Your cooperation is highly
appreciated: just send us a note with further recommendations from your search discoveries.
Meanwhile, good luck with hunting sources in and outside Japan!
27 See https://www.lib.kyushu-u.ac.jp/ja/collections?field_display_tid_i18n=All.
247
9.1 Clever approaches to tricky sources: How to extract
information from business archives and war memorials
Just as fieldwork serves as a tool for gathering data in Anthropology or Sociology, archival re-
search is the equivalent tool for historians. However, archival research differs from fieldwork
because it does not involve observation or questioning. But although historians deal with ‘life-
less’ materials in archives, it would be wrong to assume that the cultural context and a re-
searcher’s cultural competence, which matter greatly in fieldwork, can be neglected when it
comes to successful archival research in Japan. The degree of cultural competence one needs,
however, depends on the subject area as different areas involve varying levels of social interac-
tion. In the field of Social and Economic History as well as in Urban or Local History for in-
stance, historians often face special challenges ‘regarding access and discovery of archival ma-
terial’ (Gordon 2003, p. 262), which frequently can only be mastered by means of ‘personal
connections and introductions’ (ibid., p. 265). While this is generally true for all sorts of
archives apart from those maintained by the central government, it especially applies to busi-
ness archives.
What is more, historians of modern Japan—mostly political or intellectual historians—cur-
rently mainly deal with written or, to a lesser extent, (audio)visual sources; however, historical
sources are not only to be found in archives. Depending on the nature of the project, public
space can also serve as an archive. It contains myriads of openly accessible sources ready to be
analysed and interpreted as witnesses of the past at any given time. Towns and villages, streets,
squares and their respective names, castles and palaces, office buildings, schools and universi-
ties, dwellings and mansions, monuments, shrines and temples, etc. shape our image of the
present and the past.
This essay introduces the reader to different types of historical sources and archives. In the
first part, Katja Schmidtpott discusses business archives and shows that they tend to be care-
fully secluded from the outside world and often difficult to access. In contrast, in his account
on public space as an archive, Tino Schölz shows that the material public space provides is
very often in plain sight. He encourages historians to use objects and other non-textual materi-
als as sources. Based on his research on war memorials, he shows that this can lead to a multi-
tude of new insights, although it might be exhausting in comparison to usual archival re-
search. The authors argue that working with these distinct types of archives requires quite dif-
ferent skills.
248
Private archives: Business archives
For many research projects in Economic and Social History, business archives can provide use-
ful source material (Schmidtpott 2012). At first sight, Japanese businesses appear to have an
extremely strong sense of tradition as almost every large and medium-sized company will have
processed their history in the form of a company history (shashi). There are thousands of these
shashi. Nonetheless, it would be misleading to conclude that there must be a similarly large
number of company archives. As Andrew Gordon (2003, p. 264) pointed out, the ‘paradox of
obsessive organizational history writing combined with poor archiving’ exists in Japan.
As Schmidtpott has been told repeatedly by fellow historians, it is not unusual for a company
to dispose of historical documents after a shashi has been published, mainly because its stor-
age space is limited. She encountered this problem herself when visiting the library of a public
housing corporation in 1999, where most of their historical material had been discarded to
clear the shelves for newer publications. Digitisation may solve this problem, but it is doubtful
whether companies in general consider this worthwhile. This is because one of the major func-
tions of shashi is to serve as in-house reference material for employees. So once the shashi has
been written, companies feel no need to keep the raw materials any longer. Therefore, until the
turn of the millennium, only relatively few Japanese companies maintained an archive and
usually did not employ professional archivists. Since the 2000s, the Shibusawa Eiichi Memori-
al Foundation (Shibusawa Eiichi Kinen Zaidan) and the Business Archives Association of
Japan (Kigyō Shiryō Kyōgikai) have been working towards raising awareness among Japanese
companies about the importance of professionally run business archives for corporate ac-
countability. Since then there has been a small but noticeable rise in the number of business
archives and in the levels of specialised, trained archivist staff employed there (Matsuzaki
2017).
The first task for historians who want to work with business archives is to check which com-
panies own an archive. This is not the easiest of undertakings as there is no nationwide direc-
tory of business archives. As the result of an initial stock take, the Shibusawa Eiichi Memorial
Foundation published a list of business archives in 2008 (Shibusawa Eiichi Memorial Founda-
tion). Likewise, the members’ list of the Business Archives Association can be used as a pointer
towards which companies may have archives. Also, if there is an industry museum, the busi-
ness it relates to will possibly have an archive. Special tourist guidebooks contain lists of such
industry museums (Nichigai Asoshētsu Henshūbu 2003; Takeda 2008). Their advantage is that
they are open to the public and that, ideally, one might strike up a conversation with the cura-
tor, who would be able to provide information about its holdings. This is what happened to
Schmidtpott in the Seiko Museum in Tokyo, for example.
There are, however, also companies that do possess all three: shashi, a museum and an
archive, but do not allow anyone access to their records so as to keep full control over the in-
terpretation of their history. Thus, Schmidtpott failed utterly in her attempts to gain access to
one of the largest, internationally active Japanese industrial companies, which had already is-
sued a number of company histories, had its own archive that was renowned as exemplary
amongst experts, and also had a state-of-the-art museum that attracts large numbers of visi-
tors. When asked, Japanese colleagues confirmed that the business archive rejected any at-
tempts at contact. Even later on, when Schmidtpott was introduced personally to a staff mem-
ber of that archive purely by chance, her subsequent enquiries remained unanswered.
249
To sum up, accessibility probably poses the largest problem with regard to business archives in
Japan. Researchers need an introduction from a Japanese historian who is already in contact
with the archive in question (Matsuzaki 2007, p. 8). It’s important to note that companies can
freely create their own rules for their archives. During her research, Schmidtpott asked the em-
ployees of a big consumer products manufacturer’s archive how they decide which material to
preserve. They answered frankly that they keep materials that testified to the successful devel-
opment of new products, while they throw away materials on accidents or failures. Conse-
quently, the range of possible research topics seems to be quite limited.
Public space as an archive: War memorials
In contrast to the rather closed-off business archives, war memorials are located in public
spaces. Various memorial sites have been erected and used in Japan from the 1860s to the
present to mourn and pay tribute to the war dead. They include shrines such as the famous
Yasukuni Shrine in Tokyo, the national defence shrines (gokoku jinja) in the provinces and
cities, several thousand monuments in almost every community, military cemeteries, individual
and collective graves in regular cemeteries, or museums that exhibit personal possessions of
the victims. There were also thousands of trees planted and even small lakes created. For a
project on the history of public commemoration of the war dead in modern Japan, Schölz
(2016) analysed these memorial sites. In selecting his field, he considered regional diversity as
well as differences between the victors and losers of the civil wars of the Bakumatsu (1853–
1867) and early Meiji periods (1868–1877).
When focusing on monuments, it is important to actually visit and ‘document’ them. Schölz
tried to systematically answer the following questions, which address both practical considera-
tions and theoretical and methodological problems. First of all, the route to locations itself is
sometimes very revealing: Is the site placed in the middle of a town or isolated in a forest or on
a mountain that is difficult to reach? Is it visible from a distance? Is the path signposted? Do
employees in the local tourist office or taxi drivers know the site? When arriving at the desti-
nation, the next task is to carefully ‘document’ it: How big is the memorial site? Where is it
located within the public space? What does it look like? Who built it, when and why? Who
paid for it? Is it located in a battlefield where people actually died? What is the visual message
of the object? Are there inscriptions; if so, by whom? Who is remembered; who is not? Are
war victims mentioned by name or not? What additional information about the lives and
deaths of the fallen is given? Is there a hierarchy of the dead expressed? Which symbols are
(not) used? Do gravestones have a Shintoist or Buddhist shape? Which trees or flowers are
part of the site, for instance, cherry trees as symbols of the ‘Japanese spirit’ and the death of
the warrior?
Two things are important with regard to the documentation: firstly, especially at the beginning
of a project, researchers do not know what will be important in the end. Therefore, it is wise
to include as much information as possible and sort it out later. It is advisable to visit memori-
al sites as early as possible in the research process and to take enough time, as historians can
never be sure how much work lies ahead. A good camera with several batteries and memory
cards is indispensable, and a GPS function is very helpful in order to locate photos quickly on
maps. And one should also calculate enough time in order to systematically catalogue notes,
250
photos and sketches as soon as possible. Especially during short research stays, researchers
usually tend to visit as many places as possible, but without good organisation quickly drown
in their material—less is more. Secondly, one problem Japan researchers often encounter is
that they may not perceive certain cultural codes, like iconographic motifs, symbols or refer-
ences, and may place them in their own cultural context and therefore misinterpret them. His-
torians should beware of hasty interpretations and they should not be afraid to ask Japanese
colleagues specialising in the field under study even the most trivial questions (see Liu-Farrer,
Ch. 4.3; McLaughlin, Ch. 6). The same is true of talking to and asking people at the memorial
sites for information. Schölz experienced that many Japanese are happy to help—even if they
just tell foreign researchers whom to contact for further information.
After the documentation of the memorial sites’ current state, the next step historians have to
take is an analysis of the context in which the object was built and the historical change in
both its appearance and its use. Thus, it is essential to consult further sources. Usually, the re-
searcher can find them in archives: There may be references to the intention and the financing
of the monument in the private archives of donors, for example. Materials produced by the
artist can provide numerous references to the context in which a monument was designed,
possibly also to alternative plans that were not realised. Public archives, mostly prefectural
archives (see this chapter, Peucker/Schmidtpott/Wagner, Ch. 9), often hold sources about the
approval of a monument’s construction and possibly required changes to its appearance. Laws
and ordinances provide an indication of the legal dimension of building monuments in public.
Newspaper archives, image databases or albums can help researchers to understand an object’s
historical form and its use, including inauguration ceremonies or rituals performed. Edited col-
lections of primary sources and local histories as secondary sources may provide further in-
sights in this respect. Historical maps may help researchers to locate former sites if monuments
have been relocated or to understand the situation of a public space that has changed over
time. And finally, in some cases, court records, although they are rather difficult to access, can
also provide information about conflicts that took place about sites of remembrance.
Summary
Depending on the research project, it is sometimes necessary to explore different kinds of

sources located at various places. In doing so, one will not always be successful. Many visits to
an archive or a local library end in disappointment, because the researcher cannot find any-
thing, or existing sources do not reveal anything of value. But it is always worth a try, because
one can also come across information that changes and expands our knowledge of the object
under study. The historian should never forget that sources are of immense importance but, at
the same time, only the basis of a good study; even more important are smart questions, mean-
ingful approaches and hypotheses, and above all clever interpretations and answers.
251
9.2 Writing transnational history through archival sources
Sheldon Garon
One of the most exciting fields today is transnational or global history. Historians increasingly
explain developments within Japan by going beyond national history to explore the country’s
important connections with the rest of the world. Transnational history spotlights the move-
ment of ideas, institutions, peoples and practices across borders and oceans. The challenge for
scholars of Japan is how to research topics that require the use of not only Japanese archives,
but also those of other countries (Garon 2017).
Discovering the transnational in the sources
I offer my own experiences as a researcher, having devoted the past two decades to writing
transnational history centred on Japan. My book Beyond our means: Why America spends
while the world saves (Garon 2012) is a transnational history of saving and consumption. De-
spite the subtitle, one-third of the book deals with Japan. This study became a global history—
including America and several European and Asian countries—primarily because of serendipi-
tous discoveries in the archives. I had originally intended to write a national history of the
Japanese state’s efforts to promote popular saving. However, as I read reports by Japanese offi-
cials and reformers, I realised that they were fundamentally involved in the global exchange of
knowledge. Like their Western counterparts, the Japanese vigorously investigated best
practices in other nation-states that similarly sought to cultivate hardworking, thrifty popu-
laces towards the end of the nineteenth century. The Home Ministry’s journal Shimin (The
Subject, 1906–44) frequently presented models of local savings associations in Europe while
popularising Victorian ideas of thrift. One official’s enthusiastic report of Britain’s Post Office
Savings Bank led, for example, to the establishment of Japan’s famous postal savings system in
1875.
The archives also reveal the impact of transnational models on Japan’s savings-promotion pro-
grammes in the course of the twentieth century. The Ministry of Finance’s archives of
pre-1945 and postwar financial history (Shōwa zaiseishi shiryō and Sengo zaiseishi shiryō)
were particularly useful. During the First World War, the Ministry of Finance and Home Min-
istry dispatched teams of bureaucrats to Europe and America to survey war savings campaigns
and other home-front programmes. They were especially impressed by the British govern-
ment’s National War Savings Committee, which mobilised local savings associations and
women’s groups. Based on a report by its resident official in London in 1924, the Ministry of
Finance explicitly emulated Britain’s National Savings campaign structure in its own Cam-
paign to Encourage Diligence and Thrift. After Japan embarked on war with China in 1937,
officials again drew on the British model to establish a war savings campaign that continued
through the Pacific War.
252
Following Japan’s defeat in 1945, according to Ministry of Finance documents, the state once
again investigated European national savings campaigns. Officials observed that Japan was
not alone in mounting savings and austerity drives to recover from wartime devastation. The
Soviet, French, Belgian and Dutch governments were all haranguing their people to save more
and spend less. The Japanese people, asserted the ministry’s leadership, should emulate the
postwar British, who accepted lives of austerity to save for their country’s economic recovery.
In 1952, the government created the Central Council for Savings Promotion. Housed within
the Bank of Japan (BOJ), the Central Council coordinated savings campaigns with local coun-
cils and civic groups for the next several decades. A former vice-minister’s introduction permit-
ted me to access the Central Council’s working archive. Materials in the Bank of Japan library
supplemented its newsletters and documents. The BOJ journal Chochiku jihō (Savings Times)
regularly reported on innovative savings promotion practices in Europe during the 1950s and
1960s. The working archives also told the little-known story of Japanese efforts to promote
savings-led development in Asia in the 1980s and 1990s, as illustrated by the BOJ’s frequent
seminars with the region’s central bankers.
Reading Japanese sources for their transnational connections places Japan in a more global
framework. But one could go further—and I did—to use Japanese archives as a springboard to
explore the global circulation of knowledge among other societies. Since the Meiji era,
Japanese have been among the world’s most energetic transnational actors and learners (Kon-
ishi 2013). Their detailed investigations of other nations’ institutions permit the historian of
Japan to see global currents more readily than scholars of Western Europe and the United
States.
Midway through my research, I decided to follow my Japanese sources to their sources and
write a truly global history of saving since 1800. I first followed Japanese savings-promotion
officials to Britain, where I mined the National Archives to reconstruct the story of the state-
sponsored National Savings Movement from the First World War to the 1970s. I similarly un-
covered the history of the U.S. Treasury Department’s savings campaigns during the two world
wars. The history of saving had not been studied comprehensively in either country. I was,
moreover, able to connect Anglo-American developments with those occurring in Japan and
elsewhere.
My Japanese actors next led me to the obscure, but immensely useful archive of the World
Savings Banks Institute (WSBI), a Brussels-based consortium of savings banks and postal sav-
ings banks. The collection contains historical materials from many nations around the world
from the 1920s to the present. Most are written in English, German or French. I stumbled
across the WSBI’s predecessor, the International Thrift Institute, after reading of the dispatch
of a Japanese official to the organisation’s First International Thrift Congress in Milan in
1924. The WSBI archivist in turn arranged my research visits to affiliated savings banks asso-
ciations in France, Italy, Sweden and Germany.
Increasingly, my visits to the Bank of Japan have made me aware that Japan has been a maker,
as well as a taker, of transnational knowledge. The Central Council for Savings Promotion in-
spired the establishment of a similar council in the Bank of Korea in 1969. Japan’s enormous
postal savings system also served as a model for postal savings banks in Singapore and
Malaysia. In 2001, I visited the archives of the Korean and Malaysian central banks, plus Sin-
gapore’s National Archives. The Bank Negara Malaysia’s staff were particularly helpful. They
253
Sheldon Garon
were in the midst of emulating the Bank of Japan’s savings campaigns, and were quite interest-
ed in my knowledge.
Designing a transnational study
I am currently writing another transnational history, this time about home fronts in Japan,
Germany and Britain during the Second World War (Garon 2020). Whereas my book on sav-
ing became a global history only after I had discovered connections in the Japanese archives,
my current project rests on a transnational-historical design from the start. Home fronts did
not develop in isolation. Rather the very concept and practices of the home front were
transnationally constructed from the First World War through the Second World War. Officials
and experts in each nation investigated others’ mobilisation of civilians in the areas of food
security, civilian defence against air raids and the maintenance of morale. At the same time,
strategies of how to destroy home fronts through bombing and blockades circulated through-
out the world. In each country, I selected archives that would best reveal these connections.
I began with the user-friendly U.K. National Archives. Commencing in 1918, Air Ministry files
detail the Royal Air Force’s (RAF) growing commitment to strategic bombing that targeted
cities and strove to break civilian morale. The interwar RAF refined its strategy based in part
on surveys of air strategists in Italy, France, Germany and the United States. Moreover, in
1938–39, the British Committee of Imperial Defence issued several secret reports on the ‘air
lessons’ derived from the Japanese bombing of Chinese cities and air raids in the Spanish Civil
War. Transnational knowledge similarly informed Britain’s efforts to defend its own cities from
air attacks. By the early 1930s, the government’s Air Raid Precautions Committee recognised
that Britain lagged far behind the Soviets, Germans and other Europeans in preparations for
civilian defence. Learning from others, Britain entered the Second World War with a compara-
ble nationwide system of neighbourhood air wardens, first-aid workers and ‘fire watchers’.
The archives also spotlight the widely accepted transnational lesson of the First World War—
that the British blockade of Germany’s food supply had broken civilian morale and forced the
German government to surrender in 1918. In the Second World War, as key documents make
clear, the high command attempted, unsuccessfully, to bring about another ‘1918’ against Ger-
many through bombing and blockades.
German archives were more of a challenge. I had only recently learned to read German.
Rather than replicate the histories of National Socialism written by German scholars, I fo-
cused on the under-researched issue of transnational connections between the Nazi home front
and those of other nations. For the exchange of knowledge with Japan, I read the records and
clippings of the Deutsch-Japanische Gesellschaft in the Bundesarchiv Berlin. Another rich
source for transnational learning was Die Sirene (1933–44), the magazine of the multi-million-
member German Air Defence League (Reichsluftschutzbund). As Nazi officials devised their
air defence structures, articles featured civilian defence organisations and air raid drills in
Japan, Poland, Sweden and elsewhere. Die Sirene in turn inspired Japanese authorities to pub-
lish their own illustrated magazine, Kokumin bōkū (Civilian Defence, 1939–44). I compared
the magazines in their depictions of everyday practices in both countries, notably the mobilisa-
tion of neighbourhood women to extinguish incendiary bombs. The best collection turned out
to be the political archive (Politisches Archiv) of the German Foreign Office. From 1927 to
254
1941, the Foreign Office instructed its embassies to gather information on others’ civilian de-
fence while arranging visits by Japanese and other foreign delegations to Germany’s air de-
fence facilities. The several folders on air defence (Luftschutz) also contain the German Air
Ministry’s bimonthly reports on civilian defence in more than twenty countries, including
Japan.
For the American bombing of Japan, I relied on the Air Force Historical Research Agency
archive in Alabama. We assume that racism played a huge role in the U.S. firebombing cam-
paign against Japanese cities. Yet the planning documents show that the incendiary attacks
were instead modelled on what the Americans learned from British ‘area bombing’ of German
cities.
In Japan, as in Germany, some of the best transnational evidence comes from the Ministry of
Foreign Affairs archive. It holds numerous reports of the German and British home fronts
from Japanese diplomats and military attachés in Europe. They are supplemented by the mi-
crofilmed MAGIC Documents, the daily translations of U.S.-intercepted Japanese diplomatic
cables. The National Institute for Defense Studies (Bōei Kenkyūjo) possesses the influential re-
ports of Japanese military missions that went to Germany to study air defence. The most com-
prehensive collection of Japanese home-front magazines and books is found in the National
Shōwa Memorial Museum (Shōwakan). These materials showcase the impact of foreign mod-
els on Japan’s food rationing system and civilian defence practices.
Some advice
To researchers who wish to conduct a transnational study, I encourage you to be ambitious.

Transnational archival research may appear intimidating, but there are steps you can take to
realise its potential. First, leverage your languages. Most scholars of Japan know at least one
European (or Asian) language in addition to English. A little French or German can lead to
many discoveries. Second, be prepared to spot the transnational connections in your docu-
ments that others have overlooked. Finally, think about how your transnational perspectives
could contribute both to debunking myths of Japanese ‘uniqueness’ and enriching the field of
Global History itself.
255
9.3 Accessing quantitative data for qualitative research:
White Papers, official statistics and micro datasets
This handbook mainly discusses qualitative research methods. However, researchers use quan-
titative information in qualitative research, too. Both authors of this essay applied qualitative
research methods in their doctoral research. Shinichi Aizawa analysed social transformation
and discourses about school education in postwar Japan, and Daisuke Watanabe studied par-
ticipation and activity processes in club activities for people after retirement. By contextualis-
ing qualitative research results with quantitative information, our findings became more per-
suasive. We consider both qualitative and quantitative data to be valuable, depending on the
research question you would like to answer. Because comparing qualitative results with quan-
titative data can increase the relevance of one’s findings, this essay introduces ways to access
White Papers (hakusho) and quantitative data on Japan, mainly official government statistics
on e-Stat, and micro datasets. We begin this introduction with White Papers, because they are
a good starting point for researchers who want to understand Japanese society, both concern-
ing numbers and qualitative contexts.
White Papers in Japan: Characteristics and access
In Japan, White Papers are officially defined as ‘government publication materials edited by
central government agencies, which are prepared to inform the nation of the status of politics,
economics, societies and government measures’ (NDL 2019) by the administrative vice-minis-
ters’ conference in 1963. Generally, White Papers are annual government reports. Nowadays,
the Japanese government publishes three types of White Papers: 1. statutory White Papers
which are submitted by the Cabinet to the Diet upon Cabinet decisions based on laws, 2.
White Papers distributed at Cabinet meetings and 3. other White Papers. Notably, White Pa-
pers of the first and second type are decided at Cabinet meetings and introduce a series of cur-
rent policies and policy planning.
White Papers are official documents and often written in a formal style that is as dry as dust.
In historical or Political Science research, Japanese scholars analyse documents such as the
minutes of various councils’ meetings, resources of parliaments or interview data. Just like the
latter, White Papers are very useful documents in understanding how policymakers recognise
social issues, laws and social institutions. White Papers contain longitudinal data and are
structured in a similar manner. Most White Papers are published every year over a longer peri-
od of time. Therefore, long-term comparison of White Papers is relatively easy.
All White Papers are openly available online, but most White Papers are available in Japanese
only. Often, only a summary of the respective White Paper is translated into English (see Table
256
9.1). The e-Gov website run by the Government of Japan and the National Diet Library col-
lects and presents information on White Papers. Older White Papers that were only published
in Japanese have recently been digitalised and made available by the National Diet Library
(see Schmidtpott/Schölz, Ch. 9.1; Zachmann, Ch. 4).
Table 9.1: List of main White Papers in Japan
Governing agency Title [since] (Japanese / English)

Cabinet Office (CAO) Annual Report on the Japanese Economy and Public Finance
[2001–/2001–] (**)
White Paper on Nuclear Energy [1956–/2016–] (**)
White Paper on Disaster Management [1974–/2016–] (*)
White Paper on Children and Young People [1956-/2012–] (**)
Declining Birth Rate White Paper [2004–/2008–] (2008–2015*; 2016–**)
Annual Report on the Ageing Society [1996–/2002–] (**)
Annual Report on Government Measures for Persons with Disabilities
[1996–/2003] (**)
White Paper on Traffic Safety in Japan [1971–/1997–] (*)
White Paper on Gender Equality [1996–/1996–] (**)
Ministry of Justice (MOJ) White Paper on Crime [1960–/2000–] (*)
Immigration Control [2003–/2005–] (*)
Ministry of Education, White Paper on Science and Technology [1958–/1963–] (*)
Culture, Sports, Science White Paper on Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology [1959–/
and Technology (MEXT) 2003–] (**)
Ministry of Health, Annual Health, Labour and Welfare Report [1956–/2007–] (*)
Labour and Welfare White Paper on the Labour Economy [1948–/2003–2005, 2012–] (**)
(MHLW)
Ministry of Land, Infras- White Paper on Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism in Japan
tructure, Transport and [2001–/2001–] (*)
Tourism (MLIT)
White Paper on Land [1990–/NA]
National Police Agency White Paper on Police [1973–/2016–] (2016–2017*; 2018–**)
(NPA) Measures for Crime Victims [2006–/2008–] (**)
Japan Tourism Agency White Paper on Tourism [1997–/2007–] (2007–2017*; 2018–**)
(JTA)
* English version is available (as of Oct. 2020).

** English summary version is available (as of Oct. 2020).
Each ministry and agency assigns a team, whose head is the director general of the respective
agency, to collect data and to write a White Paper about topics that fall under its jurisdiction
every year. All White Papers utilise various official social survey data, such as 53 fundamental
statistics, which include the population census, surveys on employment status and data of ad-
ministrative records on public health insurance, number of crimes, immigration and other so-
cial surveys. Most White Papers visualise statistical data in graphs and tables in order to make
257
them more comprehensive. However, most White Papers in Japan do not reference academic
articles.
Writing White Papers is teamwork. All teams who write White Papers are strictly managed in
a similar manner as in lawmaking processes. Although strictly managed, White Paper writing
teams have some freedom to address middle- and long-term policy directions. Therefore, re-
searchers should pay attention to changing terms, vocabulary and expressions. White Papers
which are adopted in Cabinet meetings have a considerable influence on policymaking and po-
litical discourses. For example, the White Paper on gender equality (Danjo byōdō sankaku
hakusho) referred positively to separate surnames for married couples in 2011, when the DPJ
was the ruling party. After 2013, this was changed into the expression ‘give careful considera-
tion’ to the separation of surnames for married couples under the Abe Cabinet, which is
known as a very conservative government. Thus, we can grasp social change by analysing ex-
pressions or vocabulary in White Papers. Particularly, we should try to analyse not only what
is written but what is not written in White Papers. We also should take into account pho-
tographs and other figures in order to not focus only on texts.
Most statutory White Papers and White Papers distributed by the Cabinet Office have two
parts. One part is a selected yearly theme, and another part features categorised information
on laws, policies and empirical data. The part on the selected yearly theme is very useful when
comparing past and current White Papers. By tracing yearly themes, we can reveal dynamics in
Japanese society and politics. For example, the themes in the Annual health, labour and wel-
fare report (Kōsei rōdō hakusho), which has been published from 1956 onwards, have changed
over time. Before 1973, the themes were related to the establishment of a universal health in-
surance and pension system and the development of social welfare institutions. From the 1973
oil shock to the beginning of the new millennium, the Ministry focused on policies related to
an ageing society and pursued realising a ‘Japanese-style welfare system’ (nihongata fukushi
shakai). Finally, after 2000, the Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare (MHLW) struggled to
introduce measures to address the declining birth rate and the so-called super-aged society.
White Papers from this period onwards emphasized new roles and activities for older people
and local communities in a super-aged society (Watanabe 2009) as well as on work-life bal-
ance recommendations for the working population. To sum up, analysing the changing topics
and terms in White Papers can become useful resources in understanding discourses on
Japanese society.
Official macro statistics via e-Stat
After reading White Papers, you may become interested in official statistics. Of course, you
can access World Bank data, OECD data and UN data, too. It is often insightful to compare
Japan with other countries. However, we think that it is even better to check each national
dataset in addition, because these international comparative datasets may sometimes use non-
reliable sources. Japanese official statistics are all collected on the above-mentioned website e-
Stat (see Hommerich/Kottmann, Ch.10). You can access official statistics from various fields
on this website. However, we advise you to use the Japanese rather than the English website,
because there are great differences with regard to the quantity and diversity of the available
data. Currently, you can access 1,534,675 datasets through the Japanese website, but only
258
395,464 datasets in English. In other words, the English website provides less than 30% of the
datasets available on the Japanese website. Furthermore, the English website lacks many statis-
tics; for instance, there is no English access to the Basic survey on Japanese schools (Gakkō
kihon chōsa), which provides the most reliable official statistics about Japanese school educa-
tion (as of the end of October 2020). Therefore, we strongly recommend using this website in
Japanese.
If you can break through a wall in Japanese, you can collect official statistics easily. I will
present one example of how to access, calculate and make a table in the field of education
from this website. First, you can choose a year, a school level and a certain kind of statistic.
Together with my colleague Kagawa Mei, I created a table based on these School basic statis-
tics from e-Stat (Aizawa 2018). It shows not only the numbers of high school enrolments in
general, but also the differences between public and private schools. The website of e-Stat
makes various tabulations possible.
Although e-Stat is convenient, we recommend you to check printed materials at the beginning
of your research in order to understand the numbers in the Japanese social context and to se-
lect the most suitable tables for your research. Materials related to official macro statistics are
not only available in the National Diet Library (NDL; Kokuritsu Kokkai Toshokan) but also
in the library of the Statistics Bureau (Tōkeikyoku) in Tokyo. Naturally, you can access some
materials in the university libraries and public libraries in Japan. You can also purchase them
from the official gazette cooperation of Japan. The reason why we recommend you to check
paper materials at the initial stage of your research is that you should first familiarise yourself
with the topic by grasping a sense of relevant and realistic numbers. For instance, do you
know how many students advanced from upper secondary schools to colleges in 2019 in
Japan? You do not need to know the accurate number (the answer is 578,382) and may not
know the approximate number, but it is helpful to make yourself familiar with some rough
numbers about this topic. For example, the birth rate of Japanese babies is around one million
in the twenty-first century, but it is decreasing and has not exceeded one million since 2016.
Japan’s advancement rate to upper secondary education is over 95%, and 55% of the gradu-
ates from the upper secondary level advance to tertiary education. The last number, 578,382,
is connected to this social, institutional and demographic situation in Japan. You will be able
to imagine Japanese society with approximate numbers if you become familiar with numbers
relevant in your field of research.
Accessing micro datasets from data archives
If you are interested in statistical analysis in Japan, you can also access datasets from data
archives and execute secondary analysis using these data sets. Emma Smith’s book about sec-
ondary analysis is a valuable resource that refers to access to quantitative data in Japan (Smith
2008, p. 199). The Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR) also
features datasets about Japan, for example from the Japan General Social Survey (JGSS). The
Social Science Japan Data Archive (SSJ Data Archive) is the most famous data archive among
Japanese researchers in Japan, although some universities and research institutes like Rikkyo
University and Keio University have their own data archives. As of the end of October 2020,
SSJ Data Archive has provided 1,424 datasets, and there is no difference between Japanese
259
and English websites when it comes to access to datasets on the matter of quantity of datasets,
although some datasets include instructive information only in Japanese. You can get access to
this data archive’s datasets online after registration (see Hommerich/Kottmann, Ch. 10).
Aizawa has worked with data from data archives and has also made his own data available
through the SSJ Data Archive. In his research, Aizawa (2016) analysed the effects of social ori-
gins and schooling on advancement to schools comparing Japan and Taiwan. The dataset that
Aizawa (2016) used for the Japanese case from the SSM 2005 (Social stratification and social
mobility survey, provided by the University of Tokyo) is accessible to all researchers now via
the SSJ Data Archive. This data archive collects not only new survey data sets but also collects
and digitally restores older datasets. Aizawa and Yutaka Koyama (2016) carried out data
restoration and secondary analysis. The two authors of this essay continue to restore historical
datasets. We also published a book in Japanese about time use in collective housing in 1965
(Watanabe et al. 2019). These data on time use have also been digitally restored and will be
accessible to researchers via SSJ Data Archive. Therefore, secondary analysis via data archives
expands frontiers not only in contemporary statistical fields but also in the historical analysis
of Japan.
Final remarks
Not only should researchers in Japanese Studies combine various methodologies across quali-
tative, quantitative, historical and comparative methods, but so should those in all Area Stud-
ies. The division between quantitative and qualitative work remains all over the academic
world. However, quantitative information on societies has qualitative contexts, although some
highly mathematical Social Sciences ignore this context. Therefore, researchers in Japanese
Studies should contextualise both quantitative and qualitative information on a cross-national
or global level.
260
Further reading
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demic.
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lection building tools. Santa Barbara, CA: Libraries Unlimited.
Becker, Bernd W. (2018): Information literacy in the digital age: Myths and principles of digital literacy. In:
School of Information Student Research Journal 7, No. 2, pp. 1–8.
Pitman, Lesley (2015): Supporting research in Area Studies: A guide for academic libraries. Amsterdam:
Chandos Publishing.
Reidsma, Matthew (2019): Masked by trust: Bias in library discovery. Sacramento, CA: Library Juice
Press.
Smith, Emma (2008): Using secondary data in educational and social research. Berkshire: Open University
Press.
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Chapter 10
How to combine methods: Mixed methods designs
1. Introduction
‘In quantitative research, you do not see people’s faces; in qualitative research you tend to see
nothing but their faces’ (Kobayashi/Hommerich 2018, p. 321). To overcome such drawbacks
of purely quantitative or qualitative research designs, a methodological approach that inte-
grates both has received increasing attention over the past few years. By combining qualitative
and quantitative data, mixed methods research2 enables researchers to use the strengths of
both approaches while minimising—and compensating for—their respective limitations. Inte-
grating different methods can, therefore, be a strategy for supplementing or complementing
the findings of one approach with the other, thereby gaining a more comprehensive, multi-
faceted understanding of social problems or phenomena (Creswell/Creswell 2018, p. 316;
Venkatesh et al. 2016, p. 442). This means that ‘mixed methods research can […] answer re-
search questions that the other methodologies cannot’ (Tashakkori/Teddlie 2003b, p. 15).
Since the late 1980s, this approach has gained significant attention in the Social Sciences as
well as in Area Studies. While mixing methods might seem simple, there are complex rules,
models and hurdles involved, which researchers need to consider. We wrote this chapter with
Japan researchers in mind (mostly those who are in the early stages of their careers), who have
a qualitative background and are unfamiliar with mixed methods research but interested in
combining qualitative and quantitative data. While we also mention some topics that might be
more relevant for experienced scholars (like conducting your own survey), the chapter mainly
aims to provide an overview of basic ideas and key terms in mixed methods research as well as
basic guidelines on why and how to use mixed methods designs. After a brief introduction, we
outline three core models that researchers can adapt to their individual needs and offer con-
crete advice on how to select a research design, how to collect and analyse data, and how to
present results in a written report. Finally, we address possible obstacles that early career re-
searchers might face and share practical advice on how to avoid them. Given that this hand-
book focuses primarily on qualitative methods, we have included a few additional paragraphs
on quantitative methods and share information on further reading and relevant online sources.
Throughout the whole chapter, we refer to and give advice on topics that are specific when
doing research on (and possibly in) Japan.
1 Translated from Japanese by the authors.

2 In line with John Creswell, Abbas Tashakkori and Charles Teddlie we here use the term ‘mixed methods re-
search’. Other terms that are often used interchangeably are ‘multi-method research’, ‘mixed research’ or ‘mixed
methodology’ (see this chapter, Pekkanen/Pekkanen, Ch. 10.1).
264
Chapter 10 How to combine methods
2. What are mixed methods designs?
This relatively new methodological approach is defined as follows: A mixed methods design
requires the collection of both qualitative and quantitative data in response to an underlying
research question or to test theory-driven hypotheses (Johnson et al. 2007, p. 119). The com-
bination of quantitative and qualitative methods—two traditionally strongly separated ap-
proaches—was initially received with enthusiasm as well as scepticism (for an overview of ear-
ly discussions Brannen 1992). Recalling its early stages, Michael Fetters (2016, p. 3) acknowl-
edges that previously researchers had also combined the two methods in the fields of Anthro-
pology, Psychology, Sociology and Natural and Health Science. However, it was in the late
1980s that a ‘new intellectual and practice environment’ led to the ‘birth of modern mixed
methods research’ (ibid., p. 4). Since then this approach has significantly increased in popular-
ity to become the ‘third methodological movement in social science research’ (Tashakkori/
Teddlie 2010, p. ix). This can be seen in the vast body of literature published across various
academic disciplines (Hesse-Biber/Johnson 2015; Johnson/Christensen 2016; Tashakkori/
Teddlie, 2003a), in the emergence of influential journals (see text box below), and recent pri-
vate as well as public funding opportunities (Dahlberg et al. 2010).
Journals promoting mixed methods research

This is a selection of journals featuring and promoting mixed methods research (also
Creswell/Creswell 2018, p. 314):
• International Journal of Multiple Research Approaches: www.ijmra.org
• Journal of Mixed Methods Research: https://journals.sagepub.com/home/mmr
• Quality and Quantity: www.springer.com/journal/11135
There are various reasons for using mixed methods designs, from theoretically induced deci-
sions to pragmatism and opportunity structures. The most commonly cited reason for using a
mixed methods approach is methodological triangulation (see text box below; see also this
chapter, Imai, Ch. 10.3).3 Denzin (1978) identifies methodological triangulation as one way of
achieving a more comprehensive understanding of a research object. Differentiating between
within-method and between-method triangulations, he recommends the latter, as the ‘bias in-
herent in any particular data source, investigators, and particular method will be cancelled out
when used in conjunction with other data sources, investigators, and methods’ (ibid., p. 14).
The use of different methods can help a researcher acquire a more comprehensive awareness of
their research problem; for example, using qualitative data to interpret quantitative results (i.e.
complementarity) or using results from one method to develop the other method (i.e. develop-
ment) (Hesse-Biber 2010, p. 5). However, the appropriateness or necessity of a mixed methods
design depends on the research question and previous research on the topic (see this chapter,
Pekkanen/Pekkanen, Ch. 10.1).
3 Other forms of triangulation include data, investigator and theory triangulation (Denzin 1978).
265
Methodological triangulation
Methodological triangulation usually refers to the ‘use of more than one method for
gathering data’ (Hammond/Wellington 2013, p. 145).
In mixed methods research, data collection abides by the established rigorous procedures for
each approach, which implies profound knowledge of both qualitative and quantitative re-
search methods. Throughout the research process, the two forms of data must be integrated
(Tashakkori/Creswell 2007, p. 3). This can be done in several ways: by merging the data, by
building on one data point when collecting the other or by embedding qualitative and quanti-
tative data within an overarching framework in the analysis process. When writing up a coher-
ent research plan, it is important to decide right at the outset which data-integration method
will be used.
Research related to Japanese society has also seen several applications of mixed methods designs,
as for example in ‘Mixed-method analysis of Japanese depression’ (Arnault/Fetters 2011), an in-
vestigation of the ‘Fukushima effect’ in Germany (Hartwig/Tkach-Kawasaki 2019), or in re-
search on friendships and intimacy (see this chapter, Dales, Ch. 10.2; Kobayashi/Kawabata
2019), labour markets and employment regulations (see this chapter, Imai, Ch. 10.3), or political
parties and governmental industrial policies (see this chapter, Pekkanen/Pekkanen, Ch. 10.1). Be-
fore guiding you through the steps necessary for a successful mixed methods project, we will
briefly outline the respective rationales of qualitative and quantitative research methods and then
introduce three core models of mixed methods research.
3. Overcoming the qualitative–quantitative divide: A pragmatic

approach
The large divide between qualitative and quantitative research approaches has its roots in the
underlying paradigms on which research questions and designs are based. Qualitative research
is in most cases grounded in a constructivist worldview (Creswell/Creswell 2018, p. 7), which
means that great emphasis is placed on individuals’ subjective comprehension of their world.
Here, theory is not necessarily the starting point, but often rather a result of the research pro-
cess (theory building), generated based on individual constructions of realities that the re-
searcher has collected from the participants. Quantitative research, on the other hand, usually
conforms to a post-positivist worldview, assuming that societies operate based on general laws
(often also called theories), which need to be empirically verified. To this end, the quantitative
researcher collects data on the ‘objective reality that exists “out there” in the world’ (Creswell/
Creswell 2018, p. 7), which either supports or rejects the initially assumed theory (see Good-
man, Ch. 1).
The stark distinction that exists between the comprehension and application of a theory is also
found in the case of research methods: qualitative researchers tend to collect in-depth informa-
tion on a limited number of cases (i.e. in ethnography), while quantitative researchers gather a
limited amount of information on a large number of cases (i.e. in a population survey, also
266
Ragin/Amoroso 2011, p. 28). In this way, qualitative research emphasises the commonalities
found among a small—but intensely studied—number of cases, or looks for patterns or ty-
pologies to differentiate between when comparing a moderate number of cases (ibid., p. 36).
Quantitative researchers, however, usually examine differences across large numbers of cases.
Most often the intention is to explain these differences as a consequence of the mutual impact
of certain impactor variables and to extrapolate the results from a sample to a population.
Mixed methods research—often called a ‘pragmatic approach’—combines these two research
traditions to procure the largest possible amount of information to answer a specific research
question. Considering the still strong animosities between the two fields, this is a challenging
but rewarding task, as we will lay out in more detail below.
As this handbook does not focus on quantitative research, we insert several text boxes below, la-
belled Basics in quantitative methods, in which we focus on a selection of core questions often
asked by newcomers and offer basic definitions. For more detailed information, we recommend
Charles Ragin and Lisa Amoroso (2011, pp. 163–187) or John Creswell and J. David Creswell
(2018, pp. 147–177) as two accessible introductions to this vast methodological field.
4. Combining qualitative and quantitative data: Three core designs
In mixed methods research various classification systems and typologies exist (Hesse-Biber 2010,
pp. 68–72; Tashakkori/Teddlie 2003b, pp. 25–33). According to Creswell and Creswell (2018, p.
217), three basic models can be identified that differ considerably in 1. terms of emphasis on
quantitative and qualitative data sets; 2. the timing of the overall research process (simultaneous/
sequential collection, combination, analysis, etc.) and 3. the relationship between theory and em-
piricism (developing or testing theory). Here, we introduce these three core designs—convergent,
explanatory sequential and exploratory mixed methods design—with their basic features, respec-
tive processes of data collection, data analysis, integration and interpretation. Please note that in
practice the designs might not be as neatly separated as presented here.
The convergent mixed methods design is the most common and least complex design (for ex-
amples, Hatta et al. 2018; see also this chapter, Imai, Ch. 10.3). In a single-phase approach,
the collection as well as the primary analysis of both quantitative and qualitative data takes
place separately, followed by an analytical comparison aimed at identifying the convergence or
divergence of findings. The key assumption underlying this approach is that both types of data
—meaningful statistical results in the case of the former and extensive in-depth data in the
case of the latter—provide different types of information which complement each other. Before
the collection of data, the researcher needs to consider four points: 1. (ideally the same or par-
allel) variables (see Basics in quantitative methods I), constructs, and concepts in both forms
of data; 2. sample sizes (usually less so for qualitative than quantitative data) (see Basics in
quantitative methods II); 3. the handling of potential inequality in sample size and 4. whether
or not to include participants in the qualitative survey in the quantitative sample. Data collec-
tion is followed by data analysis and interpretation in three phases. After coding (see Meagher,
Ch. 12) the qualitative data (i.e. phase I), the analysis of the quantitative data takes place (i.e.
phase II). Phase III consists of integrating the two data sets by merging the results in the form
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of either a side-by-side comparison—through data transformation of the qualitative data into

quantitative data—or as a joint display in a table or a graph. Finally, the discussion and inter-
pretation of the comparison aim to understand whether there is convergence or divergence be-
tween the two sources of information (Creswell/Creswell 2018, pp. 217–221).
The explanatory sequential mixed methods design focuses on quantitative data and involves a
distinctively separated two-phase data collection process. Here, the main idea is that qualita-
tive data collected after quantitative data helps the researcher to understand quantitative re-
sults in greater detail and explains possible contradictions or surprising survey responses. The
data-collection process occurs in two distinct phases: after quantitative sampling in the first
phase, the purposeful sampling of qualitative data builds on the quantitative results (see Basics
in quantitative methods II). Challenges here include the identification of results to follow up
on and the selection of sources of qualitative data, for example, whether informants for the
qualitative part should be recruited from the quantitative sample or not. Data analysis takes
place separately because quantitative results are used to plan the qualitative data collection.
Here, the integration of both kinds of data occurs in the form of basing one approach on the
results of the other. The qualitative data are then used to further analyse the quantitative part
(Creswell/Creswell 2018, pp. 221–223).
In contrast, in the three-phase design of the exploratory mixed methods model the researcher
first collects and analyses qualitative data (the ‘exploring phase’), then, based on this, develops
hypotheses to be tested, and finally creates a measurement instrument to empirically test these
hypotheses: the social anthropologist Laura Dales (see this chapter, Ch. 10.2), for example,
initially only planned and conducted a qualitative study, but was then encouraged to add a
quantitative perspective in order to contextualise her qualitative findings. Similarly to the pre-
vious model, data is collected during the first and third phases, but interrupted by integration
of the data in phase II to inform the design of the—in this case—quantitative survey. Chal-
lenges here resemble those faced in the other designs and include the question of whom to
choose for the qualitative study and whether to include these participants in the quantitative
sample. After collecting the quantitative data, both data sets are analysed separately. This
means that the final interpretation of the data can include a report on the qualitative findings
and the hypotheses drawn from them, the development of the measurement instrument and
the results of the quantitative test. For this strategy, there is no inherent need to compare the
findings, as the basic intent is to ‘determine if the qualitative themes in the first phase can be
generalised to a larger sample’ (Creswell/Creswell 2018, pp. 224–226).
In addition to the above-mentioned core designs, variations and (individual) adaptations of
these core designs exist, as do several more complex designs that involve more steps and/or
procedures (also Creswell et al. 2003; Creswell/Creswell 2018, pp. 226–236). Without going
into details here, we recommend the researcher to familiarise themselves with the core designs
and adapt them wherever appropriate or necessary (see this chapter, Pekkanen/Pekkanen, Ch.
10.1). In any case, it is necessary for the researcher to explain the choice of her design, the
underlying theoretical and practical assumptions and the implications regarding the subse-
quent data collection, data analysis and interpretation. Especially when writing a proposal, we
recommend including a chart or table that outlines the basic features of the chosen design (for
useful abbreviations, Teddlie/Tashakkori 2009, p. 27).
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Figure 10.1: Three core mixed methods designs
Designs based on Creswell/Creswell 2018, p. 218
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5. Practical advice
In the following chapter, we offer concrete advice on how to get started, how to collect your
data, how to analyse your data, how to present your findings and how to overcome common
hurdles.
5.1 Getting started with your research
Your starting point should always be a thorough review of the available literature on your
chosen topic (see Zachmann, Ch. 4). Only then can you decide whether or not you wish to
employ a mixed methods research design—this choice should be grounded in your research
question. When the application of either method alone is unlikely to help you thoroughly un-
derstand your research problem, a mixed methods approach can be helpful. For example, you
might want to discover how widely distributed a certain phenomenon is among a certain pop-
ulation (i.e. how many people feel they belong to the Japanese ‘middle class’), but at the same
time you want to understand what this phenomenon means for or how it is understood by in-
dividuals in more detail (i.e. which criteria individuals associate with being ‘middle class’). A
mixed methods approach permits you to perform both and, thus, allows you to obtain results
that can be extrapolated to a broader population (e.g. more than 75% of the Japanese popula-
tion think they belong to the ‘middle class’), while acquiring detailed information on how the
respondents interpret this phenomenon (i.e. the criteria for ‘middle class’ membership vary
widely among individuals). In this way, you will probably obtain better results than when ap-
plying only one approach.
If you have concluded that you can best answer your research question by applying a mix of
the two methods, you have to specify the questions to be answered in the qualitative or quanti-
tative part of your study. Moreover, you need to decide the order in which the two parts
should be executed, as described in the three core models outlined above. At this point, you
should contemplate the role that theory will play in each part of your study. For the qualitative
part, a theory is likely to be more akin to an underlying guideline, an ‘orienting lens’ or per-
spective (Creswell/Creswell 2018, p. 62) that influences the selection of your topic and your
questions (see Okano, Ch. 3). Most probably, especially in grounded theory approaches (see
Meagher, Ch. 12), developing a theory inductively from the collected data will be the overall
goal rather than the starting point. In contrast, in quantitative research, theories are applied
more rigidly, providing a clear structure as to what is to be investigated (see this chapter, Imai,
Ch. 10.3). Theories are understood as underlying rules that specify the strength and direction
of relationships among different variables (see Basics in quantitative methods I), thereby ex-
plaining social phenomena. Explicit hypotheses are deduced from these theoretical assump-
tions, which are to be tested with empirical data. When presenting specific hypotheses to be
tested in the quantitative part of your project, you should, therefore, include the theoretical
rationale of how and why you expect a certain variable to impact another (Creswell/Creswell
2018, p. 53; for a practical example, Hommerich/Tiefenbach 2018, p. 1098).
The application of a mixed methods approach enables you to use theory deductively as well as
inductively, to empirically test its assumptions, and at the same time, further develop it. We
270
recommend using an overarching theoretical framework for both parts of your study (for a
practical example, Inglehart’s theory of value change, Hommerich 2009), and to point out
how each part utilises the theoretical perspective in its own way. When doing so, lay out your
methodological strategy: Which relationships will be tested with what kind of data? What are
the specific contributions of the quantitative and qualitative parts?
Basics in quantitative methods I: Variables and quantitative data

A variable, plainly described, is something that can take on different values. In the Social Sci-
ences, the term ‘variable’ refers to attributes or characteristics that can be measured, and
which vary among individuals or institutions (Creswell/Creswell 2018, p. 50). Quantitative
data is any type of data that can be counted or expressed numerically. In the Social Sciences,
this means that variables such as social characteristics (i.e. age, gender, education, occupa-
tion, income, etc.), forms of behaviour (i.e. time spent on housework per day, participation
in volunteer activities, etc.) or social attitudes (i.e. view of governmental redistribution, toler-
ance for minorities, etc.) are transformed into numbers when they are measured.
Quantitative data can have different measurement levels: nominal, where a certain value is
assigned to a certain characteristic, but there is no order to the values (i.e. 1 = married, 2 =
not married); ordinal, where an order is assigned to different features, but the distance be-
tween the numbers has no meaning (i.e. 1 = very much agree, 2 = somewhat agree, 3 = nei-
ther agree nor disagree, 4 = somewhat disagree, 5 = very much disagree); interval, where fea-
tures are equally spaced along a scale, but no zero exists (i.e. Celsius temperature); or ratio,
where the differences between different categories are equally spaced and an absolute zero
exists (i.e. height, weight or annual household income).
The most common method of acquiring quantitative data in the Social Sciences is via survey
research.4 Surveys can be cross-sectional, carried out at one point in time only, or longitudi-
nal, which means that a survey is repeated several times (see Okano, Ch. 3). Quantitative
surveys can help find answers to descriptive questions (i.e. what percentage of the popula-
tion works overtime?), questions about the relationship among different variables (i.e. is
there a positive relationship/correlation between family background and educational
achievement?), or—in the case of a longitudinal study—to test causal relationships5 (i.e. does
an increase in female labour force participation cause decreased fertility rates?). In the latter
case, the variable that causes the impact is the independent variable (e.g. x = female labour
force), while the variable that is impacted is called the dependent variable (y = fertility rate).
When you are investigating causal claims (i.e. the increase in female labour force participa-
tion has decreased the fertility rate), it is important not to overlook an unmeasured phe-
nomenon that affects both the dependent and the independent variables, being the main
cause of the phenomenon investigated. This third variable is called the confounding variable
(e.g. z = family-friendly/unfriendly policies).
4 Experimental designs, where certain variables are manipulated to test how this impacts outcome
are more common in psychological studies. Despite being less common in the Social Sciences,
they do exist, i.e. to test different survey methods against each other.
5 Many researchers also make assumptions about causality when working with cross-sectional da-
ta. In these cases, their assumptions are grounded in theory, not in the empirical data.
271
In the next step, you need to consider whether you possess the resources required to accom-
plish your project (see checklist below). This includes financial resources, human resources,
and time. It is important to consider if you have the necessary skills to execute both the quan-
titative and the qualitative parts of your intended study. If not, is there anyone who you can
cooperate with? How much money will you need to complete your study in the intended for-
mat? If the expenditure exceeds the budget, are there other sources of funding for which you
could apply? What is the expected time frame of your study? This might depend on a funding
scheme and/or on your career stage. Is it realistic to finish the survey within this time frame?
Last but not least, as with any other research proposal, you need to consider ethical issues (see
Reiher/Wagner, Ch. 16). Are there any possible conflicts of interest for you to consider? Is it
possible that by studying a certain population and writing about them, you might harm your
respondents? Are there questions you intend to ask that might cause respondents to experience
psychological stress? How will you ensure that the data you are collecting (both in a quantita-
tive and qualitative format) is stored safely and cannot be accessed by third parties? It has be-
come common practice at most universities to have research proposals that involve human
participants reviewed by the universities’ Research Ethics Committee.6 However, this is only
the first of many ethical considerations you will have to deal with throughout your project.
For example, you will need to be aware of possible problems regarding the anonymity and pri-
vacy of your respondents and the safety of the collected data.
Checklist for conducting mixed methods research

Before starting to collect data, ensure you have considered the following questions:
• What is the overarching research question?
• What is the rationale behind choosing a mixed methods approach?
• What specific research questions will be investigated in the quantitative and qualita-
tive parts?
• How is your theory applied in the two methodological parts?
• What information surplus do you expect from the combination of quantitative and
qualitative methods?
• What kind of data do you intend to use?
• Do you have the resources (skills, budget, time, etc.) to execute this project?
• Are there ethical issues to be considered?
If you find problems with any of these questions, reconsider and, if necessary, adjust
your research design. Once you have started collecting data, it will be too late for big-
ger changes. Therefore, it is important not to rush into anything. Instead of being over-
ly ambitious, it is advisable to be realistic and pragmatic.
6 Guidelines about this differ widely across universities, also depending on the career stage of the researcher. There-
fore, check whether you are expected to submit your proposal for review or not.
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5.2 How to collect data
The research design that you choose (convergent, explanatory sequential or exploratory se-
quential) determines the time and sequence of data collection. Again, the manner of data col-
lection will differ between the qualitative and the quantitative parts of your study. As data col-
lection methods for qualitative research are described in detail in chapters 5 to 8 of this book,
we focus mainly on core questions to think about for the quantitative part of your study. Car-
rying out a quantitative survey is time-intensive and expensive. Therefore, time and funds at
your disposal determine if you will be able to conduct your own survey. Free online survey
tools, which are widely available nowadays, may tempt you to quickly write down some ques-
tions, upload them and circulate your online survey via social networking sites (SNS), but we
strongly advise against this. When considering a quantitative investigation of your research
question, you should think carefully about the following points:
1. Who is my target population?
2. How can I reach my target population?
3. Which questions do I need to pose in order to get answers to my research question?
4. Have these or similar questions been asked before?
If yes:
5. When and where was this survey conducted?
6. Does this include a sample of my target population?
7. Is this data available for secondary analysis?
If you find a survey that is representative of your target population (see Basics of quantitative
methods II), includes most of your questions and was carried out not too long ago in order to
give relevant results for the phenomenon you are looking at, we recommend that you try to
access this data for secondary analysis (see text box below; see also Aizawa/Watanabe, Ch.
9.3). This will not only save you time and money but will also be highly likely to yield more
reliable results than you would obtain from a convenience sample recruited through friends or
SNS.
The Social Science Data Archive (SSDA) at the University of Tokyo is the richest repository of
existing surveys on Japan, open to use for secondary analysis. Surveys can be accessed online,
applications for data usage can be submitted online and data can also be downloaded from
outside Japan. Microdata from the Japanese government can be accessed through so-called ‘on
sites’—you need to physically visit the office to register—or online through the miripo-portal
of the Statistics Bureau of Japan (SBJ). A more detailed overview, which includes additional
data sources for Japan, can be found on a website directed at students by the Japanese Associ-
ation for Social Research (JASR).
Cross-national surveys, such as the World Values Survey (WVS) or the International Social
Survey Program (ISSP), also include data on Japan, which can be compared with data on other
countries or used on its own. Data is available for download through their websites. The Or-
ganisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) also provides a rich pool of
data on Japan in a cross-national context. While data is not easily available for secondary ana-
lysis, the OECD provides population statistics you will need to outline your research popula-
tion or the societal context of your study.
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Data archives and resources (selection)

• Social Science Data Archive, University of Tokyo: https://csrda.iss.u-tokyo.ac.jp
• Statistics Bureau of Japan (SBJ): www.e-stat.go.jp/microdata/
The Japanese Association for Social Research (JASR) provides a detailed list of data
archives and other data sources (in Japanese only): www.jasr.or.jp/students/links.html
Cross-national surveys:
• World Values Survey (WVS): www.worldvaluessurvey.org/wvs.jsp
• International Social Survey Program (ISSP): www.issp.org/menu-top/home/
Nevertheless, there will be occasions when the variables you need will not be included in pre-
vious surveys—or at least not in the combination that you need for your analysis. Or your tar-
get population will be so specific and/or difficult to access that it will be challenging to find
existing survey data that include this population. In these cases, you should consider conduct-
ing an original survey. Your choice of a specific method of data collection (i.e. face-to-face in-
terviews, computer-assisted personal interviews, drop-off surveys, postal surveys, online sur-
veys; De Leeuw/Berzelak 2016) is highly likely to be influenced by the size of your budget.
Nevertheless, you should carefully consider whether a certain method will give you access to
the population you want to survey. While an online survey is usually the cheapest option, it is
also a risky endeavour in terms of representativeness and reliability (Bryman 2016, p. 191). If
your target population is likely to use the Internet and large parts of the population can be
accessed, for example, through a mailing list or an online platform, using an online survey tool
and distributing the survey yourself can be meaningful. Still, this procedure will not deliver da-
ta that will be representative of your population, as you have no information on the original
target population, or because of the bias caused by the route of questionnaire distribution. If
the population is less specific, but likely to use the Internet, a more expensive alternative
would be to use registered monitors of a research company.
Research companies in Japan (selection)

There are numerous research companies in Japan, and the market is expanding. Here,
we list some companies often used by social researchers. We recommend comparing
several research companies in terms of weighing up the procedures and prices they of-
fer, before making a final decision.
• Shin Jōhō Center: www.sjc.or.jp/english/
• Nippon Research Center: www.nrc.co.jp/english/index.html
• Chūō Chōsa: www.crs.or.jp/english/
• RJC Research: www.rjc.co.jp/
• Cross Marketing: www.cm-group.co.jp/
Most companies offer quota sampling procedures, which allow control of the distribution of
certain attributes (e.g. gender, age, education, income, etc.) in the sample. However, if your
target population is unlikely to use the Internet—for example, if you want information on el-
derly people in rural Japan—then this is not a recommendable approach. If your budget al-
lows, you should opt for a random sample of your population, as this will give you the best
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possible representation of your target population (see Basics in quantitative methods II; for an
example, Hommerich/Tiefenbach 2018, p. 1100).
Basics in quantitative methods II: Sampling in quantitative research

‘How big should a sample be to be representative?’, is a common question asked by
newcomers in the field of quantitative research methods. Several misconceptions exist
regarding the relationship between the sample size and representativeness of a study.
We introduce the three most common misconceptions, based on Fowler (2014, pp. 37–
41), who we highly recommend for more details. The first common mistake is 1. to
make assumptions about the ‘necessary’ sample size based on the ‘usual’ sample size of
other studies (i.e. samples of around 1,500 respondents in national surveys, or the like).
Whether or not a sample is adequate depends on the population to be researched and
the questions to be answered. Other inappropriate but common approaches are 2. that
a certain fraction of the target population should be included in the sample, and 3. that
a researcher should decide the margin of error she can tolerate for specific estimates. As
most quantitative studies make use of not just one but numerous estimates, it is rather
unusual for the researcher to be able to specify an acceptable margin of error for each
estimate in advance. Instead, the sample size should be decided depending on the analy-
sis plan. Which subgroups within your general population are you interested in (i.e.
comparing different levels of education, for males and females separately, etc.)? To be
able to perform the intended statistical analyses, you have to make sure you achieve the
minimum sample size that can be tolerated for the smallest sub-group included in your
analysis plan (for more details, Fowler 2014, p. 39).
When drawing a sample, you should first set a sample frame that defines the target
population (e.g. residents of Japan between 20 and 64 years of age). Next, you need to
select a sample design, which is the actual procedure to sample the individuals. In order
to make inferences about the population from the sample, a probability sample is re-
quired. This kind of sampling is only possible when you have a list of all members of
your target population. In Japan, the population registry is often used for this purpose.
The most basic form of a probability sample is a simple random sample, in which each
individual in the population has an equal chance of being selected. A variation of this is
the systematic sampling procedure in which a random starting point is set and respon-
dents are selected according to a certain strategy (i.e. select every Xth number from the
list; ring the doorbell of every Xth house and ask to interview the person with the most
recent birthday, etc.).
To ensure that your sample is representative of certain characteristics of the target pop-
ulation, stratified random sampling procedures can be applied. For example, when you
have a large target population and want to ensure regional representativeness, you can
use a multistage (or stratified) sampling procedure that identifies clusters (e.g. by re-
gion) within which individuals are sampled randomly (Fowler 2014, p. 14)
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Non-probability sampling procedures such as convenience sampling are less desirable

because respondents are chosen based on their accessibility, which means inclusion in
the sample is biased. A similar procedure is snowball sampling, where respondents in-
troduce the researcher to additional respondents, or survey questionnaires are circulat-
ed via SNS among a group of friends. A quota sample—often claimed to come close to
random sampling procedures in terms of predictive power—is another form of non-
probability sampling. The goal of quota sampling is to produce a sample that closely
reflects the original population in terms of the distribution of different characteristics
(i.e. gender, age, education, income, region, etc.). For a more detailed introduction to
sampling procedures, see Bryman (2016, p. 170).
Be aware that regardless of the sampling procedure, a sample can only be representa-
tive of the sample frame, i.e. the people who had an actual chance of being included in
the sample. This means that if you work with a random sample of registered residents
of Japan who were between 20 and 64 years of age at the time of the survey, your re-
sults will only be representative of that population. You cannot draw any conclusions
for residents of Japan who are below 20 or above 64 years of age.
Before you conduct a quantitative survey, it is most important to take ample time to think
about what questions need to be included in the questionnaire, in order to find answers to
your research question. These questions need to be specific enough for you to be able to make
assumptions about what respondents imagined when answering them. Where standard ques-
tions about issues you want to research exist which have been used and checked for reliability
in other surveys, we recommend using them, rather than inventing new questions for which
you have no information on whether respondents will understand them in the way you intend.
When using questions which have been used in another language before, refer to Dorothée
Behr and Kuniaki Shishido (2016) for more information on what points to consider when
translating research questions (see also Basics in quantitative methods III). Keep your hy-
potheses in mind when writing up a questionnaire. Will you receive all the information you
need by posing these questions? This should include a clear outline of the analytical strategy
and consideration of the level of measurement variables needed for the type of statistical pro-
cedures you want to execute (Creswell/Creswell 2018, p. 155; p. 159 for some introductory
examples).
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Basics in quantitative methods III: Translation issues

When you are conducting research in Japan (or any foreign context) or in a compara-
tive setting, it is necessary to translate questionnaires, interview questions, forms of
consent, or—at a later stage of the research—interview transcripts or questionnaire re-
sponses.7 As the translation of a questionnaire and/or an interview guide is an essential
prerequisite for valid and reliable findings—as well as their comparability—it is crucial
to put sufficient effort into it, including time and money. A meaningful translation
takes into account not only language issues, but also the cultural context, ways of
thinking and communication styles (for concrete examples in the East Asian context,
Behr/Shishido 2016, pp. 278–284). This is not a one-person job, but a team effort. Dif-
ferent experts should contribute to and review the translation at various stages; for ex-
ample, in the form of an ‘expert review’ (which should be supplemented by a question-
naire pre-test; Willis 2016). Experts can be professional translators/linguists, method-
ological experts and/or topical experts (Behr/Shishido 2016, pp. 270–272). When you
are translating a source questionnaire into Japanese or designing an original question-
naire in Japanese as a non-native researcher, the help of Japanese natives is indispens-
able (Huber 2018, pp. 23, 25, 31; Schrauf 2016, pp. 94–96). When you are planning to
carry out your own survey, it is just as important to review existing surveys that are
thematically related and to stick to the established terminology. This requires thorough
knowledge of the relevant surveys in your field of interest.
In order to create such a questionnaire, you either need to be trained in quantitative data ana-
lysis (see text box above) or need a research partner with the necessary training. Once a survey
has been conducted, it is too late to make adjustments. Therefore, carry out a pilot survey
with a small number of respondents similar to those who will eventually take the survey (Bry-
man 2016, p. 260). Pre-testing in this way will enable you to simplify the complicated ques-
tions before carrying out the actual survey.
5.3 How to analyse your data
In qualitative research, data analysis tends to happen concurrently with data collection be-
cause both are intertwined and influence each other in a processual way (for an overview of
qualitative data analysis and individual methods, see Ch. 11–14). The analysis of quantitative
data, however, starts after data collection. You should always begin with becoming familiar
with your data set. This is true for the data you collected yourself as well as for the data you
have acquired for secondary analysis. While we emphasise the importance of the sampling
strategy, it must be remembered that sampling design and sample size are not the only possible
sources of error. It is, for example, just as important to check for patterns of non-response or
response bias after data has been collected. This is needed to identify your sample population
and determine whether it is representative of your target population. After this process of data
cleaning, you will start the actual analysis. Before moving on to more complex multivariate
analyses, remember to report the descriptive statistics of your sample. Writing up the results of
7 In this context, a distinction should be made between the translation of an already existing questionnaire, which
has already been tested in an empirical setting, and the creation of a new questionnaire in a foreign language.
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your quantitative analysis should begin with a brief outline of which statistical procedures you
applied and for what purpose. Always indicate which inferential statistical tests are used to
test your hypotheses.
Basics in quantitative methods IV: Analysing quantitative data

For researchers who did not undergo training in quantitative research methods as part
of their university education, several institutions offer intensive courses in quantitative
methods and data analysis. The GESIS Spring and Summer Seminars, for example, have
a long tradition of offering courses to newcomers as well as advanced learners. Simi-
larly, the Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR) organis-
es an annual summer school with a wide selection of courses. Data is analysed with
software designed for this purpose. Some of the commonly used software packages
such as IBM SPSS Statistics or Stata are relatively expensive, unless the licence is
shared, as is the case at some universities. A free open-source alternative is the pro-
gramming language R, which is increasingly also taught at universities.
GESIS Spring and Summer Seminars:
https://training.gesis.org/?site=pOverview&cat=all
ICPSR Annual Summer School:
www.icpsr.umich.edu/icpsrweb/content/sumprog/about.html
An important step in the mixed methods approach is the integration of the results of the two
parts of the project. This integration happens according to the order in which the two parts
were executed, as described above in the outline of the three core approaches. In sequential
designs, the second part of the study builds on the first part; this is one way of connecting the
two analytical parts. When you are reporting the final results, however, the contributions of
each part need to be emphasised. The extent of integration depends on the closeness of the
two data sets. In an explanatory sequential research design in which in-depth interviews
(phase II) were conducted with a selection of respondents from a larger quantitative survey
(phase I), the results of the two parts can be discussed in close reference to each other. In other
designs, the data sets might be more difficult to connect, but you might be able to draw con-
clusions at a theoretical level based on both parts of the project.
Checklist
The final results should emphasise the specific contribution of each part of your
study. A crucial point, however, is the integration of both parts. How did each part
inform the other? What is the information surplus achieved by applying a mixed
methods approach?
5.4 How to present and report your findings
While writing will be a part of the entire research process—from formulating an initial pro-
posal (Creswell/Creswell 2018, pp. 75–80; see also above) to writing an abstract, to constantly
keeping track of the research process (see McMorran, Ch. 15)—presenting and reporting the
278
final findings will most likely occur at the end of the research process. Obviously, general con-
ventions apply when presenting and reporting the findings, depending on the audience and the
dissemination form (see Farrer/Liu-Farrer, Ch. 17). However, there are some specific points re-
garding mixed methods research. Generally speaking, the crucial point is to outline the reasons
for choosing a mixed methods research design and to ‘address the integration challenge in or-
der to reap the rewards of the integration equation of 1 + 1 = 3’ (Fetters/Freshwater 2015, p.
204); in short: ‘to persuade readers of its merits’ (Sandelowski 2009, p. 321).
There are several ways of doing it, depending on the intended audience. Therefore, we recom-
mend a careful selection of the journal and its audience: Are readers likely to be familiar with
mixed methods research? If so, are they specifically interested in methodological questions? If
not, are they used to either quantitative or qualitative research or are they sceptical towards
quantitative or qualitative narratives (which do differ significantly)? Especially with regard to
an audience not familiar with mixed methods research, we recommend providing a rationale
for choosing a mixed methods design, to sufficiently outline underlying assumptions and to
avoid technical terms and jargon. Instead, it might be best to use succinct and clear language,
to adapt to the scientific conventions of your specific audience, and to present your data in
such a way that your audience can easily relate to it (more narratively in the case of a qualita-
tively trained audience, more formally in the case of a quantitatively trained audience; Sande-
lowski 2010, pp. 329–331).8
The structure of an article (or a book), in turn, is independent of the readership and should
follow a common structure of academic publications (Fetters/Freshwater 2015, pp. 205–207;
see Farrer/Liu-Farrer, Ch. 17). However, the presentation, analysis and discussion of the empir-
ical findings depend on and follow the research design. After outlining the design, that is, con-
vergent, explanatory sequential or exploratory mixed methods design (see above), you should
describe the methods—and their specifics with regard to sampling, collection and analysis—in
the same order in which they were executed (Fetters/Freshwater 2015, p. 208). That is to say,
depending on the design, the presentation of the data will either occur in different sections for
qualitative and quantitative data or through integration (known as ‘weaving’). Alternative ap-
proaches are data transformation and the use of a joint display (which we recommend using in
any case). By doing so, you can create a coherent narrative your audience can relate to (Sande-
lowski 2010). When finally presenting your results, you again need to stick to the order of the
design and present the results consistently with the research process.
As mixed methods designs can be extremely complex, it is helpful to visualise the research pro-
cess and your findings using diagrams, graphs, lists, charts or tables. This not only helps you
as a researcher/author to organise and present your research/writing, but also helps your audi-
ence to follow your argument (Sandelowski 2010, pp. 335–338). In this context, the use of
common abbreviations can also be helpful. It might also be necessary to add an appendix that
contains additional information on the empirical data, a survey questionnaire, interview tran-
scripts, statistics or selected calculations (e.g. Hommerich 2009, pp. 241–271). Finally, at the
level of content, we recommend openly and transparently discussing setbacks and problems
encountered, any unexpected (supposedly ‘wrong’ or ‘bad’) findings and the limitations of the
8 The American Psychological Association, for example, recommends in its Mixed Methods Design Reporting Stan-
dards (JARS-Mixed) to ‘refrain from using words that are either qualitative (e.g. ‘explore’, ‘understand’) or quan-
titative (e.g. ‘determinants’, ‘correlates’)’ (American Psychological Association 2020, p. 1).
279
findings—as Dales shares in her essay (see this chapter, Ch. 10.2). This kind of transparency
augments the validity and reliability of your findings and promotes further research.
Checklist
While writing starts at the very beginning of the research process, the presentation and
publication of the final results take place at the end of the process. When publishing
your findings, follow the common structure of an academic publication, but 1. specifi-
cally consider your audience and ‘speak’ to it (Are they familiar with mixed methods
research? Are they used to quantitative/qualitative narratives/logics? What is the focus
of the journal?); 2. follow the overall structure and logic of your design and create a
coherent narrative to which your audience can relate; 3. visualise your research by way
of diagrams, charts, etc. (findings); 4. use generally accepted abbreviations and add an
appendix with necessary additional information; and 5. openly discuss setbacks and
limitations.
5.5 Stumbling blocks and how to avoid them
Due to the characteristics of mixed methods research, there are specific challenges at different
levels that researchers should be aware of. Here, we summarise some common obstacles, al-
though this list is not exhaustive. The focus, however, should always be on overcoming these
obstacles in order to enjoy the advantages of this research approach.
Complexity, time and financial resources: As outlined above, mixed methods research designs
can be extremely complex due to the collection, analysis and combination of two completely
different data sets. Visualising the different steps in the research design and a detailed (realis-
tic) time schedule can help manage this complexity and save you from getting lost in the de-
tails. Since research with mixed methods is extremely time-consuming, it is essential to be
aware of possible time constraints regardless of whether they are professional (teaching re-
sponsibilities, administrative work, etc.) or personal (family, friends, care work, hobbies, etc.)
(see McMorran, Ch. 15). Financial resources, e.g. for conducting an original survey or secur-
ing professional assistance for the analysis of quantitative data or the transcription of qualita-
tive interviews, also need to be considered: you should consider respective funding options or
collaborating with experts.
Translation issues: Serious challenges include ‘translation issues’, which might appear ‘within
as well as between qualitative and quantitative phases’ (Schrauf 2016, p. 98). While we discuss
the challenges of language translation above (see Basics of quantitative methods III), a differ-
ent type of translation is likely to become necessary when moving back and forth between the
two methodological fields of qualitative and quantitative research. We recommend being
aware of the respective conventions and traditions of each scientific community and adapting
to them.
Skills, infrastructure and other resources: Finally, on a pragmatic level, we emphasise the need
for you to honestly and realistically evaluate your own (and possibly your research team’s)
knowledge and abilities with regard to mixed methods research in a Japanese context: Are you
(and/or your collaborators) familiar with both qualitative and quantitative data collection and
analysis, and will you be you able to perform it in Japanese? Dales (see this chapter, Ch. 10.2),
280
for example, was first ‘ambivalent’ about ‘adding a quantitative lens’ to her primarily qualita-
tive work and then faced serious problems when trying to analyse her data since she did not
undergo the necessary training.9 With regard to infrastructure, it is important to first identify
everything that you (and/or your team) will need to collect, combine and analyse the data sets.
Next, you need to realistically evaluate whether you have all the resources you need in terms
of manpower, software and hardware: How can you offset the abilities, knowledge and infras-
tructure you lack? Where can you find help and—most importantly—with whom can (and
will) you collaborate at which stage of the research? Overall, we recommend discussing the re-
search design and all questions and ideas with experienced peers and/or colleagues; using pro-
fessional services, if necessary and affordable (e.g. for data collection, transcription, quality
control, etc.) and undergoing training in necessary research methods.
Checklist
While mixing methods might sound simple, there are some serious challenges re-
searchers should be aware of. Do not underestimate 1. the complexity of the research
process; 2. time constraints; 3. financial burden; 4. translation issues (between lan-
guages and methodologies); and 5. conventions of specific scientific communities. Re-
alistically evaluate your own abilities and methodological knowledge, the available in-
frastructure, and the need for/possibility of collaboration. Never hesitate to reach out
for help and never lose your enthusiasm for your research question!
6. Summary: Prospects and challenges
As discussed above, mixed methods research is a complex field of growing importance. Vari-
ous developments in terms of sampling, data collection and analytical procedures as well as
philosophical foundations have evolved and developed, and specific funding opportunities
have been established. ‘These developments signal optimism’ and—according to some propo-
nents of the mixed methods approach—‘the strengths and power of mixed methods research
[…] has only just begun to emerge’ (Fetters 2016, p. 8). This seems to be especially true in the
context of increasing transnationalisation and digitalisation, which expand the possibilities of
(and necessity for) data collection and interdisciplinary collaboration. However, despite this
enthusiasm, advocates of quantitative and qualitative research remain sceptical towards this
research approach. Researchers formally trained and experienced in one of the methodological
traditions often find it difficult to learn and apply the other approach. In addition, when col-
laborating, researchers might find it challenging to integrate the viewpoints of qualitative and
quantitative scholars. Therefore, when deciding on using a mixed methods design, you need to
9 These might be common hurdles among (young) researchers in Japanese Studies around the globe, as training in
quantitative methodology is generally not a part of curricula in Japanese Studies. Robert and Sadia Pekkanen (see
this chapter, Ch. 10.1), on the other hand, work in the realm of Political Science, and observe ‘that training in
qualitative methods […] has been demoted in the Social Sciences’ and thus call for more training at universities.
Against the background of these inequalities, Creswell et al. (2010, pp. 619–637) provide some practical tips on
how to teach mixed methods research.
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be aware of your abilities and experience(s) and your discipline’s conventions. It might be use-
ful to be well-prepared for criticism from both sides.
In summary, as outlined above, mixed methods research is complex, time-consuming, money-
intensive and challenging on multiple levels—especially for junior researchers with little expe-
rience, funding and/or institutional backing. Nevertheless, mixed methods research provides a
great opportunity to achieve a deeper and more comprehensive understanding of a research
objective, fostering (interdisciplinary) collaborations and broadening the researcher’s horizons
through the application of (in most cases) new or unfamiliar research approaches (qualitative
or quantitative, respectively).
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10.1 Reflections on multi-method research
The common wisdom today is that we need to combine quantitative and qualitative methods
in order to shed more light on causal research questions in the Social Sciences. This thinking is
increasingly pervasive in Political Science and has made substantial inroads into Area Studies,
including the field of Japan. In this essay, we draw on our scholarly and pedagogical experi-
ences in approaching the three questions set out for us in this volume. We discuss how multi-
method research (MMR) has influenced our own work, what we see as some of the problems
it poses and what we see as takeaways for others.
First, what do we understand by multi-method research? Typically, in Political Science, with
causal inference in mind, this means combining statistical or formal models (the quantitative
part, with a big number of observations or Large-N) that give an aggregate overview of find-
ings with other methods such as historically attuned case studies (the qualitative part, with a
smaller number of observations or Small-N) that draw attention to causal processes, mechan-
isms and sequences (Gerring 2012, pp. 362–366). MMR is widely thought of as disciplinary
best practice for the purposes of correcting the weaknesses of any one method and providing
external validity to the findings (Ahmed/Sil 2012).
Selecting MMR represents a methodological choice. We have also deployed MMR in our own
Japan-focused research, finding the ‘triangulation’ among different methods and data sources
a useful way of answering the questions we set ourselves. In past projects, one of our authors
has chosen qualitative methods (Pekkanen 2006), quantitative methods (Pekkanen/Nyblade/
Krauss 2006) and MMR (Krauss/Pekkanen 2011). The other has chosen both a strict MMR
approach (Pekkanen 2003) and a purely qualitative one in a collaborative work (Pekkanen/
Kallender-Umezu 2010). Below we discuss our methodological choices in three books: two in
which MMR was pursued, and one in which qualitative methods were chosen and not MMR.
The research for The rise and fall of Japan’s LDP involved a study of what happened to cen-
tral institutions of the LDP after electoral reform. These were: personal support organisations
for politicians (kōenkai), factions and the party’s policymaking body, the Policy Affairs Re-
search Council (PARC). The authors used MMR to investigate all of these, but LDP party fac-
tions provide perhaps the readiest example. The central research question of the book was
how electoral reform affected institutions, and the argument revolved around historical insti-
tutionalist concepts of sequencing, institutional complementarity and path dependence. For
factions in particular, the question was how factions had changed after the electoral reform of
1994 from a single non-transferable vote in multi-member districts (SNTV MMD) to the cur-
rent mixed-member majoritarian system. One aspect that particularly interested the authors
was how factional membership aligned with personnel decisions by the LDP. The most widely
known example of this is that for decades cabinet positions were allocated roughly in propor-
tion to factional size, in a kind of intra-LDP version of Gamson’s Law. So, one question the
book was particularly keen to investigate was the role factions played in personnel decisions—
283
meaning assigning LDP Diet Members to positions in PARC (party), Diet committees (legisla-
ture) or government (cabinet and sub-cabinet).
The authors adopted a multi-methods strategy to answer this question. The reasons for choos-
ing a multi-method analysis were that the authors wanted to both understand the process and
to have an overview of the outcomes. Either element by itself would have been a piece of the
whole but insufficient for the research objectives of the authors. In other words, multi-meth-
ods were deliberately chosen as they represented the only viable path to achieving the research
objectives of the authors.
The qualitative methods research tools employed were documentary analysis and interviews.
Documentary analysis meant a thorough review of the secondary literature on factions in
Japanese and English, as well as a review of some primary sources, primarily LDP party docu-
ments. Documentary analysis was particularly valuable in the analysis of the development of
factions over time. As the research question was framed as change over time, these were essen-
tial. Equally important were the elite interviews. One of us has argued elsewhere (Bleich/
Pekkanen 2013) for the importance of rigorous reporting standards being applied to inter-
views. In this case, the interviews were essential for an understanding of the process; the au-
thors wanted to understand how factional affiliation could matter in deciding which Diet
Member would be assigned to which committee. This type of information is not available
from looking at the final committee assignments, but adheres to the deliberation process. To
gather information on the nature of the decision-making process, interviews were a required
method.
In interviews with Diet Members, the authors asked about the decision-making process, both
the how and the why. The authors wanted to know the process of how decisions were made,
specifically who met with whom and how often. They learned that factional representatives
negotiated the distribution of Diet and PARC posts. The authors also wanted to know what
kinds of arguments were advanced in these meetings, and what kinds of arguments were con-
sidered convincing in advantaging one potential Diet Member appointee over another. As a re-
sult of employing these qualitative methods, the authors were able to create a model of how
post allocation works within the LDP. All of this information could not be ascertained from
public documents, nor could the process be inferred from looking at statistical analyses of
committee assignments. Rather, interviews were required to obtain this information.
To complement the authors’ qualitative methods employed for an understanding of the pro-
cess, the authors also used quantitative methods to analyse the importance of factions in com-
mittee assignments. The key question here was whether factional affiliation or the lack thereof
had any impact on the likelihood that a Diet Member would be given particular posts in the
party, legislature or government. The authors found evidence that factional affiliation in-
creased the chances of legislators receiving posts. This kind of analysis—weighing up how
much a particular factor mattered compared to other factors—is particularly amenable to
quantitative methods. We also used measures of proportionality to assess how factionally bal-
anced Cabinets were before and after electoral reform, finding that proportionality did de-
crease markedly but remained relatively high.
The authors were able to construct their arguments about the continuing importance of fac-
tions despite electoral reform by combining their qualitative and quantitative analysis. Inter-
views and documentary analysis showed that factions still mattered in the process, and quanti-
284
tative analysis provided evidence that factional affiliation mattered in the results. The result of
the combination of these two different research methods was a much stronger evidentiary ba-
sis for the arguments in The rise and fall of Japan’s LDP.
Our other author relied heavily on MMR in one project but not another. This is because not
every research question is amenable to the MMR approach. A lot depends on existing sets of
theoretical literature, which can orient one’s thinking, the clarity of the question that can be
posed and from which neat rival hypotheses can be derived, the availability of data that often
comes one’s way fortuitously in the field, the pressures of time and resources and vagaries that
invariably go with fieldwork, the methodological competences one possesses, and the episte-
mological orientation that resonates with the researcher in the final analysis.
In Picking winners? From technology catch-up to the space race in Japan, the author combined
a statistical analysis with structured focused comparisons and case studies from dissertation
work. The book provided a look at the underpinnings of the developmental state model,
drawing on the frameworks of the literature on strategic trade policy and endogenous trade
policy. The general question it asked was how do governments choose industries to favour? If
winners were to be picked, by what selection criteria could governments choose some indus-
tries over others? What did the case of postwar Japan teach us about these larger roiling theo-
retical issues of concern?
MMR was the right choice for this book project because the author was concerned with doing
justice to Japanese institutional peculiarities but also with extracting generalisations that could
go beyond Japan. There was an element of luck that came out of the author’s professional net-
works. One thing that expedited the research was the availability of a time-series cross-sec-
tional dataset to which the author could add, and that was key to providing an aggregate
overview of the entire manufacturing sector fairly early; it facilitated the setting up of a test of
rival economic and political logic to industrial selection, carried out through a variety of hard
trade and industrial policies. This was the first glimmer that economic logic had held sway,
and that bureaucrats had been at the helm of Japan’s industrial strategising for a good bit of
time; the choice-theoretic logic that put politicians at the centre of industrial selection mattered
of course, but not as consistently. That macro overview was necessary but not sufficient to es-
tablish more credible evidence on this finding, and was followed by structured data analysis
that helped confirm roughly the same pattern of industrial selection. These aggregate windows
helped set up the case studies, in which the author drew on interviews, and primary and sec-
ondary sources to extract the criteria for selection that were consistently dominant. These
helped to illuminate the set of factors that actually mattered to policymakers on the ground
and it grounded assessments of the theoretical criteria that were assumed to drive things. One
thing that came out of this study for the author (Pekkanen 2003, p. 203) was that even a sim-
ple question can become very complicated very fast in the real world. The layers of methods
helped tremendously in clarifying the answer from different perspectives; moreover, triangulat-
ing between them kept the author aware of the complexities of approximating the ‘truth’ (en-
couraging reflexivity) and cautioned against any extreme depictions of Japanese industrial
strategy.
In setting up the next book project, however, it was clear at the outset that the MMR ap-
proach would be wholly unsuited to the enterprise. The book sought to focus on Japanese
space policy in a thematic and chronological manner, seeking to illuminate the changes in the
legal and institutional context, the technology trajectories, and the motivations and manoeu-
285
vrings of corporations that were central to both. There were few other works available to
build on. The author was able to join forces with a leading space journalist, leading to a book
that drew on academic and real-world backgrounds. Our primary objective when we set out
(Pekkanen/Kallender-Umezu 2010, p. 223) was to document specific developments in Japanese
space assets across public and private actors, and to analyse what we saw as the market-to-
military trajectories in Japanese space technology and policy. To that end, decade by decade
and across all sets of space technologies, we process-traced the space activities of the Japanese
public and especially corporate actors. Until our work, these were all thought of as scattered
dots—the corporations, rockets, satellites and emerging technologies—and we focused on
showing through detailed case study-based chapters how they were connected and what that
implied about Japan’s broader militarisation controversies. We concluded then that Japan was
on track to become a bigger military space power; and almost ten years later our predictions
have been borne out.
In retrospect, it is difficult to conceive of this project being carried out in any other way than
through qualitative approaches. One was a practical constraint, as there was little to no previ-
ous work on the topic. Another was that the research goal was not to test but to illuminate
some aspect of the unfolding realities on the ground. In the space book, given its centrality
to real-world developments and policy, we recognised that there was also a heavy premium
on getting things right. We therefore relied on piecing together and corroborating findings
through a variety of qualitative methods and techniques, such as case studies based on primary
and secondary sources, process tracing, interviews and participant observation. Our observa-
tions were drawn out across different cases and time, and it took some time to see how the
dots were connected and what they suggested about Japan.
MMR is certainly useful but it is affected by a deepening inequality in the training of social
scientists. One significant problem in advocating this approach is that training in qualitative
methods, noted for their usefulness to societies and policymakers, has been demoted in the So-
cial Sciences (Desch 2019). If we are not formally training students and younger scholars in
qualitative methods, how can we credibly talk about MMR? These realities also have the un-
fortunate effect of making qualitative methods, which can stand on their own, seem to be mere
appendages to big data analysis. One way to address this gap is to strengthen training with
respect to qualitative methodology in the Social Sciences, and one of us has taken steps in this
respect as founding director of the Qualitative Multi-Methods Research Initiative (QUAL) at
the University of Washington (2019) in Seattle.
As takeaways for researchers, we suggest that methods should be chosen to best address the
research question; there is no reason to always choose MMR as, in some cases, either qualita-
tive or quantitative methods alone will be appropriate. We have found MMR particularly
valuable when we wish to analyse both processes and outcomes. But when the nature of the
observations across time and cases is unclear to the researchers, and when the data often (as in
the field) have to be generated from first principles, qualitative methods are best suited to illu-
minating the processes at play and keeping the research accountable to the realities and people
on the ground. Quantitative methods are best in other cases, for example when weighing up
the differential contributions of multiple factors.
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10.2 Texts, voices and numbers: Using mixed methods to sketch
social phenomena
Laura Dales
Researching friendship
As a graduate student, I was trained in the ‘non-discipline’ of Asian Studies, under the good guid-
ance of an anthropologist. As a result of this background, the social research I have conducted in
Japan has tended towards the anthropological, with attention to Gender Studies and Cultural
Studies along the way. My research has involved two main methods: the collection of subjective,
reflective perceptions and experience elicited through semi-structured interviews and ad hoc dis-
cussions, and the observation and analysis of contextualised behaviour in particular field sites
over extended periods. Using these methods, I have explored individuals’ perceptions, experi-
ences and expectations of (inter alia) feminism, agency, singlehood, marriage, friendship, extra-
marital relationships, career, loneliness, belonging and happiness.
When embarking on my most recent research project, I decided to build on this practice, with
time and energy allowed by funding from the Australia Research Council for a project entitled
Beyond the family: Relationships of intimacy in contemporary Japan (ARC DECRA
(DE120101702)). This project primarily aimed to examine what role friendships and intimate re-
lationships play in Japanese society, as singlehood becomes more common, fertility declines and
the population ages. More specifically, I sought to use case studies of individual experiences with
an eye to:
1. Mapping the roles and ramifications of non-family networks of support, in the context of
broad demographic shifts (ageing, delay of marriage, low fertility).
2. Investigating gendered and generational differences in experiences and expectations of
friendship and extra-familial intimacy.
3. Clarifying the effects of marriage on friendships and the effects of friendships on marriage
(that is, marital plans, prospects and relations).
4. Analysing the discourse of intimate extra-familial relationships in recent popular media,
notably magazines and popular non-fiction literature.
In this project, as in my earlier work, I primarily used interviews and participant observation:
spending several months over the course of four years in a café that presented itself as a hub of
queer community and interpersonal relationships. I interviewed 68 people, either singly or in self-
selected ‘friend’ groups of up to six people. Through both interviews and participant observation,
I endeavoured to elicit and convey the ways that individuals see and move through their world,
with attention to details that offer specific explanation or contextualisation of these perceptions
and modes of behaviour.
Of course, there are limitations to this approach in terms of the picture that can be captured. For
example, when an unmarried woman observes in dialogue that a friendship has become compli-
cated since her counterpart married or had children, I take this observation as both a reflection of
her lived experience, and a response to the particular discussion on friendships and marriage
which I am eliciting. That is to say, it features centrally in my interview/fieldwork notes—because
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Laura Dales
this is a central thematic interest of my research—but it may not feature as a prominent daily con-
cern in my interviewee’s life. Thus, it may only be raised by interviewees incidentally, or in specific
response to the questions I posit. Furthermore, the details of the friendship—for example, the na-
ture of its complication or how the interviewee has dealt with this complication—may be specific
to the particular instance, and in that sense cannot be extrapolated to a larger population.
Triangulating with contemporary literature
To determine whether the individual might be understood as representative of a greater group, I

compare the details of individual reflections with those elicited in discussions with others, both
like (in the case above, unmarried women) and unlike (e.g. married women/men). This is not tri-
angulation in a narrow sense, because the data is similar: interviews and discussions. Rather it is
contextualisation that provides a richer sense of the ways that individuals fit into groups. For ex-
ample, what are the key themes among the responses of married women interviewees, and are
these similar or different to responses given by unmarried women? Is there meaning in that simi-
larity/difference?
But where there are only few interviewees in a category, this might yet remain insufficient as an
indicator of significance or prevalence. If one recognises this, triangulation can be helpful. Trian-
gulation, in my understanding, involves the comparison of different kinds of data, to check or
verify the accuracy or uniformity of data, but also to provide deeper insights into the context of
the study (Taylor et al. 2015, p. 94). I use contemporary literature, typically essays, non-fiction
social commentary, academic texts and popular media, to examine the salience and spread of par-
ticular themes emerging in interviews. How have Japanese authors written about friendships? Is
conflict between friendship and marriage experienced broadly, or chronically, among particular
demographic groups in society, and if so how is this understood in popular discourse? How are
extra-familial intimate relationships viewed by sociologists and social critics?
Thus, in exploring friendships and singlehood, I have looked at work by the sociologists Masahi-
ro Yamada and Chizuko Ueno, the feminist writers Yōko Haruka and Minori Kitahara, the re-
search think tank leader Kazuhisa Arakawa and the journalists Momoko Shirakawa and Megu-
mi Ushikubo. The genres of these texts can be defined variously as scholarly, social commentary,
social critique and self-help, with differing levels of popularity and circulation. The value of using
these texts is twofold: firstly, to assist in triangulating the experiences (Gray et al. 2007, p. 75).
Secondly to indicate the currency of the themes that arise in discussions and interviews with indi-
viduals. Particularly for researchers based outside Japan, it can be easy to rely on English-lan-
guage material as the secondary sources scaffolding our own research findings, without engaging
with the work of local scholars, writers and social observers. The dangers in this are self-evident;
using Japanese texts can help to avoid the potential insularity (or at worst, Orientalism) of this
approach (see Liu-Farrer, Ch. 4.3; Zachmann, Ch. 4). Incorporating popular as well as academic
literature reflects the ways that social phenomena are interpreted more broadly: how the media
and popular culture can shape the discourse around social issues such as singlehood, and drawing
attention to gaps between ideal and practical realities (Dales 2014).
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Adding a quantitative lens
Following the collection of qualitative data over four years of the project, I was encouraged by a
colleague to consider developing and applying a research tool with which to gather a bigger, and
more statistically significant, set of data on friendships. I should note that at the outset, as a schol-
ar who is not trained in quantitative methodologies, I was particularly ambivalent about design-
ing a survey for large-scale implementation: both because of uncertainty regarding the tools of
quantitative analysis, and because I was not convinced that it would provide insight beyond the
data already gathered in my qualitative fieldwork and interviews. But the potential insights of-
fered by a broad-scale (n=2,500) national survey were enticing and ultimately productive to the
project.
I began by looking at others’ large-scale surveys, introduced in sociological articles, with atten-
tion to how they had been facilitated. It is beyond the scope of most single researchers to conduct
large surveys without significant support, and the key consideration for many in this position is
likely to be costs: the larger and more detailed the survey—and the more efficient and profession-
al the service—the more expensive it is likely to be. Because I was fortunate to have a budget for
this study, I was able to focus on the services provided by particular market research companies:
the capacity to conduct a national survey with specified demographic delineators, i.e. a general
balance across age groups, sex, employment categories and marital status. Ultimately, I chose to
use a particular market research company because a senior Japanese sociologist colleague, who
had used their services for his own research in the past, recommended it. Given that many social
researchers in Japan have experience in quantitative studies of this kind, I would recommend
looking to these colleagues for advice, particularly for those embarking on quantitative research
for the first time.
In designing the survey, I decided my first step was to develop a list of the areas of which I sought
further (or broader) examination, and to clarify the target audience of respondents for the pro-
posed survey. I aimed to attract respondents from across Japan to ensure my findings were less
geographically specific than my qualitative work (which had been focused in urban and semi-ur-
ban areas), and as equally as possible across age groups (20–50 years) and economic strata. The
latter was a particularly important consideration as I sought to counter biases among my qualita-
tive research population: 44 women (relative to 24 men), skewed towards a more highly educated
middle class. I also hoped to include a sizeable sample of individuals identifying themselves as
same-sex attracted, but this proved difficult: only 2.6% of both the females and males surveyed
indicated that they were in a same-sex relationship.
I also considered the kinds of information I had found revealing and/or recurring in interviews:
the lengths and resilience of particular kinds of friendships, the effects of marriage upon friend-
ship, the impact of gender on experiences of friendship, and the extent to which friendships sup-
ported or challenged singlehood. These formed the basis for questions developed for the survey.
Further, because I am interested in perceptions of well-being and connection, I decided to include
a psychological tool: the Subjective Vitality Scale, a 5-term model adapted from the Basic Psycho-
logical Need Satisfaction Scale. This tool requires participants to respond to questions about (in-
ter alia) their sense of vitality, freedom, satisfaction, connection and competence, by indicating
the degree to which they agree with set statements. Following design completion, I submitted the
survey questions, instructions and related documentation to my university’s Human Research
Ethics Committee to obtain permission to conduct the survey (see Reiher/Wagner, Ch. 16). De-
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Laura Dales
pending on the institution and its requirements, this can be a lengthy process, so it is important to
factor this in to the time frame for your research.
Analysis of the survey results is ongoing. I enlisted the help of a research assistant experienced in
SPSS analysis to provide an initial overview of first research findings, while also exploring the da-
ta in its basic Excel format. The next steps will involve comparing and contrasting key themes
and findings from the survey and those from the qualitative research, and then situating this ana-
lysis within the overall study. So far, the survey has produced some interesting findings. Although
I did not ask explicitly about happiness and life satisfaction in my qualitative interviews, I was cu-
rious to see the impact of marriage and children on surveyed individuals’ sense of satisfaction;
however, the overall findings showed little difference between never-married and married. Fur-
ther, having children slightly increased satisfaction rates (compared to those without children),
even for single parents. Interestingly, the highest scores for satisfaction were seen in the category
‘widowed’!
I can already conclude that the survey produced valuable contributions to my overall study: both
in the breadth of its scope and findings, and in its support for the micro-level observations made
through individual case studies. The granularity of interviews is obscured in the broad brush-
strokes of the survey, but the latter reveals national trends, group patterns of satisfaction and
practices of friendship that could not easily be generalised from the individual interviews. Politi-
cal and social concerns around precarity and disconnection in contemporary Japan, reflected in
the recent proliferation in literature on living alone, are not obvious from the survey findings on
relatedness and connection. But these are nonetheless themes that emerge from discussions and
observations conducted in the qualitative research, and are therefore worthy of scholarly atten-
tion.
Conclusion
Plainly, there are many ways to answer questions about contemporary Japanese society. Insofar
as each researcher has only so much time, energy and resources, before one begins a project, it is
important to consider its scope and possibilities: how much time and resources you have to de-
vote to the study, from which to ascertain both the methods and the size of the sample. In a short-
er-term research period, such as a master’s programme, it may be difficult to design, plan, con-
duct and analyse a large-scale survey, even assuming that permission has been obtained from the
appropriate research ethics bodies. In this context, consider ways to conduct smaller studies with
similar approaches. For example, you may limit the target audience to a particular demographic,
with fewer responses needed to obtain a sense of the particular perspective. Similarly, when con-
sidering interviews and qualitative fieldwork, bear in mind that organisation of interviews (not to
mention transcription and analysis) can be time-consuming and difficult to organise, especially if
you are not based in Japan.
A large-scale survey, when conducted by market research companies, can be expensive; in-depth
ethnographic exploration of individuals or a specific environment requires time and energy.
When deciding on an approach, one should obviously also consider the aims of the project: Is it
imperative to map broad trends and produce generalisable conclusions? Or is it more important
to produce a ‘narrow but deep’ study of a particular site or individuals? There are benefits to both
290
approaches; it simply depends on the aims of the research and the interests and material capaci-
ties of the researcher.
291
10.3 Examining facts from different angles: The case of the
deregulation of employment relations in Japan
Jun Imai
Questions as a starting point
The term ‘mixed methods approach’ does not simply mean encouraging researchers to use
multiple methods. It means encouraging a strategic use of different methods under the princi-
ple of triangulation. In my view, triangulation facilitates productive ‘communication’ between
analytical frameworks and data. Research textbooks often illustrate research as either a deduc-
tive or an inductive process. However, research does not proceed in such a linear fashion;
rather it is a process of constant (re)adjustment of interpretation and observation (retroduc-
tive) (Ragin/Amoroso 2011). The idea of triangulation facilitates this process, and a mixed
methods approach helps to produce well-informed, nuanced and convincing interpretations of
data and causal sequences and enables researchers to articulate their findings in explanatory
narratives.
The examples I introduce here are from my research on the deregulation of the employment
relations and labour market in Japan, a trend that happened mainly during the period between
1995 and 2005, but is still ongoing. The deregulatory reforms at the turn of the century are
known to have had significant impacts on Japanese society today. The reforms included the
expansion of non-regular employment forms such as temporary dispatched work (rōdōsha
haken, hereafter temporary work), which was first established in the late 1980s and signifi-
cantly expanded in and after the decade of deregulatory reforms. It also included the case of
the Discretionary Work System (sairyō rōdōsei, hereafter DWS), a working time regulation that
almost exempts a segment of white-collar workers from the regular working time regulations.
This was also first established in the late 1980s, and significantly expanded due to deregula-
tions in this period. Its further expansion was discussed during the recent work-style reform
(hataraki-kata kaikaku, implementation April 1, 2019).
I had questions such as why, how and for whose benefit these deregulatory reforms were im-
plemented. What are the consequences of these reforms? By asking these questions, I wanted
to understand the impact of the deregulatory reforms on employment relations and labour
markets in Japan, focusing on policy debates, the changes to labour management practices, the
changes to the structure of inequality, the patterns of social mobility and the ways workers
make effort at the workplaces. I planned to contribute to the research literature that examines
the changes to and continuity of the employment institutions in industrial democracies (Yama-
mura/Streeck 2003), and that attempts to identify new characteristics of inequality emerging in
these societies (Emmenegger et al. 2012). The results of this research project were published as
books and articles in the early 2010s (Imai 2011; Sato/Imai 2011).
In order to produce finely tuned explanations about social reality, I recommend always keep-
ing the concept of triangulation in mind. In my case, using multiple methods was a natural
and appropriate choice to understand the policy process and its social consequences. The most
common methods I used in my research were archival work/document analysis, expert inter-
292
views and quantitative data analysis. Putting all these into historical perspective was indispens-
able, as having knowledge about the development of the employment relations and labour
market structure in Japan greatly helped me to interpret my observations. By combining the
different data and methods, I constantly performed triangulation on the issue in question.
Tuning the interpretation via triangulation
Usually, the main research questions guide the research, but the steps described below often
take place in parallel and/or even in an intertwined manner. In the case of my research, the
first thing I needed to do was to collect documents related to the regulative reforms, such as
policy proposals published by related parties and transcriptions of the important meetings, in
addition to the laws in question. It was necessary to read all these materials to roughly grasp
what was going on in the field related to the issue in question. However, understanding legis-
lative texts, related documents and policy discussions is often difficult for those who are not
policy or legal experts. The legal explanation provided by legal experts often did not help us to
sociologically understand the impact of these reforms since those explanations were for legal
scholars and practitioners. Legal scholars need to put reforms into the context of legal devel-
opments and theory, and practitioners need to understand the legal details to practice law
properly. Since legal abstraction is different from sociological abstraction, we needed to put
the laws, their revisions and the discussions on them into a sociological context.
The guiding principle of a sociological interpretation should be the theoretical argument. In

my case, the argument was that the policy process and the articulations of the legislative texts
(and the guidelines provided by the ministry) reflect the balance of power between the related
actors, such as the state, employers and employees, in the case of employment/labour market
regulations. Since the actor who has the upper hand in this matter benefits most from legal
revisions, measuring to what extent the reform favours specific stakeholders is a crucial ana-
lytical point. Expert interviews greatly helped us to read between the lines of the documents
and the discussions. For instance, the minutes of the ministry’s advisory councils’ (shingikai)
meetings were the main source of information about the major points of the ongoing discus-
sions and the stances taken by the most important actors. However, only relying on these
sources frustrated us since they appear to lack some important issues.
When the expansion of the list of occupations for temporary work was considered at the advi-
sory council, I wondered why non-expansion was never considered and why the discussion
was so hasty. It was a series of expert interviews with the members of the advisory councils
and Deregulation Committee, including representatives from employers, labour and scholars,
who taught me what the ‘shifting balance of power between related actors’ means in reality.
During the deregulatory reforms, the Deregulation Committee, which includes entrepreneurs
and deregulation advocates, became an important actor that tilted the balance of power in tra-
ditional tripartite corporatism. By that time, I already knew that the alliance between employ-
ers and the Deregulation Committee had the upper hand in the process of deregulation. In an
interview, a public representative, who was supposed to be neutral towards employers and
workers, told me that due to the tilted balance of power, the points I raised were not the issue
or an option. Whether to include working at manufacturing lines in the list of non-applicable
jobs in the category of temporary work or not was the real issue from the beginning. This in-
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Jun Imai
terview clearly taught me that the shifting balance of power could push potential issues and
options away, and that this was exactly the reason I felt the discussion was so hasty. The im-
balance of power facilitated discussions in favour of one party.
A brief stint of participant observation was also helpful in me understanding the growing in-
fluence of business and deregulation advocates in the policy process, which confirmed which I
was told in the expert interviews. I attended one session of the above-mentioned advisory
council, where three actors were traditionally on an equal footing about agenda setting. How-
ever, in the session I attended as an observer, I witnessed that the agenda setting power was
clearly in the hands of employers due to the rising status of the Deregulation Committee that
backed them up. It was my moment of ‘seeing is believing’. When the employees’ side refused
to discuss the issue, which was a normal way of doing things at advisory councils, the employ-
ers had no hesitation in pushing forward their agenda, citing that the agenda had already been
set by the Deregulation Committee. While the labour representatives were up against the
ropes, there was no support for them, even from the public representatives.
In this research project, I mainly used survey data collected by government ministries, such as the
Employment Status Survey (shūgyō kōzō kihon chōsa), the Labour Force Survey (rōdō ryoku
chōsa) and the General Survey on Working Conditions (shūrō jōken sōgō chōsa) to check the
quantitative significance of the deregulation and the shift of power relations. My examination of
that data, using cross-tab tables including mobility tables (that show the patterns of job changes)
and graphs of chronological development, helped me to understand the changes in the sections of
the population affected by the policy changes. I examined the situations of every employment
form, considering important variables for the study of inequalities such as gender, company size
and mobilities. These examinations did not provide an in-depth understanding of the phenome-
na. However, they did reveal an accurate profile of the variables and their impact on the issue. It
is important to connect these findings with qualitative observations.
Since the reforms were driven by employers, I expected an expansion of non-regular employ-
ment that further helps employers to achieve flexibility in labour management, and, in fact,
the number of temporary workers increased greatly after the revisions in 1997 and 1999, espe-
cially in clerical jobs that were mainly occupied by women. This was followed by an even
greater increase in male-dominated manufacturing jobs after the revision in 2004. My analysis
confirmed this ‘expansion’ proposition, but the combination of my findings from the survey
data and the knowledge drawn from the qualitative investigation informed by the existing lit-
erature helped me to reach an even deeper understanding of the issue especially concerning the
relationship between the expansion and gender.
For example, men’s increase in temporary work was eye-catching. This increase, I concluded,
prepared the ground for the turmoil after the Lehman crisis in 2008. However, I recognized
that it could mean more to the social change because it looked like it violated the conventional
relationship between employment and gender. Following the crisis, so-called ‘tent cities’ be-
came a visual symbol of those temporary workers, who had lost their jobs due to a termina-
tion of contract. Since temporary work was usually considered as a possible form of work for
women, the media coverage of men, who are supposed to be breadwinner, thrown onto the
streets as homeless people was so shocking that it seemed to trigger the re-regulation of tempo-
rary work in the following years. The observation of such a tight relationship between em-
ployment form and gender even generated new questions. For instance, these clearly gendered
developments posed the question of whether the initial establishment of temporary work in
294
the mid 1980s and the establishment of the Equal Employment Opportunity Law (EEOL) in
1986 was coincidence; was the disproportionate allocation of women into the expanded tem-
porary work intentional? Although I could not follow up on this question, it is an important
historical issue as it may reveal that gendered inequality was deepened or deliberately pre-
served when it was supposed to be being dismantled.
There was a partial answer to the continuity/change question. The expansion of the new forms of
employment such as temporary work and contract work (keiyaku) grew more significantly at
large firms than in small and medium-sized firms, where traditional non-regular employment
such as part-time work (pāto) seems to be enough to achieve flexibility. This proves that the shift
in employment practices by large Japanese companies was enabled by the deregulatory reforms.
Importance of the historical context
Putting any observation into a historical context is necessary to measure and clarify the signifi-
cance and the exact meaning of the findings. It is an indispensable part of the efforts to inter-
pret policy discussions, legislative texts, power dynamics and changes in numbers. In my re-
search, for instance, I found that employers tended to demand ‘autonomous decision-making
at an organisational level’ (rōshi jichi). The discussion on the above-mentioned DWS was no
exception. In order to decide to whom the DWS should be applied, employers constantly ar-
gued that these decisions should be made in each respective organisation and not through gov-
ernment regulations. It is no surprise that employers opted for deregulation and preferred de-
centralised, organisational-level decision-making. However, to properly understand the above-
mentioned discussions, specific knowledge about the history of Japan’s labour market and
working time regulations is necessary. The Labour Standards Act (LSA) stated that the upper
limit of overtime work is 45 hours per month in Japan. However, there was a big loophole in
this law. Article 36 of the LSA includes a clause on exceptional circumstances that allows com-
panies to negotiate the upper limit of overtime work depending on the situation of individual
companies. This agreement—negotiated at the organisational level—made extreme overwork
possible and completely undermined the social regulations. The media reported the shocking
examples of this agreement’s consequences: overtime at some major companies exceeded 100,
or even 200 hours per month. Knowing that it has been already negotiated at the organiza-
tional level in favor of employers, employers’ assertion cannot be interpreted simply as the
general preference of decentralized decision making. Japanese employers knew what they
could benefit from controlling working time and were confident to control it at the organiza-
tional level. They wanted to maintain the status quo of the power relations by extending it to
the governance of the DWS.
Summary
In this essay, I introduced examples of triangulation that aimed to produce well-informed, nu-
anced and convincing interpretations of observations on deregulation processes in the
Japanese labour market and presented findings and their explanations. In sum, I examined the
same issues in documents, people’s narratives and behaviour, numbers and accounts of histori-
295
Jun Imai
cal contexts to finalise my interpretation. Although it sounds simple, I want to conclude this
essay by pointing out some difficulties of this approach. Triangulation, once it is in progress, is
clearly effective in answering research questions. However, it is also effective in generating fur-
ther questions. It is a productive way to conduct research, but it also raises the difficult
question of ‘saturation’: When should researchers stop collecting and analysing data (see Ger-
ster, Ch. 12.3; Rosenberger, Ch. 12.1; Spoden, Ch. 12.2)? In order to make this decision, re-
searchers have to reconsider their data and interpretations, reflect on the breadth and depth of
their research question and ask whether it has reached the point of saturation.
296
Further reading
Creswell, John W. (2014): Research design: Qualitative, quantitative & mixed methods approaches. Los
Angeles, CA: Sage.
Creswell, John W./Creswell, J. David (2018): Research design: Qualitative, quantitative & mixed methods
approaches. International student edition. Los Angeles, CA: Sage edge.
Johnson, Burke R./Onwuegbuzie, Anthony J./Turner Lisa (2007): Toward a definition of mixed methods
research. In: Journal of Mixed Methods Research 1, No. 2, pp. 112–133.
Schrauf, Robert W. (2016): Mixed methods: Interviews, surveys, and cross-cultural comparisons. Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press.
Tashakkori, Abbas/Teddlie, Charles (eds.) (2010): SAGE handbook of mixed methods in social & behav-
ioral research. Los Angeles, CA: Sage.
Teddlie, Charles/Tashakkori, Abbas (2009): Foundations of mixed methods research: Integrating quantita-
tive and qualitative approaches in the Social and Behavioral Sciences. Los Angeles, CA: Sage.
Venkatesh, Viswanath/Brown, Susan A./Sullivan, Yuila W. (2016): Guidelines for conducting mixed meth-
ods research: An extension and illustration. In: Journal of the Association for Information Systems 17,
No. 7, pp. 435–494.
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Chapter 11
How to analyse data: An introduction to methods of data
analysis in qualitative Social Science research
David Chiavacci
1. Introduction
Data analysis is like baking a cake (Kornmeier 2018). The raw data or materials you have col-
lected are just as important to your argument as the ingredients—sugar, eggs, flour—are for
baking a cake. But to develop this argument from your data or material—your final goal—you
have to work with the ingredients. That means that you have to think through your data and
transform them into evidence for an innovative argument that should be as pleasing as a splen-
did cake. Not many people will be interested in your raw data—or ingredients—as such, but
an innovative argument or a good cake might bring you fame.
Hence, data analysis is arguably not only an important step but also the core of qualitative
Social Science research. While for a long time the main methodological focus lay on data col-
lection per se, data analysis has increasingly attracted attention in recent years. Parallel to the
huge expansion of, differentiation in and the many turns in qualitative research methods and
methodology of the last few decades,1 qualitative data analysis has also and perhaps even most
markedly advanced and diversified: while earlier handbooks and textbooks usually cover the
entire qualitative research process (Denzin/Lincoln 2005a; Flick et al. 2000; Silverman 2000),
an increasing number of thick introductory publications have appeared in recent years that fo-
cus primarily or even exclusively on qualitative data analysis (Bazeley 2013; Bernard et al.
2017; Flick 2014a; Grbich 2007; Harding 2019; Miles et al. 2019). This leads to highly com-
plex recent definitions of qualitative data analysis, which try to incorporate different traditions
and worldviews of the diverse field of qualitative research. Uwe Flick (2014b, p. 5), for exam-
ple, proposes the following definition, which looks rather like an abstract than a definition
with a length of 114 words:
Qualitative data analysis is the classification and interpretation of linguistic (or visual)
material to make statements about implicit and explicit dimensions and structures of
meaning-making in the material and what is represented in it. Meaning-making can refer
to subjective or social meanings. Qualitative data analysis also is applied to discover and
describe issues in the field or structures and processes in routines and practices. Often,
qualitative data analysis combines approaches of a rough analysis of the material
1 For an overview of the history and development of qualitative research, see Norman K. Denzin and Yvonna S.
Lincoln (2005b, pp. 14–20). However, this model has been criticised as representing primarily the development of
qualitative research in Anglo-Saxon areas. Uwe Flick (2014b, pp. 8–10), for example, has developed a quite dif-
ferent account of the history of qualitative research in German-speaking countries.
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Chapter 11 How to analyse data
(overviews, condensation, summaries) with approaches of a detailed analysis (elaboration

of categories, hermeneutic interpretations or identified structures). The final aim is often
to arrive at generalizable statements by comparing various materials or various texts or
several cases.
This chapter will not be able to address all of the issues raised in the above definition in detail
but will seek to provide an introduction to and overview of the main aspects of qualitative da-
ta analysis in general and research on Japan in particular. The chapter is primarily intended for
PhD students and young researchers who want to learn more about qualitative research, and it
discusses some of the major steps and challenges of qualitative data analysis. First, the position
of qualitative data analysis in the entire research process and its relationship to the other re-
search steps is introduced. Then a brief overview of some of the main analytical approaches is
given. In the next section, the main work stages of qualitative data analysis—data transcrip-
tion, data coding, identification of patterns and the development of theoretical models—is ad-
dressed. This overview is followed by a discussion of the pros and cons of the use of computer-
assisted (or aided) qualitative data analysis software (CAQDAS), which has undergone huge
advances in recent years. The next section focuses on reflexivity as an important means to en-
sure the quality of data analysis. This is followed by a discussion of issues related to the
Japanese language in qualitative data analysis, before the chapter closes with a brief summary
and a few final remarks.
2. Qualitative data analysis and the research process
The Social Science research process is often depicted as a sequence of clear-cut steps in the neat
research plans of PhD students: decide on your research topic → identify a research gap →
determine your theoretical approach → formulate your research question → decide on the
method(s) → collect your empirical data → analyse your data → write your academic publica-
tions. However, the research process is often not a simple sequence of steps but is circular and
consists of overlaps between the different steps. In qualitative Social Science research, in par-
ticular, data analysis begins during the collection process and not afterwards. Researchers of-
ten engage in a number of rounds of data collection and data analysis in qualitative research.
In such cases, analysis of data from earlier and sometimes preliminary fieldwork is often inten-
tionally used to further focus and sometimes even to completely redefine the research question
(see this chapter, Castro-Vázquez, Ch. 11.2). These loops are not a problem, but actually a
strength of qualitative research. They allow us to reflect on our research question and on the
appropriacy of our theoretical and methodological approach. However, it is also important to
remain pragmatic. Research projects can be extended to any length of time through these
loops. However, the world of academic careers requires researchers to come to an end and
produce output. The goal should be to make an important and innovative contribution to the
understanding of the world, and not to produce a full and final explanation of it.
The degree to which researchers engage in such loops and the circular research process de-
pends on the research question and research methods. For example, if the policymaking pro-
cess is to be analysed through semi-structured qualitative interviews with political actors, in-
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terviews will most likely only begin once the researcher has a good overview and sound under-
standing of the entire policymaking process and its key players. Accordingly, the data analysis
of early interviews may rarely lead to a reformulation of the research question, but most likely
help to identify important interview partners and to refine the questions asked in the later in-
terviews by using new insights from earlier interviews (see this chapter, Hülsmann, Ch. 11.1).
However, if you want to analyse, for example, the behaviour and emotional experience of cus-
tomers in convenience stores, you will most likely start with participant observation, begin
qualitative interviews or focus group research much earlier. In such a case, the early analysis of
the data collected is actually needed for you to understand the field of research better and be
able to formulate a meaningful research question. In any case, it is very important to plan
enough time for careful data analysis during data collection to ensure the quality of your re-
search.
3. Approaches to data analysis
The rich and long history of qualitative research has led to a large number of research tradi-
tions that often include not only various data collection methods but also various data analysis
methods. These research traditions are often linked to certain theoretical positions and philo-
sophical worldviews, such as constructivism, phenomenology, hermeneutics or post-mod-
ernism (see Goodman, Ch. 1). In addition, each of these traditions consists of several sub-
fields, and it is often not only the different traditions but also their sub-fields that stand in
quite stark contrast to each other. However, aside from complex theoretical and philosophical
questions, the simple typology of analysis approaches proposed by Catherine Dawson (2002,
pp. 111–120) is, in my view, appropriate for a useful and hands-on overview (Harding 2019,
p. 194).
Thematic analysis
This approach is very inductive. Thematic analysis aims to identify the main recurrent
themes that arise from the data and material itself. In other words, researchers avoid
imposing themes on the data but try to approach their data as open-mindedly as possi-
ble in order to allow them to emerge from the data themselves. The goal is to reach a
saturation point where additional analysis does not lead to any new emerging themes
(see Meagher, Ch. 12).
Comparative analysis
Comparative analysis is closely linked to thematic analysis. It consists of comparing
and contrasting data from different sources to identify all the themes and issues in
question. The goal is to reach a saturation point where no new issues arise from the
material. Thematic and comparative analyses are often used jointly or alternately in
qualitative research projects, as they are often mutually complementary (see Meagher,
Ch. 12; Okano, Ch. 3).
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Content analysis
The basic goal of content analysis is to code by content. Researchers use a list of cat-
egories or labels to quantitatively identify content and patterns and to interpret them
qualitatively. This list of categories may have emerged from the data itself, but may
also be set up in advance, depending on the theoretical approach or state of research.
Generally, the content analysis is often more deductive than the two aforementioned
inductive approaches to thematic and comparative analysis. However, even in highly
deductive research projects, researchers should not exclude in advance the possibility
that some new categories may be identified in the sample during the data analysis itself
(see Arrington, Ch. 13).
Discourse analysis
The focus of discourse analysis is on patterns of communication. It includes a wide
range of approaches. Conversational analysis, based on the conceptual works of
Harold Garfinkel (1967) and Erving Goffman (1974), focuses on patterns of informal
daily conversation and interaction. Studies in line with Michel Foucault (1969) search
on a much more abstract macro level for institutionalised patterns of ideas and knowl-
edge that guide society. The goal of discourse analysis is to identify the rules and regu-
larities for communication and how meaning is conveyed through it (see Eder-Ram-
sauer/Reiher, Ch. 14).
These approaches are located on a continuum from highly qualitative to almost quantitative
approaches (Dawson 2002, p. 115). Thematic and comparative analysis are highly qualitative
approaches. As a result, data analysis normally takes place in these approaches throughout the
entire data collection process. Content analysis can be much more quantitatively oriented.
Therefore, the entire research process is much more consistent with the clear-cut sequence tem-
plate described above, with the (bulk of) data analysis often taking place after the data collec-
tion has been completed. Discourse analysis is generally located somewhere in the middle of
these two pools of the continuum (Dawson 2002, p. 115).
Which one of these approaches a researcher chooses for a research project depends on her re-
search interests and research questions as well as the project’s theoretical (and philosophical)
foundations. When deciding for an approach to data analysis, the researcher should keep in
mind the field of research that she would like to contribute to through her project.
4. Steps in the analysis: From data to theories
Concrete analytical work with data and its subsequent steps vary greatly depending on the re-
search question or the analytical approach in qualitative data analysis. The general strategy,
however, often consists of four steps.
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Four steps in data analysis

1. Transcribing and exploring the data,
2. summarising and identifying themes in the data,
3. developing codes and categories for the data, and finally
4. identifying conceptual patterns and building theoretical models based on the data.
4.1 Transcribing and exploring the data
In the initial step, the data is transcribed from the recording of an interview or field notes to
an annotated written text. The extent and degree of detail of this transcription is again a mat-
ter of the research question. While it is important to bring all data into a form in order to be
able to compare different recordings of interviews or notes from participatory observations,
the transcription level should also be guided by pragmatism: do the transcription in as detailed
and exact a way as necessary. To go back to the two examples mentioned above: recorded in-
terviews with political actors about the policy process are rarely analysed with regard to the
interviewees’ emotional feelings but are mainly used as a source to better understand their po-
litical role and their influence on the dynamics and chronology of the policymaking process.
Thus, the transcription of recorded interviews is often only partially word-for-word and needs
limited annotation. However, a study on the behaviour and emotional experience of customers
in convenience stores will most likely require very detailed and accurate transcription with
comprehensive annotation in order to provide a basis for analysing the relationship between
behaviour and the emotional experiences of consumers.
In this first step, the data is in its raw and transcribed form and should be explored through
careful studying and reading (and restudying and rereading). In cases where, for example, an
audio or video recording of the interviews or real-life interactions is not possible this explor-
ation becomes even more important. It should be done as soon as possible after the fieldwork.
Keep in mind that the ability to check, review and complement one’s field notes is much better
when the fieldwork is still fresh in your memory.
4.2 Summarising and identifying the first themes
The second step in working with the data is to summarise it and to identify the first themes in
it. Summarising data is an important step as it enables us to become more acquainted with the
material and to work out its core content and important points. This also includes the identifi-
cation of recurrent and central themes in the data. Once themes have been identified, we can
go back to the data to compare different interviews or observations on these themes. In semi-
structured, guided interviews, most themes will have already been identified through a guide-
line developed prior to the interviews. However, in more open formats like narrative inter-
views, themes will almost entirely be derived from the data, and the pool of themes will be
identified in parallel with the data collection.
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4.3 Coding
The third step is then to develop codes through coding (see Meagher, Ch. 12). The researcher
develops codes and later on (theoretical) concepts by naming, organising and refining the first
content-related themes. This coding process is still tentative in the early interviews or observa-
tions of highly qualitative research projects and is undergoing a process of revision and refine-
ment. However, in the analysis of later interviews and observations, the coding process be-
comes increasingly saturated when no more new codes emerge. At this point of (theoretical)
saturation, the codes can be finalised into a codebook. This is especially recommended when
you are working in a team. Ideally, this is also the moment in research when data collection
can soon be concluded as new interviews or participatory observations will not lead to new
important analytical insights. Even in research projects with semi-structured interviews or con-
tent analysis, researchers are strongly recommended to consciously develop codes and invest
time in doing so. Even in a highly deductive content analysis research project, a good code-
book with revised and refined codes should be developed on the basis of a pretest of first
codes (or concepts) that most likely derived from a review of research literature.
4.4 Identifying patterns and structures
In the fourth and final step, the analysis consists of the identification of conceptual patterns
and the construction of theoretical models. This theoretical construction is a major objective
of qualitative research. In this step, the researcher links codes and categories and builds hierar-
chies between them in order to build theoretical knowledge. The objective is to develop ex-
planatory and coherent models for the patterns of codes identified in the data. The best-
known approach to constructing middle-range theories from qualitative data is grounded the-
ory, as developed by Barney G. Glaser and Anselm L. Strauss (1967) in their seminal mono-
graph The discovery of grounded theory: Strategies for qualitative research. The authors pro-
posed that ‘qualitative inquiry could make significant theoretical and empirical contributions
in its own right, rather than merely serving as a precursor to quantitative research’ (Charmaz
2007, p. 2023). In so doing, Glaser and Strauss made a strong case for theoretical ambitions in
qualitative research.2
5. Computer-assisted qualitative data analysis software (CAQDAS):

Pros and cons
More and more researchers have recently been using software to facilitate data analysis. Soft-
ware programs that assist researchers in qualitative research date back to the 1970s. Today,
they are well established but still highly contested in qualitative data analysis. To some degree,
2 The discovery of grounded theory has become a foundational text with an immense influence on qualitative So-
cial Science research. However, nowadays we have to speak of several grounded theory approaches, since Glaser
and Straus parted ways and revised the original grounded theory separately. This led to the emergence of
‘grounded theories’ by Glaser, Strauss, colleagues, collaborators and students (Charmaz 2007).
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a generational gap in the perception and use of CAQDAS can be identified. Quite a number of
older researchers have renounced CAQDAS as some of them even see a fundamental contra-
diction between qualitative research and the use of CAQDAS. Carol Grbich (2007, p. 234), for
example, speaks of ‘[t]he tyranny of a system, however useful, which has the capacity to direct
and simplify the construction of the views of researchers and ultimately those of readers [and]
will thus always be problematic.’ However, many younger researchers have often learned
about CAQDAS in their introductory courses to qualitative methods and usually emphasise the
advantages of using them. When researchers are using CAQDAS, it is important for them to be
aware of its main advantages and disadvantages.
Certainly, CAQDAS provides valuable support in routine tasks in the entire data collection
and analysis process. It helps to organise, manage and analyse data and materials. Experienced
users of CAQDAS can save a lot of time in the research process by using it. Recent software
programs can even assist researchers not only in identifying themes and developing categories
but also in gaining conceptual insights and constructing theoretical models during data analy-
sis. In addition, CAQDAS opens up completely new opportunities for data analysis. For exam-
ple, some programs allow researchers to produce graphs of networks based on the data, which
could not be done without them. Or content analysis of a large amount of data from a wide
number of sources is only possible with CAQDAS (see this chapter, Heckel, Ch. 11.3).
The main argument against using CAQDAS is that it entices researchers to focus more on the
software and to follow its lead instead of studying and analysing their qualitative data and
material in-depth and intensively. By becoming a kind of filter between researcher and data,
CAQDAS poses the risk of superfluous qualitative data analysis, which would clearly contra-
dict the fundamental principles of all qualitative analysis approaches. Moreover, using CAQ-
DAS also means that a significant amount of time and energy must be spent on becoming an
experienced user, which will not be available for fieldwork and data analysis (see Wiemann,
Ch. 13.1).
Overall, it is believed that the pros prevail against the cons when using software in qualitative
data analysis. However, the decision to use or not to use CAQDAS should depend on its poten-
tial advantages over the efforts needed to work with it in view of your specific research
question and project. Another problem is how to decide which software package is best suited
for your research project. Increased qualitative research in recent years has also led to the de-
velopment and refinement of a large number of software programs which support data collec-
tion and analysis. The CAQDAS entry in Wikipedia alone lists nearly 20 software packages.3
Most of these programs have some special features and functions, which makes it difficult and
time-consuming to find the most appropriate software (for a recent overview, see Sánchez-
Gómez et al. 2019).
A pragmatic strategy in deciding on the software you will use is to find out which packages
are offered by your university or research group as well as whether introductory courses and
further support are offered in order to get the most out of CAQDAS in data analysis. Finally,
please also note that not all software packages are capable of supporting Japanese characters.
However, there are still good programs available today that cover most writing and language
systems, such as CATMA (Computer Assisted Textual Markup and Analysis).4 Finally, re-
3 See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer-assisted_qualitative_data_analysis_software [as of July 2020].

4 See https://catma.de/.
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searchers must be mindful that the use of CAQDAS should never be a shortcut and cannot re-
place intellectual engagement with their data and material, which brings us to the next section
on reflexivity.
6. Ensuring the quality of data analysis: Reflexivity, validity and

reliability
As described above, the loops between data collection and data analysis offer a huge opportu-
nity for qualitative research, which also allows researchers to continually reflect on their own
position throughout the entire research process. It is only during data analysis that we can be-
come fully aware of our position as researchers, especially on issues of power and bias. Data
analysis involves not only analysing data but also thinking about possible traps and engaging
in ethical questions in the research process (see this chapter, Hülsmann, Ch. 11.1). The
metaphor of making a cake for data analysis that was used in the introduction does not really
fit in this context. Social scientists do not work with death material, but with human beings,
which raises all kinds of ethical questions.
To mention just one example of ethical problems that may arise during the research process:
non-Japanese researchers are often by nature outsiders when doing qualitative fieldwork in
Japan. Depending on the research field and question, this can be helpful in opening up new
opportunities for data collection, but it could also be a problem that may lead to bias. A gen-
eral solution to this problem does not exist since, depending on the individual project, being
an outsider may have different effects on the research process. But in any case, it is important
that researchers reflect on this issue and address it in the most transparent way possible.
In addition, reflexivity in qualitative data analysis is also of the utmost importance for the
quality of one’s research results. The problem, however, is that researchers do not agree on the
criteria for quality in qualitative research, but are divided into several camps (Steinke 2000,
pp. 320–321). Validity and reliability, for example, are regarded as being important and mean-
ingful objectives in qualitative research by some researchers. However, others denounce these
concepts as being imposed on qualitative research by dominant standards of quantitative re-
search. Some postmodern approaches even argue that quality criteria in qualitative research
are impossible. Still, in line with Patricia Bazeley (2013, pp. 401–421) and David Silverman
(2000, pp. 268–291), we can identify a few central strategies to ensure the quality of research
findings most scholars agree on.
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Strategies to ensure the quality of your research

• Even in a highly qualitative research project, researchers should try to develop de-
scriptive quantitative statistics during data analysis in order to give their readers a
plausible overview of their entire material.
• Deviant cases in their data, which contradict the conceptual explanations and theo-
retical models developed in qualitative data analysis, should be carefully analysed
and included in the publication of research results. Deviant cases often help to
strengthen and clarify the theoretical models by making their limits transparent.
• Researchers should, if possible, analyse data collected through different methods
and from different sources. In addition, they should also check their findings with
complementary data.
• Researchers should compare their findings with those of other studies and/or pre-
dictions made by alternative theories. This helps them to put the findings into a
larger context and see the bigger picture after being trapped in their own qualitative
data analysis.
• Finally, researchers should not be insecure. Of course, their analysis is not the only
meaningful, coherent and relevant analysis of the data and material used since the
analysis highly depends on the researcher. But, despite the often used and complete-
ly objective neutral language used in quantitative research, qualititative analysis of
the same dataset also produces different and sometimes even completely contradic-
tory findings.5
7. Data analysis with Japanese language material
For non-native Japanese speakers, even after years of studying the Japanese language and be-
ing generally fluent speakers and readers, qualitative analysis of Japanese language material
can be a very thorny issue. Particularly if the research project consists of qualitative interviews
with completely open questions or participatory observations and the aim is to carry out an
in-depth analysis, including emotional aspects, every non-native Japanese speaker will reach
the limits of his or her interpretative capabilities. This is nothing to be ashamed of, but it has
to be recognised. It is a myth that Japanese is the most difficult language in the world, but a
non-native speaker is a non-native speaker. Researchers should also bear in mind that the spo-
ken Japanese language may seem easier to understand than the apparently more complex writ-
ten version, but many nuances of the spoken language are never explained in language teach-
ing and not found in dictionaries or grammar books.6
5 See, for example, a study about racism in football, in which 29 teams of experienced quantitative researchers
reached different findings despite having the same research question and analysing the same dataset (Silberzahn et
al. 2018).
6 My most impressive Japanese language class was a very advanced Japanese language course at the University of
Tokyo that I took when I was a young postdoctoral researcher. The instructor explained many subtle nuances in a
recorded debate, which I and all my classmates had completely missed despite years of Japanese language train-
ing.
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The best way to address these issues in such cases is to involve native speakers in your data
analysis. Discuss your interpretation, the data section you struggle with or your (preliminary)
categories and interpretation of your material with Japanese collaborators (more than one if
possible). Actually, collaboration in qualitative data analysis, in which two or more re-
searchers work on the same data and continuously discuss their findings, is a strategy that is
often used to improve quality in qualitative research. Therefore, by comparing your views
with the interpretation of native speakers, you will not only get an insight into the nuances of
the Japanese language but also increase the quality of your research (see Kottmann/Reiher, Ch.
7).
Nevertheless, these language issues do not in any way imply that non-native speakers should
refrain from qualitative research about Japan. Misunderstandings are common in all lan-
guages, even among native speakers. Therefore, native speakers are not immune to misinter-
pretations in qualitative data analysis. Non-native speakers may sometimes be even more pre-
pared for qualitative data analysis, as they will struggle with certain passages and have to
work harder to understand the material, which can prevent superfluous analysis.
8. Concluding remarks
Now that I have written a few points on the most important aspects of qualitative data analy-
sis, a few general comments may be appropriate as concluding remarks. What are the most
important strategies in qualitative data analysis? In my opinion, the two most important ones
are the following. First, qualitative data analysis is not something that a researcher can learn
from reading a handbook or a short introduction like this chapter. You have to practise it!
Thus, try to obtain as much training as possible by doing the exercises in handbooks, attend-
ing methodology courses at research institutions, but also reading methodological publica-
tions. Wolff-Michael Roth (2015), for example, published a book in which five instructors of
qualitative methods code and interpret the same transcripts, allowing even experienced re-
searchers the opportunity to look over the shoulders of other researchers and see how they do
it. Second, never forget the truly wise words of Robert E. Stake (1995, p. 19): ‘Good research
is not about good methods as much as it is about good thinking.’ Sound knowledge and expe-
rience of methods provide an array of useful and proven tools, but at the end of the day in
qualitative data analysis like all research steps, there is only one important analytical tool—
your mind.
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11.1 Negotiating the ethics of gathering research data in a
subcultural context
Katharina Hülsmann
Like many scholars from my generation, I became interested in Japanese Studies through my
interest in Japanese popular culture, such as manga. I was always interested in the way that
cultural flows spread with little regard for national borders. The first time that I visited Tokyo
Big Sight in 2012 for an event geared towards women at which artists could exchange their
fan works (dōjinshi) with fellow fans; I was able to—seemingly—connect seamlessly with and
chat to artists that were producing fan work for the manga and anime I was interested in back
then, which made a big impression on me. Even though I looked different from everybody
else, a pin on my chest suggested that I was a fellow fan and immediately we found things to
discuss. On the other hand, while a lot of international fan work is shared freely on social me-
dia sites on the internet, Japanese fan work seemed strangely reclusive, confined to online plat-
forms like Pixiv and personal homepages that could often only be accessed with passwords. It
gave me pause that I was able to have this personal experience of immediately feeling welcome
even though my difference was obvious, but that, as a whole, dōjinshi culture seemed a bit
hidden and closed off, not least because the dominant form of the narrative fan work is still
the printed zine.
This discrepancy stuck with me during my master’s degree, as I voraciously consumed academ-
ic literature from the Anglophone field of Fan Studies. The number of academic works that
examined the existence of homoerotic narratives in Japan (yaoi or boys’ love) also grew to the
point that keeping tabs on all the articles coming out was difficult. After finishing my MA de-
gree however, I realised that I was less interested in analysing the content of these works. The
question of why ‘these women’ write the often erotic works and what that says about their
ideas of gender, feminism, sexuality, etc. was, in my opinion, 1. difficult to answer and 2. had
been answered too often already. I grew slightly frustrated with the exemplary analyses of fan
works (knowing full well that I was guilty of having done this sort of analysis in the past) and
more interested in the agency of the authors as participants in an economy of cultural goods. I
wanted to find out to what extent dōjinshi culture could be conceptualised as a transcultural
phenomenon. Finally, I decided that asking the authors themselves to talk about broader
trends in dōjinshi culture would offer more insight than just analysing exemplary works or re-
lying solely on quantitative data about participation in dōjinshi events.
The study of fan and subcultures is appealing because it often allows the researcher to deploy
expertise and skills to obtain research materials they previously accessed through non-academ-
ic means (see Vogt, Ch. 2). You can save time if you already know how to operate the search
system on a fan site because you have previously used it privately. Thus, it is not surprising
that some academic examinations of fan work have drawn criticism from fans themselves be-
cause they feel their works and practices have been misread and exposed without their con-
310
sent. It is part of your job as a researcher to examine your own position and point of view. Are
you dragging something out into the open that you only have knowledge of because you were
—more or less—a participant yourself? You have to remind yourself that you, as a researcher,
are benefitting professionally (and maybe financially) from the fact that you have insider
knowledge of a cultural phenomenon (Nielsen 2016, p. 237). You have to become very aware
of your stance as an academic and of your stance as a participant in the cultural phenomenon
that you plan to examine. You also have to ask yourself: Are you analysing texts or are you
analysing people? And if you are analysing people, then ethical guidelines apply.
Examining the visibility and spreadability of Japanese fan work for my PhD research made me
intimately question my own approach as a researcher and what material was even okay for me
to use. Many of my senior colleagues, whose advice I sought, came from the field of Literary
Studies and thus the idea of asking for authors’ consent to examine their works seemed ludi-
crous to them. When I started my research into dōjinshi culture in Tokyo in spring 2017, the
so-called Ritsumeikan/Pixiv incident happened. Three researchers from Ritsumeikan Universi-
ty had presented a paper at the 31st Conference of the Society for Artificial Intelligence in
Nagoya. In this paper, they used written Japanese fan works from the platform Pixiv as a text
corpus to develop a text-filtering software for obscene and harmful content. The paper itself
supposed, for example, that the desired purpose of the software would be to detect sexual ex-
pressions, even if they were expressed through metaphors. Thus, the software should be able
to detect precisely when the word banana is used to describe a penis and censor the word ba-
nana accordingly because it is a harmful expression in this context. At no point does the paper
discuss exactly why sexual metaphors are harmful, but the authors do establish the fact that
‘[t]he internet is overflowing with harmful content’ (Omi et al. 2017, p. 1) in the very first line
of their paper and they used the fan works as an example of such harmful content.
A big discussion ensued in the Japanese Twittersphere on whether the right to academic cita-
tion trumps the need for informed consent. The paper was taken offline but remains accessible
through Internet archiving services. At the time, I had not yet been able to secure any interview
partners and I felt rather alarmed at this incident and the consequences that it might have on
my ability to secure interview partners in the future. While it was, of course, possible for me to
obtain fan works at dōjinshi exchange events and specialised bookstores, it did not feel right
for me to consider these materials fair game for my analysis. I decided that it would be of the
utmost importance to obtain the informed consent of the cultural agents that I was going to be
researching and that it would be safest to produce the material for my analysis myself through
the interviews with the authors. I selected my interview partners by reviewing my field notes
from my participant observation of the events and the quantitative data that I had drawn from
event catalogues recording their (and their circles) attendance figures. Thus, I was able to see
which were the most popular and fastest growing genres during my period of research.
When data is ‘out there’, it is sometimes impossible to ask for consent or very improbable that
you, as a researcher, will receive consent from the author, especially if you are analysing phe-
nomena such as racism, sexism or other problematic issues. However, you have to ask your-
self: Are you adequately equipped to be researching your subject? What will the consequences
for the authors of the content be, especially if they are operating within a legal grey area? Are
you going to protect their identities and how far will you go to ensure anonymity? There are
phenomena that are important to research, but you have to ask yourself, especially as a young
researcher with little institutional security, if you are able to accurately assess the risk that
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your research poses to those it is conducted on, if you are able to follow the ethical guidelines
of sociological research, and how you will be able to deal with the consequences in case some-
thing unexpected happens. Last but not least, I cannot stress enough that being comfortable
with your position as a researcher is important as well, especially when conceptualising your
PhD project. This research will be your defining feature as an academic for the coming years
and will define your job opportunities.
The Ritsumeikan/Pixiv incident helped cement my decision that I would use Jean-Claude
Kaufmann’s method of the comprehensive interview to approach my set of questions about
Japanese dōjinshi culture. It would allow me to grasp the cultural phenomenon that I was ex-
amining in all its complexity and, at the same time, allow me as a researcher to bring my
knowledge and expertise into the interviews. Kaufmann encourages the researcher to bring
themselves into the interview situation instead of trying to be ‘sterile’ (Kaufmann 1999, p. 25).
This proved to be a very valuable approach to examining a marginalised fan practice that
takes place in a legal grey area. My interview partners would test my own credentials when it
came to fan culture and actively asked for participation in the interviews. Had I been prevent-
ed from providing these credentials, that is, my own involvement in the form of attending
events, consuming media, etc. I am quite certain I would have received only very superficial
and unpersonal replies about my interview partners’ involvement in fan culture. As Kaufmann
argues, an impersonal interviewer will yield unpersonal answers. In my case, being perceived
as somebody that understands fan culture and does not aim to expose the participants helped
create a space of trust, so that my interview partners would paradoxically extensively speak to
me about the ‘hidden’ and ‘secret’ culture they participate in. I have come to the conclusion
that this secrecy is partly ostentatious but an important constitutive practice of the subculture
that I examined.
Beyond talks with my academic advisors, what helped me most in deciding my approach to
the research questions I posed was attending international conferences and speaking to many
different people from different fields and disciplines. Japanese Studies does not necessarily
come with its own treasure chest of research methods and approaches, and it is up to you as a
researcher to poach from any academic disciplines that you may come into contact with. It is
advisable to connect early on with fellow researchers and keep an eye on what happens in the
field. Any mistake others make is something you can observe and learn from.
This networking is not just useful during the conceptional phase of your research project.
While I was conducting a qualitative analysis of the interviews, it also helped me immensely to
present the project in different contexts—to researchers concerned with Japanese popular cul-
ture, with Gender Studies, with Comic Studies, with Fan Studies, with Digital Humanities—to
draw inspiration from their views on the topic and, occasionally, to confront them with ex-
cerpts of the interviews and discuss my interpretations. Kaufmann, a scholar 40 years my se-
nior, advises the researcher to use analogue devices such as the trusted filing card to work to-
wards a theory. My colleagues advised me to use digital tools such as Citavi to sort through
my analysis notes. What helped me more, especially in my making the shift from empathetic
interviewer to objective researcher, as Kaufmann describes it, was presenting my temporary
findings to diverse audiences and gathering from their critique whether I was considering all
facets of the meanings that were communicated in the interviews.
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11.2 Researching sex and the sexuality of Japanese teenagers:
The intricacies of condom use
This essay draws on part of my experience of conducting a research project for my PhD disser-
tation. First, I discuss how I became interested in an investigation of sex and sexuality among
teenagers and why I felt attracted to the Japanese case. I present why and how I moved from a
functionalist quantitative perspective to a qualitative one that would help me better under-
stand condom use as a gendered matter. Finally, I succinctly introduce the theoretical and
methodological approach that I employed in this study on a group of young Japanese men.
My first encounter with research related to sex and sexuality dates back to the time when I
worked as a counsellor at a senior high school attached to the National University in Mexico.
It was a fruitful but disheartening experience. In a country where abortion remained illegal
and teenage pregnancies a rampant social and medical problem, teaching about how to effi-
ciently and judiciously choose contraceptive methods—condoms in particular—entailed one of
my main duties. With a strong emphasis on empiricism and the functionalist tradition, I firmly
believed that rational thinking and objective measurement were necessary to underpin any
pedagogical action. I thus endorsed the Health Belief Model—largely suggesting that perceived
benefits trigger healthier and positive behaviour—to help students reasonably calculate the
risks and benefits of using contraception and/or postponing intercourse (Rosenstock et al.
1988). No matter how hard I tried, however, my pedagogics appeared rather ineffective. Many
of my female students ended up facing the difficult conundrum of an unplanned pregnancy or
unsafe, illegal abortion. I did not know the theories and methodologies to explain it, but
found it extremely strange that female students had to face unwanted pregnancies almost
alone.
In looking for alternative teaching methods, I was drawn to Japan as it is the country that
boasts the highest condom use rates in the world. I assumed that this was due to its top-notch
school-based sex education. Little did I suspect, nonetheless, that the Japanese situation was
rather similar to the Mexican one. Condom use rates were largely associated with the unavail-
ability of birth control pills, and the ineffectiveness of sex education was reflected by the num-
ber of women who might have recourse to legal abortion as a ‘contraceptive method’ (Nor-
gren 2001). Furthermore, Japan has one of the largest pornographic and prostitution indus-
tries, erotic art expressed in a woodblock print format known as shunga—produced during the
Edo period (1603–1867), festivals such as hōnen matsuri—one of the fertility festivals where
copious visual displays of handmade statues of phalluses can be seen, and the supposed orien-
tal knowledge of sensual pleasure pervading Japanese culture—referred to as ‘ars erotica’
(Foucault 1990). Nevertheless, a daily conversation about sex and sexuality entailed a great
taboo (Castro-Vázquez 2015). As one of the teenagers that I interviewed as part of my doctor-
al dissertation suggested:
313
[S]ex education related topics [are] difficult to deal with in school and daily conversations
[…] because of the meaning embedded in the Chinese character shade (kage). […]
Japanese people, teachers in particular, do not feel at ease talking about sex-related issues.
The character is formally used in words to refer to most sex-related vocabulary (Castro-
Vázquez 2007, p. 115f.).
Thus young people are most likely left in the dark, unable to engage in conversations about
sex with teachers and parents, and mostly depending on pornography, the mass media and
peers as a source of information.
In trying to produce a research proposal for my PhD dissertation, I realised another similarity
between my experience in Mexico and the Japanese case: functionalism was the tenet of most
academic reports on sex and sexuality in Japan, which were basically surveys that could be re-
ferred to by the construct of the ‘Taylorization of sex […] or the production of rationalized
means of producing pleasure [expressed in] a number of stages to be gone through before the
final output: foreplay leading to coitus culminating in orgasm’ (Jackson/Scott 2010, p. 61–62).
Within this framework, contraception use was considered one of these precisely calculated
stages (ibid.). This viewpoint could be clearly seen in the biannual reports that the Japan Fami-
ly Planning Association produces to offer an ‘accurate’ panorama of the sexual behaviour of
the Japanese (Japan Family Planning Association 2017), where, for instance, details of the fre-
quency and number of contraceptive means used are offered, but information concerning the
social processes involving decision-making can hardly be obtained. The reports largely allow a
description of behaviour but not really an explanation that would help understand whether
negotiations underpinning the use of contraception took place and/or why young women most
likely experience the consequences of unplanned pregnancies alone.
I intuited a gendered view of contraception decision-making processes—wearing condoms or
not was a man’s decision, but the consequences of not using them a woman’s concern—and
was very keen on conducting an ethnographic study involving interviews and participant ob-
servation. Nevertheless, my university would not approve such a research plan as it was
deemed largely non-scientific. I thus had to offer statistical evidence that would prove that
gender influenced condom use among Japanese teenagers. Grounded in the gender schema the-
ory (Bem 1981), through an attitude scale and a semantic differential, I managed to show sta-
tistically that a traditional male gender role was detrimental to condom use negotiation and
connected to an unfavourable perception of condoms. Methodologically, the difficult part was
to produce a valid instrument, but data analysis was rather easy; it was basically done through
the SPSS computer programme (Cronk 2017), which in the end would help to accept or reject
the hypotheses. This ‘science of contraception’ made my academic adviser satisfied as we were
apparently speaking the same language. In line with Raewyn Connell (1987, p. 51), the gender
schema theory, however, reduces masculinity and femininity to a simple form of dualism and
sets a normative standard that hardly serves to comprehend ‘the way things usually happen’. I
was unable to explain how gender might influence condom use in ‘reality’. Statistics and fig-
ures, however, helped me open the door. I was permitted to continue with an ethnographic
study where I could interview Japanese teenagers and observe sex education classes. I was par-
ticularly interested in finding out how condoms were an element of teenagers’ gender relation-
ships.
Interviewing male senior high school students was insightful and absolutely fascinating. I dis-
covered the gendered intricacies of contraception, through which the significance of language
314
and sexual reputations became apparent. Starting the conversations with them was almost al-
ways challenging due to a lack of agreed words to refer to sex, sexuality and condoms in gen-
eral. Most of the available Japanese terms were either too technical or too ‘vulgar’—dirty
jokes and double entendres (shimoneta)—to have them included in a ‘normal’ daily conversa-
tion. The language of sex mostly entailed silences, omissions, similes and innuendo. An open
discussion of condom use elicited sexual expertise, which largely jeopardised the sexual repu-
tation of the person involved—a young man willing to talk about sex would likely appear as
an ‘unreliable’ guy who sleeps around (karui yatsu). In dealing with these issues, I took the
interview transcripts to be the interviewees’ accounts of their experiences of dealing with con-
doms, rather than considering their words to directly represent reality. Interview transcripts
are not portraits of reality, but pieces of the participants’ life histories (Plummer 1995). When
the young men felt distress and at risk of losing their reputation, my strategy was to allow
them to decide how far they wanted to talk about their knowledge and experiences, and I pro-
posed sources of information and support when it appeared appropriate.
Transcripts of my interview and participant observation notes entailed the main raw data of
this part of the investigation. Given my teaching experience, the statistical evidence and a
framework of feminist sociological theory (Ramazanoglu/Holland 2002), I assumed that con-
dom use decision-making was both unequal and gendered, and although my reading of the da-
ta significantly buttressed this, it did not necessarily support the young men’s viewpoints, who
tended to endorse a discourse of essentialist gender difference: men are naturally protectors
and women are to be protected (mamoru and mamorareru ningen). As such, my main conclu-
sions arose from my attempts to explain contradictions, the unexpected, and absences and si-
lences in the interviews, because in different sectors of the same conversation the young men
turned to and answered to differing versions of masculinity and femininity and presented their
gendered identities accordingly. I did respect the informants’ recollections as what they wanted
to convey, and presented verbatim excerpts of the conversations when I reported on the study,
but I did not think of the conversations as an open window to the ‘truths’ of the social world.
I rather considered the outcomes of the interviews as resulting from specific circumstances
strongly determined by a social interaction between a researcher and an interviewee, and was
particularly interested in delving into how gender relationships were presented in the experi-
ences reported, how the young men were able to become both subject and object, how they
placed themselves in relation to the other, and how these relationships made sense to me.
In contrast to how I dealt with the statistical analysis, I was slightly daunted and mostly over-
whelmed when trying to systematise and analyse the huge amount of information generated.
Transcribing was the first step of the interview analysis. Transcribing interviews encompassed
a tedious and time-consuming process; a one-hour interview turned into an approximately 30
page document. Although I noted down every word included in the conversations, along with
interruptions, pauses and hesitations, I did not count them up. This was not a quantitative
analysis. The transcripts together with my observation notes served to propose a number of
provisional concepts with which to analyse data, and the software Ethnograph helped me set a
number of codes that I included in a map of ‘systemic networks’, which entailed a graphic rep-
resentation of codes and subsidiary codes affixed to the transcripts (Bliss et al. 1983). A net-
work, which preserves and shows the information as it was presented in the conversations, en-
tails a practical and analytical device to sort out and categorise data efficiently. The entire pro-
cess was an attempt at theorising condom use in the context of everyday life and ‘wider pat-
315
terns of sociality’ (Jackson/Scott 2010, p. 1). The networks helped me to translate the conver-
sations with the young men into a language of theorising, and this interactive process involved
both induction and deduction.
As the whole investigation was conducted by a single researcher, and every participant was
interviewed twice, comparative analysis thus largely circulated around detecting inconsisten-
cies, consistencies and correlations between ‘intra-data’—contrasting the outcomes of the two
interviews with each young man—and ‘extra-data’—contrasting the outcomes of interview
with each participant with the rest of the group. In the reports on my investigation, I always
made explicit and justified how data had been analysed and provided evidence by including
verbatim interview excerpts to help the reader comprehend my assumptions on theory and
methodology as well as the origin of my conclusions. This largely served to strengthen the
quality of my analysis and allowed me to respond to issues of validity. A researcher is obliged
to provide ‘detailed descriptions of the path of their research and decision-making processes so
that the reader can inspect’ and judge the study’s dependability, consistency and accuracy
(Sparkes/Smith 2014, p. 181).
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11.3 Studying economic discourse
Markus Heckel
Introduction
Economic theory has created a framework for understanding the functioning of the economy,
formed a structure for economic policymaking and even shaped our reality. Usually
economists are expected to offer clear statements regarding the condition and direction of the
economy. However, Harry Truman, U.S. president 1945–53, is said to have stated, ‘All my
economists say, “on the one hand ... on the other.” Give me a one-handed economist!’ (Fadi-
man/Bernard 2000, p. 542). This quote hints at the fact that there is no one truth in Eco-
nomics. Economics can be viewed as a construct that changes frequently and adapts to new
phenomena and new research insights. As a result, within the context of economic policy rec-
ommendations, one finds differing and sometimes totally contradictory statements in Eco-
nomics, especially in the area of fiscal and monetary policy.
The role of language in economic discourse is very important. Indeed, stressing the role of lan-
guage, Leslie Armour (1997, p. 1062) argues that Economics is ‘largely made up of language
and belief’. In fact, John Maynard Keynes, the famous British economist whose ideas played a
fundamental role in macroeconomic theory, tried to find a plain language to describe the econ-
omy. Specifically, Keynes developed a pedagogic habitus and communicated in the language of
monetary theory, which laid the foundations for meaningful public discourse about the econo-
my (Holmes 2013, p. 32). Benjamin Braun (2014, p. 48) even argues that economic discourse
is so powerful that it ‘contributes to the cycles of boom and bust’ in the economy. According
to Warren J. Samuels (1990, pp. 1–6), economic discourse can be viewed from different per-
spectives: knowledge or ‘truth’ (economic theory), discourse (here in the sense of language and
‘rhetoric’) and the identification of meaning. The central idea is that Economics, just as in any
field, uses language and that the words used create a certain meaning which can then be stud-
ied.
Below are two examples that show how economic discourse can be analysed: one example fo-
cuses on the issue of the well-being of employees in East Asia and the other on monetary poli-
cy in Japan.
Employee well-being in China and Japan
Under the umbrella of the Volkswagen Foundation’s research initiative ‘Key Issues for Re-
search and Society’, a group of scholars from Goethe University in Frankfurt launched a
project in 2014 called ‘Protecting the Weak—Entangled Processes of Framing, Mobilisation
and Institutionalisation in East Asia’. Together with Stefan Hüppe-Moon (Sinology and Politi-
cal Sciences) and Na Zou (Economics), we used media content to compare employee well-be-
ing measures instituted by the governments of China and Japan. One important source for me-
dia analysis was newspapers. Japan scholars (in Germany) can make use of the CrossAsia
317
Markus Heckel
database (see Peucker/Schmidtpott/Wagner, Ch. 9). This rich source allows access to many dai-
ly Japanese newspapers (e.g. Asahi Shimbun, Mainichi Shimbun, Nikkei Shimbun).
For this project, we conducted a media content analysis by accessing a Chinese (The People’s
Daily) and a Japanese (Asahi Shimbun) daily newspaper through the CrossAsia database. By
collecting data from both newspapers for the time period 1995 to 2014, we analysed how the
Chinese and Japanese media report on governmental policies for protecting employee well-be-
ing, specifically focusing on migrant workers in China and regular employees in Japan. We
used the headline approach, i.e. we focused on articles in which keywords such as ‘hukou/huji
reform’ (household registration system) in China and ‘work-life balance’ in Japan appeared in
the headline of the article. This method was employed in order to extract the most relevant
articles, as a headline conveys an article’s relative importance (Dor 2003) and also helps filter
out less pertinent news articles. Another possible approach would have been to conduct a
quantitative analysis of the whole sample of articles, e.g. through a text-mining analysis.
One challenge of this kind of analysis is how to compare two very different countries such as
China and Japan. As the economic development and institutional design of both countries are
quite distinct, the subject of ‘employee well-being’ requires country-specific measures. It is for
this reason that we focused on migrant workers in China and on regular employees in Japan.
Furthermore, a detailed knowledge of the language (e.g. with the help of native speakers) in
order to understand the nuances of the articles was a necessary requirement. Our results
showed that the discourse of ‘hukou/huji reform’ and ‘work-life balance’ is linked to issues
that go beyond solely the subject of employee well-being. For China, increasing domestic con-
sumption by improving the general situation for migrant workers is tethered to the larger
question of how to reorient China’s economic growth model. The results for Japan showed
that the government was well aware of problems for regular workers regarding work-life bal-
ance, such as overwork and burnout. As a consequence, the government implemented some
family-friendly measures (e.g. the Charter for Work-Life Balance in 2007). However, the intent
was not necessarily to improve conditions for individual workers, but rather to tackle prob-
lems related to Japan’s declining birth rate and ageing society (Heckel et al. 2018).
Monetary policy
My project on Economic Discourses of Monetary Policy focuses on central banks, especially

the Bank of Japan (BoJ), central bank communication and inflation/deflation. Given Japan’s
prolonged struggle with deflation and low inflation, the BoJ is a good case study for discourses
in monetary policy. Since the start of the financial crisis in 2008, financial stability has been
precarious and monetary policy has been high on the political agenda. The BoJ is often the
first, or one of the first, to try unprecedented monetary policy tools. A zero interest rate policy
and quantitative easing were first applied in 1999 and 2001 respectively. After the financial
crisis, the monetary arsenal was augmented with quantitative and qualitative monetary easing
(QQE; 2013), QQE with a negative interest rate (2016) and QQE with yield curve control
(2016). Next to financial analyses of the efficiency of these monetary policies, discourses of
communication strategies have become increasingly important as central bank communication
impacts financial markets and financial stability (Born et al. 2014).
318
One strand of relevant papers in the academic literature on this subject reveals a steadily
growing number of studies on central banks’ communication. For example, Mikael Apel and
Marianna B. Grimaldi (2014) as well as Stephen Hansen and Michael McMahon (2016) anal-
yse the communication of central banks by employing automated content analysis techniques
that transform qualitative information to quantitative data. That is to say, in many cases
economists analyse texts with different approaches, including computational and statistical
methods in a quantitative research design. Kohei Kawamura et al. (2019) are a good example
of how to apply this approach to monetary policy in Japan. They analyse the BoJ’s monetary
policy by using the BoJ’s Monthly Report of Recent Economic and Financial Developments in
the time period between 1998 and 2015. They employ natural language processing techniques,
which involves using computer programmes to analyse, process and derive meaning from a
large quantity of human language data. This method helps to classify expressions according to
polarity (whether an expression is positive, negative or neutral) and modality (whether an ex-
pression is clear-cut, ambiguous or subjective). A simple game-theoretic model is applied to
understand the empirical observations from the viewpoint of strategic central bank communi-
cation. It implies a principal–agent relationship between the BoJ (acting as the agent) and mar-
ket participants (acting as the principal). This game-theoretic model is a persuasion game in
which the sender—the BoJ—uses its information advantage (asymmetric information) towards
market participants (receiver) in an attempt to influence inflation expectations in order to
achieve the goal of 2% inflation. The authors show that the BoJ has an upward bias in report-
ing about economic conditions by increasing ambiguity when economic prospects are rather
unfavourable. This finding is in line with Born et al. (2014), who show that Financial Stability
Reports released by central banks have positive effects on financial markets (in terms of stock
market returns) if their views are optimistic but no effects when they are pessimistic. One gen-
eral problem with these kinds of analyses is the occurrence of multiple similar announcements
in official documents, such as minutes of monetary policy meetings, and monthly and annual
reports. Consequently, it can be argued that the level of variance is rather low, possibly casting
some doubts on statistical results.
Text-mining tools
One technique which has gained momentum as an analytical tool in Economics is text mining.
Text mining refers to the process of extracting new and relevant information from a large col-
lection of texts by means of automated computations. Typical data generated includes term
frequencies, term patterns and term correlations. If text mining is combined with natural lan-
guage processing techniques, text semantics can be examined as well, which allows for addi-
tional insights through, for instance, sentiment analysis and topic modelling such as latent
Dirichlet allocation (LDA). LDA is a statistical machine-learning model for collections of data,
such as text corpora, and it is used to group words and expressions to a fixed set of topics.
Text mining can be performed with the help of software programmes: Python and R are open
source programming languages that are commonly used for conducting data analysis. While
Python is a general-purpose language with a focus on productivity and easy-to-understand
syntax, R is a language (and at the same time an environment) with strengths in user-friendly
statistical modelling and data visualisation. Generally, Python usage is more prominent in
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Markus Heckel
fields such as engineering (machine learning and artificial intelligence), whereas R is most
commonly used in research focused on data analysis and statistics (employed not only in
academia, but also by companies, journalists, etc. who can benefit from the rich visualisation
capabilities of R). However, the question of what programme is the best choice depends on
what problems need to be solved and what tools are most frequently used in one’s field. Addi-
tionally, it is possible to use Python in R and vice versa through the application of special
packages. There are many web resources and books that help students ranging from beginners
to experts to master Python and R (Bird et al. 2009; Wickham/Grolemund 2020).
A tool that uses the Japanese language is the open source software MeCab. MeCab is a mor-
phological analyser used for text segmentation (tokenisation) and it is compatible with differ-
ent platforms: through a wrapper it can be used with Python, while the TopicExplorer (a web-
based system for topic modelling developed by the University of Halle-Wittenberg) has inte-
grated MeCab. Additionally, a user can install and call on the package RMeCab to benefit
from the MeCab tool within an R environment.
Conclusion
One major challenge for Japan scholars in Economics is the need to acquire additional skills in
order to access and analyse large data sets. Especially in the field of Economics, learning statis-
tics and economic theory can be a great burden and very time-consuming. However, once one
succeeds in mastering this field, there are many opportunities for research and also job
prospects. The analysis of discourse in Economics requires inter alia linguistics, software skills
and (where applicable) statistics. In addition to this, detailed knowledge of the institutions and
language of the country in question are required. Especially in the case of Economics, many
international experts who have an excellent reputation in their field comment on Japan with-
out any specific knowledge about the country. In many cases, standard explanations and poli-
cy recommendations are used which very often have a strong Western bias. However, it is of-
ten the case that Japan needs different explanations. This is where Japan scholars can play an
important role.
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Further reading
Bazeley, Patricia (2013): Qualitative data analysis: Practical strategies. London: Sage.
Bernard, H. Russell/Wutich, Amber/Ryan, Gery W. (2017): Analyzing qualitative data: Systematic ap-
proaches. Los Angeles, CA: Sage.
Flick, Uwe (ed.) (2014): The SAGE handbook of qualitative data analysis. Los Angeles, CA: Sage.
Grbich, Carol (2007): Qualitative data analysis: An introduction. London: Sage.
Harding, Jamie (2019): Qualitative data analysis: From start to finish. Los Angeles, CA: Sage.
Miles, Matthew B./Huberman, A. Michael/Saldaña, Johnny (2019): Qualitative data analysis: A methods
sourcebook. Los Angeles, CA: Sage.
References
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Economics 65, No. 1, pp. 53–76.
Armour, Leslie (1997): The logic of economic discourse: Beyond Adam Smith and Karl Marx. In: Interna-
tional Journal of Social Economics 24, No. 10, pp. 1056–1079.
Bazeley, Patricia (2013): Qualitative data analysis: Practical strategies. London: Sage.
Bernard, H. Russell/Wutich, Amber/Ryan, Gery W. (2017): Analyzing qualitative data: Systematic ap-
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Bem, Sandra Lipsitz (1981): Gender schema theory: A cognitive account of sex typing. In: Psychological
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Chapter 12
How to make sense of data: Coding and theorising
Caitlin Meagher
1. Introduction
This chapter outlines the procedures of coding and theorising, the fundamental processes by
which researchers organise their data into meaningful categories and concepts, and then into
theoretical schema. The chapter is primarily intended for junior scholars of Japan Studies—
undergraduates and early graduate students—as it discusses strategies to develop theory out of
raw data. In the following pages, I will provide a step-by-step guide to the stages involved in
coding: data collection, initial coding, focused/selective coding and finally theoretical coding;
and I will discuss the methodological and epistemological significance of each step, particu-
larly with regard to the study of Japan. Throughout, I will provide concrete examples of each
type of coding, and of related concepts, from my own work—an ethnography of a medium-
sized, mixed-sex sharehouse in Osaka Prefecture (Meagher 2017; 2018; 2020)—and from the
essays that make up the rest of this chapter. This is to root the methodological guidance in
concrete examples from a variety of projects, research topics and disciplines. The goal is to
provide a blueprint for effective coding and to offer a reflection on the value of this methodol-
ogy for social scientists producing scholarship in and about Japan.
2. Grounded theory as one framework for coding
The process of coding and theorising, to be laid out in this chapter with reference to recent
and ongoing Social Science research in Japan, is associated with the grounded theory method.
Grounded theory emerged in the late 1960s—specifically, with the publication of The discov-
ery of grounded theory: Strategies for qualitative research, co-authored by sociologists Barney
Glaser and Anselm Strauss (2009), in 1967. The aim of that core text was to provide a clear
road map for generating theory from qualitative data. Discovery was written in response to
what the authors saw as theoretical stagnation in the Sociology of the 1960s, with researchers
merely finding new quantitative data to reaffirm accepted theories, rather than producing new
insights.
Grounded theory’s emphasis on using data to generate new theory is relevant for Japan
scholars in planning and constructing our research because ethnographic/empirical research on
Japan is as likely to defy or challenge grand Social Science theories generated elsewhere as it is
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to affirm them. As Japan scholars, we endeavour to formulate theoretical models grounded in

our data that may, however, be relevant and useful to scholars of other regions. The conclu-
sions we reach on the basis of our data can and ought to be generalisable, to some extent at
least, if we are to make meaningful contributions to our fields. Although not all coding fol-
lows the grounded theory method, I have chosen to emphasise grounded theory in this chapter
for this reason, and because it offers the most comprehensive and formulaic approach and is
therefore most instructive to novice coders.
3. A blueprint for the process of coding
There are, in essence, two types of coding: substantive and theoretical. The first, substantive
coding, subsumes all the activities or steps through which the researcher identifies, isolates,
names and delimits central ideas in her data. It consists of ‘initial’ or ‘open’ coding (of which
in vivo coding is one form), and ‘focused’ or ‘selective’ coding. The following table sets forth a
blueprint for the process of coding, from data collection to preliminary analysis. It may be use-
ful for you to refer back to it as you read the remainder of the chapter. Please note, however,
that this is provided as a guideline and that the process has been simplified (perhaps oversim-
plified) for the sake of exposition and clarity. In practice, the process is inevitably more com-
plicated, often repetitive and/or recursive, with ideas impelling the researcher to forge new
conceptual paths or return to older ones. Additionally, some of these steps, particularly gener-
ating memos and diagrams, may and often do take place at every stage of this process. This
table is an attempt to capture a non-linear process in linear form, so it necessarily obscures the
more creative and serendipitous aspects of coding and theorising.
Table 12.1: The process of coding
Step Purpose Example Related concepts
Interview transcripts, field

Amassing a robust body of notes, archival materials,
Elicited and extant
Data collection (4) qualitative data for analy- technical and professional
texts
sis and generating theory literature, government doc-
uments, life histories
Identifying central
Initial (also known as The sharehouse as emanci- Word-by-word, line-
open) coding codes and concepts for de- pation (jiyū) from home by-line, incident-by-in-
velopment in generating and the workplace cident coding
(5, 6)
theory
A method of initial coding

in which the original term
In vivo coding Amaeru: the expectation
or phrase is retained to
that women feign depen-
(7) keep the concept as faithful
dence
as possible to its use in the
original text
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Chapter 12 How to make sense of data
Step Purpose Example Related concepts
The various uses of jiyū in

my data: naturalised gen-
Developing the central der expectations with re-
themes and concepts iden- gard to household labour;
tified in initial coding by relationships between
Focused (also known as seeking as many incidents daughters and parents in
selective) coding the parental home; sex- Theoretical saturation
of the code as are neces-
based discrimination in the or sufficiency
(8, 9) sary to establish theoretical
saturation or sufficiency: labour market; travel, in-
when no new insights ternationalism, and cos-
emerge from the data mopolitanism;
sexual enfranchisement,
etc.
Establishing relationships
among the concepts identi- ‘Emancipation’ in the
fied in initial coding and sharehouse as ‘investing in
Theoretical coding elaborated in focused cod- yourself’ or ‘study abroad
(10) ing; generating theory at home’; emancipatory
through these relation- rhetoric versus observed re-
ships; weaving the threads alities
together into a tapestry
Clarifying and elaborating

emerging ideas; articulat-
Memos and diagrams
ing nascent categories in
(11)
written or visual form; giv-
ing way to new insights
4. Data collection: What counts as data?
One of grounded theory’s contributions to Social Science enquiry was the expansion of the
concept of ‘data’ to include various qualitative forms. Qualitative researchers collect data
through various activities and strategies, including participant observation, interviewing, and
the collection of archival materials, amongst others. For example, Julia Gerster’s more than
one year of fieldwork researching community rebuilding efforts in Tōhoku included conduct-
ing 150 semi-guided interviews, collecting oral narratives and compiling several books with a
huge amount of fieldnotes in addition to her own reflections on her participant observation
experiences (see this chapter, Ch. 12.3).
The two fundamental categories of textual data are elicited and extant texts. Elicited texts in-
clude interview transcripts and other informant statements rendered in textual form. Obvious-
ly, as these elicited texts emerge out of the interaction between researcher and research sub-
ject(s), it is important to recognise that they are not value-neutral; rather, they represent a situ-
ated interaction between parties with often divergent interests and emphases.
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In my case, for example, I had spent nearly a year living closely with young men and women,
most of whom were living outside their family home for the first time. Though I had recorded
my interviews with housemates as faithfully as possible, the content of these interviews was
determined, of course, by what I thought necessary to ask and how/whether my informants
thought fit to respond. This recognition (that my data set is both partial and determined in
part by my own research agenda) is referred to as reflexivity. Another related concept is that
of positionality. Positionality refers to the recognition that elements of my own identity, in-
cluding my age, my gender and my outsider status, made me both: 1. more interested in some
ideas, which I pursued in my interviewing and notetaking, than others; and 2. that my re-
search subjects’ awareness of these identifiers made them more or less willing to talk to me
about certain issues (see McLaughlin, Ch. 6).
Extant texts, on the other hand, consist of existing materials and encompass various textual
forms, from personal diaries to technical materials that offer some insight beyond what the re-
searcher and research subjects produce. These offer a view of the research topic at a remove
from the researcher’s and research subjects’ immediate concerns, though they are not to be
construed as objective sources any more than elicited texts are: they, too, are artefacts of their
authors’ motivations, circumstances and beliefs. Concrete examples from my own research in-
clude the numerous examples of sharehouse marketing, including sharehouse guidance litera-
ture, as well as government reports on the state of shared housing, that I collected and read
during and after my fieldwork. In fact, a major theme of the book I produced out of this re-
search (Meagher 2020) is the contrast between the ways sharehouses were marketed, on the
one hand, and the realities of living in a sharehouse (my observations and what was revealed
in interviews), on the other.
Coding treats all data, essentially, as text, and the coding process takes an obviously textual
approach to sorting data. In addition, new technologies have made it possible to code audio/
visual materials in this way (see this chapter, Gerster, Ch. 12.3). As a result, according to
Kathy Charmaz (2006, p. 35), elicited and extant texts may be used as primary or supplemen-
tary data. Both are subjected to the same analytical scrutiny, the same method of analysis (i.e.
coding), and both may spark insights that might otherwise escape the researcher.
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Table 12.2: Elicited and extant text
Considerations and
Definition Example
caveats
Positionality of the re-
A text generated out of Transcripts of inter- searcher; influence of
interactions between reviews with my house- interpersonal relation-
searcher and interlocu- mates/ informants and ships and power struc-
Elicited text
tor(s)/research subjects: industry professionals; tures between re-
interview transcripts, field notes from partici- searcher and infor-
fieldnotes, etc. pant observation mant(s) on texts pro-
duced
Sharehouse marketing Purpose and conditions
A text already in exis- literature; sharehouse of the texts’ produc-
tence and independent guidance literature; tion; possible bias or
of the research project: sharehouse real estate agenda; completeness
may include profession- websites; depictions of and accuracy of the
Extant text
al or technical literature sharehouses in popular text; suitability and rel-
on the topic, marketing media; government evance of the text
materials, other aca- white papers and other
demic literature reports on shared hous-
ing
5. Identifying and isolating codes and concepts: Initial/open coding
Imagine that you have returned from a productive period of fieldwork in Japan. You are at
once satisfied with and overwhelmed by the volume of data you have collected: most likely, it
is an amalgam of interview transcripts, observational field notes, various types of images and
varying kinds of extant text. Your task is now to make some sense of it all, to construct a co-
herent analytical narrative out of patches and fragments. This was precisely the situation I en-
countered when I returned from research with boxes of field notes, some handwritten and oth-
ers typed and saved in numerous separate documents; hundreds of photos; transcriptions of
interviews; and various forms of literature.
As Anselm Strauss and Juliet Corbin put it, ‘Science could not exist without concepts. Why are
they so essential? Because by the very act of naming phenomena, we fix continuing attention
on them’ (1990, p. 62). In coding, a ‘concept’ is a significant word or idea that a researcher
identifies and elaborates as a unit of meaning. Concepts are, of course, not stand-alone phe-
nomena, but exist in various relationships to each other; a theme is a recurrent and pervasive
master concept that brings disparate other concepts into conversation with each other, leading
to the generation of theoretical insight. A code is the term assigned to a concept and stands in
relation to a concept in much the same way that a symbol stands in relation to an idea: it is
simply the single, consistent term assigned to represent a concept or set of concepts. As with
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the concepts they represent, some codes are more pervasive and salient than others: a key code
represents a master concept or theme.
The first step in generating theory, then, is isolating concepts and naming phenomena through
open coding or initial coding, which Charmaz defines as the process of ‘naming segments of
data with a label that simultaneously categorizes, summarizes, and accounts for each piece of
data’ (2006, p. 43). Identifying and naming these concepts, which will serve as the building
blocks for analysis, is not merely housekeeping. Instead, it is the necessary first step to generat-
ing theory from the chaos of raw data.
Note that the derivation of theoretical concepts from the qualitative data, as opposed to the
use of data to verify existing concepts, is embedded in this process. The researcher does not
pore through data in search of concepts borrowed from existing theory. Rather, to the extent
possible, the researcher approaches the data without any preconceived itinerary, reading the
signposts as they appear. This is particularly relevant to our work on Japan, which often fits
imperfectly, or does not fit at all, into theoretical concepts developed elsewhere. Rather than
starting from the perspective of testing the Japanese case against established models, coding in
this way prioritises, in a quite literal sense, the Japanese data. Any theory generated should be
grounded in the specificities of the (in this case, Japanese) sociocultural context, not an ill-fit-
ting hand-me-down from scholarship generated elsewhere (for quantitative data and prede-
fined hypotheses see Hommerich/Kottmann, Ch. 10).
To return to my own research, for example, I found that theoretical work on alternative hous-
ing generated elsewhere had limited relevance to my study, given the rarity of and stigma
against living with non-kin (tanin) in modern and contemporary Japan. Indeed, even the con-
cept of tanin (literally: ‘others’) is not an easy idea to translate, because the ideological isome-
try of home and family that emerged in modern Japan imbues tanin with ideas about conta-
gion and otherness. Had I approached the data from the perspective of verifying existing theo-
ry about the meaning and experience of shared housing which, at that time, had only been
produced in other contexts, I would have missed considerable insight into my own contextual-
ly situated data. Instead, by grounding the theoretical aspects of my work in the specific data I
collected, I was able to generate fresh theoretical insights into the meaning of sharing a home
with others that, while based in the Japanese data, can inform broader knowledge about the
meanings of ideas like ‘home’, ‘family’, ‘independence’ and ‘community’.
6. How to do initial coding?
In coding, the researcher seeks out central codes and concepts that will form the basis of the
generation of theory. Initial coding takes place at a number of levels, as Charmaz (2006, pp.
50–53) describes: word-by-word coding, line-by-line coding or incident-by-incident coding. In
the beginning, it is advisable to stick as closely as possible to the data, and to this end it may
be useful to code word by word. Simply put, this means that the researcher reviews every word
of her data in search of meaningful concepts. Though it is labour-intensive and may be some-
what tedious, it minimises the risk that a salient trope, one that might serve as a key concept
in the generation of theory, escapes the researcher’s attention.
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A number of relevant codes will emerge through this laborious first step, and eventually the
researcher will graduate to line-by-line coding, where the unit of coding is a line of text rather
than the individual word. This progression occurs quite naturally as the researcher grows
more familiar and more confident with her data; indeed, many researchers, especially those al-
ready familiar with the research topic and/or more experienced in grounded theory, may skip
word-by-word coding entirely. As with word-by-word coding, line-by-line coding requires that
the researcher remains attentive to the content of the data and the concepts emerging there-
from. Finally, initial coding may proceed to the incident level; researchers may or may not
want to reach this level of abstraction during the initial coding process and, if they do, they
will undertake incident-level coding once word-by-word or line-by-line coding has generated a
preliminary corpus of codes that can be identified and applied to ‘incidents’ in the data.
One of the challenges of initial coding is to resist the urge to make conceptual leaps or indulge
in the application of a priori categories that originate in the researcher, rather than emerging
from the data. Glaser (1978) suggests that, in order to keep initial codes as ‘open’ as possible,
and to retain the processual nature of the data, researchers should use gerund forms rather
than nominal forms whenever possible. Celia Spoden (see this chapter, Ch. 12.2) provides ex-
amples of the codes that emerged early in her own research into advanced directives. These
included ‘experiencing illness/death of a loved one’, ‘suffering as a surrogate’, ‘experiencing
conflicts at the deathbed’, ‘feeling insecure about the own end’, ‘worrying about being a bur-
den’ or ‘being informed of advance directives’. As she explains, this initial labelling is ‘provi-
sional’, and she maintained an attitude of openness to possibilities, ‘considering different inter-
pretations and delaying their fixation’ (ibid.). This is important because it exemplifies ground-
ed theory's emphasis on theory being driven by data, rather than the researcher's own (poten-
tially subjective or premature) analytical conclusions.
In my initial plunge into the data I had collected, I began by coding word by word, searching
for recurrent and seemingly significant themes. Of course, though I did not begin coding in
earnest until I returned from the field, my data-collection strategies in the field were driven by
early inklings and cues that presented themselves, so it was not as if I was seeing the data for
the first time. One of the first codes to emerge in my word-by-word coding was jiyū (freedom),
which arose especially with regard to female sharehouse residents. It refers to the idea that the
sharehouse offered emancipation from gendered behavioural conventions in other spheres of
their lives, in particular: the family home, the marital home and the workplace. Once I identi-
fied jiyū as a central or key code, I could look for instances of jiyū and its variants using line-
by-line and eventually incident-level coding, recalling contexts and scenarios (conversations,
events and materials) where this concept arose and was elaborated. I will return to this exam-
ple with reference to in vivo coding and focused coding below, but this concept and its vari-
ants arose with enough frequency and in enough permutations that I knew it warranted a cen-
tral place in my analysis.
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7. In vivo coding
One strategy to ensure that codes remain as faithful as possible to the data is the use of in vivo
codes (Glaser 1978, p. 70; Charmaz 2006, pp. 55–57), which simply refers to retaining the
original language and phrasing when naming concepts. In vivo codes ‘anchor your analysis in
your research participants’ worlds [and] can provide a crucial check on whether you have
grasped what is significant’ (Charmaz 2006, p. 57). In her contribution to this volume, Gerster
(see this chapter, Ch. 12.3) discusses her own use of in vivo codes in her research on regional
revitalisation in Tohoku: as her special focus was social relations within communities affected
by the natural disaster, she isolated phrases that emphasised this element rather than, for ex-
ample, details about the disaster itself. Thus, the in vivo codes she identified included ideas
like ‘everyone was supporting me’, ‘strongest community’ or ‘not able to express my opinion’.
One value of in vivo coding is that it protects the researcher against inadvertently imposing her
own interpretation on the data, in recognition of the fact that language is never value-neutral.
This risk is ever-present in Social Science research, when researchers translate their informants’
statements and expressions for an academic audience. But the risk is considerably greater
when the researcher and informants are working across different languages, and this ‘transla-
tion’ becomes more literal. This is a special concern in Japan Studies, as translations from
Japanese to English and other languages of instruction/research can be unwieldy. Though in
theory any emic (native) concept is translatable given enough space, Japan scholars are often
tasked with how to work with terms and concepts that defy a neat one-to-one translation. We
rely on approximations, exegeses and elaborate analogies. But these should come last, during
the explication of a theory, not during its development. In the preliminary stages of coding, it
is important to retain these original concepts, as expressed in the original language, lest they
become confused or degraded by the researcher’s analytical agenda.
To return to an example from my own research, I found frequent references to the concept of
amaeru. This code emerged as one of the many sub-concepts or sub-codes under the theme of
jiyū. The concept of amaeru, with a storied history in mid-20th century Japanese social psy-
chology, means very much more than the reductive English language translation as ‘depen-
dence’. In my interviews with young female sharehouse residents and in sharehouse marketing
literature, amaeru often meant something like ‘to feign dependence or beg indulgence as a
form of flattery and to downplay one’s own abilities and independence’. The sharehouse was
depicted as a space of emancipation from the burdensome cultural mandate for women to
amaeru. It was important for me to retain the idea of amaeru in its original Japanese to retain
the full force of the concept, a full exegesis of which is impossible here due to spatial con-
straints. However, settling for the conventional English language translation ‘dependence’
would have foreclosed further enquiry into the nuances of this important code, which emerged
as a central concept in one of the chapters of my thesis.
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8. Developing concepts: Focused/selective coding
Once the researcher has achieved some analytical purchase on the mound or wave of data be-
fore her through the rather arduous and slow-going process of initial coding, she can begin to
sift through the remaining data by performing focused (or ‘selective’) coding. In advancing
from initial to focused coding, the researcher’s purpose shifts from discovering codes to finding
instances of known codes and specifying the parameters of those codes. Thus, in this phase of
coding, the researcher seeks out new incidences of designated codes, essentially to test whether
these new incidences challenge or add to the meanings she has already assigned to them. Obvi-
ously, this process is not mechanical. On the contrary, focused coding is a recursive process
through which the researcher tests the adequacy and relevance of previously discovered codes
with an eye towards refining or revising them to more accurately capture the realities ex-
pressed in the data. This is an important step in ‘grounding’ grounded theory, as it forces the
researcher to justify the analytical frames she will use in generating theory.
After my initial coding, during which jiyū emerged as a key code or theme, I began to actively
look for instances of jiyū in my data to elaborate the ways it is used, and the contexts in which
it was used, through the process of focused coding. It emerged, for example, in discussions
about naturalised gender expectations with regard to household labour; about the relation-
ships between daughters and parents in the parental home; about sex-based discrimination in
the labour market; about travel, internationalism and cosmopolitanism; and about sexual en-
franchisement, among others. My goal in initial coding had been discovering and naming
concepts. Having designated the idea of jiyū in its various forms as a key code or theme, I en-
deavoured, during the focused coding stage, to compile a more or less exhaustive list of the
contexts in which it appeared in my data.
9. How much is enough? Theoretical saturation
The threshold for determining that a code or concept is developed enough for analytical use is
theoretical saturation (Glaser/Strauss 2009, pp. 61–62). The aim of theoretical saturation is to
ensure that the codes designated correspond to the data; that they are sufficiently specific; and,
finally, that they are sufficiently complete to carry theoretical weight. Theoretical saturation is
achieved once ‘gathering fresh data no longer sparks new theoretical insights, nor reveals new
properties of these core theoretical categories’ (Charmaz 2006, p. 113).
The researcher proceeds cautiously at the beginning, venturing a provisional analysis and
checking it against (grounding it in) the empirical evidence. However, especially with regard to
the patterns of human behaviour, it is crucial to recall that whether an incident reaffirms or
challenges the ‘pattern’ observed by the researcher depends, at least in part, on the researcher’s
judgement and on the core theoretical categories established by the researcher. As a result, Ian
Dey (1999, p. 257) rejects the notion of saturation in favour of sufficiency, as a reminder that
‘data suggest categories but involves conjecture’.
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With regard to my key code of jiyū, there finally came a point when I was confident that I had
achieved this sufficiency. I was no longer in Japan, having returned to the United Kingdom to
write up my thesis. The material conditions of fieldwork, which are typically dependent on
funding over a set period, mean that we as researchers cannot continue our research indefinite-
ly, however dear it is to our hearts. Fortunately, technology allows us to maintain some access,
for free and in real time, with our contacts in the field (see McLaughlin, Ch. 6). In the U.K.
and actively writing, I continued to collect and review new materials about sharehouses and
continued to be connected to my former housemates/informants on social media, where I was
privy to their discussions about sharehouse living from afar. When I realised that every new
iteration of the idea of ‘emancipation’ idea was captured within the parameters I had previous-
ly set for that code, I was satisfied that it was, if not exhaustive, sufficiently elaborate for use
in generating a meaningful analysis. Had I continued to encounter new permutations of the
concept, however, or unanticipated applications, it would have been my cue that I had not
achieved sufficiency, much less saturation, and it would have been incumbent on me to seek
out new data until no new theoretical insights emerged.
10. Coding as theory: Theoretical coding
So far, we have discussed initial/open coding and focused/selective coding. To reiterate, the
first is to discover central concepts and pin identifying markers (codes) to them, and the sec-
ond is to elaborate and define these concepts through saturation. These processes are primarily
descriptive/definitive, and are both subsumed under the category of substantive coding.
Theoretical coding is distinct from substantive coding in that it moves the research from estab-
lishing and defining categories to establishing the relationships among concepts and categories.
Thus, while substantive coding breaks the undifferentiated mass—the mound or the wave—
into its component parts, theoretical coding re-combines these parts into a coherent pattern
(like shards into a mosaic, or threads into a tapestry). As Glaser (1978, p. 55) puts it: ‘Sub-
stantive codes conceptualize the empirical substance of the area of research. Theoretical codes
conceptualize how the substantive codes may relate to each other as hypotheses to be integrat-
ed into the theory.’
Thus, as the name ‘theoretical coding’ suggests, coding and theory are elements of the same
process, of discovering regular relationships among concepts. In my case, ideas about emanci-
pation, as expressed by my housemate informants and in sharehouse marketing literature, cen-
tred around two themes: the idea of living in a sharehouse as ‘investing in oneself’ and one’s
career; and the idea of the sharehouse as a way to ‘study abroad in Japan’ (Meagher 2018;
2020). These two somewhat interrelated ideas emerged to me through theoretical coding and
became the themes of the first two substantive chapters of my study.
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11. Practical considerations: memos and diagrams
Coding is the strategy used by grounded theorists to wrangle an expansive and unwieldy data
set—the ‘mound’ to be climbed or the ‘wave’ to be surfed, in the imagery of Gerster and
Rosenberger (see this chapter, Ch. 12.1; Ch. 12.3). With a seemingly infinite array of direc-
tions for the researcher to follow, she makes conscious decisions at every step, following some
directional cues in the data and declining (or postponing) others. At the early stages of the
coding process, they allow the researcher to explore hunches or possible connections without
immediately committing these to a linear narrative. The reader has likely experienced the way
that putting our ideas down on paper—whether in a written or visual format, and however
provisionally or schematically—forces us to engage with our ideas in a different way from ca-
sual speculation. Rosenberger describes her construction of a theme map as a ‘playful’ and ex-
perimental process, writing themes in bubbles and moving them around a page. In the more
advanced stages of the research process, memos and/or diagrams keep track of the researcher’s
own line(s) of thinking, a theoretical trail of breadcrumbs. Should the researcher find herself
too far afield of her initial signposts, she is able to ‘double back’ to any point along the route
by referring back to them.
Thus, the construction of memos and diagrams is useful at every stage of the research process:
it allows the researcher to clarify and elaborate emerging ideas; or, in articulating these nascent
categories in written or visual form, they may give way to new insights. The hunches and pos-
sible connections captured in these artefacts may end up on the cutting room floor, so to
speak. Or they may find their way—in their entirety or in an excerpted form—into the pub-
lished research.
12. Conclusion
I would like to conclude this chapter with a brief discussion of Spoden’s anecdote (see this
chapter, Ch. 12.2) of her coming to terms with the concept of songenshi (‘death with dignity’)
in her own research on advance directives, which demonstrates a number of the principles and
ideas presented herein. She mentions that this term caught her attention as she was coding,
and emphasises that it was not a frequently occurring concept in her data; on the contrary, it
only occurred twice in her interviews. Spoden, by tunnelling into the significance of this id-
iosyncratic expression rather than discarding it as irrelevant, discovered a central concept that
might otherwise have escaped her attention. This is the advantage of staying close to one’s da-
ta in the exploratory phase of initial coding. Second, by retaining its original form as songen-
shi rather than translating it into English or German (in vivo coding), she also retained the
peculiar history of this term and its linguistic implications.
The anecdote also demonstrates the way that a researcher’s particular background and theo-
retical engagements influence the choices she makes in dealing with her data and the directions
she will follow. Note that, far from denying the role of her existing beliefs and interests, Spo-
den emphasises the role of her ‘academic socialisation in Germany’, which made her sensitive
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to the implications of songenshi. As researchers, we bring certain ideas and assumptions with
us to the data but, to the extent that we can be circumspect about them, they may contribute
to, rather than undermine, our theoretical abilities (reflexivity).
The process of coding, as I have set forth in this chapter, is a strategy that can be used to grap-
ple with a substantial and varied mound of data: to tease out important strands of meaning
(initial coding), discover their parameters (focused coding to theoretical sufficiency) and to
weave them back together into a cohesive narrative (generating theory through theoretical
coding). Coding in this way is especially useful to scholars of Japan (and Area Studies more
broadly), as it ensures that theory proceeds from the data, and not vice versa. This is impor-
tant because it can be a corrective to the occasional tendency in the Social Sciences to impose
procrustean theories, developed elsewhere, to specific cases. Coding is an opportunity to gen-
erate theory grounded in the Japanese context for application or assessment in other spheres.
It can reposition Japan, and scholarship on Japan, within disciplinary conversations and theo-
ry building.
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12.1 Cresting the wave of data
Nancy Rosenberger
It is you and the data. You are home from three weeks, three months or a whole year of field-
work. Your machine is full of transcribed interviews, conversations and observations. The
wave has arisen from the ocean and is swelling towards the shore. Your job is to surf the back
of the wave—to ride it up to the point where it breaks into a story. This is ethnography—the
writing of people’s experiences—being born at its creative edge.
I have always found this a stressful, exciting ‘don’t-know’ point. The flow of words that have
filled your ears and notebooks is going to join with your particular manner of riding the wave.
The question is whether you can do it in such a way that mines the data for all it is worth,
stays honest to the data, yet ultimately results in a narrative that communicates what you un-
derstand to be the most important tale to tell.
Of course, you sit at your desk with some ideas already as to what is going on in the data. You
have shaped the research questions, the questionnaire, the sample, and you have melded it
with theoretical perspectives and previous research on the topic. But the task at hand is to put
that aside and listen to what the data has to tell you. Now you are being asked to dive into the
words of the people who have given you their thoughts and hearts, and let the cold water clear
your brain so that you can listen to the roar of the data.
Coding
Careful coding is the first step because it reduces the complexity, makes you focus on small
bits of text and interrupts the overall story that you are already creating in your head. Coding
is essentially classification. This stage entails going through all of your data carefully and clas-
sifying it into parts. Name each stream of water that flows through the data; some streams
might get coded in several parts because they relate to two or more aspects of your research.
Do not miss the spindrift that blows off the edges—felt senses of what is going on, things al-
luded to, half-spoken, gone in a second, but once glimpsed, important to preserve.
Coding is tedious and one is often tempted to pay someone else to do it. Do not ignore the
value of reading through all of your data again, reacquainting yourself with what you have
forgotten or think you know, and considering how you want to categorise it. The classifica-
tions will highly influence what the data tells you. If you yourself are unable to do the actual
coding, read through as much data as you can in order to suss out the codes that you want
your coder to use. Make a list and refine it. If you have the luxuries of time and money, you
might have both you and a coder unfamiliar with the material code the data. The familiarised
eye and the unfamiliarised eye will see differently.
Coding follows the technology of our brains—sort out the blue blocks, the red and the green.
Put them in piles: same, different, same, different. Let us say the blue blocks represent what I
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call a bucket, which simply names a general topic. Some topics are obvious, such as when I
asked all of the women I interviewed about their dreams for the future: ‘dreams for the future’
becomes a general topic or what I call a bucket—something that has no specific meaning yet; it
is just carrying the water.
Different shades of blue quickly emerge and with them a hierarchy of buckets under the main
blue bucket: large-scale dreams of geographical movement (going to New York City to work
or leaving northern Japan to open a coffee shop in Okinawa); small-scale dreams (returning to
flower-arranging lessons or working at a friend’s store); relationship dreams (travelling with
your husband or visiting an old friend). How you divide these up makes a difference to how
the tale will be told. Code your data into more buckets than fewer. The hierarchy of smaller
buckets saves you because you can always pour the little buckets back into the big one, but
you cannot divide the big one easily after the coding is finished. You will probably use coding
software, such as NVivo or Dedoose. I started out coding on paper and this was a great boon.
But never forget that your brain is called on to draw the connections and express the nuances
that lie in the data.
An important challenge is to be sensitive to feelings or values that are spread throughout the
data without an obvious flag attached to them. Sometimes this is embedded in a word such as
jibunnari (something that suits me, or is of me). If it comes up often, it becomes its own code.
And, often a sentiment may not be represented in a word, but come out as a general feeling or
tone. For example, if all the dreams for the future have to do with time away from the de-
mands of other people, and if that sentiment pops up in other buckets as well, this becomes a
code: ‘desiring time away’. All segments of conversation or observed action that attest to the
depth of this feeling are stored under this code. As you go through your data, a hierarchy may
in time develop under this code, classifying different forms of time away, different intensities
of desire, the nature of desires, the way the person judges her own desires or feels other judg-
ing them, and so on.
When you write up this code, you return to the hierarchy to figure out how to portray this
desire and what to emphasise. Size matters in this decision, like for example, if half of the peo-
ple dream of travelling overseas, then this needs to be stressed, analysed for nuances and de-
scribed with rich quotations and stories. The unusual also matters. A small group of people,
maybe only ten per cent, may turn to religion to get away, and another small group, another
ten per cent, to drawing, ballet or piano. Do not lose this group. In Dilemmas of adulthood
(Rosenberger 2013), I merged these last two groups into people getting away into the irra-
tional or unproductive side of neoliberal life, and included quotations and case studies under
this rubric, with religion and art still divided out.
Looking carefully inside codes and searching across codes is essential to staying honest to the
data and emerging with your own unique story to convey—a story that relates to inherited
theory and studies, but that adds a new hue to the ocean. In finally writing up your material, it
could be easy to classify time away from the demands of others as individuality—a major pre-
occupation of theory about Japan versus the West. But characterising individuality accurately
for this group of people is important. Do not let theory define it for you. What does your data
for these people in this time and place tell you? This will become your contribution to the
field. Study the context and manner of speaking about time away. Was it said with a sense of
futility, anticipation, embarrassment, anger, resistance or joy? Furthermore, it will be impor-
tant to look for other codes that relate to this sense of wanting time away, and may in the long
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run contribute to your characterisation of individuality. The research will heighten your
awareness to utterances and contexts containing words like jibun (self), wagamama (selfish)
and watashi wa (I am/do), all of which show nuances of the Japanese language and specifics of
the representation of the self. These might also be considered in contrast with codes that trace
feelings about relationships or identity. How do feelings about relationships connect to the
feelings about time away? How does desire for time away relate to giving up individual iden-
tity in the flow of art or religion? We might assume they would be in opposition, but think it
through for nuances.
Themes
Themes are statements that characterise a particular study. They grow out of the topic buckets
mentioned above. Themes carry meaning particular to your study with these specific people,
and it is around themes that you will wrap your story. From the buckets of ‘dreams for the
future’ and ‘wanting time away’ comes a theme such as: ‘Japanese women (in this study)
dream of having a time or place where they can live for themselves away from the responsibili-
ties of everyday life’. Such a theme statement can become the centre of a chapter or section of
your work. As you write it, you get the luxury of delving into all the neatly coded sections
mentioned above to draw out pithy quotes that represent different aspects, intensities, emo-
tions, behaviour and judgements that will bring this theme alive for your readers.
For most studies, three to five main themes will either evolve or be chosen as most important.
Now you are shaping the wave as it rolls in towards the shore—the mutual product of what
the data has told you and what you think tells a story that is analytically robust (supported by
the data), persuasive and accurate to what you have experienced as an ethnographer. Qualita-
tive research involves a lot of data, and while your data analysis may have resulted in ten or
more themes, each of which deserve to be told, your job is to winnow these down. This pro-
cess may feel overwhelming. Live with that for a while, struggle with it, freewrite about it, talk
to friends about it, and in time you will see through the froth to the clear water.
I suggest leaving some themes for later papers and choosing the ones that, like pieces of a jig-
saw puzzle, will paint a picture that tells an engrossing story when assembled. But keep in
mind that various jigsaw puzzles are possible; you have to decide which pieces to carve out
and reassemble. When choosing themes, the researcher often goes back to their research ques-
tions once more. What combination of themes is going to best answer your research questions
—or perhaps unsettle them? What themes relate to each other in interesting ways?
In the process of choosing themes, one more analytic tool can come to your aid: theme maps.
Theme maps arrange the most important themes of your study in graphic relationship to each
other. Play with your themes, considering various possible relationships between them. They
may complement each other. The theme above about Japanese women’s dream of time or a
place away might be complemented by a theme such as: ‘Japanese women in this study attest
to the importance in their lives of a period of enjoyment before and after children/career’. The
‘dream of time or a place away’ theme may also exist in apparent contradiction to another
theme such as: ‘Japanese women expressed a high sense of responsibility to family members
and work colleagues’. Then again, there may be an ironic relationship such as: ‘(though they
want time away,) Japanese women yearn for more time with their friends, partners, husbands
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and children’. Another relation could be assumed to be causal: ‘Japanese women feel over-
worked’.
Many people can think through these themes best if they write them in bubbles and move
them around a page in relation to each other. Make sure to characterise the type of relation-
ship between the variables and draw arrows between them; the arrows may go both ways be-
tween bubbles or across the page as well as around a circle. This helps you to perceive the
overall shape of the argument that you will make. Try explaining your theme map to someone
else. This helps your story to unfold.
You might make several theme maps before you settle on one. Themes may be included and
taken out, others revived; you may develop sub-themes. Stay in touch with the quotations that
support these themes, perhaps adding them to your theme map. Do not err in either direction:
towards telling the story that you wanted to tell in the first place that rests mainly on your
own assumptions, or towards clinging to the data so hard that the exposition becomes a list of
quotes under themes. You are the expert on this data and it is the melding of your expertise
with the depth and accuracy of the data that will make your paper, article or book zing.
The final stage of the analysis is to choose an overall statement to characterise your paper or
book. To some extent, it brings together the various themes. Contradictions are often interest-
ing to emphasise, such as yearning for a relationship and longing for flow of the self. The title
of my book Gambling with virtue (Rosenberger 2001) expresses the contrary position in
which young, single Japanese women found themselves in the 1990s. In my book Dilemmas of
adulthood (Rosenberger 2013), the tensions of ambivalence and uncertainty seemed to charac-
terise the population I was studying. For organic farmers that I studied, the irony between
themes is clear: organic farmers are resistant to typical farming methods, operating outside of
the market; yet they are ideal citizens of neoliberal Japan—individualistic and responsible for
themselves, taking advantage of government subsidies (Rosenberger 2017). Such tensions as
these make for an intriguing story to sort out and, luckily for anthropologists, human life is
full of them.
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12.2 Lost in translation? Grounded theory and developing
theoretical concepts
Celia Spoden
In a project on advance directives in Japan (Spoden 2015; 2017; 2020), I conducted narrative
interviews (Schütze 1983) with people who documented their wishes on medical treatment for
end-of-life situations in advance in a so-called living will (ribingu uiru) in case they might not
be able to decide for themselves any more. My primary interest was to study the motivation
and subjective perspectives of my research participants to formulate such a living will. Follow-
ing a grounded theory approach (Glaser/Strauss 2009), I analysed ten cases of five women and
men respectively who were between 45 and 88 years of age. I developed the key concept ‘be-
coming critically aware of life-sustaining treatments’ and the underlying concepts ‘lifetime and
timing’ and ‘conceptions of the self as a mirror of decision-making’.
Grounded theory and coding
Grounded Theory (GT) is a systematic approach to constructing theories which are grounded
in the data. This means generating codes inductively from the data and developing them fur-
ther into theoretical concepts. The research follows a theoretical sampling approach, which
means that the researcher decides which data to gather next based on the emerging categories
in order to develop them further. This process of analysing and going back into the field takes
place until theoretical saturation is reached, meaning that categories become refined and filled
out, and no new properties emerge any more (Charmaz 2006). However, this is the ideal pat-
tern, which is sometimes difficult to realise due to time and financial restrictions, especially
when the research takes place in a different country and funding is limited.
Coding is the core element and there are different approaches to coding in GT, but regardless
of what approach you go for the first step is called open coding (Strauss 1987; Strauss/Corbin
1990) or initial coding (Charmaz 2006) and the intention is to break up the data. Kathy Char-
maz suggests constructing short codes, preserving actions using gerunds and moving quickly
through the data (Charmaz 2006, pp. 48–49). The labelling of data in this first step is provi-
sional; the codes are not related to each other yet and can be renamed later. The basic attitude
is to be open. This can mean looking at the data from an alienated perspective, considering
different interpretations and delaying their fixation, asking analytical questions of the data
and questioning one’s own preconceptions.
In the following step, the initial codes are related to each other, bundled together and their
properties and dimensions considered. This process of axial coding means sorting and bringing
order from chaos. I draw mind maps and start developing the relations between codes and
subcodes, or I write codes on cards and cluster them on a wall. I always write my first analyti-
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cal thoughts down in a memo whatever the sorting technique. This helps to clarify my
thoughts and get them out of my head or detect gaps in the data, and it is the first step into
writing. Through selective coding––the third step––the goal is to develop one or more key cat-
egories, which are grounded in the data and explain the processes or actions studied. This
means constantly asking analytical questions or determining which theoretical categories are
indicated by the codes.
When I was coding my data on advance healthcare directives, different codes such as ‘experi-
encing the illness/death of a loved one’, ‘suffering as a surrogate’, ‘experiencing conflicts at the
deathbed’, ‘feeling insecure about one’s own end’, ‘worrying about being a burden’ or ‘being
informed of advance directives’ emerged. By asking which kind of process is indicated by these
codes and how the codes are related to each other, I developed the category ‘becoming critical-
ly aware of life-sustaining treatments’, which comprises feelings of insecurity among my study
participants about their final days, especially in the event that they might no longer be able to
voice their own wishes regarding medical treatment. Therefore, drafting a living will is a pre-
caution against potential problems in the future, which restores an indivdiual’s feeling of being
secure in the present.
Grounded in the data or forced onto it?
Besides the category ‘becoming critically aware of life-sustaining treatments’, which is ground-
ed in the experiences of my research participants, there were other codes, indicating ‘notions
of lifetime’ or pointing towards ‘self-conceptions’ in connection to social roles and responsibil-
ities. For example, ‘having lived long enough or longer than expected’, ‘living ten years in
one’, ‘existing eternally/soul (tamashii)’, ‘(not) thinking about one’s own future’ were expres-
sions related to ‘notions of lifetime’. Codes I attributed to ‘self-conceptions’ included, for ex-
ample, ‘having always decided for myself’, ‘being afraid of losing myself’, ‘searching for a de-
cision in accordance with myself’ or ‘leading an independent life’. Here, the perception of so-
cial roles and corresponding responsibilities was important and expressed in formulations such
as ‘having always cared for others/not being able to endure being cared for’, ‘not wanting to
burden others’, ‘giving up social roles in order to give up living’ or ‘having no one who de-
pends on me’. However, the theoretical categories ‘lifetime’ and ‘self’ that, in my understand-
ing, were indicated by these codes, originated in a Western context. Could they be applied to a
Japanese context or was I imposing the theoretical framework of a ‘Western researcher’ on my
data?
I struggled with this question and searched for answers. This took me to the literature about
the period of modernisation in Japan, during which philosophical and sociological concepts
were translated into Japanese with the aim of modernising society. Key concepts of moderni-
ty––such as society, individual, nation, religion and so forth (Shimada 2007)––were first trans-
lated and introduced into the academic discourse. They became key concepts of modern life
and now belong to general knowledge and language, and are seldom remembered as translated
concepts. This is also the case with ‘time’ (jikan) and ‘self’ (jibun).
Coding involves many choices the researcher has to make, such as which route to take and la-
bels to use. The more I reflected on the language used by myself and the study participants as
well as my preconceptions, concepts used by participants and theoretical concepts developed,
340
these choices became conscious decisions. I decided to work with the concepts ‘lifetime’ and
‘self’ and elaborate on how they were translated into Japanese society, which structural
changes they brought about and how their meaning shifted. Aside from theorising my empiri-
cal data, this allowed me to contribute to a wider discourse on key concepts of modernity.
In a chapter on ‘lifetime and timing’, I outlined the historical process of translation and cultur-
al adaptation of this concept. This made it possible to consider the evolving modern concept
of time in Europe in its relation to its introduction in Japan and its consequences for modern
societies. Opposed to a pre-modern understanding of time––where time and space were closely
connected––an abstract concept of time and the institutionalisation of the life-course charac-
terise the modern concept ‘lifetime’. Together with standardised scientific measurements of life
expectancy, this concept forms the basis for the interpretations of life and its finiteness by the
research participants. On the other hand, beliefs in spirits (tamashii) or the afterlife are related
to pre-modern concepts of time, which offer us the opportunity to transcend the finiteness of
lifetime.
For the concept of ‘self’, I searched for existing theories which best explain the reflections and
actions of the study participants. I chose the symbolic interactionist understanding of the self
(Mead 2015). In a chapter on the concept ‘self-conceptions as mirroring the decision-making’,
I illustrated how the symbolic interactionist understanding of the self corresponds to the ex-
pressions of self by my research participants and how their self-conception is mirrored in their
decision to draft a living will.
Absent or grounded in the data?
While you are coding, it is helpful to reflect on the ways a specific term is used: Is it present in
the everyday, medial or academic level of discourse? Does it belong to a specialised field or a
certain professional language? Sometimes meanings may differ in everyday and academic lan-
guage. Reflecting on a code’s usage in different languages reveals the historical and sociocul-
tural contingence and makes it possible to reconstruct certain developments in relation to each
other with their similarities and disruptions. For example, when I was coding the first inter-
view, a statement by a 45-year-old hospice nurse puzzled me: ‘For me dying in dignity (songen-
shi) holds an exceptionally high standing. But there are others who say that is not the case for
them.’ It seemed obvious that she wanted to highlight the importance of ‘dying in dignity’ for
her, but why should there be others who do not think that a dignified death is important? Or
could this statement even be interpreted as there being others who do not want to die in digni-
ty?
As soon as I started comparing codes with data, I realised that ‘dying in dignity’ was men-
tioned in only one other interview. Only the participants who had access to expert knowledge
and professional discourses––the hospice nurse and a former journalist––explicitly mentioned
songenshi. So why consider a concept which is more absent than grounded in the data? As
someone whose academic socialisation took place in Germany––where Würde (dignity) is re-
ferred to quite often in the context of advance directives––this seemed to be a difference and
caught my interest. I wanted to understand how the hospice nurse uses the term ‘dying in dig-
nity’, why the concept was almost absent in the other interviews and how and with what
meaning it was used in the Japanese debate on advance directives.
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Celia Spoden
This took me back to debates from the 1970s when the concept of songenshi was invented as
a translation for the English ‘dying with dignity’ in 1976. The Asahi Shimbun (1976) coined it
when covering the Karen Ann Quinlan case in New Jersey––the world’s first court ruling in
favour of the withdrawal of a mechanical ventilator in a continuous comatose patient. In
1983, the Japan Society for Euthanasia renamed itself Nihon Songenshi Kyōkai (Japan Society
for Dying with Dignity, JSDD). Ever since, the JSDD has used songenshi to campaign for the
spread of advance directives and the legalisation of (passive) euthanasia. Digging deeper into
the Japanese debate on euthanasia and especially the arguments of its opponents, I soon re-
alised that songenshi is indeed the object of rejection (Otani 2010). Not in the literal sense, but
because it stands for the legalisation of euthanasia in the JSDD’s campaign. Against this back-
ground the nurse’s statement––songenshi holds an exceptionally high standing with her––ac-
quires a new nuance and can be understood as a self-positioning act in the debate on euthana-
sia.
This shows that although songenshi seemed a good candidate for a key concept from the view-
point of a researcher socialised in a ‘dignity’-laden environment of German bioethics, it was
more absent than grounded in the data. It had no explanatory power for the empirical part.
However, for the discursive context of my study and an understanding of the Japanese debate
and its relation to the international debates, songenshi was an important concept.
Co-construction, self-reflexivity and cultural translation
In GT, the researcher is involved in a process of co-constructing the data. What we see in the
data depends on our research question, which is connected to our research interests, theoreti-
cal knowledge in a certain field and our preconceptions. We decide which codes we use to la-
bel our data, what to bring into focus, which paths we follow in the theoretical sampling and
which ones we put aside. However, it is not simply we as researchers who construct a theory,
we are also affected by our data: we have experiences in the field which might alter our point
of view and we constantly reflect on emerging concepts and our preconceptions. Therefore,
self-reflection and an open attitude are important prerequisites for interpretation and help pre-
vent us imposing concepts on the data. Moreover, being aware of our own concepts, cultural
backgrounds and the language used by research participants––and sometimes the terms they
do not use––offers us the chance to reconstruct how key concepts of modern society were con-
structed under specific historical, social and cultural circumstances. By tracing how certain
concepts were translated into different sociocultural contexts, we can show the relatedness of
the debates and transformations of meaning.
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12.3 Coding: Mapping the mountains of ethnographic post-
disaster data
Julia Gerster
Fieldwork was without doubt one of the most exciting times in my life. As a PhD candidate, I
spent one year at Tohoku University in Sendai beginning in December 2016. I found my re-
search topic because I was present in Tokyo when the Great East Japan Earthquake, Tsunami
and Nuclear Disaster of 2011 happened. Ever since that time, the recovery process of north-
eastern Japan has captivated me. Soon after the disaster, people from severely affected areas
revived their local festivals and strived to hold on to their hometown traditions. Cultural pat-
terns from the Tohoku region, like local food culture or dialect, were used in other regions in
Japan as well, either to express support for northeastern Japan or, in cases of displaced com-
munities, to preserve their identities. These observations finally led me to the research ques-
tions I focused on in my dissertation (Gerster-Damerow 2019): Why do people turn to local
culture after a disaster? How does local culture affect community building among those who
have been displaced? And lastly: What are the differences between communities mainly affect-
ed by the tsunami and communities additionally severely affected by the nuclear disaster in
terms of the impact of local culture on community building?
To compare different aspects of the disaster, I chose Natori City in Miyagi Prefecture and
Namie Town in Fukushima Prefecture, before and after Namie’s partial release from the evacu-
ation zone, as my primary field sites. There, I joined in local cultural activities, followed dis-
cussions on recovery that took place at the temporary housing, and helped to organise com-
munity events at newly built public housing. The data I gained through my participant obser-
vations became the foundation of my dissertation. Additionally, I collected more than 150 se-
mi-structured interviews, unstructured narratives, and several books filled with almost unread-
able field notes gathered during my visits. In short, I was content at first and then rather terri-
fied by the amount of information I managed to collect.
Then I reached the point that every researcher dreads: making sense of the mass of data I was
so eager to accumulate. It reminded me of the deep forests and dark mountains in Northeast
Japan, where it is difficult to figure out where to go and what to encounter. Although it is al-
ways exciting to enter such a forest, it is also easy to get lost. Coding was like creating a map
that helped me to find a way through the mountains of data and keep track of it. The longer I
used the tool, the more I was able to recognise reoccurring patterns and structures that eventu-
ally helped me to answer my research questions. The map became clearer and clearer with
some big roads connected to my research questions and many sideways that seemed interesting
as well. I knew that it was impossible to follow all the streets that emerged from this project.
Nevertheless, with the coding map I could always go back to explore the sideways in other
projects later without having to start all over again. According to Charmaz (2006, p. 43), cod-
ing refers to ‘naming segments of data with a label that simultaneously categorizes, summa-
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rizes, and accounts for each piece of data’. Since the way researchers conduct coding is influ-
enced by various aspects like individual background, discipline, choice of methods, type of da-
ta, field site or research questions (Benaquisto 2008), Elliott (2018, p. 2850) proposes concep-
tualising coding as a ‘decision-making process’. Although coding is mostly done with text, i.e.
transcripts of interviews, field notes or other types of textual data, it has recently also been
applied to pictures, video and audio recordings.
Coding takes a lot of time, but Elliott (2018, p. 2851) emphasises that ‘coding is a way of […]
essentially indexing or mapping data, to provide an overview of disparate data that allows the
researcher to make sense of them in relation to their research questions. Most simply, it can be
a way of tagging data that are relevant to a particular point […]’. Hence, coding is a crucial
tool with which to contextualise one’s arguments through the data collected. It helps to find
connecting themes and patterns as evidence.
The challenges of the coding process depend on how familiar the researcher already is with the
data. Especially in grounded theory approaches (see Spoden, Ch. 12.2), many start with so-
called in vivo coding in order to stay close to the raw data and not jump to conclusions. In
vivo coding describes the practice of taking words or expressions from a piece of data and lit-
erally using them as a code (King 2008). Let me illustrate what in vivo coding looked like
within my research project. Since I was investigating social dynamics, my special attention fo-
cused on references to social relations within these communities. If somebody said, for in-
stance, ‘after the disaster everyone supported me’, the in vivo code could be ‘everyone support-
ed me’. The statement ‘my hometown used to have the strongest community’ could be coded
as ‘strongest community,’ and another person’s comment ‘after the disaster I felt not able to
express my opinion anymore’ could lead to the in vivo code ‘not able to express my opinion’.
This kind of in vivo coding should serve as a first step towards familiarising oneself with the
data. This is recommended when working with data that was collected a long time ago or by
other researchers, although researchers working with grounded theory especially would al-
ways recommend beginning with in vivo coding as early as during the data collection process.
Since I started working with the data immediately after its acquisition, I only used this coding
method to highlight a certain expression and keep it until similar codes emerged. This relates
to one of the crucial steps for that kind of qualitative data analysis: putting similar references
together and summarising them using an overarching code.
The examples mentioned above refer to various aspects of social dynamics. Therefore, in the
process of coding, I developed the overarching code ‘social relations’. For the various aspects
of social relations, I had identified sub-codes—sub-categories of a certain topic. Examples of
my sub-codes are ‘social ties before the disaster’, ‘social ties after the disaster’, ‘positive rela-
tions’, ‘suppression’ and the like. Sub-codes that contain the terms ‘positive’ or ‘negative’
might appear too simplistic, but these codes were mainly meant to structure the data or to dis-
cover common themes while further exploring the data. For instance, I eventually summarised
references indicating a time before and after the disaster as ‘change’; I renamed, deleted or
shifted other codes to other sub-codes. In the end, a code structure emerged that represented
the most important topics within the data. In view of my research design and questions, I was
able to compare different cases. This led to findings like a gender-based or age-based differ-
ence related to interviewees mentioning certain topics; ‘fear from radiation’, for example,
proved to be age-related.
344
During my years as a student and as a PhD candidate, I applied coding within different re-
search projects and in various ways (Gerster 2018, 2019; Gerster-Damerow 2019). Initially, I
tried to code segments from interviews by printing them, using multi-coloured post-it notes, or
by marking them directly. In that way, each ‘code group’ was able to get a specific colour,
which gave structure to the whole and made a future search easier. For smaller projects, this
method worked. Yet, it might be harder to manage with larger projects, for the overall coding
structure is not always easy to grasp. Many researchers therefore use Excel files for code sum-
maries and attach examples from the data in a table. Nevertheless, for a large project, such as
my dissertation, I preferred to use MAXQDA, a type of software that allows managing quali-
tative data easily. One of the main advantages of this and similar software like Delve, F4anal-
yse or NVivo is the neat display of the coding structure, which makes it easier to keep track of
the topics within the data. Further advantages are fast localisation of the main topics and ac-
tors as well as an easier comparison and processing of codes for different projects. This is es-
pecially helpful when going back to the data after a long time. However, it should not be ex-
pected that digital tools do all the work for the researcher. Software may be easy to handle and
lure users into playing around with all the beautiful graphic tools. Yet, these types of software
are only tools which support working with the data. The real work—that is, making sense of
all the colourful codes—still has to be conducted by the researcher.
Of course, there are also some pitfalls regarding coding as a method. As mentioned before, the
time needed to examine the data, even with the help of software, should not be underestimat-
ed. Another challenge is to know when to stop the analysis and start the writing process. Some
scholars even argue that it is ‘nonsensical’ to subdivide data into useful and brute words (St.
Pierre/Jackson 2014, p. 716). There is no standard procedure that is applicable to different re-
search projects in the same way. Repeated evaluations of the data might be necessary as new
topics emerge in future interviews, which relate to similar, but yet unnoticed patterns in earlier
interviews. It is key not to get stuck in the analysis process but also to avoid jumping to con-
clusions. Especially if you have an approaching deadline, this is not an easy task!
I furthermore want to point to another challenge regarding coding that is of special impor-
tance when working in teams. The instructor of a course I attended once had the participants
of different research groups code the same interview on their own and present the results in
class. The outcome was stunning: although all four participants in my group used the same
data, each of us came up with different codes, even for the same sentence. For instance, a
paragraph about the time the triple disaster of March 11 occurred was coded with ‘3.11’, ‘the
day of’, ‘earthquake’ and ‘natural disaster.’ This may have severe consequences when other
team members are searching for a certain aspect or code within a set of interviews. The way a
segment is coded points to different aspects of the interviewees’ experiences, even if the same
segment is marked. Of course, more than one code can be attached to a segment and codes
may also overlap sometimes, but when you are working in groups, it is important to agree up-
on a coding system in which the meaning of a code is explained in a way that other members
and people not involved in the project may understand and apply later on. This is often done
in the form of codebooks.
In sum, although coding is time-consuming, it proved to be a helpful method to structure my
data and to compare my two cases. While new software allows researchers to code video or
audio files as they are, I still recommend transcripts for larger projects. In that way, it is easier
to compare different interviews or other types of data, and to revise files without losing sight
345
Julia Gerster
of the bigger structure. Furthermore, coding requires researchers to stick to their data. This
prevented me from jumping to conclusions or turning to topics that were never raised in the
interviews. For beginners in Japanese Studies, coding may seem challenging, especially when
having to work with sources in Japanese. Nevertheless, it is a great opportunity to thoroughly
research all kinds of data while staying close to the evidence.
346
Further reading
Benaquisto, Lucia (2008): Codes and coding. In: Given, Lisa M. (ed.): The SAGE encyclopedia of qualita-
tive research methods. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, pp. 86–88.
Charmaz, Kathy (2006): Constructing grounded theory: A practical guide through qualitative analysis.
London: Sage.
Elliott, Victoria (2018): Thinking about the coding process in qualitative data analysis. In: The Qualitative
Report 23, No. 11, pp. 2850–2861.
Gibbs, Graham R. (2013): A Discussion with Prof Kathy Charmaz on Grounded Theory. Interviewed by
Graham R Gibbs at the BPS Qualitative Social Psychology Conference, University of Huddersfield,
U.K., September 14-16 2013. www.youtube.com/watch?v=D5AHmHQS6WQ, [Accessed 19 October
2020].
research. London: Aldine Transaction.
Schensul, Jean J./LeCompte, Margaret D. (2013): Essential ethnographic methods: A mixed methods ap-
proach. Lanham, MD: AltaMira Press.
Thomas, Gary/James, David (2006): Reinventing grounded theory: Some questions about theory, ground
and discovery. In: British Educational Research Journal 32, No. 6, pp. 767–795.
Timmermans, Stefan/Tavory, Iddo (2012): Theory construction in qualitative research. In: Sociological
Theory 30, No. 3, pp. 167–186.
Yi, Erika (2018): Adding codes to your data: Qualitative coding tools review. www.medium.com/@project
ux/adding-codes-to-your-data-qualitative-data-coding-tools-review-8aa44221382f, [Accessed 10 July
2020].
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tive research methods. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, pp. 86–88.
Charmaz, Kathy (2006): Constructing grounded theory: A practical guide through qualitative analysis.
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Otani, Izumi (2010): ‘Good manner of dying’ as a normative concept: ‘Autocide’, ‘granny dumping’ and
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tance. Honolulu, HI: University of Hawai‘i Press.
Rosenberger, Nancy (2017): Young organic farmers in Japan: Betting on lifestyle, locality, and livelihood.
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Schütze, Fritz (1983): Biographieforschung und narratives Interview. In: Neue Praxis 13, No. 3, pp. 283–
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Shimada, Shingo (2007): Die Erfindung Japans: Kulturelle Wechselwirkung und nationale Identitätskon-
struktion. Frankfurt a.M.: Campus.
Spoden, Celia (2015): Über den Tod verfügen: Individuelle Bedeutungen und gesellschaftliche Wirk-
lichkeiten von Patientenverfügungen in Japan. Bielefeld: Transcript.
Spoden, Celia (2017): Well-being and decision-making towards the end of life: Living wills in Japan. In:
Holthus, Barbara/Manzenreiter, Wolfram (eds.): Life course, happiness and well-being in Japan. New
York, NY: Routledge, pp. 221–237.
Spoden, Celia (2020): Deciding one’s own death in advance: Biopower, living wills, and resistance to a leg-
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St. Pierre, Elizabeth A./Jackson, Alecia Y. (2014): Qualitative data analysis after coding. In: Qualitative In-
quiry 20, No. 6, pp. 715–719.
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Strauss, Anselm L./Corbin, Juliet (1990): Basics of qualitative research: Grounded theory procedures and
techniques. London: Sage.
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Chapter 13
How to systematise texts:
Qualitative content and frame analysis
1. Introduction
Fieldwork yields a plethora of materials and texts, ranging from interview transcripts and
notes to policy deliberations, council minutes, blog posts, photos and news stories. How does
the researcher systematically analyse such diverse sources? Qualitative content analysis and
frame analysis are methods through which researchers can examine such materials’ formal
structure, content, meaning, latent features and context. Qualitative information about a cor-
pus of materials can also be transformed through coding or cross-tabulation into a form
amenable to quantitative analysis. Scholars from across the Social Sciences, Law, Public
Health, Humanities and other disciplines use qualitative content analysis and frame analysis.
They extract, summarise and interpret qualitative information and reconstruct meanings from
diverse texts and from unspoken facets of communication.
This chapter discusses such qualitative content analysis and frame analysis, with a focus on re-
search about Japan. It describes how to conduct qualitative content and frame analysis and as-
sesses the strengths and weaknesses of these analytical tools to aid students and researchers
who might consider using them. These methods, which are often used in combination, can il-
luminate important features of texts, such as shifts in issue framing, how honorifics (keigo) are
used, the social construction of meaning, what tactics groups adopt or which actors define is-
sues. Additionally, this chapter considers how qualitative content analysis differs from quanti-
tative content analysis and when it can be productively combined with quantitative tools.
Prior chapters addressed earlier stages in the research process, including how to formulate a
research question and link it to broader scholarly debates or how to balance trade-offs in sam-
pling decisions. While this chapter focuses on the analytic and data-presentation stages, it ac-
knowledges how interconnected they are with the processes of research design and data collec-
tion. Since categorising qualitative information involves abstracting from or interpreting com-
plex and changing realities, analysts should be thinking about methods of analysis and how to
operationalise concepts during data collection.
I write this chapter as an American scholar of comparative politics, specialising in Japan and
the Koreas. Drawing mainly from my home discipline of Political Science, but also from Soci-
ology and Law, this chapter offers a few examples of how to develop, apply and refine analyti-
cal categories, share data and document the analysis. The three accompanying essays elaborate
on this with further examples from other social scientists trained in Europe and Japan.
349
2. What are qualitative content analysis and frame analysis?
Qualitative content analysis describes the process of systematically considering and interpret-
ing materials to make meaningful descriptive, correlational and causal inferences or generalisa-
tions (Mayring 2007). Most often, the materials are written texts and transcribed speech. Such
texts may be generated by the researcher in interaction with human subjects (e.g. focus group
and interview transcripts, site visit notes or emails) or collected by the researcher from other
sources (e.g. newspaper articles, posts on social networking sites, politicians’ speeches,
archival records, or social movement flyers). Some scholars call for integrating analysis of vi-
sual and non-verbal content, such as images on protest posters (Cooper-Cunningham 2019).
Frame analysis is generally considered a subset of qualitative content analysis and discourse
analysis (see Eder-Ramsauer/Reiher, Ch.14). It focuses more specifically on investigating how
people ‘locate, perceive, identify, and label’ events and experiences; Erving Goffman’s influen-
tial work defined frames as ‘schemata of interpretation’ (Goffman 1974, p. 21). Frames are
socially constructed and contested. Analysing them illuminates how shared understandings of
the world develop (Benford/Snow 2000). Studying frames also helps us comprehend such phe-
nomena as collective action or policy change since issue framing mobilises people by defining a
problem and associating it with possible solutions.
Analysis entails examining materials in a consistent, rule-based way that fits with the research
question and can be validated by other scholars. The researcher takes texts and categorises or
sorts their component parts, which can then be analysed and presented qualitatively or quanti-
tatively. Such coding (see Meagher, Ch. 12) may be manual or done with computer software.
Researchers consider not just words or phrases and their meanings but also the context in
which the communication occurred, other properties of the text like length or formality and
implied or missing factors. They may both summarise evident content of materials or illumi-
nate latent content such as information about context or language (Mayring 2000). Descrip-
tion and summary help reduce the volume of content so that researchers can draw conclusions
about it (Schreier 2012, p. 5). Such analysis aims to systematically discern patterns in the ma-
terials and to reconstruct people’s understanding of the meaning of their past words and ac-
tions. But it also involves interpretation, which is why it is important for the researcher to be
transparent about her analytic framework and position or potential impact on the materials.
For instance, my identity as a non-Japanese has led interviewees to both sugar-coat their
replies at times and to reveal more than they normally would to an in-group member. Addi-
tionally, researchers must recognise that subjects may exhibit omissions or revisions in recall-
ing the past. Triangulation (see Hommerich/Kottmann, Ch. 10) or using data from various
sources, such as contemporary media accounts or secondary scholarship, can help fill in gaps
and alleviate biases.
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Chapter 13 How to systematise texts
Key terms
Coding: the processes of categorising, summarising or describing texts or parts of texts to
highlight and/or compare important features of the texts; coding may be done manually or
with computer assistance
Corpus: a collection of written, visual or aural materials to be analysed
Data Access and Research Transparency (DA-RT): a movement to enhance evidence-based
Social Science by developing clear standards and procedures for making explicit how and
on what bases researchers reached their conclusions and for sharing research materials
Diagnostic evidence: information that prior knowledge and/or theory suggests is important
for establishing some sequence or relationship
Frame analysis: the investigation of how people perceive and interpret events and experi-
ences; frames are socially constructed and contested shared understandings of the world
Mechanisms: generalisable statements about how and why a variable contributes to some
outcome
Operationalisation: deciding what indicators signal the presence of some abstract concept
or how to measure a theoretical concept in a reliable and valid way
Process tracing: assembling and interpreting information about the unfolding of events in a
temporal sequence
Qualitative content analysis: methods that aim to systematically examine and interpret pat-
terns in the materials to summarise them and reconstruct what people understood were the
meanings of their past words and actions
Quantitative content analysis: systematically assigning elements of communication to cat-
egories and using statistical methods to analyse relationships among those categories
Texts: written or transcribed communication; visual or non-verbal forms of expression;
generated by the researcher interacting with human subjects (e.g. interview transcripts, site
visit notes) or collected by the researcher from extant sources (e.g. newspaper articles, so-
cial media posts)
Triangulation: gathering and evaluating evidence for something from multiple sources
3. Getting started: Don’t wait!
Often, the processes of conducting fieldwork and managing data receive more attention than
the important task of analysing that data. Close knowledge of the case and the broader con-
text is essential for persuasive content analysis. Hence, analysis is most effective when done in
dialogue with and parallel to data collection. Analysing and collecting data iteratively results
in better definition and operationalisation of concepts and more context-conscious analysis
(Kapiszewski et al. 2015, pp. 335–337). Operationalising concepts refers to the process of tak-
ing an abstract idea or social phenomenon and figuring out what indicators signal its presence
for observers, as Kai Schulze outlines (see this chapter, Ch. 13.3). It can also improve inter-
viewing and other data collection. Iteration is more feasible with ethnographic or archival re-
search methods than, for instance, with survey experiments, which are hard to adjust or repeat
once fielded.
351
As a comparative politics specialist, I have found moving iteratively among national or cultur-
al contexts to be analytically productive because comparison often lays bare factors that are
taken for granted in one context. It can also help me discern when I have enough data and can
stop interviewing or transcribing. I often adopt qualitative analysis in conjunction with the
method of paired comparison, which matches relatively similar cases or contexts to reduce the
range of potential confounding factors and focus on the core research question (Tarrow 2010).
Most often I compare cross-nationally between Japan and Korea, across issue areas and across
time. Japan and Korea have the advantage of being relatively similar socio-cultural contexts,
but as an American I also bring preconceived ideas of these two societies to my research. For
researchers studying only Japan, iteratively comparing across regions, issue areas, groups or
time periods can similarly reveal factors taken for granted. Conducting research and analysis
over iterations and remaining attuned to such differences bolsters findings.
Qualitative content analysis and frame analysis also frequently rely on a comparative sensibili-
ty towards recognising patterns, such as recurring phrases or relationships among themes. And
researchers constantly compare their evidence with conventional wisdom in existing scholar-
ship. Thus, be explicit and conscious about your comparative referents. Do not wait until after
fieldwork to think about and analyse your materials because you may end up duplicating
work or wishing you had collected different sorts of materials if you do.
Organising texts and preparing them for analysis can be a daunting task, which is a second
reason why content analysis should not be put off until after data collection. Qualitative re-
search tends to produce rich and voluminous data. Good organisation greatly facilitates analy-
sis, and software can, too. For example, Atlas.ti or MAXQDA are software packages for
qualitative research, but even labelling files in systematic ways and using Microsoft Word’s
Navigation or hyperlink functions can help with organisation. Naming files clearly with the
interviewee’s name/code and the interview date and method as you conduct the interviews will
also expedite subsequent analysis. I recommend writing down specifics about the material (see
checklist below). It is important to adhere to clear procedures when recording supplemental
observations about non-verbal communication in interviews, descriptions from site visits or
other latent information. Do not forget to repeatedly back up your materials and adhere to
your procedures for maintaining their security (see McLaughlin, Ch. 6). Effectively managing
materials makes them easier to use as data and renders them verifiable to subsequent re-
searchers (see Reiher/Wagner, Ch. 16).
A checklist for documenting how you organise and manage materials1

• Who is working with the materials (i.e. research assistants or translators for tran-
scription)?
• What steps were taken to collect the materials (i.e. what search terms and sampling
methods were used)?
• In what formats are the materials stored? How are you maintaining the materials,
including their confidentiality (e.g. an informed consent protocol)? How are the
materials organised?
• How are you handling all the documentation you produce in analysing the materi-
als (i.e. codebooks, annotations, tabulations or other metadata)?
1 For guidelines, see the Qualitative Data Repository website, https://qdr.syr.edu/guidance/managing.
352
Once the researcher settles on a significant, clear and researchable research question and data
collection procedures, there are interrelated decisions she must take with regard to the analysis
of such data.
Decisions to be made before data analysis

• What are the study’s core goals and the ontology behind the research design and
mode(s) of analysis?
• What units of analysis and sampling strategies should the researcher focus on, con-
sidering the challenges of qualitative content analysis, especially in complex lan-
guages like Japanese?
• By what means should concepts be operationalised and the categories for coding
derived: inductively from the texts or deductively from theories, many of which
were developed in the West?
• Should the researcher use manual coding methods or computer-assisted methods?
• How can researchers present qualitative materials and findings in credible and per-
suasive ways?
The next sections discuss these choices. There are rarely right or wrong choices. Instead, as de-
tailed below, researchers must weigh disciplinary norms, feasibility, language capabilities, ac-
cess to sources and other factors. The best choices are ones that are transparent and well-con-
sidered.
4. The logic behind the methods and research design
To make persuasive inferences, a researcher must first consider her objectives. Research involv-
ing qualitative materials can have conceptual, descriptive, correlational or causal aims. Quali-
tative content analysis and frame analysis can contribute to them all. Different logics underlie
each, and researchers should be clear about their aims. Yet social scientists working with
qualitative materials often combine the positivist approach, which seeks generalisable explana-
tions, with the interpretivist’s eye, such as when they consider why interviewees answered the
way they did or when they convert responses into discrete categories (Mosley 2013, pp. 10–
11; see Vogt, Ch. 2). This section compares interpretivist and more positivist causal logics.
4.1 Interpretivist accounts
Qualitative content analysis and frame analysis are ideal for constructionist or interpretivist
approaches to studying complex socio-political phenomena, which are often difficult to ‘mea-
sure’ with quantitative methods. These methods also work for positivist approaches, which as-
sume research can uncover truths and demonstrate correlations or test hypotheses to infer cau-
sation. Socio-constructionist accounts, however, explore how communicative processes and
353
narrative forms constitute common knowledge or shared understandings (e.g. Neumann et al.
1992).
Interactions and communication—the texts to be analysed—produce and reproduce shared
understandings of events or issues. Socio-constructionist accounts elucidate the recursive pro-
cesses by which this occurs. In studying mobilisation processes, for example, Anna Wiemann
(see this chapter, Ch. 13.1) used qualitative content analysis to explore how representatives of
social movement organisations talked about dynamics in their organisational networks in
Japan after the 3.11 triple disaster. Similarly, Schulze (see this chapter, Ch. 13.3) leverages
qualitative content analysis to investigate the social construction of Japan’s foreign policy iden-
tity towards China.
Reconstructing how shared meanings emerge from social interactions is not easy in one’s
mother tongue because it requires careful and self-aware observation and interpretation. For
those of us non-native speakers of Japanese, the nuances of communication and connotations
of words and phrases in a different cultural context can be challenging to navigate. In my ex-
perience, embedding oneself in a topic and its discourses before, during and after fieldwork
helps mitigate these challenges. With the growing availability of online blogs and other ‘mini-
media’ from groups (i.e. newsletters or public social media pages), this process need not in-
volve extended field research trips. As Levi McLaughlin (see Ch. 6) notes, groups often engage
with each other on social media and react to events publicly in ways that can be useful to re-
searchers because they include commentary on the language with which they or the mass me-
dia choose to characterise an issue. For example, I initially used a literal translation of the
word victim (higaisha) to specify the type of movements I studied in my first book (Arrington
2016) but quickly replaced it with ‘directly-affected party’ (tōjisha) after reading in activists’
online blogs how they self-identified. From there, I uncovered an entire social discourse that
used the term tōjisha to assert both innocent suffering and agency before the law (Nakanishi/
Ueno 2003). I recommend reading as much as possible in Japanese regarding one’s topic from
secondary scholarship, media coverage and websites or social media pages. In particular, con-
tent gleaned through digital ethnography, which describes long-term immersion in and study
of online sites, can supply linguistic insights to non-native speakers (Han 2015).
4.2 Correlational or causal accounts
While qualitative content analysis and frame analysis have elective affinities with interpretivist
approaches, they can also be useful for the more causal or correlative inquiry of positivist
scholars. For instance, they can illuminate the mechanisms by which X causes Y and the con-
ditions under which a cause is activated. Identifying patterns and relationships among vari-
ables is also foundational for middle-range theorising (see Okano, Ch. 3). Content analysis
can contribute to causal inference by drawing attention to potential alternative explanations,
including causal theories held by participants in a process. In addition, qualitative materials
are critical for process tracing, which is a common method for assembling and interpreting in-
formation about the unfolding of events in a temporal sequence, as well as about context and
causal processes (Collier 2011). Longitudinal qualitative content analysis reveals patterns or
recurring relationships among phenomena or actors, which can supply diagnostic evidence or
354
evidence that prior knowledge and/or theory suggests is important for making causal infer-
ences and lay the groundwork for qualitative network analysis.
Compared to its quantitative counterpart, qualitative content analysis often produces more di-
verse, abstract and interconnected findings. Quantitative content analysis focuses more on nu-
merically tabulating coded features of a corpus of materials (Schreier 2014, p. 173). Qualita-
tive and quantitative content analyses are often productively paired, however (see Hommerich/
Kottmann, Ch. 10). For example, qualitative content analysis enhances concept development,
which is critical for accurate measurement and contextualisation in quantitative methods like
survey research (Gallagher 2013). Qualitative content analysis and frame analysis can also be
transformed into data amenable to statistical analysis, such as with phrase frequencies, vari-
ance between categories of interest, or data on co-located words. For instance, in conjunction
with qualitative content and frame analysis, I compared the pairwise correlation coefficients
for coverage of four issues across Japan’s and Korea’s main newspapers to show the relatively
high degree of news content homogeneity in the Japanese mediascape (Arrington 2017). Amy
Catalinac (2016) also conducted quantitative text analysis of Japanese campaign manifestos
alongside qualitative fieldwork to explain why Japanese ruling party politicians paid more at-
tention to national security issues after the 1994 electoral reforms.
As researchers consider the logic behind their research design, they should be wary of feasibili-
ty and issues related to limited sample size, missing data, the difficulty of coding spoken and
unspoken features of texts in the same way, or conceptual stretching. For example, since man-
ual coding in qualitative content analysis requires multiple close readings, the researcher might
only be able to include several dozen speeches in her analysis. But she can enhance the credi-
bility of her findings by being explicit about her sampling strategy to show that it did not in-
troduce systematic biases (Mayring 2014). For one article, for instance, I conducted frequency
analysis of all articles published in the past twenty years in Japan’s top three newspapers men-
tioning the words ‘North Korea’ and ‘abduction’, but then supplemented the analysis by close-
ly reading any that included those words in the title to trace shifts in issue framing (Arrington
2018). No method is without drawbacks, but they can complement each other when used in a
logical and transparent way. As demonstrated by the multi-method research trend in Political
Science and the Social Sciences in general, using diverse methods produces more robust con-
clusions.
5. Units of analysis
Intimately related to the process of identifying a research question and the logic behind the re-
search design is a second issue: specifying the units of analysis (Mayring 2014). After consider-
ing what types of materials you have or can access (e.g. newspaper articles versus editorials,
websites created by the social movement organisation versus by its supporters) as a quantita-
tive researcher might do with descriptive statistics, then you can embark on qualitative content
analysis and/or frame analysis. Here are five possible levels (not mutually exclusive) at which a
researcher could begin to parse the materials and the frames they contain (based on Ferree et
al. 2002, p. 50–52).
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• The article or speech: One might analyse newspaper articles on an issue or how a prime
minister’s official speeches discuss a topic. For example, I examined all of the speeches by
Japanese prime ministers that mentioned abductions over twenty years (N=77) to discern
trends in how they discussed North Korea’s abductions of Japanese nationals (Arrington
2018). I found that from the late 1990s to early 2002, prime ministers referred to the ab-
ductions as ‘suspected’ but also ‘an important issue that concerns the lives and security of
our country’s citizens’. In 2002, Prime Minister Junichirō Koizumi (2001–2006) dropped
the term ‘suspected’ and began consistently listing the abductions first among the ‘out-
standing issues to be addressed with North Korea’ (Arrington 2018, p. 489). The number
of speeches and the words on the abductions issue in each speech rose under Prime Minis-
ter Shinzō Abe (2006–07, 2012–2020). Additionally, one could analyse whether a newspa-
per story appears on the front page or includes a photo, both of which tend to draw atten-
tion to the story.
• The speaker: Another form of qualitative analysis investigates differences in interpretation
and emphasis among speakers quoted in news articles. For instance, the terminology used
by a social movement may start appearing in speech acts by legislators after the movement
has gained media coverage. To show a movement’s discursive influence, I traced the emer-
gence of its idea of ‘uniform financial assistance’ (ichiritsukyūsai) for all victims of hepatitis
C-tainted blood products, regardless of differences in their symptoms (Arrington 2017, p.
18). From within my corpus of all the articles that mentioned ‘hepatitis C’ in Japan’s main
newspapers over a thirty-year period, I closely read a sub-sample of articles from 2007
with hepatitis C in their titles to reveal how news coverage hedged or qualified the victims’
claims about the state and drug makers’ liability less and less as more plaintiffs in the law-
suits revealed their real names during that year. The plaintiffs thereby signalled their empir-
ical credibility, which is an important part of effective issue framing (Snow/Benford 1988).
• Utterances: This term describes speech acts by a single speaker. At a rally or on a news talk
show, any given speaker might speak multiple times. Whereas formal speeches or individu-
als’ quotes in newspaper articles stand alone, utterances from one speaker may interact
with those of others. For instance, when analysing legislative debates over a proposed bill
regarding discrimination against people with disabilities in ongoing research, I compare the
issue framing that opposition lawmakers use across utterances with that of politicians from
the ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP). Opposition lawmakers often cite NGOs’ stud-
ies in legislative debates, whereas LDP lawmakers tend to cite business groups’ research
more. But ruling party lawmakers may shift their terminology in response to opposition
pressure. By examining utterances in their context (i.e. the parliamentary debate or a talk
show), as Wiemann (see this chapter, Ch. 13.1) does, researchers can examine the recursive
processes through which meaning is constructed and phenomena interpreted.
• The frame or idea: An article or utterance generally includes multiple ideas and sometimes
multiple issue framings. The analyst could examine how the idea of second-hand smoking
is discussed in a policy council meeting about increasing restrictions on indoor smoking in
Japan. I found it framed as ‘smoking harassment’ (shortened to sumo hara in Japanese),
violations of children’s and women’s rights to health and clean air, ‘harm to others’ (tasha
kigai), and ‘smoking manners’ (kitsuen manā in katakana). These represent ways of think-
ing about a phenomenon and are commonly the target of frame analysis. Sometimes, the
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framing devices are visual (Van Gorp 2007). In Japanese, katakana (for foreign words) can
visually and aurally emphasise a concept or frame, such as sumo hara.
• Time period: Detailed chronologies are central to many qualitative research methods.
Analysing articles or speeches by time period can help researchers see the relationships be-
tween observed data and changes in the political environment unfolding over time.
As noted above, one tendency in qualitative content analysis and frame analysis has been to
privilege textual or spoken forms of expression. Yet considering non-verbal forms of commu-
nication and signals is integral to understanding context and the social construction of shared
understandings. This is especially true in the Japanese language, which arguably involves more
unspoken forms of communication than many languages. But visuals can send important sig-
nals in many polities. For instance, politicians often wear lapel pins. The ubiquitous blue-rib-
bon pin on Prime Minister Abe’s lapel signaled his support for the families of Japanese nation-
als abducted by North Korea; the pins were created as a reminder that only the sky and the
Sea of Japan connect abductees to their families in Japan (Arrington 2018). Hence, they can be
interpreted as content that a wearer intends to convey and as expressing the activists’ issue
framing. Future research should more systematically examine illustrations, graphic text and
other visual effects in conjunction with texts (Cooper-Cunningham 2019). Posters and photos
used in political activism or websites and social media posts are promising targets for qualita-
tive content analysis and frame analysis that consider both textual and visual features.
Interpreting communication and meanings at each or several of these levels of analysis and via
non-verbal signals is something we do unconsciously daily. But qualitative content analysis
aims to make such processes more systematic in order to assess more data or texts than one
normally would in everyday contexts. Explicit procedures for coding or interpreting materials
and clear units of analysis also facilitate knowledge building by making the findings verifiable
to other researchers, even if every scholar brings their own priors to the research process.
6. Coding, categories and concepts
Coding schemas make the analyst’s interpretations and the link between concepts and cat-
egories explicit. Concepts are abstract Social Science phenomena, whereas categories are ‘those
aspects of the material about which the researcher would like more information’ (Schreier
2014, p. 174). Researchers must consider whether they develop the coding framework in in-
ductive or deductive ways, or through a combination of both. Inductively developing cat-
egories involves abstracting up from the materials and identifying labels that emerge from the
texts. The process may be theoretically informed but is also deeply linked to the research
question and materials and is more subjective (Mayring 2014). On the other hand, deductively
applying categories entails using prefabricated concepts from extant theories and can thus
more readily connect to existing scholarship but may not match the Japanese context or lan-
guage.
There are trade-offs to either inductive or deductive category development, and many re-
searchers combine both. Often, researchers toggle between deductively applying concepts from
existing scholarship and inductively developing concepts based on close study of a given con-
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text. For example, in my current research about tobacco control policy and the anti-smoking
movement in Japan and Korea, I look for ‘rights-based’ terminology, which is predicted by
theories about transnational advocacy networks and socialisation through international inter-
actions (Finnemore 1993; Keck/Sikkink 1998). Yet I also code local issue framings, such as the
right to hate or dislike smoking (ken’enken), which Japanese activists coined in the 1970s.
Social Science concepts are often multifaceted. Thinking through how to operationalise them
is a critical but difficult step in research that is intertwined with coding. Words have different
connotations or valence in different contexts, which can complicate operationalisation and
categorisation. As a non-native Japanese speaker, I have used my status as an outsider to ask
interview subjects to explain their self-perceptions or terminology at length (Steinhoff 2006;
see Kottmann/Reiher, Ch. 7). For instance, I study Japanese lawyers who go beyond just serv-
ing clients to advocate for policy reforms (Arrington 2014). The Western research literature
calls such activity ‘cause lawyering’, which is not normal English parlance and has no Japanese
translation (Sarat/Scheingold 2006). Yet I describe cause lawyering in Japan by qualitatively
analysing how such lawyers conceive of their work, how they divide their day, how they inter-
act with clients (and what clients say about them), what their backgrounds are, and what so-
cial networks they belong to. One question I asked repeatedly was about labels found in the
media and academic scholarship, such as jinken bengoshi versus jinkenha bengoshi (human
rights lawyer versus human rights-type lawyer). The latter apparently softens the communist
overtones of the former, which emerged in the 1960s as communist and socialist party affiliat-
ed lawyers led challenges to LDP dominance and the social costs of rapid industrialisation; one
of my interviewees explained that it is ‘like red versus pink.’ The technique of citing my out-
sider status to probe such nuances emerged through trial and error over the course of inter-
viewing, which is why iteration between data collection and analysis is helpful.
Deep familiarity with the issue and context helps with valid conceptualisation and opera-
tionalisation. Some ideas may be nested in specific contexts, which should also be coded. As
Schulze and Wiemann (see this chapter, Ch. 13.1; 13.3) note, it is important to be self-reflec-
tive in coding and to redefine categories or labels if needed. Additionally, consider what inter-
viewees or other texts omit, distort or imply, because doing so can reveal shared understand-
ings, practices and unspoken assumptions about past interactions and developments (Fujii
2010). The ‘evidence of absence’ can be compelling (see Kottmann/Reiher, Ch. 7). Interviewees
may also adjust their replies after you press them with follow-up questions. Triangulating
among various sources can help you discern when such omissions or revisions are relevant and
deliberate or irrelevant and accidental.
In short, coding classifies texts or parts of texts into predefined categories and sub-categories.
By doing so, the researcher compiles, summarises and describes important features of the texts
—as defined by the research question and associated theory. The clearer the coding process is,
the more other scholars can evaluate and replicate it. So, document and annotate every step.
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Key terms
Inductively developing categories: abstracting up from the materials and identifying
labels that emerge from the texts
Deductively applying categories: using prefabricated concepts from extant theories,
which can thus more readily connect to existing scholarship but may not match the
Japanese context or language
7. Manual versus computer-assisted analysis and feasibility
Qualitative content analysis and frame analysis simplify rich data and reduce the volume of
data through summary, interpretation and abstraction. Getting to see the forest for the trees
requires that the researcher decide whether hand-coding is feasible or whether computer assis-
tance or some systematic sampling strategy is needed. How coding occurs ultimately depends
on research objectives, journals’, theses’ or other outlets’ space limits, the researcher’s capabili-
ties and disciplinary norms. Increasingly, most qualitative and quantitative software work with
Japanese language texts, although Japanese’s multiple scripts and writing directions and lack
of spaces between words were challenges for optical character recognition (OCR) software
(Catalinac/Watanabe 2019). KH Coder is one free software program for quantitative content
analysis that was developed in Japan and handles Japanese.2
In general, computer programs can facilitate analysis, especially with voluminous material, but
they cannot replace the researcher (Mayring 2000, p. 18). Deciding how to organise and cate-
gorise the materials still falls to the researcher. Hence, software is most profitably used after
the analytic framework is well-developed. Computer-Assisted Qualitative Data Analysis Soft-
ware (CAQDAS) includes programs like NVivo, Atlas.ti or MAXQDA (see Chiavacci, Ch. 11;
Gerster, Ch. 12.3; Rosenberger, Ch. 12.1). Microsoft Access is another common database cre-
ation and management system that can help organise and analyse qualitative data, as Schulze
(see this chapter, Ch. 13.3) describes. Wiemann’s essay (see this chapter, Ch. 13.1) offers exam-
ples of how MAXQDA helped with transcribing interviews and annotating passages for easy
retrieval in analysis, but she warns about the importance of being self-reflective and revising
coding schemas if needed. For instance, she combined deductive and inductive approaches to
coding to avoid having overly individualised categories. Having the researcher first code a sub-
set of the materials manually and then checking its correlation with computer-assisted coding
helps to validate findings and identify errors or biases in either the researcher or the computer
analysis. As Wiemann notes (see this chapter, Ch. 13.1), the upfront costs of learning how to
use the software can be daunting but have long-term payoffs. Among others, the National Sci-
ence Foundation has offered workshops on text analysis tools to alleviate some such chal-
lenges. However, data access and research transparency initiatives (see below) note that shar-
ing materials can be difficult across qualitative research software.
2 See website at https://khcoder.net/en/index.html.
359
Even without such software, most texts will be stored on and accessed through computers.
General-purpose programs like Word or Excel are also useful for searching, annotating, navi-
gating and tabulating a corpus of texts. Ultimately, categorising and coding texts requires close
reading by the researcher at some stage, but computers can facilitate these tasks.
8. Presenting qualitative content analysis and frame analysis findings
Researchers present qualitative content and frame analyses in different ways, depending on the
research question and other constraints such as word limits of journals. Findings can remain
qualitative, presented in narrative or discursive form. They include block quotes from inter-
views, summaries of how a cluster of editorials framed a particular issue, or dissections of the
indicators of any given issue framing. Block quotes have the advantage of enabling other
scholars to assess and confirm the author’s conclusions. They let the sources speak for them-
selves. But, perhaps especially in my field of Political Science, much qualitative research bumps
up against the reality of limited space in journal articles, books or master’s theses, and the fact
that analysis should reduce the materials’ volume and complexity to arrive at conclusions.
Rather than valuing thick description, the premium in Political Science is on demonstrating
that one’s findings are generalisable, at least within certain scope conditions. Hence, re-
searchers must select small portions of text in order to illustrate their findings, which can seem
like cherry-picking. One solution is to explicitly explain why you think a particular quote is
important and/or representative, such as that the speaker wrote an influential first draft of a
particular bill or that seven other interviewees echoed the terms used by that speaker. Area
Studies publications may value thick description more. Nevertheless, being explicit about the
representativeness of one’s qualitative findings leads to more credible and legitimate social in-
quiry.
Findings can also be presented quantitatively, such as by tallying the frequency of certain
words and phrases, creating tables or graphs or conducting statistical analyses on categories.
For example, I investigated how the media environments in Japan and Korea affect the
amount of media coverage a social movement gets, as well as the message and reach of that
coverage (Arrington 2017). I presented graphs tallying cross-temporal variations in the fre-
quency of newspaper articles that mention hepatitis C as a proportion of the ‘news hole’ (i.e.
the average number of articles per month devoted to health policy). To retain some of the rich-
ness of the qualitative content analysis, these quantitative analyses were then coupled with
close reading and manual coding of editorials and movement newsletters to discern issue fram-
ing patterns and the message of news coverage.
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9. Reliability and validity: Annotating and documenting the analysis
Social scientists are increasingly recognising that documenting every stage of data collection
and analysis makes research understandable for and assessable by others. Standards and prior-
ities differ across disciplines, so I recommend informing yourself about your discipline’s best
practices for data and research transparency. The American Political Science Association has
extensively deliberated the discipline’s Data Access and Research Transparency (DA-RT) initia-
tive in recent years, with many resources available online.3 Journals and funding agencies are
also increasingly requiring data management plans and online methods appendixes to enhance
research transparency and data preservation and access (see Reiher/Wagner, Ch. 16). An im-
portant component of such appendixes is not only to describe the corpus of texts and how it
was generated, as a researcher using quantitative data sets would, but also to detail how the
author analysed those texts.
As with transparency in citations, the researcher should take detailed notes along the way
about how materials were collected and analysed. Annotating texts enables the researcher to
keep track of what she has done and leaves a record for subsequent scholars. As Schulze (see
this chapter, Ch. 13.3) notes, relevant details include the data source, background information
about the source, such as who produced it or where it is archived, any sampling procedures
(i.e. is the source representative of a class of similar sources or is it unique), and the unit of
analysis. Annotation should also include descriptive or causal inferences and interpretations.
Working with co-authors or research assistants raises the issue of inter-coder reliability. Train-
ing and close monitoring can help avoid inconsistencies. Have research assistants carefully an-
notate their coding decisions. As David Chiavacci (see Ch. 11) notes, involving Japanese re-
searchers whenever possible can help overcome the challenges of interpretation in another lan-
guage. Because the interpretation involved in coding qualitative materials is sometimes consid-
ered—perhaps incorrectly—more subjective than most quantitative analyses, transparency
about coding and interpretation is vital.
Many political scientists working with qualitative materials concur that protecting subjects or
respecting copyright remains a challenge in the face of calls for transparency. But disciplines
are developing best practices about how to share information about one’s sources without
compromising them. For example, methods appendixes often contain tables of interviewees
and their professions but not their names or a narrative explanation of the sensitive archival
materials gleaned from subjects. Ultimately, data sharing entails judgement calls by the re-
searcher. As I found in my research about stigmatised disease populations in Japan and Korea,
some interview subjects may express a willingness to be quoted by name—especially in Eng-
lish-language scholarly publications that few Japanese will read—but anonymising all inter-
views avoids disparities among interviewees (Arrington 2019). With any research involving
human research participants, be attuned to potential ethical difficulties or risks that you might
unleash by sharing content from them. For some topics, information may already be in the
3 For reports, see https://www.qualtd.net/. Additional options in Political Science include a transparency appendix
(TRAX) or an Active Citation Index (ACI), which was originally proposed by Andrew Moravcsik (2010). The
idea is to provide hyperlinks to more detailed, annotated versions of the citations to support claims and infer-
ences. If possible, the links also lead to the actual sources on which the analysis is based.
361
public domain, such as in newspaper editorials or court rulings, enabling researchers to pro-
tect human subjects (see McLaughlin, Ch. 6; Reiher/Wagner, Ch. 16).
10. Summary
This chapter has examined qualitative content analysis and frame analysis as methods for re-
searchers studying Japan. A key take-away is that scholars adopting both qualitative and
quantitative methods must make choices about what to analyse and how. These choices in-
clude the study’s core goals, the units of analysis and sampling strategies, the materials to be
analysed, categories for coding, types of analysis—manually or computer-assisted—and the
style of presentation. The chapter detailed how making these choices depends on the research
question, the researcher’s access to sources and Japanese language abilities, the study’s objec-
tives and disciplinary norms. They are not easy choices. The most effective and persuasive ana-
lysis leverages transparent and self-reflective iteration, conducting data collection, analysis and
writing in dialogue with each other and the existing literature. This level of discretion can be
daunting but still yield valid inferences and interpretations, if done as transparently and self-
consciously as possible at every step.
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13.1 Qualitative content analysis: A systematic way of handling
qualitative data and its challenges
Anna Wiemann
When researchers are at the point of applying qualitative content analysis, their research
project has already gone through important stages in a research process: the designing of the
research framework and gathering data in the field. They are then at a point where their
study’s research question, theoretical background and chosen methodology gear into each oth-
er and are about to show first results. A qualitative content analysis (especially one that is
computer-assisted) can bring order into data collected in the field, facilitates their systematic
interpretation and, in so doing, leads to reliable findings.
This essay gives insight into why and how I used computer-assisted qualitative content analysis
in my PhD thesis Networks and mobilization processes: The case of the Japanese anti-nuclear
movement after Fukushima (Wiemann 2018). After a short overview of the method itself
(which adds to the main chapter to some degree), I will focus on how I applied this technique
as well as the difficulties I encountered when doing so and how I dealt with them. The essay
closes with some recommendations for readers who decide to use computer-assisted qualitative
content analysis.
Qualitative content analysis developed in the first half of the 20th century at the same time but
in contrast to quantitative content analysis (Mayring 2014, p. 18ff.; Schreier 2014, p. 173). At
that time—in the context of a growing media landscape—scientific and political interest in me-
dia content grew significantly and researchers had to deal with the analysis of large amounts
of data material. Both qualitative and quantitative content analysis are systematic ways of in-
terpreting (mostly but not exclusively textual) data. While quantitative content analysis is de-
fined as an objective, numerical way of analysing the ‘manifest content of communication’
(Schreier 2014, p. 171), qualitative content analysis represents an interpretive form of analysis
where text evaluation and coding or categorisation rely on the cognitive processes of the re-
searcher (Kuckartz 2014, p. 38). Qualitative content analysis thus comprises the meaning and
context of communicative data ‘by assigning successive parts of the material to the categories
of a coding frame’ (Schreier 2014, p. 170).
A coding frame consists of ‘at least one main category and at least two subcategories’ (Schreier
2014, p. 174). Main categories are ‘those aspects of the material about which the researcher
would like more information’, while sub-categories ‘specify what is said in the material with
respect to these main categories’. The main categories thus relate to the cognitive interest of
the research (in other words to the research question). The sub-categories bring together and
structure data passages that provide different aspects of meaning to the main category. The
structure of the main categories and sub-categories reflects the coding frame; hence, coding is
the act of sorting data passages into categories according to their meaning and context. In
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Anna Wiemann
qualitative research, such processes of categorisation are necessary to reach a level of abstrac-
tion that enables the researcher to make a statement related to the purpose of the research.
In my eyes, the most comprehensive procedure on how to conduct qualitative content analysis
has been proposed by Mayring (2014). Philipp Mayring’s suggested workflow starts with a
preparatory phase, consisting of finding a research question, selecting and characterising the
data material, and determining the direction of the study (including the characteristics of the
data producer and the communicative context) as well as the units of analysis. This is followed
by what is at the heart of the method: the coding of the data material. Coding of data material
can be performed deductively or inductively. If necessary, both approaches can be combined.
When categories are defined deductively, it means that they are derived from theory, that is,
before the researcher works with the data. Consequently, establishing a coding guideline be-
fore starting coding helps with applying deductive categories consistently throughout the pro-
cess of analysis. Defining categories inductively means categorising data passages while going
through and interpreting the data at hand. Accordingly, this approach derives categories from
the meaning of the collected data. Before inductive coding, however, Mayring recommends de-
termining a guideline for category definition and the level of abstraction that needs to be
reached. Deductive and inductive coding both require a double check of the categories applied
and the coding guideline after 10 to 50% of the data material has been coded. Additionally,
after the coding has been finished, the reliability of the categorisation should be doubly tested.
Thus, a systematically applied qualitative content analysis is a method with a very high level of
traceability, reliability and validity and equates to the highest social scientific standards—
which is why I chose to employ this systematic interpretive research technique.
In my study on network mobilisation processes of social movements after the nuclear accident
in Fukushima in 2011, I analysed social movement actors’ (collective) behaviour based on the
perceived quality and dynamics of network relations. I applied qualitative content analysis to
analyse their perceptions of the intergroup networks in which they are embedded and the dy-
namics within these networks before and after the nuclear disaster. Looking at such network
dynamics allowed me to assess mobilisation processes at the intergroup level of a social move-
ment. I used qualitative content analysis to analyse interviews and other documentary data to
systematically discover the meaning organisational actors attribute to their relational embed-
dedness in the broader movement field. Thus, I used qualitative content analysis as a tool for a
qualitative network analysis. In my thesis, I triangulated qualitative network analysis with
quantitative network analysis to understand the interrelation between different but overlap-
ping networks and the network centrality of certain actors as well as to draw sensible network
boundaries and to visualise the networks. Quantitative network analysis—which is not the fo-
cus of this essay—is a methodological toolkit (which is sometimes also regarded as a theoreti-
cal paradigm) to analyse relational patterns among defined units of analysis by means of
mathematical (matrix algebra and graph theory) and computational models which aims at dis-
playing graphic network imagery (for more on quantitative and qualitative social network
analysis as both a method and a theory, various authors in Scott 2011). In sum, I contributed
to the field of social movement research by providing an analytical framework for looking at
mobilisation processes through networks at the meso-level after a disruptive event.
Having a clear understanding of the analytical perspective and the phenomenon under study
was important for me in approaching the field but also for the subsequent qualitative content
analysis of the collected data. In my case, the richest data I gathered in the field were qualita-
364
tive semi-structured interviews with representatives of social movement organisations. When

interpreting and coding these data, I had to keep in mind that I recorded the voices of individ-
uals, but these individuals—through their individual lenses—spoke on behalf of organisations/
groups. They explained the embeddedness of their groups from their point of view. This was a
bias I had to bear in mind throughout the analysis.
Before I started my systematic content analysis, however, the data, especially the interviews ne-
cessitated transcription to enable a systematic computer-assisted analysis. Depending on the
amount of spoken data, transcription can be very time-consuming. There are several software
programmes for transcription and content analysis. My choice for transcribing the interviews
in question fell on f4transkript because it is compatible to the coding software MAXQDA,
which I used to support my qualitative content analysis. However, through recent programme
updates, it is now (2019) also possible to transcribe directly into MAXQDA. To ease tran-
scribing, I recommend investing in a foot pedal to be able to run and stop the audio while typ-
ing. I decided to code my data with the help of qualitative data analysis software because it
facilitates looking at the material systematically and it is possible to retrieve all original data
passages belonging to one code with just one click. Moreover, it is possible to connect analyti-
cal memos to codes as well as to certain text passages or groups of memos, which is very help-
ful in getting to different levels of abstraction in the process of coding, analysing and writing.
The software also allows several researchers to work on the same data material, if one is
working in a research group. Some universities provide qualitative data analysis software to
their graduate students free of charge. In the case of MAXQDA, it is also possible to buy a
price-reduced student licence.
After transcription and the installation of coding software, and in accordance with the re-
search design, the researcher needs to decide on a coding strategy. In my case, I had a clear
research question concerning relational patterns of social movement organisations before and
after Fukushima, and I wanted to discover the meaning the organisations attribute to their re-
lations. I thus followed a deductive–inductive coding procedure. Based on my research inter-
est, I established the two first categories deductively: ‘network antecedents’ and ‘networks’,
which referred to relations pre- and post-Fukushima. The coding guideline for the category
‘network antecedents’ envisaged all passages relating to past relational patterns, past issues of
contention, but also to the emergence of two coalitional meso-level networks which were
founded after Fukushima and which serve as case studies. The guideline for the category ‘net-
works’ on the other hand referred to actual working procedures, ideas and frames, and coop-
eration and conflict within the operating coalitional networks of the case study. As a result, I
was able to induce sub-categories inductively to uncover the meaning the actors attribute to
their relations. The combination of deduction and induction while coding had the advantage
of me not losing sight of the research question to be answered, while avoiding only coding
according to my own expectations. Instead, the meaning derived from the data themselves.
During my first round of inductive coding, it proved a challenge to find meaningful sub-cat-
egories. Every interviewee had his or her own style of expression, and after finishing the first
round of coding, I realised that the established categories in this first round were far too indi-
vidual and lacked the necessary level of abstraction to add points to my argumentation. I thus
decided to redo the inductive coding—within the two deductive categories—from scratch. This
proved to be very time-consuming, but it was also a chance for me to become more familiar
with the data material. I thus recommend revising and specifying established codes regularly,
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Anna Wiemann
just as Mayring (2014) suggests. If one has to go back to the start, coding may be frustrating
at times. But repetition and revision help researchers to develop a feeling for the data, the
speakers and the structure of ideas. The coding process, in other words the really confronting
the data with the research question, might be painful and it is difficult to estimate the time
needed for it, but it is a necessary part of reliable social scientific research.
In conclusion, even though it is an interpretive form of data analysis, computer-assisted quali-
tative content analysis enables high traceability of the qualitative data analytical procedure.
Data passages and their coding may be retrieved with just one click even years after the initial
research. Moreover, the systematic approach as proposed by Mayring also increases the re-
searcher’s awareness of her or his way of looking at the data, and thereby it facilitates trans-
parency of the methodological approach to the future reader. Qualitative content analysis may
also be used for a large variety of research questions. The only disadvantage I see is that when
working with qualitative content analysis software for the first time, you may find it a time-
intensive and at times frustrating procedure until it runs smoothly. However, in my opinion,
applying computer-assisted qualitative content analysis increases the explanatory power of
qualitative research immensely, so that any hardship in the process is more than worthwhile.
366
13.2 Analysis of biographical interviews in a transcultural
research process
Emi Kinoshita
Area Studies often face challenges in using foreign languages, which accompany the whole re-
search process from fieldwork to publication (Kruse et al. 2012). This is connected not only to
language proficiency but also to understanding and participating in academic discourses in a
foreign tongue, which always include specific perspectives. In this sense, Area Studies require
transcultural translation of academic discourses, since researchers move repeatedly between
home and foreign field sites as well research contexts (Bachmann-Medick 2016). This short es-
say reports on some of the transcultural challenges I faced in applying biographical methods.
Confusion
For my dissertation at a university in Tokyo (2005–2010), I explored educational ideas during

the societal changes in East Germany since the 1970s by focusing on people’s lives. I chose a
biographical approach, ‘life history (seikatsushi)’, as a central method in the attempt to write a
lived history of educational ideas of ‘ordinary people’ (Nakauchi 1992). I interviewed East
German teachers and educators in German, which is my second foreign language after English,
while my mother tongue is Japanese.
In the early phase of my project, I did several interviews, as suggested in Japanese textbooks
on life history (Nakano/Sakurai 1995) and life stories (Sakurai 2002), which emphasise respect
for the interviewees and their words to embrace their subjective lifeworld. Questions on col-
lecting data such as ‘how to conduct an interview, where and with whom’ were dominant is-
sues in Japanese literature around 2000. To analyse interviews, I examined, for example, re-
peated episodes and discrepancies among interviews and, if applicable, written life documents,
as discussed in Japanese literature. At the same time, I read relevant German academic litera-
ture, which also focused on ‘ordinary people’ using similar methods. Besides this, research
concepts developed in Germany enabled me to consider educational theories such as socialisa-
tion and human development by means of empirical research. Japanese language, German lan-
guage and Anglophone discourses had seemed to stand harmoniously with each other, until I
began my research stay as a doctoral student in Germany.
‘How do you analyse your data?’—This was the most difficult question for me at a workshop
in Germany. It sounded quite simple, but I was not able to give an adequate answer that day. I
explained some of the techniques mentioned above as analysing methods, but they were under-
stood as a concept, framework or even a moral view. Basic terms were different as well. I re-
alised that I shared only little theoretical background with other participants from Europe. To-
day, I must confess that I was not conscious of the analytical procedure or its concrete steps.
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Emi Kinoshita
But neither data collection nor analysis were explained as a systematic procedure in Japanese
literature at that time. Then, I was unsure of myself and wondered whether my research would
contribute to any academic community.
Thus, I started comparative reading of German, Japanese and Anglophone literature on quali-
tative and particularly biographical research to identify differences (Kinoshita 2010). Some-
times, it was a long detour, but it gave me the chance to identify the theoretical and field-relat-
ed significance of my research in terms of methodology. Around the millennium in Japan, life
historians introduced constructivist views and developed life story interviews as their method.
Hereby, they discussed the societal implications of qualitative research, mostly reflecting criti-
cally on the researchers’ position and power asymmetry in research situations. In this context,
the thoughts on oral history of the anthropologist Yanagita Kunio, the founder of Japan’s life
history method in the 1920s, was often referred to. It aimed at listening to voices of the ‘igno-
ramus’ about their daily lives and shares the motivation of empowerment with feminist or
postcolonial researchers in the U.S. Their approach to research as a form of ‘societal’ critique
framed the theoretical concepts of life history in Japan.
In contrast, German discourses on qualitative or biographical research pursued questions on
specific procedures since the 1970s. The traceability of data analysis was intensively examined,
and procedures of data collection and analysis were clearly distinguished. Until today, the lat-
ter have been discussed in different ways—based for example on the objective hermeneutics,
the documentary methods or the content analysis respectively—to suit specific research ques-
tions and theoretical foundations. Anglophone research discourses, such as the grounded theo-
ry approach, were introduced to accurately analyse detailed communication in interviews or to
focus on ‘social’ or interactional situations in the field.
There has hardly been any exchange between German and Japanese biographical or even
qualitative research. Even though a famous German handbook by Uwe Flick (2002) was trans-
lated into Japanese, it has not been discussed critically in Japan. Anglophone discourses are
also perceived contrastively in both countries. The discourse referred to in the German context
almost only aimed at improving given analysis procedures of social interaction, whereas in
Japan, they were actively introduced to constitute a research fundament for societal critiques
in Japan. Besides this, not all the terms are used identically. For example, the Japanese term
life history could be replaced by Lebensgeschichte in daily use but only partly carries its mean-
ing as a technical term. In turn, a more extensive German term Biographie does not cover the
meaning of life history.
Decision
The divided discourse challenged my research practice in between the German-speaking and
Japanese-speaking research contexts. Comparative reading helped me to decide on a suitable
method with which to analyse my data. As for the biographical approach in Educational Stud-
ies, researchers in Germany establish their own concepts on biography from a pedagogical per-
spective, whereas the ones in Japan directly adopt the biographical approach to Educational
Studies (Kinoshita 2010, p. 160). German biographical interviews enabled me to contribute to
the critical development of educational theories. They allowed me to concentrate on personal
368
narratives first and to add societal aspects in the Japanese context later. For me, this seemed
honest towards ‘ordinary people’ and applicable to both research contexts.
In consequence, I adopted the narrative interview developed by German sociologist Fritz
Schütze (1983) in the 1970s as a method, which is barely known outside Germany (Fiedler/
Krüger 2016; Nohl 2010). It includes detailed procedures for interviewing and analysing. This
method corresponded to my framework and made it possible for me to bridge the gap between
the discourses in Germany and Japan due to its following two characteristics. Firstly, my ana-
lysis focused on the whole span of someone’s life and suited my interest in the development
and socialisation process in Educational Studies. Secondly, the controlled method made it pos-
sible for me to overcome the heated debates among constructivists in Japan, as storytelling in
interviews is understood as a social construct and embraces it not as a hurdle against fact-find-
ing but as a natural condition. In my opinion, Schütze’s analytical procedure opens up the re-
sults for further discussion on societal changes.
As for interviewing, Schütze’s approach strictly controls the interview situation through so-
called ‘ascetic listening’, which lets an interviewee’s narrative expand as it should. Data is in-
terpreted in a structured way in four steps, so that the ‘interpretation pattern’ (Deu-
tungsmuster) of the narrating person is traced as a ‘process structure on the course of a life’
(Verlaufskurven). First, the different types of expressions are identified in the transcriptions of
the interviews, so that narrative, i.e. storytelling passages, can be distinguished from descrip-
tion or argumentation. This narrative text is segmented to obtain a formal structure of the bi-
ography (formale Textanalyse). Second, the content and performance of the narrative is anal-
ysed by the researcher focusing on its structure. Thereby, he or she examines, for example,
how each story connects to each other and which markers are set to make each passage rele-
vant (e.g. time, place, the person in question, reason). On this basis, typical characteristics of
biographical stages are ascertained (strukturelle inhaltliche Beschreibung). Building on this, the
researcher transfers the results on each biographical stage to the other stages and then deter-
mines the whole structure of the biography (analytische Abstraktion). This is finally interpret-
ed as biographical knowledge in terms of the specific context of the interviewee (Wissensanal-
yse). Schütze concentrates on deep analysis of each case, whereas today’s qualitative biography
research often aims at case comparison (Nohl 2010, p. 197f.).
Beyond analysing my narrative interviews based on Schütze’s method, I needed to methodolog-
ically bridge German and Japanese methodological discourses. I risked classically introducing
‘the more developed’ procedures from the West to the East and thus reproducing the asymme-
try of knowledge. However, both methodological trends belong to different strands. For exam-
ple, the common attempt to identify a ‘genuine’ narrative in an interview has different motiva-
tions: to deliver the voices of the ‘ignoramus’ in Japan or to reconstruct processes of someone’s
life in Germany. Both could not be simply combined, but the focus on narratives accounts for
the discourse of educational theories in international research contexts. The transformation of
someone’s development is sought after in Germany, while in Japan the focus on turning points
in someone’s life is considered to be epiphany. This insight into a specific moment in life does
not suggest a ‘perfect fusion’ but invites, for example, further discussions on socialisation.
Thus, Schütze’s method had to be ‘translated’ for Japanese discourses. Here is the transcultural
challenge in Area Studies. Due to researchers’ transcultural migration between the field and
the home and participation in foreign discourses, the original theories need ‘translation’ into
‘understandable’ conceptual language during research practice.
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Emi Kinoshita
Analysing interviews in transcultural exchange could never be realised without research work-
shops in a biography research community. To a workshop, one can bring one’s transcripts and
exchange interpretation with other participants. A relaxed, cooperative atmosphere with tea
and cookies enables researchers to widen their interpretations and to explore various, some-
times controversial perspectives with specific methods. I started to recognise characteristics in
the German language which I had not learned in language schools, lectures and seminars: e.g.
colloquial or regional expressions, specific uses of personal pronouns which are not really seen
in Japanese, and markers of certain nuances.
Prospects
Comparative reading is a kind of a detour. Nevertheless, it is still a part of my transcultural

research practice, because methodological perspectives can support deeper understandings of
and critical reflection on a research field and discourses. This journey goes on. I am participat-
ing in a comparative qualitative project on school lessons in Germany now and see similar
challenges. Comparative inquiries in Germany and Japan have different academic and practi-
cal motivations as well institutional origins, which are accompanied by different theoretical
concepts and methodological approaches. This makes our intercultural dialogue more com-
plex but, at the same time, allows us to reflect on our perspective in terms of theory and meth-
ods in transcultural research practices.
370
13.3 Qualitative content analysis and the study of
Japan’s foreign policy
Kai Schulze
My main field of research is the normative and ideational basis of Japan’s foreign and security
policy. I have investigated changes in Japan’s foreign policy identity, matters of securitisation
and ontological security particularly in Japan’s China policy. All of these topics deal with com-
plex social phenomena—identities, norms, ideas and perceptions—that are socially construct-
ed. To explain why the method of qualitative content analysis was very helpful and sufficient
for my research, I will briefly point out why and how I adopted and executed this method for
my doctoral thesis on the changes of Japan’s foreign policy identity towards China in reaction
to China’s rise.
When I conducted my PhD research on identity constructions in the field of international rela-
tions and foreign policy analysis, I often received very harsh and fundamental criticism from
senior scholars. This is because the study of international relations at the time was still domi-
nated by positivist-minded scholars that base their research on ‘hard facts’, such as military
and economic strength. A large part of the criticism was targeted at the complexity and imma-
teriality of the social phenomena—such as identities—that I was studying. Critics found my
research too abstract and purely based on theoretical concepts, which they claimed do not deal
with ‘reality’. ‘How can you define and measure something that only exists in the minds of
social actors and does not materialise?’ they asked. ‘If you cannot measure the things you re-
search, how can you generate new insights into what is really going on in Japanese politics?’
Thus, I needed to prove that my research on the normative and ideational basis of Japan’s for-
eign policy met the basic academic requirements of validity.
At that time, I was a rather young and inexperienced scholar and, at first, this quite funda-
mental criticism from established scholars in the field made me very insecure, and I did not
really know how to respond. The reason for my insecurity was simple: the critics were right—
at least at first sight—because it is difficult to directly measure social constructions, such as
identities, norms and ideas. However, the representation of social constructions in Japan’s po-
litical discourse can be measured. In fact, they materialise in different forms, such as texts or
pictures. In my case, the representations of identities usually materialised in written texts.
Therefore, I needed to operationalise my research by adopting methods that allow systematic
and intersubjectively comprehensible analysis of text-based sources.
At the beginning of my project, I worked my way through the very rich and complex literature
about discourse and discourse analysis. This literature provided me with many insights into
how to define important actors, how to select primary sources and how to relate them to one
another. However, it did not offer a detailed description of how to actually deal with text-
based sources in a structured manner. Therefore, I searched for instructions on supplementary
methods and techniques that explain how to analyse the texts and how to categorise the infor-
371
Kai Schulze
mation. This is when I came across qualitative content analysis. This method enables re-
searchers to identify and extract the important passages from written sources and to interpret
them in a systematic and reliable manner.
There are many different forms of qualitative content analysis that can be applied to different
types of research. I wanted to investigate the changes in Japan’s foreign policy towards China
and identify different levels of the related identity concepts. For the analysis of these identity
concepts, I was looking for a data interpretation strategy that is based on the systematisation
of patterns, the contextualisation of regularities in the sources and on categorisation. Philipp
Mayring (2002; 2008; 2014) calls the categorisation of the defining patterns ‘content-related
structuring’. This technique of interpreting different text corpora does not focus solely on spe-
cial keywords in the texts, but rather searches for passages that show certain similarities re-
garding their content. Basing their work on these similarities, researchers can code the text and
form the categories that are necessary for their research.
Categories can be developed in two different ways. They can be derived deductively from ex-
isting theoretical concepts or inductively from primary sources. It is important to note that
these two categorising systems are not mutually exclusive, but can be combined (Mayring
2014). For my own study, I first deduced two main categories from theoretical definitions of
identities. According to social identity theory, identities are defined by the categories of a ‘self’
and an ‘other’ (Abdelal et al. 2006). Thus, in a first step, I extracted passages from my sources
that described and defined China as the ‘other’ and Japan as the ‘self’.
In a second step, I inductively developed sub-categories to find out how the ‘self’ and the ‘oth-
er’ were defined in detail in the documents I analysed. This process of categorising the content
of my sources was the most interesting but simultaneously also the most exhausting part of my
research. I literally had to go through all the texts individually, and more than once. To do
this, it is advisable to find technical support for your analysis that helps you to clearly arrange
the individual steps in your research. By now, there are many computer-based programmes
available that can support your analysis. For the practical implementation of qualitative con-
tent analysis, I, for example, took advantage of Patricia Steinhoff’s (2009) approach based on
the databank system Microsoft Access. In this system, I created a main table and first inserted
basic data, such as the title of the source, the date of publication and additional information
about the source, like its author, issuing authority and place of publication. For example, I dis-
tinguished between sources depending on whether they were published on behalf of the Prime
Minister or the Minister of Foreign Affairs or on whether they were published online or as a
printed version. Then, I also created columns and text boxes in the databank. The first text
box was rather large. This enabled me to insert the whole passage from the respective source,
the whole speech or the statement. I did so because it is very important to always keep the
context in mind in which certain assertions and definitions are made. Otherwise the possibility
of misinterpretation is very high. In addition, I inserted text boxes in which I only collected the
passages that directly defined the construction of ‘self’ and ‘other’ for each individual source. I
labelled them ‘Japan’ and ‘China’ respectively. Below these text boxes, I created boxes where I
labelled the different categories that I developed from the data. Every single category was visi-
ble on each form and could be tagged with a check mark whenever a passage was grouped in
its respective category. One big advantage of the software for qualitative content analysis is the
fact that the main table can constantly be adjusted. This is helpful because I had to adjust the
372
databank over and over again in the process of data analysis; for example, when I identified
new categories.
The process of the actual analysis was quite wearing. I began with the first text, extracted the
important parts and grouped them into content-related categories. It is very important that ev-
ery category is precisely defined, so that every extracted part of the texts only fits into one cat-
egory. When I found a pattern in one of the texts that fitted into two or more categories, I
either needed to define a new category, in which it fitted or had to redefine the categories I had
already formed. After I had finished with the first text, I proceeded to the second text, and the
process started again. Hence, whenever a new pattern became visible, the categories needed to
be adjusted accordingly. While analysing one text after another, I ordered and reordered con-
tent-related categories until I had identified certain stable patterns in the whole sample. This
process was very frustrating at times, especially when I found a new pattern only after I had
already analysed a huge number of sources. In this case, and in fact this happened fairly often,
I had to go through all the sources again and look whether or not the pattern could be found
there as well and if I needed to redefine my categories. This admittedly caused stress because I
was working with a sample of texts in a rather complicated language like Japanese. But it is
exactly this constant defining and redefining of the categories that brings about advancement
in the analysis and the research process as a whole. Therefore, I encourage researchers to be
very patient and to maintain their motivation to go through their sources over and over again
until they find stable categories. To maintain my motivation in this process, I received good
advice from one of my supervisors to trick myself a little bit. It was pretty simple: I just had to
reward myself for finding a new category. That could mean buying a book I had wanted to
buy for a long time, going out for a beer with friends, taking a day off or going to my
favourite rāmen (noodle soup) eatery. Whatever makes people happy works! And then, I went
back to the sources and worked on them again.
Once I had finished with this process, I had a great data set and I could start the last step of
the analysis. For example, I could see when a certain category first occurred in the discourse
and when it vanished. This enabled me to identify various patterns of change and continuity in
addition to the content-related results I had gained from the categories alone. With regard to
changes in Japan’s foreign policy identity towards China, for example, I gained valuable in-
sights into changing patterns of representation of Japan as the ‘self’ and China as the ‘other’,
and how these were related to the broader discourse on the ‘rise of China’. By filtering the
content until the patterns became visible, I was able to measure the significance of the respec-
tive categories in and for the discourse. In contrast to quantitative approaches to content ana-
lysis, however, this is not a matter of pure quantity, but rather of regularity and continuity. A
pattern that was expressed in various sources and regularly mentioned within a certain time
span could be considered to be more important for the discourse than a category that was only
mentioned occasionally, even in the unlikely case that the absolute quantity of mentions might
be higher. A second determinant for measuring the importance of a certain category was
strongly content-related. When a category, for example, served as a precondition for another
category, I considered it to be more important than a category that was built upon its founda-
tion or a category that existed unconnected to the other categories, given that the other pa-
rameters were similar. Basing my work on this data, I was able to create a hierarchy of the
different categories and definitions of ‘self’ and ‘other’ as well as the changes to this hierarchy
over time.
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Kai Schulze
These were just a very few examples of the richness of data one can gain from a well-struc-
tured qualitative content analysis. In any case, it is a wonderful method to employ when deal-
ing with social phenomena like identities, which require an interpretative approach based on
empirical, text-based analysis. And although you still might not be successful in convincing
positivist-minded scholars, you will at least have a strong empirical and methodological basis
for an intersubjectively comprehensible analysis with which to validate and confirm your con-
clusions and results. The time-consuming and hard work you need to put into an analysis like
this is definitely worth it.
374
Further reading
Benford, Robert D./Snow, David A. (2000): Framing processes and social movements: An overview and
assessment. In: Annual Review of Sociology 26, No. 1, p. 611–639.
Goffman, Erving (1974): Frame analysis: An essay on the organization of experience. New York, NY:
Harper & Row.
Lindekilde, Lasse (2014): Discourse and frame analysis: In-depth analysis of qualitative data in social
movement research. In: Della Porta, Donatella/Malthaner, Stefan (eds.): Methodological practices in so-
cial movement research. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 195–227.
Mayring, Philipp (2014): Qualitative content analysis: Theoretical foundation, basic procedures, and soft-
ware solution. Klagenfurt: SSOAR. https://nbn-resolving.org/urn:nbn:de:0168-ssoar-395173, [Accessed
08 April 2020].
Schreier, Margrit (2012): Qualitative content analysis in practice. Los Angeles, CA: Sage Publications.
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Chapter 14
How to understand discourse:
Qualitative discourse analysis
1. Introduction
How people make sense of the world they live in and how they act upon this particular under-
standing are important questions for Social Science and Area Studies researchers alike. Dis-
course analysis (DA) allows us to study the various meanings people attribute to specific phe-
nomena and situations, and to analyse how meaning is mediated or constructed through lan-
guage, images or routinised practices. Thus, DA is a useful tool for studying how people un-
derstand, represent and thereby shape the world. In order to analyse discourse, concise knowl-
edge of linguistics and societal, economic, political and historical contexts is important. This is
why Area Studies researchers are particularly qualified to carry out DA due to their language
competence and their contextual knowledge of the area being studied (Schäfer 2011). Japan
scholars, for example, have produced deeply embedded empirical studies by analysing dis-
course on ethnicity (Kamada 2010), the reconstruction of the Tohoku region after the 3.11
triple disaster (Samuels 2013), education policies (Rear/Jones 2013) and ‘Japaneseness’ (nihon-
jinron) (Befu 2001).
There are various types of DA and each one is rooted in a different set of theoretical assump-
tions about the concept of ‘discourse’. This makes it especially tricky for researchers who want
to apply DA for the first time. Analysis can also be daunting due to the rather open research
design of DA. Thus, in this chapter, we provide some guidance on what discourse analysis is,
introduce different types of DA and discuss how DA has been used in the study of Japan. Our
goal is to help students and early career researchers to make informed decisions on whether
DA is helpful for their research project and in answering their research question(s). We will
also give some advice on how to conduct DA.
After a brief introduction to the concept of discourse and DA, we break down the process of
DA into its individual steps to explain them in more detail. For a hands-on introduction of
DA, we will focus on Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) as one specific form of DA, and par-
ticularly draw on Norman Fairclough’s work. We chose this type of CDA since it is prevalent
in the analysis of political discourse in Japan. Also, because Fairclough’s CDA approach has a
strong focus on linguistic methods of text analysis, we think that Area Studies specialists are
particularly well-equipped to conduct this type of DA due to their language skills. Although
DA is complex and diverse, this very short introduction is kept simple in order to motivate
readers to engage with it. Before you start a DA project, studying different discourse theories
and related concepts of discourse in more detail is necessary. Therefore, we introduce literature
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on discourse theories and corresponding types of DA for further reading. Throughout the
chapter, we discuss examples of DA in the study of Japan. The three essays that follow this
introductory chapter illustrate how scholars have analysed discourse on and in Japan from a
Political Science, sociological and anthropological perspective, respectively (see Heinrich, Ch.
14.3; Schad-Seifert, Ch. 14.1; White, Ch. 14.2).
2. What is discourse?
Discourse is not a static concept. It is the continuous attempt of different actors to stabilise—
often only for a certain time—meaning and interpretations and to establish a specific order of
knowledge (Keller 2013, p. 2). Discourse is therefore always related to power. It can help to
sustain and reproduce but can also transform the social status quo (Angermuller et al. 2014, p.
362). Discourse also has the power to define what can be said and what must not be said
(Foucault 1970). Thus, while on the most abstract level, discourse is language that contributes
to shaping the world and people’s understanding of the world, it is also shaped by its econo-
mic, political and social conditions. While there are differences in how discourse scholars eval-
uate the scope of language’s influence on society and vice versa, all agree that language matters
in social processes (Fairclough 2001, p. 122). In other words, language and the world it shapes
or represents are mutually interlinked (Fairclough 2003, pp. 3–4). Because of this emphasis on
language, concepts of discourse are often based on a constructivist worldview and structuralist
or post-structuralist perspectives.1
Many discourse scholars, however, consider discourse to be more than just language. From
their perspective, discourse is not only an interrelated set of texts (language), but also includes
the practices of its production, dissemination (sociocultural contexts) and reception (cogni-
tion) (Lindekilde 2014, p. 198). Through language, specific actors in society might try to cre-
ate a certain type of discourse to promote their understanding of a given problem (language).
However, depending on how other actors understand the problem (cognition), discourse and,
possibly, society can change (sociocultural context) (Keller 2013, p. 13). Thus, by studying dis-
course, researchers can analyse power relations and/or specific conditions in a society and
study how and why they persist or change.
It is important to note that researchers define discourse differently, but concepts of discourse
are mostly not mutually exclusive. Japan scholars, for instance, have combined quite different
theories and concepts of discourse. In their CDA on education policy and work skills in Japan,
David Rear and Alan Jones (2013, p. 375) defined discourse as ‘a particular way of represent-
ing certain parts of the world’ and call it an ‘important strategic resource for reproducing or
challenging the social, political and economic status quo’. Although they mainly followed Fair-
1 According to constructivists, all knowledge about the world is constructed from human experience instead of re-
flecting external or ‘transcendent’ realities (Harvey 2012). Structuralists think about the world as a system of in-
terrelated objects, concepts or ideas and aim to identify the structures that underlie human behaviour, thoughts
and practices (Blackburn 2008). Post-structuralism emerged out of a critique of Marxist economic reductionism,
structural determinism and methodological individualism. Post-structuralists argued that no social order is fully
structured through one underlying mechanism (economic structure or social concepts) that explain everything
and that there is always the potential for political intervention (Panizza/Miorelli 2013).
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Chapter 14 How to understand discourse
clough’s concept of discourse, they merged it with ‘nodal points’ and ‘hegemony’ (see Figure
14.1)—concepts developed by two other discourse theorists, Ernesto Laclau and Chantal
Mouffe (2006). In her Feminist Poststructuralist Discourse Analysis (FPDA) on ethnic and gen-
dered embodied identities of adolescent girls in Japan with Japanese and ‘white’ mixed-parent-
age, Laurel Kamada (2009; 2010) understands discourse as connected to and structuring so-
cial practices (Kamada 2009, p. 330). In his CDA on Japanese national identity in the Yomiuri
Shimbun’s coverage of the Fukushima nuclear disaster, James W. Tollefson (2014) equates dis-
course with ideology (see Figure 14.1). Thus, conceptualisations of discourse differ, but
concepts from different discourse theories can be combined, when necessary to answer a par-
ticular research question—if they do not contradict each other. However, researchers should
always explain their understanding of discourse and related concepts in a transparent way.
Figure 14.1: Three concepts related to discourse
Three concepts related to discourse

Hegemony is temporarily fixed meaning (i.e. a particular set of ideas) that expands a
discourse into a dominant collective understanding, social orientation and/or action
(Akerstrom Andersen 2003, p. vii; Donoghue 2018, p. 396; Torfing 1999, p. 101).
Ideology: There exist quite different definitions of ideology (see for example Althusser
1971; Gramsci 1971; Mannheim 2015), but in its most basic sense, the term refers to a
set of beliefs shared by members of social groups (van Dijk 1995, p. 248).
Nodal Points organise discourse by creating centres, like ‘people’ in populist discourse,
for example. They assign meaning to elements in a discourse and partially fix it through
creating relations between these discursive elements (Žižek 1989, pp. 95–97).
3. What is discourse analysis?
How can social scientists analyse how people understand, represent and shape the world or
society? One option is to analyse how people communicate and make sense of the world
through language. There are not only various definitions of discourse, but also many varia-
tions of DA. The latter are always based on a specific understanding of discourse. In general,
DA seeks to systematically understand and empirically analyse discourse. Despite its plurality,
DA can be broadly defined as the study of how meaning, and thus social reality, is discursively
constituted or represented by analysing the interplay between individual texts, discourse (inter-
related sets of texts) and its historical, social, economic, cultural and political contexts
(Phillips/Hardy 2002, pp. 3–4). One specific form of DA, Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA),
aims to understand this interplay between discursive elements, discourse and society in order
to critically study social problems, power and inequality (van Dijk 1997). However, not every
analysis of discourse is DA, as DA does not simply summarise, paraphrase or quote texts, but
follows specific rules to uncover concepts and structures (van Dijk 1997, p. 32).
Depending on the concept of discourse, different dimensions of discourse (see above) can be
analysed. DA can study the interplay between the ‘discursive units’ (the text), the ‘discursive
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practices’ (production, dissemination, reception) and the ‘social practices’ (the wider order of
discourses in society), for example (Fairclough 1992). It can start at the macro-level and move
to the micro-level of individual talks, texts or specific contexts (top down). But DA could also
begin at the micro-level and analyse discourse bottom up, beginning with sounds, words, ges-
tures, meanings or strategies (Keller 2013, pp. 13–14).
It can sometimes be difficult to distinguish between discourse theory and DA, but also between
DA, content analysis and frame analysis. Simply put, discourse theories develop general theo-
retical perspectives on the linguistic constitution of reality. DA empirically investigates dis-
course (Keller 2013, p. 3). Therefore, discourse theory is the foundation of DA, but not DA
itself. Content and frame analysis (see Arrington, Ch. 13) on the other hand are ‘focused sub-
variants of discourse analysis’ (Lindekilde 2014, p. 197). Just like DA, they cast an interpretive
perspective on social interaction and can both become methods within DA in which texts are
understood in a larger socio-historical context. While content analysis focuses on individual
texts, frame analysis scrutinises the strategic intent of texts (Keller 2013, p. 31). Compared to
DA, both methods’ analytical scope is rather narrow (Lindekilde 2014, p. 204). In other
words, when researchers build larger connections between texts and study how texts relate to
each other in a particular context, they are performing DA.
As mentioned above, there are many different approaches to DA. We explain CDA in more de-
tail below, because it is often used in research on Japan. But we want to at least mention a few
more types of DA here: political discourse theory or post-structuralist discourse analysis builds
on Laclau and Mouffe’s (2006) work, as well as on post-structuralists’ ideas, like those by
Jacques Lacan (Glynos/Howarth 2007). Culturalist discourse analysis, on the other hand was
developed in Sociology in the context of symbolic interactionism2 and builds on the works of
Pierre Bourdieu (Keller 2013, p. 33). The Sociology of Knowledge approach to discourse
(SKAD) originates from the Sociology of Knowledge theory by Peter Berger and Thomas
Luckmann and is interested in the social production, circulation and transformation of knowl-
edge, rather than in power and hegemony (Keller et al. 2018). Handbooks and compendia are
an important source of learning about these different types of discourse theory and DA (see for
example Angermuller et al. 2014; Gee/Handford 2014; Keller 2013; Schiffrin et al. 2005).
4. How to conduct discourse analysis?
Due to the existence of diverse approaches, DA is not restricted to just one method or method-
ological toolkit. DA is more a research design than an individual method and, thus, theoretical
assumptions, research questions and methods should not contradict each other. The assump-
tions about what constitutes discourse determine what kind of research questions a researcher
can ask within a certain framework, what kind of DA she will use, how she defines the discur-
sive field under study and what sources she uses. Just like in any research design (see Okano,
Ch. 3), researchers conducting DA should select the tools that work best with their theory and
2 Symbolic interactionism is a framework, developed by George Herbert Mead that aims to understand the interac-
tions between individuals that create symbolic worlds, and how these worlds in turn shape individual behaviour
(West/Turner 2018).
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data, and adapt DA to their own study (Gee 2011, p. ix). While scholars should not be afraid
of flexibly adapting theories and methods, it is crucial to understand that depending on the
assumptions about science and society (epistemology and ontology), different methods of data
collection and data analysis make sense. Most importantly, they should be used in a coherent
and transparent way. Despite the differences, performing DA involves some common steps (see
Figure 14.2).
Figure 14.2: Key steps in discourse analysis
Key steps
1. Decide on a research topic
2. Explore the field under investigation
3. Develop research question(s)
4. Clarify if DA is appropriate to answer these questions
5. Clarify what type of DA and what discourse theory you want to use
6. Define concepts (discourse, discourse field, actors, audience, etc.) in accordance
with this theory
7. Select data sources
8. Find formal (and linguistic) structures
9. Situate statements in their situational and material context
10. Interpret findings
Of course, these steps do not necessarily take place in the chronological order proposed in Fig-
ure 2. Researchers might read about discourse theory first and find their research topic later.
Sometimes, researchers begin their projects with a different methodology, but realise later in
the research process that DA might be a better way to approach their questions. But once a
researcher has decided to use DA, it is important to clarify which discourse theory and type of
DA she wants to use. Throughout the research process, it is important to check the ‘fit’ be-
tween theory and research questions (Keller 2013, p. 69). Since Japan scholars are often more
interested in the empirical study of Japan and not primarily in theoretical or philosophical
musings about how language in general influences society, power relations or interactions in a
society, only certain parts of discourse theory are relevant. Nonetheless, some basic knowledge
about underlying philosophical and theoretical considerations is necessary for any analysis.
This is mainly because it empowers the scholar to argue and explain the relevance and effects
of language and certain practices. In the following parts of this chapter, we will mostly draw
on CDA to explain the individual steps of DA in more detail, but we also include examples
from the essays and our own work.
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Key steps 1–3: Decide on a research topic, explore its context and find a research
question
First, researchers should decide on a research topic, make themselves familiar with its context
and develop research questions. CDA usually focuses on social problems and critically exam-
ines politics and society. Accordingly, questions of power imbalances, exclusion from societal
participation, sexism or racism are among the major topics in CDA. This is also reflected in
CDA on Japan. Tollefson (2014, p. 299), for example, analysed discursive constructions of na-
tional duty and the ideology of technoscience to mitigate the risks from the Fukushima nuclear
disaster, and to call Japanese national identity into the service of the nuclear industry. Rear
and Jones (2013) analysed competing discourses related to education policy and identified a
dominant discourse harnessing the individuality of Japanese citizens into a vision of patriotism
and national solidarity (Rear/Jones 2013, pp. 375, 377).
After deciding on a research topic—a social problem in the case of CDA—researchers should
familiarise themselves with the topic, its context and important actors. In the process of study-
ing the context of a social problem, CDA researchers aim to identify a ‘network of practices’,
describe key actors, learn who interacts with whom and how they negotiate a certain problem.
Rear and Jones (2013), for example, identified the Liberal Democratic Party, the Ministry of
Education, Culture, Science, Sports and Technology (MEXT), as well as the Japan Business
Federation (Keidanren) as the major policy players in education policy. In Annette Schad-
Seifert’s analysis on masculinity and herbivore men in Japanese print media, two particular
journalists were key players (see this chapter, Ch. 14.1). Daniel White’s study on emotions in
the Cool Japan campaign (see this chapter, Ch. 14.2) focused on politicians and television
broadcasting. In her study on local identity and rural revitalisation in Arita, a town famous for
porcelain production, Cornelia Reiher (2014) identified several relevant actors on different ge-
ographical and administrative levels: local government officials and politicians, museum cura-
tors, art historians, local potters, civil society organisations, national tourist agencies, prefec-
tural government officials, journalists, department stores in Tokyo and national ministries like
MEXT.
When analysing discourse, researchers can ask a wide variety of questions (see Figure 14.3). In
CDA, the question of dominance—who dominates the meaning-making process—is key in ex-
plaining why a problem persists in a society. Therefore, CDA asks about how social life is
structured and organised, and how these structures relate to the problems of domination, ex-
ploitation and power imbalances (Fairclough 2001, p. 126). Most importantly, CDA (just as
any DA) should not be conducted for its own sake, but in order to explain the emergence, con-
tinuity or shift of a particular social problem. Japan researchers should always think about
how their research contributes to the body of knowledge about Japan or Japan’s society, polit-
ics, culture or history. A simple test for researchers is to explain their research in one sentence.
If all they have to say is: ‘I am conducting DA on hikikomori’, for example, they need to re-
think their research question and explain what they actually want to find out (Turabian 2007,
p. 9). For example, a researcher could say: ‘I am conducting DA on hikikomori, in order to
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find out how expert knowledge by medical doctors changes public discourse on hikikomori in
Japan.’3
Figure 14.3: Questions in Social Science discourse research
Questions in Social Science discourse research

• When and why does a specific discourse appear or disappear again?
• How, where and with what practices and resources is a discourse (re)produced?
• What formations of objects, utterance modalities, concepts and strategies does a
discourse contain?
• What are the decisive events in the development of a discourse, and how does it
change over time?
• What actors occupy the positions of speakers using what resources, interests and
strategies?
• Who are the bearers, the addressees and the audience of the discourse?
• What links does a discourse contain to other discourses?
• How can a discourse be related to more or less far-reaching temporal-spatial social
contexts?
• What (power) effects result from a discourse, and how do they react to fields of so-
cial practice and ‘everyday representations’?
(Keller 2013, p. 75)
Key steps 4–6: Clarify if and what type of DA to use and define key concepts
The next steps are to think about whether the research question can be answered through DA
in a meaningful way and if so, what type of DA is the best choice (steps 4 and 5). In order to
make an informed decision, researchers should first learn about DA to evaluate its aim and
what skills it requires. Considerations with regard to DA’s fit with a research question could
include the following questions: Is your research about the analysis of the interrelations be-
tween language and power, as for example in Kamada’s (2010) work on ethnic identities of
adolescent girls with mixed ethnicities and their struggle for control over marginalising dis-
courses which disempower them as ‘others’ within Japanese society? Here, discourse analysis
is probably helpful, because it can uncover how linguistic representations might reproduce un-
equal relationships and conditions in society. Or is the aim of the research project to find out
how language is strategically used in order to achieve certain goals in a government campaign,
for example on radionuclides in food in post-Fukushima Japan (Reiher 2017)? In this particu-
lar case, frame analysis was the better methodological choice, because it helped to identify ‘the
strategic and deliberative side of language usage’ (Lindekilde 2014, p. 197) by particular ac-
tors and, thus, is smaller in scope than DA. Researchers should also think about whether they
want to study the content of individual documents or to analyse how their content is interre-
lated. For the study of individual documents content analysis is a more straightforward
method, while DA is better suited to analysing the interrelatedness of texts and society.
3 Please refer to Chapter 2 for more information about research questions.
383
Practical considerations include the question of language proficiency, access to data and time
constraints. For DA, language particularly matters. Naturally, when studying Japan, re-
searchers should be aware that they probably have to deal with large amounts of data or texts
in Japanese. It is also possible or sometimes even necessary to conduct DA in a language other
than Japanese when the discourse, for example, concerns the representation of Japan as a cul-
tural or political actor in international relations in other countries or international organisa-
tions. Sometimes, it even takes several languages to analyse a particular discourse, particularly
if transnational phenomena are the research topic (see Garon, Ch. 9.2; Shire, Ch. 5.2). Re-
searchers should realistically evaluate whether they are able to read sources in the respective
language before starting their analysis.
Once a researcher has decided to use DA and selected a specific type of DA, she should make
herself familiar with the specific discourse theory the selected type of DA is based on, define
concepts like discourse according to this theory and explain what this means for the project at
hand. CDA scholars, for instance, take a critical position towards the societal status quo and,
as ‘engaged researchers’ (see Slater et al., Ch. 16.2), seek to change social practice and social
relationships reproduced in the discourse under study (Keller 2013, p. 25). This is because
CDA scholars consider linguistic representations to potentially reproduce unequal relation-
ships and conditions in societies. But even in CDA there exist different approaches (see Figure
14.4). While this chapter introduces Fairclough’s dialectical-relational approach, Schad-Seifert
(see this chapter, Ch. 14.1) in her essay on discourse on herbivore men in Japan, provides a
step-by-step manual to a discourse analysis based on Siegfried Jäger’s approach to CDA and
his concept of interdiscourse.
Figure 14.4: An overview of Critical Discourse Analysis
Critical Discourse Analysis

Major proponents Teun van Dijk, Ruth Wodak, Siegfried Jäger, Theo van Leeuwen
and Norman Fairclough
Approaches inside • Dialectical-Relational Approach (Fairclough)
CDA • Socio-Cognitive Approach (van Dijk)
• Socio-Semiotics and Visual Grammar (van Leeuwen and Kress)
• Dispositif Analysis or Kritische Diskursanalyse (Jäger)
• Discourse-Historical Approach (Wodak)
Fairclough’s dialectical-relational approach puts a focus on the interaction of social practices.

He argues that social life can be observed as interconnected networks of social practices of di-
verse sorts (economic, political, cultural and so on). His starting point is the question of who
or what stands in the way of resolving a social problem. He also analyses counter-hegemonic
discourses that strive to resolve the social problem. Each of the social practices identified as
relevant has a semiotic element. Semiotic elements are all elements of communication that con-
vey meaning, either in the form of spoken or written language, or, for example, body lan-
guage. The researcher’s task is to choose a network of practices that deals with a specific social
problem and study the construction of meaning that occurs within this network (Fairclough
2001, p. 122).
384
Key step 7: Select sources
Once the CDA researcher is familiar with a specific social problem and relevant institutional
structures, important socio-economic factors, actors and opportunities (or the lack thereof) to
participate in discourse or status inequalities in wider society, she needs to identify important
‘texts’ to analyse. Thus, getting to know the field and context of one’s research topic and iden-
tifying the key actors of a particular discourse is an important step towards finding sources, no
matter what type of DA a researcher is conducting. In general, texts are produced within cer-
tain institutional and social contexts (Keller 2013, pp. 26–27). Newspaper editorials, for ex-
ample, are produced inside what constitutes the media; government White Papers originate
from practices within government bureaucracies (Fairclough 2001, p. 129). Thus, a wide vari-
ety of different sources should be selected by any researcher who carries out DA. These sources
should be widely distributed and influential with regard to their range and reception (see this
chapter, Heinrich, Ch. 14.3). In a nutshell, DA researchers should select texts that are relevant
for answering their research question and analyse them in their particular contexts of produc-
tion, dissemination and reception.
Japan scholars have studied texts produced by a wide variety of actors when conducting DA.
In their analysis on education policies, Rear and Jones (2013) used policy reports, policy
speeches and advisory reports by the aforementioned actors. Steffen Heinrich (see this chapter,
Ch. 14.3) shows how only by using different types of sources for his analysis was he able to
show the scope of discourse on the recent work-style reform (hataraki-kata kaikaku) in Japan
and its relevance over time and across different realms of society, including: politics, the media
or public opinion. Schad-Seifert (see this chapter, Ch. 14.1) analysed mainly media content to
study discourse on masculinity in Japan. Both authors began their selection of sources by trac-
ing media buzzwords like herbivore men or hataraki-kata kaikaku. White (see this chapter,
Ch. 14.2) analysed the rhetoric on soft power in Japanese media in order to study emotions in
Japan’s society.
As pointed out above, depending on which discourse theory the DA is based on, sources can
include more than written texts. This could be ethnographic material like interviews, field
notes with observations on social practices, visual representations or artefacts. DA allows for a
wide variety of methods of data collection (and analysis). In her research on local identity and
rural revitalisation, Reiher (2014) conducted DA based on interviews with local actors, partici-
pant observations, and text and images in local, prefectural and national government policy
papers, reports and plans, as well as in media coverage, memoirs, tourist information pam-
phlets and the advertisements of local businesses.
Key steps 8–9: Find formal (and linguistic) structures and situate statements in their
situational and material context
After you have identified and collected sources and data, the content of the specific discourse
should be scrutinised. For linguistics-focused CDA, not only what is said, but how, is of im-
portance. Fairclough (2001, p. 130) suggests first looking at genres, styles and (sub-) discours-
es that structure a specific discourse. This is because texts are typically hybrid in terms of gen-
res, discourses and styles: Is the call for more patriotism only communicated in typical bureau-
385
cratic style and language, or do government agencies use pop-cultural motifs and genres to
communicate the same message (Rear/Jones 2013)? Fairclough (2001) uses insights from lin-
guistics, more specifically systemic functional linguistics that focuses on grammar and finds
specific functions behind the concrete use of grammar (Martin 2016). To give an example,
Fairclough (2001, p. 130) writes about the absence of agency in neo-liberal discourse implied
through the grammar used in a text—i.e. many passive clauses—and analyses how ‘new com-
petitors’ and ‘new opportunities’ are claimed to exist, without being located within active pro-
cesses of change. Therefore, they remain abstract and thus, in Fairclough’s analysis, the social
agents responsible for political processes remain an abstract ‘we’. In a similar manner, the term
globalisation is used in neoliberal discourse in Japan as a force from above with no alternative
that forces specific actors like ‘the government’ or ‘the economy’ to cut social services or to
outsource manufacturing to Southeast Asia (Yoda 2000). Grammatical features like the pas-
sive voice can conceal the actual actors behind certain social problems that are responsible for
these processes and, thus, complicate counter-movements due to the lack of a specific actor to
whom to address protest (Massey 2005).
Another key step in CDA is the analysis of interdiscursivity. This means the recontextualisa-
tion of discursive elements in new and different contexts (Fairclough 2001, p. 131). In her re-
search on revitalisation strategies in Arita, Reiher (2009) found that a programme by the
Japanese government to promote food education (shokuiku), and particularly the related con-
cept of food culture (shokubunka), was recontextualised in local discourse on Arita’s identity
and revitalisation. The Basic Law on Food Education (shokuiku kihonhō), its related policy
plans and financial support programmes were intended to promote a healthy diet. Yet, in or-
der to receive subsidies, Arita’s local government integrated food culture into their local revi-
talisation plan but referred to food culture as ‘serving food on beautiful porcelain’ (made in
Arita). In their local plan, images showed junk food, like cup noodles, being served in hand-
crafted noodle bowls and presented as traditional Japanese food culture (Reiher 2009). In
summary, not only are linguistic methods possible tools for the analysis of written texts or vi-
sual data, but so are approaches from content analysis, text analysis or frame analysis (see Ar-
rington, Ch. 13).
Key step 10: Interpreting data
After identifying the linguistic structures and patterns of grammar, researchers conducting
CDA have to interpret these structures to answer their research questions. First, they should
reflect on how the empirical results of the linguistic analysis, frame analysis or any other type
of textual analysis relate to other dimensions of discourse, i.e. its context or cognition (see
above). There are different ways to do this. Fairclough (2001, p. 126), for example, suggests
interpreting linguistic structures from the perspective of ideology (see Figure 1). In such an
analysis, the researcher would study whether and how a discourse contributes to sustaining
specific power relations and the dominance of a certain understanding of a social problem by
negating or ignoring alternatives to certain practices or interpretations. In his work about ne-
oliberalism and language, Fairclough (2001) identified claims that markets operate based on
‘their own logic’ and cannot be socially changed as a strategy for disqualifying alternatives,
386
thus denying agency to those actors who are trying to challenge neoliberalism. Yoda (2000)
has identified similar strategies in neoliberal discourse on globalisation in Japan.
Those defending the hegemonic discourse on neoliberalism, present alternative discourses as a

misrepresentation of economic matters and by doing so consolidate unequal relations of pow-
er by dominating the representation of the problem. This is what Fairclough calls ideology
(Fairclough 2001, p. 132). Strategies to discredit alternative discourse have occurred in Japan,
for example after the Fukushima nuclear disaster, when mothers concerned about radiation
were ridiculed as irrational radiation brain moms (hoshanō mama) incapable of understanding
science (Kimura 2016).Thus, a next step in relational-dialectic CDA is to describe the alterna-
tives to the dominant arguments in the analysed texts (counter-hegemonic discourse). Issues
that remain completely uncontested in society are rare. Depending on the research design, re-
searchers analyse one or several alternatives brought forth by counter-hegemonic discourses.
Alternative discourses can be studied, for example, by inquiring how they relate to the domi-
nant discourse, how the latter responds (if at all) to counter-hegemonic discourse and vice ver-
sa. In her study on citizen scientists who monitor radionuclides in food in post-Fukushima
Japan, Aya Kimura (2016) shows, for example, how citizen scientists provided alternative
knowledge to the Japanese government’s assertion that food was safe.
The final stage in CDA includes what some scholars who cling to a positivist idea of ‘objectivi-
ty’ might find controversial: to critically reflect on the results of the analysis and to suggest
possible solutions to the social problem under study. This includes thinking about how re-
search results can support critical engagement in society and thereby contribute to social
emancipation. In addition, CDA also demands that researchers question their own role and the
implications of their research for upholding dominant power relations. This might be due, for
example, to a researcher’s own position in academic practices and her related networks with
the market and the state (Fairclough 2001, p. 127). Through this reflexivity (see Coates, Ch.
3.2; Cook, Ch. 5.1), research results, the researcher, discourse and the social problem being
studied are put into perspective and allow for thinking about possible solutions to the prob-
lem. Of course, this kind of engaged scholarship exists beyond CDA and also in the study of
Japan (see Slater et al., Ch. 16.2). But to be sure, DA does not have to go as far as to suggest
solutions to social problems, particularly when DA is carried out by students. Therefore, we
would like to stress again that CDA is just one of many possible ways of conducting DA. For
many scholars, however, research and social engagement are closely related and CDA is one
approach that acknowledges this ideal.
5. Summary
Discourse structures how we see, understand and represent the world. Through DA re-
searchers can find out ‘how particular texts either reproduce or challenge established defini-
tions and understandings of social reality’ (Lindekilde 2014, p. 197) by focusing on the inter-
play between discursive elements and between discourse and society. There are several ap-
proaches to DA and various methods of data collection and analysis within DA that a re-
searcher can choose from, i.e. content and frame analysis (see Arrington, Ch. 13). Thus, before
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beginning DA, researchers should familiarise themselves with the various approaches of DA
and the specific rules it follows. Because the various approaches to DA relate to different dis-
course theories and, thus, assumptions about the relationship between language and the
world, researchers should make sure that their research questions, the theory and their chosen
approach to DA correspond to each other.
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14.1 Media buzzwords as a source of discourse analysis:
The discourse on Japan’s herbivore men
Introduction
Discourse analysis is a valuable device that helps us to understand processes of social commu-
nication and representation. By discourse I mean all kinds of public communication that influ-
ence how people in modern societies think and conceptualise the reality they live in. Discourse
is usually produced by social institutions such as the media, academia or politics. For social
scientists, analysing the functioning of discourse is essential in order to understand how peo-
ple’s thoughts, ideas, beliefs, values, identities, interaction with others and behaviour are
shaped. There are several useful (sometimes contradictory) instructions available in research
literature and on the Internet that provide guidance on technical and analytical steps when
conducting a specific research project, especially on the basis of East Asian languages; one ex-
ample in this respect is Florian Schneider (2019). In the following, I will give an example of
qualitative discourse analysis by referring to my own research on gender in Japan, specifically
on herbivore men.
Step one: The broader theoretical picture
I am very much indebted to Gender Studies as a research approach. Since gender identities
have come to be viewed as both socially and culturally constructed phenomena, it is no sur-
prise that the deconstruction of femininity and masculinity forms a crucial part of discourse
analysis in Gender Studies. With regard to men and the male gender, Raewyn Connell de-
veloped the theory of hegemonic masculinity, against which subordinated or opposing mas-
culinities are positioned (Connell 1995; Connell/Messerschmidt 2005). The concept was swift-
ly adapted to the Japanese context, and the social existence of the so-called salaryman as the
male breadwinner and economic provider for the family was identified as the hegemonic mod-
el of Japan’s postwar middle-class society (Dasgupta 2013; Roberson/Suzuki 2003; Schad-
Seifert 2007).
Step two: The socio-economic context
Taking the salaryman into the perspective of Gender Studies means framing the study of men
within a larger socio-economic context. The economic crisis after the burst of the financial
bubble in the 1990s had detrimental consequences for Japan’s regular labour market. The
main pillars of the company welfare system, such as lifelong employment and in-house recruit-
ing, started to erode. Under the new legislation of neoliberal deregulation, companies tended
to avoid regular employment of new recruits, relying instead on atypical forms of labour such
as part-time and casual work for men. The fact that men increasingly lost their chances to find
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regular jobs was perceived as generating socially harmful effects, and stirred a debate about
the hegemonic salaryman.
Step three: Material for analysis
The generation of university graduates entering the labour market between 1993 and 2005
was particularly hit by the restructuring measures and they found themselves trapped in a so-
called employment ice age. The discourse around this generation, called rosujene in Japanese—
a Japanese–English abbreviation of lost generation—also created terminologies for explaining
modifications in Japanese masculinities. One of them is the term herbivore man (sōshoku (kei)
danshi)—referring to young men who have lost interest in sex, work and consumption. I chose
the discourse on Japan’s herbivore men as part of my research on men’s studies (Schad-Seifert
2016) and will show in the following how I investigated it through qualitative discourse analy-
sis. Other examples of discourse analysis on the topic are Steven Chen’s (2012) study on herbi-
vore men and consumption, and Constanze Noack’s (2015) work on knowledge and masculin-
ity. After I had screened online and print sources with regard to the above-mentioned context,
one of my noticeable findings was that buzzwords and neologisms such as herbivore man have
drawn public attention extensively. In order to analyse the character of this attention, I applied
Siegfried Jäger’s term interdiscourse, which has to be differentiated from the specialised aca-
demic discourse (Jäger 2004, p. 159).
Interdiscourse refers to all kinds of statements that have not been proven empirically, but into
which elements of academic discourse are interwoven. While specialised academic discourse
aims to accumulate ‘objective’ and ‘true’ knowledge, interdiscourse intertwines this ‘objective’
knowledge with other, non-academic discourse. In so doing, it aims at making information
more relevant and relatable for individuals and their everyday lives by providing concrete im-
ages, identity constructions and possible modes of behaviour (Link 2003, p. 23). Typically,
journalists are key in producing interdiscourse. This is why I collected my main material from
Japan-related media sources with a high circulation in both the Japanese and English lan-
guages. In step five, I am going to provide examples of different types of enunciations on her-
bivore men as threads of discourse (i.e. sequences of discourse fragments with a common
theme) that generate images and models in order to explain so-called odd or non-normative
behaviour among men.
Step four: Identifying the actors of discourse
I found out that the Japanese term sōshoku (kei) danshi was created and has been circulated
by two marketing journalists in particular, namely Fukasawa Maki and Ushikubo Megumi.
With their publications, the term gained such an amount of attention that it was awarded with
the Grand Prize of Buzzwords and Neologisms in Japan in 2009. As a result, it was much re-
ceived and commented on by Japanese and foreign reporters. I argue, based on Michel Fou-
cault’s ideas (1970), that during this process of production, dissemination and reification of
discourse (discursive reproduction), and as an effect of repeated modes of enunciation, herbi-
vore men became a social fact. At the same time, public statements confirmed, complemented
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or rebutted the typologies of the social phenomenon. In my analysis, I tried to capture exactly
this process of reproduction and interaction in discourse.
Step five: Content analysis
From 2006 until 2008, as a columnist for the online magazine Nikkei bijinesu, one of Japan’s
largest business newspapers, Fukasawa (2006) published a 32-part column entitled Marketing
lexicon of U35 men (U35 danshi māketingu zukan). In this column, Fukasawa pictures vari-
ous lifestyles and forms of consumption behaviour of young men between the ages of 18 to 34
years. Among a wide range of types, the herbivore is described as a ‘new type of person’
(atarashii jinshu) that has to be differentiated from traditional male categories. Fukasawa de-
fines two types of traditional male characters: one is popular among women and actively seeks
sexual relationships with them, while the other is unpopular and has no chance of finding a
mate. According to her, recently a new type has emerged: men who are attractive and popular,
but not interested in sex and love, and are therefore called ‘herbivores’ (Fukasawa 2006, p. 1).
What became influential for the discourse is that although Fukusawa identified a variety of
new male types, it was only the herbivore that became so popular afterwards. She quickly re-
sponded to the hype by publishing a book on the The era of the herbivore man (Sōshoku dan-
shi sedai. Heisei danshi zukan; Fukusawa 2008). When sōshoku (kei) danshi reached the top
of the list of the most important Japanese buzzwords in 2009, it seemed undeniable that a
whole generation of young men in Japan had turned into herbivores.
Ushikubo fuelled this impression by maintaining that these guys ‘will definitely be in your sur-
roundings’ (2008, p. 4). She calls them ‘feminine men’ (ojōman) of the herbivore type, because
of their distinct preferences for sweets, fashion and cosmetics, and their strong dislike of prod-
ucts usually consumed by men, such as cars, alcoholic beverages and real estate (Ushikubo
2008, p. 48). The reader is provided with an explanation of why the new generation has lost
its appetite for high-priced products that were considered indispensable in demonstrating sta-
tus in the bubble era. In sum, both Fukasawa and Ushikubo give an account of how the long
recession must have had an impact on the tastes of the young, therefore, making their restraint
comprehensible. This marketing-oriented discourse is clearly written in favour of such femi-
nine men and as a lesson to those markets and producers that have yet to come to terms with
the new tastes and trends in an era of economic decline.
After analysing these two authors’ works as the first thread of discourse, I tried to come to
terms with the spillover of the discourse into Japanese newspaper articles (here Asahi Shimbun
published in 2009 and 2010). My reason for choosing Asahi Shimbun was that it is one of the
largest newspapers in Japan. In addition, I had a pragmatic reason: I was able to access the
newspaper archive from the University and State Library Düsseldorf via CrossAsia (see Peuck-
er/Schmidtpott/Wagner, Ch. 9). I decided the time span for my investigation would be the
years when the discourse started to manifest itself as discursive knowledge in Japanese and in-
ternational media sources. Most of the articles give an account of how and why the phe-
nomenon should be seen as a serious social issue. Concern is expressed about the fact that a
whole generation of young men is becoming feminised and ignorant towards love and sex.
Their passive character in particular is interpreted as a weakness. Alongside their poor physi-
cal strength, all kinds of mental shortcomings are attributed to herbivore men, such as fear of
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failure or lack of ambition. As a third thread of discourse, I took the international media cov-
erage, such as that by CNN, Japan Times Online and other English-language channels, in the
respective time span. One example here is a video report by CNN’s journalist Morgan Neill: It
covers an original video recording that shows Fukasawa—as an expert—who spots herbivore-
type men on the streets of Tokyo, or interviews senior Japanese salarymen, who express their
negative views about the young generation of herbivores (Neill 2009).
Step six: Conclusive evaluation of discourse
Qualitative discourse analysis helped me to show that statements about herbivore men have to
be recognised as a social practice of self-assurance and as knowledge construction of social re-
ality. The traditional salaryman, in other words Japan’s hegemonic masculinity, is defined in
contrast to the men of the lost generation. It is claimed with regard to gender identity that nor-
mal men have a natural sexual need as a carnivore, while herbivore men have lost this interest
in erotic intimacy. This attitude is seen as an expression of a deeper emotional state, which
manifests itself as withdrawal from society and a general passivity. The question of whether
this behaviour is a consequence of the long-lasting stagnation of the Japanese economy can in-
deed be found in the first thread of marketing analysis, but does not determine the discourse in
the articles of the Asahi Shimbun. Rather, the assertion that herbivore men caused the econo-
mic recession with their consumer reluctance tends to use them as a scapegoat. At the same
time, the discourse has produced empirical surveys, according to which society and people in
their everyday lives have started recognising men as herbivores. Moreover, male individuals
are presented as identifying themselves with this character and as calling themselves by this
name. This self-identification is again empirically proven in surveys and interviews conducted
by Japanese newspapers, which—as an effect—generates a high degree of authenticity. Herbi-
vore men are actually starting to exist and to speak. It can be concluded that discourse analysis
helps us to understand how the knowledge production of discourse does not only influence
but also actually constructs gender images in social reality.
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14.2 Analysing affect, emotion and feelings in fieldwork on
Japan
Daniel White
It is not likely coincidental that one of the most iconic early studies of Japanese culture con-
ducted from outside Japan focused so closely on feelings. Ruth Benedict's The Chrysanthe-
mum and the sword (2005) introduced ‘the Japanese’ to both scholars and English-reading
publics through a framework of sentimental polarities. From her culturally relativist perspec-
tive, understanding who the Japanese were required seeing them through contrasting patterns
of discipline and sensitivity. Today, wary of the essentialising effects of her schema, only few
anthropologists of Japan would adopt Benedict’s approach to culture. But it is interesting to
note that in the wake of the decline of the psychological interpretations of culture that she in-
spired (later called the Culture and Personality School), a renewed anthropological interest in
the emotions and, more recently, in affect has emerged. This departure from overarching mod-
els for analysing emotion combined with a recognition of how an increasingly global Japan is
transforming lives on intimate and emotional levels leaves many students and scholars unsure
of how to proceed. The following chapter offers a general framework for attending to and
analysing data focused on emotion and affect, or what we might more broadly call feelings. By
drawing on recent theorisations of emotion and affect in the Humanities and Social Sciences, I
argue that any successful social account of feelings in Japan needs to pay attention to at least
three components: the discursive, the sensorial and their mutual interaction within material
cultural environments.
Discourse and emotion
Despite the variety of methodological approaches to analysing emotion from across the Hu-
manities and Social Sciences, a feature they share is an attention to how feelings are expressed
discursively. A discursive approach analyses how feelings are organised through the represen-
tational practices and codes that assign meanings and values to their expression in processes of
social interaction—including those of both consensus and contest. While there are a variety of
terms under which social theorists have traditionally grouped this aspect of feeling (e.g. senti-
ment, effervescence, emotion, affect, feeling, sensation), a growing consensus has emerged
around the use of the term ‘emotion’ to refer to how experiences of feelings embed themselves,
circulate and acquire affective intensity in part through mediums of representation. Represen-
tational modes of feeling operate primarily through sign systems and processes of signification.
The way different representational systems order and ascribe value to certain categories of
feeling determines how emotion comes to matter in social life. The importance of cultural vari-
ability to this process becomes clear when considering how emic terms like meiwaku (nui-
sance), omoiyari (consideration) or omotenashi (hospitality) guide conduct and interaction in
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Daniel White
Japanese public culture. These key words in Japan’s ‘emotional lexicon’ (Frevert at al. 2014)
not only communicate a sense of how one is expected to express feelings in specific contexts in
everyday life in Japan; they also become values by which national identity is defined, managed
and leveraged towards political expedience in response to perceptions of globally structured
pressures and threats.
For example, consider the importance of the term ‘soft power’, which has captured the atten-
tion of politicians and bureaucrats since the early 2000s. The term describes how a nation-
state cultivates prestige through attraction to its culture, values and policies rather than
through traditional hard power sources such as a strong economy and the military (Nye
1990). Although originally applied to counter critiques of America’s waning power on the
global stage in the wake of the Cold War, the term was taken up by Japan’s politicians, who
used it as a discursive tool with which to recover geopolitical influence in the cultural field
where the nation had lost it in the economic one in the two decades following the collapse of
its asset bubble in 1991. Analysing the rhetoric surrounding soft power in Japan, one can trace
how a hope in the potential for Japan’s popular culture industries to rescue the nation from
decline was both rooted in and generated by discourses that began focusing less on Japan’s tra-
ditional arts and more on those of pop culture and anything marketable as ‘Cool Japan’. One
particularly illustrative example comes in a list of programme themes for the national public
broadcaster’s TV series, Cool Japan (NHK 2010):
Stationery, shopping, winter, examinations, childbirth, childrearing, memorial services,
Japanese men, Japanese women, mothers, fathers, anniversary parties, sweets, discipline,
hot pots, sightseeing, toys, health, luck, rain/the rainy season (tsuyu), privacy, the
Japanese language, and Japanese companies (parts 1 and 2)….
By way of a nation branding strategy that sought to label as many mundane aspects of
Japanese life as ‘cool’, content and policymakers both signalled and produced a discursive shift
that increasingly tied national identity to images of a cool, popular and alternative Japan that
was attractive to foreign consumers. Whether in registers of national politics or of everyday
life, cataloguing discursive shifts in the lexicon, rhetorical strategies, symbolic content and oth-
er representational strategies for ordering and reordering value constitutes a fundamental
starting point for analysing how emotion operates through signifying practices.
The sensorial and affect
Recognising the power of discourse’s impact on emotion is what inspired much of the recent
anthropological and sociological work on feelings that emerged as an alternative to national
character studies; however, facing the limits of discourse is what inspired a subsequent turn to
the body, sensation and affect. Defined in contrast to emotion, in which feelings are rooted in
narrative, symbols and other conscious and forms of representation, affect refers to noncon-
scious intensities and capacities of bodies that do not take shape in the usual signs of discourse
(Massumi 2002). Indications of affect can be found in the seemingly spontaneous emergence
of new political movements, an unexpected meme or slogan gone viral, collective waves of
anxiety or anomie vaguely sensed but not explicitly articulated, or in the unexpected eruption
of anger, animosity and violence. The task of the fieldworker interested in both emotion and
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affect is to account for what is seemingly unexpected or unexplainable through discourse

alone.
Consider again the popularisation of soft power in Japan. What is curious about the excite-
ment over soft power among bureaucrats in the 2000s is how it grew despite a number of
complicating factors: criticism that it was ambiguously defined, a lack of metrics for tracking
growth, stagnation in the culture markets cited as primary soft power resources, and a broad
consensus among nation branding experts that government investment in popular culture of-
ten backfires (White 2011, p. 8–10). In short, despite a variety of criticisms over the potential
for a pop culture-driven form of soft power to revitalise Japan, interest and investment in soft
power grew nevertheless. Contradictions, breakdowns and even profusions of discourse can
often indicate where affect is bubbling underneath. Getting in touch with this requires not on-
ly a discursive mapping of as much of the social, political and other environmental ‘arrange-
ments’ (Slaby et al. 2017) that the researcher can identify as fuelling affect. More importantly,
it also involves paying attention to the body—of both the researcher and interlocutors. In
short, it requires not only an analysis but also ‘practices of feeling with the world’ (De Antoni/
Dumouchel 2017). Indeed, it was only after substantial time doing the same things that policy-
makers do—attending meetings, editing documents, evaluating programmes—that I began to
sense the urgency of my interlocutors. Tuning in to this urgency helped explain the contradic-
tions of logic, tensions in speech, and a variety of creative and experimental policies (White
2015) which were previously unimaginable outside the recent discursive rearrangements of
soft power. Researching affect requires sensing how bodies tense or relax according to certain
situations, noting how environments and events resonate or grate, tracing how moments of
frustration transform into action, and simply but somatically doing what one’s interlocutors
do.
Interactive approaches
Although I have divided the emotional from the affective dimensions of feelings for the sake of
illustration, a comprehensive approach would integrate discursive analyses with sense experi-
ences. Margaret Wetherell (2012, pp. 7, 46–48) refers to these as the ‘looping’ effects of emo-
tion and affect. In my own work (White 2011; 2017), I have used the phrase the ‘affect-emo-
tion gap’ in order to draw attention to how the epistemological fissure between what we feel
affectively and what we know of what we feel emotionally becomes a productive site for fric-
tion generating social and material reproduction, cultural transformation and political contest.
Combining a discursive analysis of emotion with a sensorial analysis of affect allows one to
analyse and ultimately argue for how they are held together in dynamic relation. For example,
making sense of the affective and emotional dimensions of soft power’s rise in Japan required
an understanding of how they are mutually constructed. Soft power cannot be described as
only an affective anxiety over Japan’s geopolitical decline or an emotional hope for Japan’s
resurgence. Rather, its discursive and affective dimensions are held together in a productive
tension. Put summarily, soft power rhetoric functioned as a means to transcribe an ambiguous-
ly described but poignantly felt anxiety over Japan’s present into a communicable and manage-
able hope for its future.
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Daniel White
Conclusion
Although no single strategy of analysing feelings can be applied uniformly irrespective of one’s
particular research aims, a comprehensive and historically sensitive approach would combine
a semiotic attention to discursive ruptures in emotional discourses with a ‘somatic mode of at-
tention’ (Csordas 1993) to affective sensations, tensions, gestures, expressions and atmo-
spheres. Such integrative work can at times seem vague and unwieldy, but it is hardly unempir-
ical. That the process of not only semiotically reading but also somatically sensing feelings at
first involves an abstract relation to affect by no means renders affect unverifiable, as anyone
who has been acknowledged in Japan for ‘reading the air’ (kūki o yomu), or ‘getting it wrong’
(kūki o yomenai), knows well enough. Even more importantly, that this process of verification
is inescapably a subjective one does not then require repressing or removing one’s subjective
feelings from the ethnographic encounter, as if such a thing were even possible; instead, it re-
quires an even more reflexive accounting of them (see Coates, Ch. 3.2; Cook, Ch. 5.1; Spoden,
Ch. 12.2).
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14.3 From buzzwords to discourse to Japanese politics
Steffen Heinrich
In spring 2016, the Japanese government under Prime Minister Shinzō Abe announced that the
fight against excessive working hours and wage inequality was now a major policy objective
for his government. In autumn of the same year, a government-appointed commission present-
ed sharply worded guidelines for future reforms that promised, among other things, to ‘eradi-
cate’ all unjustified differences in the working conditions of so-called regular and non-regular
workers. Many observers at the time wondered whether this so-called ‘work-style reform’
(hataraki-kata kaikaku) programme meant that the male-dominated and business-friendly gov-
erning Liberal Democratic Party (Jiyūminshutō, LDP) was suddenly, and rather unexpectedly,
responding to the concerns of societal groups it had never sought to appeal to previously:
women and non-regular workers. In the following essay, I will show that discourse analysis
can illuminate the motives behind such unexpected policy decisions and help to enhance one’s
understanding of dynamic shifts in Japanese politics more generally.
Political discourse in Japan and the discourse on the work-style reform
Until fairly recently, public political discourse in Japan was usually described as restrained and
as offering little insight into actual policymaking processes. In particular, research on the role
of the bureaucracy and the LDP’s Policy Affairs Council suggested that crucial parts of policy
formulation were happening outside the public’s view (Inoguchi/Jain 2011). This perception
draws mostly from three features of Japan’s postwar politics. First, under the single non-trans-
ferable votes (SNTV) electoral system for the Lower House of the Diet, politicians of the LDP,
the dominant party since its formation in 1955, have had relatively few incentives to mobilise
voters through public speech and detailed policy statements. Instead, they sought to foster
close ties with specific organisations who would act on their behalf. Second, for politicians
their ability to secure support from bureaucrats was long deemed more important for electoral
success than their policy positions. Third, political reporting in Japan was often criticised as
being rather close to the official line of the government, thus providing an incomplete glimpse
on crucial discourses and controversies. This has prompted many scholars to conclude that
‘the discrepancy between façade and substance […] is more pronounced in Japan and may be
the single most important feature to be considered by any analyst of politics’ (Feldman 2004,
p. 8).
However, though this distinction remains relevant, the following sections will demonstrate,
analysing public political discourse in Japan is far from pointless. In fact, such analyses may
never have been as insightful as today, because the link between public discourse and policy
decisions has become stronger since the 1980s. Since then a major reform of the electoral sys-
tem in 1994 and administrative reforms have not only strengthened the role of elected politi-
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Steffen Heinrich
cians vis-à-vis bureaucracy but also the value of public speech and communication in voter
mobilisation. Takashi Inoguchi and Punendra Jain (2011) have described this as a shift from a
‘karaoke democracy’, where politicians merely represent what bureaucrats have conceived, to
a more populist and engaging ‘kabuki democracy’, where politicians mobilise support also by
promoting popular policies. Moreover, not all scholars agree that the representation of public
discourse in the Japanese mass media is overly narrow. Tasaki Taniguchi (2018, p. 123), for
example, even argues that editorials as well as the readership of newspapers vary so much
with regard to their ideological orientations that they offer a range of opinions unseen in many
other comparable democracies. Hence, there are not only good reasons to consider discourse
analysis when studying Japanese politics but there are also several readily available sources on
which such endeavours can draw.
To illustrate how they can be put into practice, in the following sections, I will focus on a spe-
cific discourse that is connected to the buzzword ‘work-style reform’ (hataraki-kata kaikaku).
Such buzzwords can be, under certain conditions, can be signposts of potentially significant
policy changes. The term ‘work-style reform’ has been in use for some time, but since 2016 it
has come to represent a range of issues, including the problem of overly long working hours
and other unfair and overburdening work practices in Japan. The buzzword ‘work-style re-
form’ has even been used frequently outside the political realm. It has been referenced in talk
shows and comedy shows on TV and even in advertisements for products ranging from bever-
ages to a new office building in Tokyo’s Toyosu district. The vast popularity of the term is not
sufficient to asses whether it indeed marks a fundamental policy change or whether this dis-
course is politically relevant. To answer such questions, it is necessary to first establish how
politically salient a buzzword is.
Salience
Political salience—that is, whether a buzzword resonates with the public and remains in use
for some time—can be assessed by using sources such as parliamentary debates, government
documents, manifestos of political parties, opinion polls, political newspaper reporting and
other media. Most of these can be accessed online and analysed with relatively moderate in-
vestments in time. Arguably the quickest and simplest initial option for getting a sense of
salience is to look at how interest in a buzzword has fluctuated in online search queries.
Google trends, a commercial but free tool offered by the Google empire, allows you to survey
the number of web searches for a specific term over time and provides a rough indication of
the temporal changes in interest. Moreover, it indicates, again in a rather rough form, to what
extent a buzzword has attracted interest online over a longer period of time and lists search
queries and keywords that have been used in context. This will work, however, only for
queries that have been fairly widely used as otherwise Google Trends may report that not
enough data is available.
In the case of the Japanese term hataraki-kata kaikaku, the number of queries increased
sharply in late 2016, a few months after the announcement of a government action plan with
the same name, and peaked in early 2019. Among the top five related topics listed are ‘legis-
lative bill’ (hōan) and ‘working time’ (rōdō jikan). Hence, we can assume that the buzzword
‘work-style reform’ has attracted attention at least in part because it is related to specific legis-
398
lation that deals with working hours. To substantiate this further, I then used the online
database of a newspaper and focused on those periods when the number of queries surged.
The big five of Japan’s newspapers, Nihon Keizai Shimbun (Nikkei), Asahi Shimbun, Yomiuri
Shimbun, Mainichi Shimbun and Sankei Shimbun all maintain extensive electronic databanks
of their publications, in which terms and combinations of expressions over several decades can
be searched for. Using Asahi Shimbun’s databank, I found that the announcement to establish
a commission tasked to work out concrete measures for reforming work-styles in early 2016
was the reason for the first hike in interest. The release of a government action plan in March
2017 marks a second peak. This plan entails proposals for legislative changes, many of which
were enacted in April 2019, when search queries on ‘work-style reform’ on Google peaked
overall.
However, this does not suffice to explain the popularity of the term hataraki-kata kaikaku be-
yond policy debates. To shed light on this aspect, it can be worthwhile to draw on polls and
surveys. The national public opinion poll on the livelihoods of the people (Kokumin seikatsu
ni kansuru seron chōsa), for example, has been conducted annually by the Cabinet Office
(CAO) since the 1950s (CAO n.d.) and is easily accessible online—albeit only in aggregated
form. One question that is particularly useful for assessing salience and that has been consis-
tently asked from the beginning surveys the issues citizens want the government to address
with the greatest urgency. Here, I found that the topic closest to the term hataraki-kata
kaikaku, namely work and employment, peaked during the global financial crisis of 2008 and
2009. Although mentions of these terms later declined, it still ranks among the biggest con-
cerns for citizens in Japan. From this it can be concluded that there had been no exogeneous
factor or event that had prompted the government to address work-style reform in 2016, al-
most a decade after the crisis. Instead, the objectives of the reform are, if at all, salient because
they connect to pressing and long-standing concerns of citizens.
Content and context
But what explains the Japanese government’s sudden interest in reforming work-styles? To un-
derstand its motives, I first looked at the aforementioned action plan—drafted by an advisory
committee headed by the Prime Minister—and found four conspicuous statements and expres-
sions: The document claims that 1. the reform aims at changing Japanese work culture, which
often entails excessive working hours for many employees. It uses 2. the term ‘work-styles’,
which describes, in a rather neutral fashion, the variety of employment forms and connected
working conditions instead of the more common distinction between non-regular (hiseiki
koyō) and regular employment (seiki koyō), which has a somewhat more negative connotation.
Although many specific problems of each employment form are acknowledged, the document
does not depict regular employment as a desirable norm, nor does it portray non-regular em-
ployment per se as precarious. Instead, the main objective 3. is to ‘eradicate’ unjustified differ-
ences in the working conditions of different worker groups. To achieve this, 4. the plan is to be
implemented swiftly and in broad societal consensus.
To get a sense of whether the action programme represents a departure from previously held
positions and provides evidence of an emerging consensus, it can be insightful to examine par-
liamentary debates or party manifestos. The former can be accessed and searched for online
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Steffen Heinrich
with keywords via the National Diet Library’s website (see Peucker/Schmidtpott/Wagner, Ch.
9) and the latter, for example, through the Manifesto Project (Volkens et al. 2019). In the case
of work-style reform, I analysed the party manifestos of the two largest parties in Japan at the
time (Heinrich 2017), the LDP and the Democratic Party of Japan (Minshutō, DPJ), for the
lower house election in 2014, the last election before the work-style reform was announced. In
their manifestos, both parties devote a similar amount of text to the issue of work and both
acknowledge that there are discrepancies between the working conditions of regular and non-
regular workers. However, they differ noticeably in their visions for reform. While the LDP’s
manifesto sees higher mobility between different types of jobs as the most important objective,
the DPJ calls for stricter legislation to end practices of unfair treatment and long working
hours. Seen against this background, it appears that with the work-style reform the LDP has
shifted noticeable towards the positions of the DPJ.
In this sense, the buzzword ‘work-style reform’ could indeed signify a shift in Japanese labour
politics. However, newspaper reporting on the actual policy process reveals some important
caveats. For example, Japan’s largest trade union federation Nihon Rōdōkumiai Sōren Gōkai
(Rengō), which had been invited to participate in the drafting of working time policy after
2016 and whose consent had been deemed essential by the cabinet, eventually withdrew its
support for the proposed rules on capping excessive working hours. It gave in to members’
protests, who had claimed that the reform was in effect legitimising rather than limiting exces-
sive overtime.
A similar ambiguity characterises another centrepiece of the work-style reform, the new legis-
lation on improving standards of equal treatment between regular and non-regular workers.
Here, newspaper reporting indicates that the government’s primary goal was to prompt em-
ployers into raising wages in order to support its plan for economic growth known as ‘Abe-
nomics’. Whether the reform would achieve its intended goal of moderating inequality was on-
ly of secondary importance. This is also mirrored in how newspapers discussed the reform
proposal. While the Asahi Shimbun looked at it mostly from a social justice point of view,
Nikkei and Yomiuri Shimbun focused more on its possible implications for economic policy
and growth (this draws on unpublished work by Tamara Fuchs and the author). These differ-
ences hint at a strong strategic motivation for reform, which reflects less an unexpected belief
shift on part of the LDP but instead the strategic opportunity to connect one short-term policy
objective, wage growth, with issues that are known to resonate with many voters. Put differ-
ently, the new labour policy consensus appears to hold only as far as problem perception or
description (diagnostic framing) are concerned, but to a much lesser degree regarding the sub-
stance of policy because the commitment of the government to realizing the objectives of the
reforms often seems to be shallow.
Although this somewhat disqualifies the assessment of the work-style reform as a major
change, it is nonetheless a significant finding as it shows that concerns regarding excessive and
discriminatory work practices are not only salient but acknowledged by parties and politicians
across the political spectrum. This plausibly explains why the work-style reform has resonated
so strongly even beyond questions of policy. Examining the content and context of the buz-
zword ‘work-style reform’ can therefore indeed help us to understand ‘the dynamics of change
(and continuity)’ (Schmidt 2011, p. 107) in contemporary politics and policy choices.
400
Concluding remarks
In this essay, I showed that buzzwords can be a fruitful starting point for an investigation that
aims to shed light on Japanese politics. A note of caution is due, however. Since they are highly
vulnerable towards strategic issue framing, buzzwords are not per se reliable indicators of
transformative change. Only when it can be established that buzzwords are linked to a salient
discourse, can they offer the opportunity to uncover aspects of current political dynamics that
might otherwise remain indiscernible. Discourse analysis can be the method of choice for
studying highly relevant research questions, such as why the Fukushima nuclear crisis led to a
major policy shift in Germany but not in Japan (Rinscheid et al. 2019) or cases of electoral
success and failure of Japanese prime ministers (Sauzier-Uchida 2014). Yet tools and strategies
connected to discourse analysis can also be used to enhance one’s understanding of Japanese
politics or to generate meaningful research questions. Fortunately, nearly all of the sources of
data and tools needed are readily available to scholars regardless of whether they are based in
or outside Japan.
401
Further reading
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Angermuller, Johannes/Maingueneau, Dominique/Wodak, Ruth (eds.) (2014): The discourse studies read-
er: Main currents in theory and analysis. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing.
Gee, James P. (2011): How to do discourse analysis: A toolkit. London: Routledge.
Gee, James P./Handford, Michael (eds.) (2014): The Routledge handbook of discourse analysis. London:
Routledge.
Keller, Reiner (2013): Doing discourse research: An introduction for social scientists. Los Angeles, CA:
Sage.
Schiffrin, Deborah/Tannen, Deborah/Hamilton, Heidi E. (eds.) (2001): The handbook of discourse analy-
sis. Malden, MA: Blackwell.
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Chapter 15
How to finish: Writing in a stressful world
Chris McMorran
1. Introduction
In late 2007, my PhD research in Japan ended several months sooner than expected. I had
been in Kumamoto for 17 months, studying the physical and emotional labour of hospitality
in Japanese inns (ryokan), but my wife and I were not yet ready to return to the United States.
As November drew to a close, our return was decided for us, as we learned that my father was
dying from cancer. He was being moved to a hospice, and if we wanted to share any final mo-
ments with him, we needed to return as soon as possible. Within two days, we packed our be-
longings, sold our car, and hopped on a plane. In a flash, my precious time of field research
ended.
After the funeral and a few weeks spent trying (and failing) to comfort my mother, I took
stock of my situation. I had more than a year’s worth of fieldnotes, transcripts from a few
dozen interviews with ryokan employees and owners, and a mountain of ephemera, like
ryokan brochures and daily work schedules. I needed to make sense of everything and write a
dissertation that would meet the standards of my department, contribute something original to
my discipline and do justice to everyone who had supported my project, from funding agencies
and advisors, to informants and family. I had a six-month writing fellowship waiting for me at
the University of Colorado, but nothing secure after that. My loving partner had made sacri-
fices for me for nearly a decade, following me back and forth between the U.S. and Japan. I
owed it to her to complete the PhD as quickly as possible and begin my career.
I share this critical juncture in my life to highlight some of the ways intersecting challenges—
from disciplinary expectations to time management and family responsibilities—can interrupt
or set in motion the final stages of a research project. In this chapter, I discuss how to turn
one’s research into a coherent whole, while also being pragmatic about organisation, writing
habits, deadlines and more. I highlight the importance of communicating your work to the ap-
propriate audience and establishing routines. I conclude by discussing the importance of main-
taining a healthy work-life balance amid the realities of a precarious job market and height-
ened expectations in today’s universities. I wrote this chapter with PhD students in mind, but I
hope all those who must write to succeed in academia will find it valuable.
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Chris McMorran
2. Getting started
Often the greatest obstacle to completing a project is deciding how to begin. When I returned
from the field as a PhD student, I felt overwhelmed by the volume of information I had collect-
ed and the expectation to contribute something valuable to my discipline of Geography. Some
researchers return from the field to find so much new work has been published on a similar
topic—whether conceptually or empirically—that they fear they have nothing new to say. Oth-
ers struggle to switch from one phase of the project to the next; from collecting data to pro-
ducing knowledge. Sometimes it helps to remember that there is no best way to communicate
research to an audience. You must trust yourself, choose a way and stick with it to comple-
tion.
Fortunately, scholarly outputs follow established patterns, or as Christian Tagsold (see this
chapter, Ch. 15.2) puts it: ‘academic texts follow the rules of their community’. You can use
these rules to your advantage. As a permanent faculty member at the National University of
Singapore, when I first meet graduate or undergraduate students, I suggest they begin any
project by reading several recently completed dissertations or honour’s theses. I do not expect
them to read cover to cover, but to see how the chapters are structured and to understand
what is expected by their department and discipline. How long are they? How are the intro-
duction and literature review structured? Are the methods buried in an early chapter, or do
they stand alone in their own chapter, or are they omitted entirely? What is the overall balance
between conceptual discussion and empirical findings? What is the average number of refer-
ences cited?
All writing must address an audience (see Farrer/Liu-Farrer, Ch 17), and this audience—
whether members of a PhD committee, readers of a particular journal or a general audience—
will expect you to follow a certain structure. PhD dissertations must meet departmental and
disciplinary expectations, and most journals not only have strict word limits, but also may ex-
pect contributors to follow a very narrow style and structure. It is best to understand
these general expectations before you begin writing up.
Key ideas
There is no single best way to structure your work. Refer to dissertations or articles recently
published in your field and take note of standard conventions: length, number of chapters,
balance between conceptual framing and empirical findings, etc. Create a rough outline of
your own work that would correspond to these conventions, then proceed with confidence.
It will never be perfect, but it will be finished.
3. Engaging with theory
While there are well-established ways to structure a dissertation or journal article, there is
more flexibility when it comes to engaging with theory. This is one place where you can ‘be
brave’ (see this chapter, Samuels, Ch. 15.3). In graduate courses, students are often exposed to
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Chapter 15 How to finish
a range of theories and theorists. In my own graduate days, I read Judith Butler (2006),
Michel de Certeau (2011), Tim Cresswell (1996), Michel Foucault (1995), David Harvey
(1989) and Doreen Massey (1994). My professors assigned these scholars, and we spent hours
reading and debating their work. They were held up as exemplars of the ‘big ideas’ our work
should engage with and push in new directions. When we developed our own theoretical
frameworks and imagined the scholarly debates to which our work might contribute, we natu-
rally mentioned these authors. At the same time, we were warned not to simply ‘apply’ their
theories to new cases, especially cases outside the Euro-American theoretical context where
those ideas emerged, such as Japan. Many of us felt stuck. How were we supposed to engage
with those theories? Challenge them? Ignore them? There is no easy answer, but engage with
them we must.
There are many metaphors that can be used to conceptualise such an engagement in the prac-
tice of scholarship: a hunt for knowledge, a garden to be tended, a journey to an unexplored
planet. I find the metaphor of scholarship as a conversation particularly useful. This is com-
monly referred to as the Burkean parlour (Burke 1941), an imaginary room filled with
scholars deep in conversation about a particular field. As you enter the room and walk
around, you overhear different conversations, gradually recognising the big questions in the
field. The real-life equivalent is the literature review (see Zachmann, Ch. 4). Eventually, you
must step into one of the small clusters and join the conversation. Perhaps you know a case
that contradicts, complicates or supports what others are saying. When you write any academ-
ic piece, you must similarly choose a field and join its ongoing conversations. The venue helps
determine the conversation and how you might enter.
3.1. PhD dissertations
A dissertation in History or Anthropology must address a slightly different audience than one
in Japanese Studies, and each work must engage with the field’s central themes. These were
likely established in the research proposal, but now that you have returned from the field (lit-
erally or figuratively), you must contradict, complicate or support the theories and answer the
research questions that framed your study. A dissertation tends to be a very specialised work
written for a very small audience: a committee and perhaps an outside reader. Dissertations
tend to be full of jargon, and most include a long literature review (see Zachmann, Ch. 4) that
serves a specific purpose: demonstrating your broad grasp of the field and providing a concep-
tual framework for your findings. There are many ways to organise and present your empirical
findings in subsequent chapters, but consider how you might arrange them in a way that com-
plements the context of the study. For instance, one of my students did an ethnography of a
Japanese high school in Singapore and arranged his empirical chapters sequentially, from
opening ceremony to graduation (Toh 2019). Similarly, Lieba Faier’s (2009) study of Filipina
women in rural Japan moved from their dreams of working abroad while in the Philippines, to
their entrance into hostess clubs in rural Japan, to their marriage to Japanese men, and finally,
for some, to their decision to run away. Empirical chapters might also be arranged spatially,
moving from one research site to another. For instance, many classic ethnographies of Japan
begin with a walk around a neighbourhood, before going ‘deeper’ inside the businesses and
homes in later chapters (Bestor 1989; Kondo 1990). Finally, you might highlight three or four
407
Chris McMorran
key words or phrases that were meaningful to the people in your study and use each one to
frame a chapter.
3.2. Journal articles
A journal article is a very different piece of scholarship that requires a different way of engag-
ing with theory and presenting empirical results. If it is the flagship journal of a major aca-
demic society, the article will need to address a major trend in the discipline and make a sig-
nificant contribution. If it is a specialist journal or an Area Studies journal, the breadth of the-
ory can be narrower, but the article will need to make a significant empirical contribution (see
Farrer/Liu-Farrer, Ch. 17). Read several recent issues to get a sense of the balance between
depth and breadth. Some scholars write a rough draft of an article before deciding where to
submit it, while others find it more efficient to first identify the journal they want to engage
with. As you read the journal, ask yourself: What conversations are occurring in the discipline,
and how are these being addressed in this particular journal? What are the gaps, and how does
your work address these gaps, either through your empirical or conceptual findings? By writ-
ing your article with a specific journal in mind, you will not only write to suit the journal’s
structure and style, but also be in a better position to join the conversations found in its pages.
For example, a few years after I completed my dissertation, I became excited by the field of
mobilities, especially as its scholarly conversations were being presented in the still new jour-
nal Mobilities (established 2006). ‘Mobilities’ referred to scholarship across the Social Science
fields that understood the movement of people and ideas around the world not as a simple,
free-flowing, judgement-free process, but as deeply meaningful and shaped by political rela-
tions on multiple scales, the creation and policing of borders, and unequal access to movement
based on race, gender, class and more (Sheller/Urry 2006). However, the more I read, the more
I felt something was missing. During my PhD fieldwork in Japan, I had witnessed a complex
relationship between ‘mobility’ and ‘fixity’ (the terms found in the field) among ryokan own-
ers and employees, and a deep ambivalence people felt about both. I did not write explicitly
about this in my dissertation, but when I read more scholarship on mobilities later, I found a
gap in the conversation I could fill. My resulting article in the journal Mobilities drew on find-
ings from Japan to suggest a new way of thinking about mobility (and fixity) beyond
Japan (McMorran 2015). As Richard Samuels (see this chapter, Ch. 15.3) and Kaori Okano
(see Ch. 3) remark, we students of Japan are often told ‘Japan is unique’. However, many of
the questions we ask about Japan apply beyond Japanese Studies. Whenever possible, we
should try to contribute to these broader scholarly conversations, as Samuels did in his work
comparing the post-disaster narratives of 3.11 and Hurricane Katrina, or as Aya H. Kimura
(see this chapter, Ch. 15.1) did through her introduction of the idea of ‘food policing’. Journal
articles provide a useful format for thinking beyond Japan and making theoretical contribu-
tions to wider conversations outside Japanese Studies, and not just adding case studies from
Japan to ideas developed by others.
408
3.3. Books
Books typically provide the most freedom for engaging with theory. One example of an inno-
vative method of engaging with theory comes from anthropologist Nancy Rosenberger in her
book Dilemmas of adulthood (2013). In this study of over fifty Japanese women carried out
over two decades, Rosenberger frames her work within broad scholarly debates about ‘agency’
and ’resistance’, but she does so without the typical literature review. Instead, she reproduces a
conversation she had with two Japanese graduate students one night over Indian food in
Tokyo. Rosenberger tells the students about her struggle to apply these widely-used concepts
to her informants, and a student replies, ‘They don’t fit my feeling of what it is like to be a
woman in Japan now. It’s too hard to resist in Japan’ (2013, p. 4). During the meal, the stu-
dents discuss different authors who have been at the centre of scholarly conversations about
agency and resistance, including Lila Abu-Lughod (1990) and Sherry Ortner (1995), and they
explain why these perspectives don’t exactly suit their own lives. Instead of providing readers a
dry literature review, Rosenberger lets her conversation with the students frame both the exist-
ing scholarship and her effort to join the scholarly conversation with a concept that corre-
sponds better to the experience of these Japanese women: long-term resistance. Through ef-
fective storytelling (see this chapter, Tagsold, Ch. 15.2) and her own version of scholarship as
conversation, Rosenberger reveals both her struggle with theory and her efforts to develop the-
ory to engage audiences beyond Japanese Studies.
Key ideas
Scholarship as a conversation is a useful metaphor for conceptualising the practice of schol-
arship. There are significant stylistic and structural differences between dissertations, articles
and books, but each format requires you to choose your audience, find a gap in the existing
conversation and make an original contribution that engages with theory. In Japanese Stud-
ies, we must find ways to contribute more than case studies that simply support existing the-
ories.
4. Establishing good habits for writing
Once you know how to structure your work and what scholarly conversations you want to
join, you still need to make a habit of writing in order to finish in a timely manner. If you en-
joy writing and always complete work on time and without stress, you may skip this section.
The rest of us must find effective ways to manage our writing obstacles and establish good
habits.
4.1 Avoid writing myths
Writing myths are common ideas people have about writers and writing that can cripple pro-
ductivity. Joseph Moxley (1992) outlines fourteen such myths. These include myths like gifted
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Chris McMorran
writers are overflowing with ideas, writing is a lonely craft best done by introverts and gifted
writers rarely revise. One particularly toxic myth is that writers enjoy writing. In fact, Moxley
notes that many prolific writers freely admit that they don’t enjoy writing. For them, writing
can be painful, but it pays the bills. Moxley argues that if you hold the myth that writers enjoy
writing, you may worry something is wrong with you because you do not enjoy it. To make
his point, Moxley quotes Lafcadio Hearn (1920), an educator and author who lived and
taught in Japan at the turn of the twentieth century, including at Tokyo Imperial University.
Hearn wrote: ‘Nothing has been more productive of injury to young literary students than
those stories, or legends, about great writers having written great books in a very short time.
[…] Above all things do not imagine that any good work can be done without immense pains’
(1920, p. 36; cited in Moxley 1992, p. 8). For a rare few scholars, writing is a joy. But for
most of us (myself included), writing is work, and it is perfectly normal to not enjoy it.
Another obstacle that interferes with writing is the belief that careful scholarship requires long
blocks of uninterrupted time. Whether this means four to five hours of uninterrupted time in a
day or four to five weeks of uninterrupted time during a school break, many people believe
they need such long periods in order to write, and that without such blocks of time, they sim-
ply cannot write. Graduate students without families who have just returned from the field
may experience that rare luxury of a semester, or even a year, to do nothing but write. But the
reality is that most scholars’ lives are full of interruptions, and long blocks of uninterrupted
time are increasingly rare. Those who believe they can only write during long stretches of un-
interrupted time soon find themselves unable to write anything, as teaching, service, job
searches, family, friends, meals, exercise, hobbies, childcare and other essential elements of a
busy, rewarding life make such writing blocks impossible. It is best to develop brief, regular
writing habits early and maintain them as best you can.
4.2. Writing routines
So how can you establish good habits? One particularly prolific writer with something useful
to say in this regard is novelist Haruki Murakami:
To keep on going, you have to keep up the rhythm. This is the important thing for long-
term projects. Once you set the pace, the rest will follow. The problem is getting the fly-
wheel to spin at a set speed—and to get to that point takes as much concentration and
effort as you can manage. (Murakami 2008, p. 5).
Write every day, and as Kimura (see this chapter, Ch. 15.1) points out, this daily practice
should even begin during the research process, ideally during fieldwork. Indeed, routine writ-
ing is one of the central ideas in Robert Boice’s (2000) insightful Advice for New Faculty
Members. Boice’s long-term research with new faculty members suggests that writing for even
15-minute chunks, between meetings or before classes (instead of checking emails or posting
on social media), makes the difference between scholars who are highly productive and just
average.
One trick is knowing when to stop each day. Again, Murakami offers some advice. ‘I stop ev-
ery day right at the point where I feel I can write more. Do that, and the next day’s work goes
surprisingly smoothly’ (2008, p. 5). Samuels (see this chapter, Ch 15.3) mentions a similar
practice by a former professor who never left his desk ‘without writing the first sentence of the
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next paragraph of whatever manuscript he was wrestling with at the time’. These writers begin
each day with momentum.
As for the writing process itself, there are many ways of staying organised. Samuels (see this
chapter, Ch. 15.3) uses physical notecards, which makes it possible to keep everything within
grasp and to quickly make connections that you might overlook. Others organise their ideas
and write in the cloud, which makes it possible to work anywhere, search for terms quickly,
and copy and paste from one place to another. Some write out everything by hand, since they
spend too much time revising when working on a screen. On paper, their ideas flow more
smoothly, and they can cross out a word or insert an idea more easily. Others dictate long pas-
sages to themselves, which they later transfer to the computer by hand or through a transcrip-
tion function. None of these tricks will make writing (and revising and rewriting) easy. Rou-
tine writing will not eliminate the need to wrestle with big ideas or the self-doubt most writers
feel. But by making writing routine, you can keep the ball rolling. If you wait for those big
blocks of time, you may find it increasingly difficult to return.
4.3. Write with others
Another way to help make writing routine is to make writing social. Kimura (see this chapter,
Ch. 15.1) mentions the value of joining a writing group that meets regularly. Both aspects
of this writing group are important and speak to themes covered earlier in this chapter. First,
the writing group meets regularly, which incentivises the participants to maintain momen-
tum. Second, the writing group requires participants to consider the audience. Returning to
the metaphor of scholarship as a conversation, regularly sharing your work with others (either
in your field or not) forces you to clearly communicate your ideas. Having constant feedback
from others in the group, or even hearing your writing read aloud, keeps the project moving
forward and directed at the audience. Some writers work fine alone, setting their own goals
and keeping to a self-directed schedule. But many of us need some peer pressure and support
to accomplish our goals. A writing group makes you accountable to someone who is support-
ive and equally in need of support.
Even if a writing group does not suit your style, remember that you will always be writing
within a community of scholars whose ideas you must engage with. Some fledgling scholars
struggle to decide what to say, largely because they have not yet decided who they want to say
it to. Joining a writing group, or imagining your community of readers, may help you main-
tain the pace and finish the project.
Key ideas
Finishing scholarly projects takes routine and concerted effort. Learn to recognise the obsta-
cles that prevent writing, establish and maintain a writing routine, and make your writing
social by writing to an audience and sharing your work with others. Establish good habits
as early as possible (even during fieldwork), so you can remain active even after other com-
mitments (family obligations, teaching, service, job searching) take up more of your time.
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Chris McMorran
5. Managing mental health
Throughout this chapter, I have implied that completing a research project can be stressful. Of
course, PhD students writing dissertations are not the only ones who feel under pressure. In-
deed, universities have increasingly become institutions characterised by unhealthy and unsus-
tainable levels of competition and stress. In recent years, prospective students have found it
more difficult to gain entrance to them, undergraduates feel more competition to achieve ex-
cellent grades and get a good first job, and many students face rising tuition costs and the
long-term impacts of rising student debt. Graduate students find the job market more competi-
tive than ever, and recent PhD graduates are increasingly turning to precarious, short-term
post-doctoral positions or adjunct teaching positions as they wait for an elusive permanent
job. Plus, the competition among universities in national and international rankings of schools
trickles down to faculty members fortunate enough to have permanent positions. They are ex-
pected to produce a greater quantity and quality of publications; to teach more, with better
student feedback; to do more committee work; to hold more leadership positions in interna-
tional scholarly societies; and to make an impact beyond the university through outreach to
the community or as public intellectuals.
This heightened competition has negatively impacted the well-being of students and faculties
alike. One recent report prepared by the American Association of Geographers cited ‘the pro-
liferating number of peer-reviewed studies which indicate that anxiety, depression, and other
mental-health conditions have reached crisis proportions in the North American academy and
beyond’ (Peake et al. 2018, p. v). While some of the stress of university is inevitable—it is
work after all, and most workplaces involve some stress—you do not have to manage that
stress on your own. I conclude this chapter by discussing ways to manage stress and help co-
produce an academy that is a safer, healthier and more supportive environment for all.
Throughout this chapter, I have argued that being pragmatic—by knowing your audience,
writing to suit the format (dissertation, journal article, book), making writing social, and writ-
ing regularly—can help you manage some of the stress associated with finishing your project.
The key is striving for work-life balance. This means not only writing every day, but also exer-
cising regularly, eating healthy meals, getting enough sleep, maintaining social relationships
and pursuing hobbies. Attend concerts, be active in politics and read novels. Graduate stu-
dents and early faculty members in particular tend to imagine they have no time for these
things, which take precious time away from their writing. But no one can write for ten hours a
day every day without quickly burning out. If you push too hard, you may endanger your
physical and mental health. I have colleagues who scuba dive, sing in community choruses,
play brass instruments and admit (in embarrassment) to watching too much television. These
things make us interesting and make our work lives sustainable. Plus, we need outside sources
of inspiration and perspectives, which are unlikely to come from staring at our own work.
Admittedly, some sources of stress may be outside your control. In the opening vignette, I
mentioned my father’s unexpected death. It prematurely ended my PhD field research, but it
also put my own life in perspective. You cannot plan for such life-altering moments, but hope-
fully you can build a support network of friends, family, mentors and fellow students or facul-
ty members who can help you through. When that is not enough, most universities have coun-
selling services that provide valuable support for anything from writer’s block to family issues
412
and depression. By utilising these services and openly addressing the realities of the stressful
21st century university, we can help destigmatise the topic of mental health in academia and
help make the university more supportive for all.
Key ideas
The 21st century university is a stressful place, characterised by increasing student debt in
many countries and precarious post-doc and adjunct positions, and growing expectations on
faculties everywhere. It is important to care for both your mental and physical well-being by
maintaining a healthy work-life balance and to seek support from professionals when need-
ed.
6. Conclusions
In today’s increasingly stressful universities, completing the final stages of a research project
requires careful planning, a healthy work-life balance and writing, writing, writing. Use the
format and expectations of your venue—dissertation, journal article or book—to help you
plan your writing. Know your audience—both within Japanese Studies and beyond—and join
their conversations through your writing. Avoid common writing myths that may threaten to
derail your progress. Use others, and support them in return, to receive feedback on your writ-
ing and maintain momentum. Plan time for writing as part of a healthy daily routine. And do
not hesitate to admit your struggles and utilise professional counselling services when neces-
sary. Life is messy and largely out of our control. One of the things you can control is your
commitment to writing. Write, and you will feel the satisfaction that comes from completing
projects and contributing to the world of knowledge.
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15.1 Training your ‘writing muscle’: Writing constantly and
theoretically
Aya H. Kimura
As a writer, I have faced multiple issues that are perhaps familiar to many students, such as a
lack of time, self-criticism and the resultant paralysis, or information glut. There is now a lot
of writing on how to write, so I do not want to replicate it here. In this chapter, I will focus on
three issues that might be particularly interesting to Japanese Studies scholars: when to write,
how to make writing social and the audience of your writing. Using the metaphor of ‘writing
muscle’, these three issues might be phrased as follows: Muscle needs to be constantly trained.
Training is fun and often more effective when you do it with others. And muscles need diverse
exercise; you write for different audiences and often we need to stretch our muscle a bit to
speak to the larger, non-Japanese Studies audience.
Write as you go
For those of us who do fieldwork in Japan but do not teach or study there, our time in the
field is often very limited. So there is a temptation to just focus on collecting data (do inter-
views, participant observation) and wait to go home to start writing. Writing up field notes
and interview notes itself takes a lot of time, so I often feel that I am too tired to write any-
thing beyond them. However, writing is not only about communication, but also about analy-
sis. Writing hones thinking and helps crystallise what the researcher is exploring in fieldwork.
There is something about writing that forces you to explain what you are thinking in detail
and in a logical manner, so it is a good idea to always write, even in the field. There is a bene-
fit to this approach of writing during fieldwork. I can think of so many instances when new
ideas about additional interviewees or interview questions emerged in the process of my pre-
liminary writing. And I did not have to wait for another year until I went back to Japan to do
these interviews.
How do I write as I go? I usually create a research log document. Research log documents
could contain free writing in addition to notes on research activities like interviews and meet-
ings. I also create several folders on my computer with emergent themes or book chapters. I
metaphorically ‘throw in’ bits of things as I continue my research. For instance, I might read
some books I feel I could use for theoretical framing. I would write a short summary, create a
Zotero (bibliographic software) entry and insert that citation with my summary into a particu-
lar chapter folder. Never wait to create a bibliographic entry—it will be a nightmare if you
wait until the very end of your manuscript! I might read a newspaper article—I might take a
picture of it and paste that in, or find a web version and put the link in this document, and
write several sentences about it. I also throw paragraphs from my free writing into these fold-
ers. Writing can be like a sport where consistent exercise of your muscle could have a good
414
pay-off. Obviously, there will be a lot of junk in free writing. The point is to use your writing
muscle consistently and to use the momentum when it emerges—even when you feel like you
cannot envisage the whole picture yet.
Making writing social
The word ‘writing’ can invoke the image of a lone writer sitting in a den, staring at their com-
puter. But it can be very communal if you have something like a writing group (Luker 2010).
Having an audience and a sounding board makes writing fun, engaging and less isolating.
When I started as an assistant professor at the University of Hawai‘i, my colleague Christine
Yano invited me to a writing group. What a blessing it was! This writing group’s system is so
brilliant that I believe it has contributed immensely to my productivity. Here is how it works:
the group meets every week. Unlike other writing groups that I had been in, this system does
not require you to produce a full-length paper and read a number of papers by others, which
eats up a lot of time. But our system is to just come prepared to read your writing for seven
minutes. It can be an abstract for a conference, or two pages from your manuscript. You read
and others listen, with pencils and scratch papers at the ready to jot down notes. And then you
read the same thing a second time. After the reading, the listeners take turns giving comments.
Another rule is that when you get comments, you do not debate or argue. You just take the
comments in, and the group moves on to the next person. This way, each person is done with-
in about twenty minutes.
Writing groups force you to produce something weekly at least and get feedback on it. In the
system that I described, reading out loud is also effective in pinpointing what works and what
does not. Because people are listening rather than reading the paper, your sentences cannot be
too dense, which improves the clarity of writing. Writing groups can contain non-Japanolo-
gists. Christine Yano is a distinguished scholar in Japanese Studies and I have benefited im-
mensely from her comments, which are based on a deep knowledge of Japanese culture and
society, but other members can come from outside disciplines. In fact, having those fresh sets
of ears is often very helpful in you not glossing over important issues. Another long-standing
member of the writing group is ethnomusicologist, Jane Moulin. I had little clue what she was
writing about (Tahitian dance and festivities, for instance), and I am sure she was the same
way with my topics, such as Japanese consumer cooperatives and agriculture. But having to
explain your argument without resorting to disciplinary shorthand is really helpful in refining
it.
Writing to different audiences
For those of us who study Japan, it is rare that we can only operate in Japanese Studies. For
instance, topics like post-Fukushima citizen monitoring, food education (shokuiku) or kids’
cafeterias (kodomo shokudō) may all be interesting to Japanologists, but any writing on them
needs to be able to articulate why non-Japanese Studies scholars should also care about them.
It has been one of my biggest challenges to relate to the grant agencies and journal reviewers
who might say, ‘Well, that only happens in Japan. Why should I care?’ I strive to write about
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Aya H. Kimura
Japan in a way that explains why Japanese case studies provide insights into broader dynamics
that affect many other societies.
Of course, this question of broader relevance is not limited to Japanologists or Area Studies
scholars: social scientists who use qualitative methods and Small-N cases face this question,
too, as they try to contribute to social analysis beyond localised and historically specific obser-
vation. If you are conducting in-depth ethnography or interviews with a limited number of
people, the question of broader relevance and importance is paramount. Lofland et al. (2006,
chapters 6 and 7) suggest eight questions with which to frame your analysis so that you can
convey broader sociological relevance. These abstract propositions may help students situate
their Japan-based cases in relation to more general social inquiries. The Japanese case study
might contribute a new setting or identify a new aspect of types, structures, strategy or others:
1. Type: what are the topic’s types?
2. Frequencies: what are the topic’s frequencies?
3. Magnitudes: what are the topic’s magnitudes?
4. Structures: what are the topic’s structures?
5. Processes: what are the topic’s processes, such as sequences and cycles?
6. Causes: what are the topic’s causal relations?
7. Consequences: what are the topic’s consequences, for whom/what?
8. Agency: where is the agency? How do people use strategies and tactics?
When reporting the research results, the use of metaphors and ironies can help abstract your
observation and allow you to move away from local particulars (Lofland et al. 2006). I try not
to come up with new jargon or concepts because I think they tend to unnecessarily make the
writing esoteric and inaccessible. But good metaphors could crystallise the essence of the phe-
nomenon and help to uncover similarities with other contexts. For instance, in my book, Radi-
ation brain moms and citizen scientists (Kimura 2016), I used the term ‘food policing’ to cap-
ture how radiation concerns were seen as harmful and socially sanctioned. This concept
emerged out of my observation of post-3.11 Japan, but has the potential to be applied to a
non-Japanese context where citizens’ fears about food quality may be dismissed and ridiculed
as irrelevant and unscientific.
The challenge is how to do the abstraction, but do it in a way that still captures localised dy-
namics. For instance, another concept that I came up with in the book was ‘activist joshi’. This
may be described as ‘irony’ because activists and girly girls (joshi) are often not thought of as
compatible with each other. I was trying to capture the phenomenon of feminine women who
are socially active but yet friendly and properly feminine (not angry or outraged). In the book,
I tried to explain this in relation to the history of Japanese women’s mobilisation (specific and
localised) but also neoliberal feminism (broader and global relevance). Another way to think
about the broader relevance is to use existing literature and sociological conceptions. I have
been trained in the Extended Case Method (ECM) (Burawoy 2009), so I tend to follow some
variant of it. Using ECM means that I start with some ideas about theories that guide my
questions in my fieldwork. ECM directs you to use a case study; not to come up with a brand
new theory of something but to refine the existing theory. This can happen when you find a
‘puzzle’ or ‘anomaly’ in your case that cannot be explained with existing theories.
Take the case of citizen radiation measuring organisation that I wrote about in my book and
also continue to theorise on in my co-authored book on environmental citizen science (Kimu-
416
ra/Kinchy 2019). I started my fieldwork with some expectations based on existing theories of
citizen science. They tended to portray citizen scientists as mavericks and radicals, using data
to challenge polluting corporations and complacent bureaucracies. The primary example were
environmental justice activists in the U.S. who collected their own health and environment da-
ta to prove pollution and environmental harm in order to hold corporations and government
agencies accountable. But then, once I started my fieldwork and conducted interviews, I found
tremendous diversity in citizen radiation monitoring organisations (CRMOs). There were ob-
viously strongly activist-oriented ones, but I also saw a mail-in CRMO in which there was not
really much interaction between the CRMO and ‘customers’. It could well be like a private
lab. I also saw many that were kind of in the middle—they did not want to seem ‘political’
and they did not want to be seen as ‘activists’. In ECM’s parlance, here was an ‘anomaly’ or
‘problem in the field’ that you could leverage to refine the pre-existing theory.
The difficulty for Japanese Studies scholars or, for that matter, those who work in non-Euro-
American contexts, could be that it would be tempting to see the ‘puzzle’ as something that is
purely explainable due to the case’s non-Western context. For example, the above instance of
subdued political activism on the part of CRMOs may be explained as a manifestation of the
strong state, the weak civil society and the culture of conformity and harmony in Japan. Of
course, these particularities and context dependency do matter. In fact, there is a bit of privi-
lege in being ‘the norm’ if you are doing Sociology in an American context; you do not have to
defend why you are studying the U.S. to journal reviewers and editors. But Area Studies
scholars have to master the intricate dance of not negating the deeply rich history and a cultur-
al understanding of the context that they work in, but retain the ability to talk to broader
scholarship.
Conclusion
Japanese Studies scholars may face challenges of writing in a way that has resonance and rele-
vance to broader academic fields. But this compels researchers to answer ‘so what’ questions
in a focused manner, improving the quality of the writing in the end. Despite the limits im-
posed by the necessity of fieldwork at a distance, writing during research is recommended.
Writing is like a physical exercise: the more regularly you do it, the easier it is to maintain mo-
mentum and continue with it. You can also avoid procrastination and burnout if you do it
with other people. Having non-Japanologists in your feedback circle may also improve your
writing if it helps you to unpack issues that we might take for granted.
Although not a perfect match, the analogy of training muscle is helpful. You need to constant-
ly write to train your writing muscle. Make it engaging and get feedback immediately by hav-
ing a social network that you can turn to. And we need to write to different audiences. Area
Studies scholars often need to justify their case vis-à-vis the presumed ‘universal’ that is often
embedded in Euro-American contexts. But take such pressure as a good opportunity to flex
your writing muscle in new and innovative ways.
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15.2 Writing stories
Christian Tagsold
In the early 1980s, a volume changed the worldview of many anthropologists. In Writing cul-
ture, edited by James Clifford and George E. Marcus (1986), various authors discussed the im-
pact of creating texts in Anthropology—field notes, research reports, but most of all papers
and books. Hitherto, bringing observations, interviews and other anthropological data into a
textual form had mostly been seen as a mere technical task. The resulting text was judged ac-
cording to its ability to convey the meaning of data and theories to its readers. Reviews of
such texts certainly did not neglect style and prose altogether; though they made little effort to
discuss these systematically. The ensuing debate on Writing culture not only influenced anthro-
pologists but spilled over to the Humanities in general. Ever since, our texts have been scruti-
nised not just for their content, but also for the language creating their very meaning. Writing
culture thus brought the gist of the so-called linguistic turn into the realm of academic writing.
The linguistic turn, a theoretical movement of the 1970s, posited that language is not simply
an instrument that replicates reality. On the contrary, it creates this very reality of its own ac-
cord. The ramifications of the linguistic turn may sound terrifying to those who still want and
have to produce texts on their research. But I would argue instead that the self-reflective
stance of Writing culture enables us to think anew about the trade of writing and to develop
stronger self-confidence, ultimately coupled with pleasure, concerning this task. In the follow-
ing, I will introduce a playful approach to organising research results and forging them into
words. This approach frees us from the heavy burden of perfectly replicating reality—a lofty
aspiration that many thinkers of the linguistic turn would ultimately see as vain.
The power of stories
If it is not in language’s ability to faithfully replicate reality, the persuasiveness of academic

texts must lie elsewhere. Two main factors are relevant here. First of all, academic texts follow
the rules of their community. These rules turn strings of words into significant descriptions
which are read, shared, referenced and quoted by other texts of the same genre. Second, texts
gain their power of persuasion from a good and appropriate storyline. It is not enough to
gather data and dump it into a Word document. The data has to come alive before the readers’
eyes. It has to be wrapped into a convincing and compelling narrative. Usually, we learn the
first set of rules at university when being introduced to the craft of writing. Examples consist
of employing neutral, scientific language, which stresses ‘objectivity’ and avoids first-person
pronouns or perspectives. Often enough, however, authors who overemphasise these rules
write quite uninspiring texts because they are terrified of overstepping boundaries. The skill of
forging a good and convincing story, however, is rarely systematically taught. Lately, ‘story-
telling’ has become a fashionable buzzword and is marketed as a miracle cure for academics
418
who struggle to gain the attention of a broader readership. Gurus of scientific storytelling,
such as the mathematician Marcus du Sautoy (2015) and maritime biologist Randy Olson
(2015), argue that by packaging our findings into narratives, our data will arouse wider inter-
est. Furthermore, it will help readers to remember the information better, because humans
have been used to stories as a tool of information for practically as long as we can remember. I
am very much convinced of the power of storytelling myself, but would go one step further.
For the theory of storytelling, the narrative usually comes at the end of a research process.
First, we create data by means of our methods. Then, we analyse this data and draw our con-
clusions in line with the standards of our academic community. Finally, we translate these con-
clusions into a story.
However, I am sceptical about this model, and in my own work stories come into play from
the very beginning. I doubt that we can create good stories without material that has a good
narrative core. But in order to find this core, we must interact with our data within the frame-
work of storytelling at a much earlier stage than in the model just introduced. And we already
do, if we think about it. Even quantitative social scientists rely on the power of typical narra-
tive elements when analysing their data. On discovering a correlation between variables, they
try to find a good and convincing explanation that clarifies why a link exists between two sets
of numbers. Without making sense of the mere mathematical correlation, social scientists
would discard the findings in their data as meaningless and not follow up on this numerical
coincidence. If even quantitative research relies on small stories to stitch the elements together,
qualitative research should do so even more. After all, fieldwork and interviews usually tap a
rich reservoir of stories. People we meet in the field tell us stories about themselves and how
they view the world in informal talks and chats. Interviewees do the same in a more for-
malised setting. Last but not least, written sources like newspaper articles and books employ
stories. Having recorded and gathered these stories from the field, we can rearrange and refo-
cus them to suit our needs and answer our research questions.
Storify but don’t get carried away
My research process revolves around stories and storifying to a large degree. Like most re-
searchers, I enjoy sharing my experiences from the field with colleagues, friends and family. I
also try to draw the attention of like-minded people to my work and test whether my stories
are convincing. Bit by bit, a larger narrative evolves out of small stories, and sharing is often
an excellent test of whether it will carry over into a paper or even a book—this is probably a
good moment to thank all my voluntary, but—most of all—my involuntary listeners over
many years for patiently listening to the stories about Japanese gardens which formed the core
of my book Spaces in translation: Japanese gardens and the West (Tagsold 2017). Thus, one of
my most important pieces of advice to students who are preparing to write a thesis is to go to
parties: when everybody is slightly drunk, try to find someone you like and tell them about
your research. Try to get their full attention for ten minutes! This helps you gauge what inter-
ests potential readers, and it is a perfect way of finding out whether a thread connects the dif-
ferent pieces of the story, which might become chapters of a thesis later on. Without such a
thread, you will quickly lose your audience at the party.
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Christian Tagsold
In addition to telling my stories and narratives to other people, I usually write them down at
an early stage. My preferred piece of software for papers and books is Scrivener, a multifunc-
tional programme for creative writing. Among other things, Scrivener has a corkboard where I
can pin cards with summaries of different text segments. I use this corkboard to store my sto-
ries long before I actually start writing on my findings. When deadlines get closer, I set out
with the introduction, which functions as a schedule and constant reminder of what the text
will be about. I constantly rewrite this introduction as I move towards the finished text, but
also keep in mind that it has to introduce the reader (me first of all!) to a good storyline which
forms the backbone of the full text. The flexibility to change stories throughout the process of
researching and writing and adapt them to new data is one of the most important skills in my
version of storytelling. If I created a convincing story and stuck to it regardless of contradicto-
ry findings, I would wall myself in. However, staying flexible is very much in line with good
storytelling. After all, good stories require unexpected turns and surprising twists. If the reader
knew the end of the story beforehand, they would hardly indulge in reading it! As a conse-
quence, I am usually very happy if new data conflicts with parts of the story already in my
mind or written down in Scrivener. Such contradictions help to form new elements of tension
that ultimately enrich the text.
One of my recent research projects is a good example of this process. I wanted to find out
more about gardens in Kyoto and Tokyo which were commissioned by politicians and the
nouveau riche around 1900. Initially, these gardens were classified as eclectic by garden ex-
perts: not quite Western, but not Japanese either. Lately, however, many of the gardens have
become listed as examples of national heritage for being important ‘Japanese gardens’. The
story thus was about changing perceptions of gardens and incorporating them into the canon
of national tradition. But my further research revealed that the classification of these gardens
is still not fully resolved. Sometimes they are considered Japanese; sometimes they are still seen
as eclectic. Yet these complex classifications are much more telling than a seamless shift from
eclectic to Japanese. These blurred classifications ultimately allow for a richer story, which
does not argue in black and white but exposes a whole spectrum of shades in between.
The same is true for theory. Reading around the topic of one’s research is usually an ongoing
process. We constantly discover books and papers related to our own projects. Some of them
back up our stories, but the more exciting ones challenge them and ask us to move forward
and adjust them. Often enough, I am most inspired by those texts which tell excellent stories
themselves and set an example through their elegance. Bruno Latour’s Pandora’s hope (1999)
is certainly one such book. His description of fieldwork in the tropical forests of Brazil and
interaction with different researchers as they try to make sense of changes in the environment
is a thrilling story. In the end, Latour’s theoretical explanation of this story formed the back-
bone of my book Spaces in translation. Latour’s pursuit of scientific studies hardly seems to
have much in common with Japanese gardens. Nonetheless, his underlying theory made me
understand the communication between Western and Japanese garden experts in a different
light.
420
Conclusion
One of the great side effects of thinking in stories and sharing them with others is that re-
search and writing both get more enjoyable! Certainly, many stories you will encounter are not
of the funny kind. At times, we run into dramas and tragedies. During my research into care
homes for the elderly in Japan, not everything I saw was pleasant. However, some moments
were truly heart-warming. One old woman, who had developed severe Alzheimer’s, called me
a ‘star-grabber’ each time she saw me and never failed to explain that in her youth tall people
were nicknamed that way—and I enjoyed her attention each time. Even the most burdensome
fieldwork experiences become less depressing when shared with friends as a story. Often
enough, theoretical issues only become clearer through the process of storifying. Talking to
friends and colleagues will help straighten out the story. In addition, talking to different peo-
ple helps you to avoid an obtuse style and accustoms you to writing for a broader public. This
brings me to my final suggestion: writing about your topics in non-academic contexts can very
much help to make your style more accessible. A couple of years ago I had the pleasure of au-
thoring a popular book on Japan (Tagsold 2013) for a well-established book series on various
countries. This experience did not directly translate into my more academic texts, but it helped
me to reflect more on style and the expectations of my audience—and once again the power of
stories as the book was largely built around anecdotes of my time in Japan, which I used as
starting points for more general reflections. My next book Spaces in translation: Japanese gar-
dens and the West gained very much from this as I started each chapter with a stroll through a
garden and thus attracted my readers to my more abstract conclusions through a vivid story
connected to the core topic of gardens. However, you do not have to start with a book. A blog
or a short article in a popular magazine is a great start too!
421
15.3 Writing about Japan
Richard J. Samuels
I have been asked to think aloud about how to write about Japan. It is hard to know where to
begin. But I am reminded of the frequent (and always unsolicited) advice of the great China
scholar and political scientist, Lucian Pye. When passing graduate students in the hallway, he
invariably asked us: ‘Are you being brave, scholar?’ We were not sure how to respond, so we
all smiled and walked on. But I have never forgotten that rhetorical question, and over the
course of a long career writing and teaching about Japan, I have come to realise he was not
joking.
‘Brave’ means many things, of course, but it appears as a choice in one form or another at ev-
ery stage of the writing process. This starts with choosing a topic. It is easier to take on sub-
jects that have already been validated by mentors and peers than it is to get out ahead of the
discipline and outpace one’s teachers. Anyone ought to be able to review existing literature
and identify a narrow niche in which to drill down for new information. But it is much more
difficult—and riskier—to ask new questions and explore the previously unexplored. Great
teachers should not mind.
The same goes for scholars’ choices of methodology—the way they approach the chosen topic.
There are plenty of ‘plug and play’ approaches to any topic, including Japanese Studies. But
only the brave scholar will attempt to hack through the undergrowth of difficult problems
with new tools. The risks are greater, and for some the rewards may not warrant taking them.
But the brave scholar will discount the risks and tackle the problems head-on and creatively.
And again, teachers should not only not mind, but respond enthusiastically.
There are norms in every field, not least of all in Japanese Studies, where one is taught the im-
portance of decorum. But the problem with excessive decorum is that one may end up writing
for one’s mentors—and to ensure one’s own job security—rather than to generate new knowl-
edge. This can constrain creativity. In my own case, this challenge was most painfully manifest
when I asked my teacher (onshi) for an affiliation at his new research centre in Tokyo. He de-
clined because my topic—one on which he had organised an impressive study group—was ‘too
sensitive’. Then, when I asked for a copy of his group’s published report, he ignored the re-
quest. Since I had followed all the ‘rules’ of ‘Japanese Studies 101’, including regular greetings
(aisatsu), gifting and accommodating him over many years, and since he was supposed to be
an academic, I was shocked. In the event, I wrote the book I wanted to write and it won a
prize. But I suffered for doing so, as I never met him again and was excluded from a range of
relevant activities in Japan for at least a decade. Lucian Pye’s injunction to be brave was in my
head throughout.
Where do topics come from? In my experience, research projects have always had an organic
quality to them. Small topics have taken me to larger, wholly unanticipated places. In one case,
I was interested in trying to understand how Japanese firms could collaborate in applied re-
422
search, a widespread practice in Japan in the 1970s–1980s that was contrary to what I was
taught about market competition. U.S. textbooks on technology management described such
behaviour as collusion. That short study of research collaboration became a book on tech-
nonationalism (Samuels 1994). In another case, tired of hearing second-hand (and unconvinc-
ing) explanations for why Japan’s Cabinet Legislation Bureau was so powerful, I tried to un-
derstand what it actually was and what it actually did. This grew into a book on Japanese na-
tional security and grand strategy (Samuels 2007). My current example is research I undertook
in order to understand Japan’s highly controversial State Secrets Law in 2014. Before I knew
it, I had stumbled into a book project on the Japanese intelligence community (Samuels 2019).
But I must confess that there were times when I did not ‘listen’ to my projects, times when I
was insufficiently curious or, I might say, excessively polite. This was the case in a study I did
on Japanese energy markets (Samuels 1987). In the chapter on nuclear power, I neglected to
ask the hard questions about Japan’s possible interest in nuclear weapons. I suspect I was too
wed to the conventional wisdom about a ‘nuclear allergy’ and to the idea peddled by diplo-
mats and politicians that a nation that had suffered a nuclear attack would never arm itself
with nuclear weapons. Now that the archives are open a crack—and now that Japan is con-
fronting the possibility (and potential consequences) of a leaky U.S. nuclear umbrella—that
idea seems quaint. I finally scratched that itch 30 years later, but still wonder why so little at-
tention has been paid to the topic. Insufficient bravery and excessive decorum, perhaps.
Each of these projects—and each of the others I have tackled over the years—try to place con-
temporary Japan in comparative and historical perspective. After all, without a historical and
comparative context, how can one establish a clear and comprehensive portrait of any coun-
try? How does one know what questions to ask? As my Japanese friends never tire of remind-
ing me, Japan is unique. But, since every country is unique in its own way, I have always found
this a tiresome and trivial claim. (For the record, I find it just as exasperating when the same
claim is made about the United States.) As someone determined to make Japan comprehensible
to the rest of the world without resorting to essentialist (and tautological) claims, it has always
seemed more important to show how and why Japan is different. Not surprisingly, in that pro-
cess one learns that Japan may be differently different than other countries are, and that in the
areas I have cared most about—politics and public policy—Japan exhibits many of the same
strengths and weakness as the rest of the world. One thing is certain: Japan is more compara-
ble in generic terms than we have been taught.
I first realised this in a project I conducted regarding political leadership (Samuels 2000). A
historical comparison with Italy revealed that Tokyo did not have any greater ‘leadership
deficit’ and did not suffer from a bureaucratism that was any more insidious than Rome’s. In
fact, each had to accommodate to prewar authoritarianism and to the same postwar U.S.
agenda, and they did so in parallel ways. Likewise, I learned in a project on national grand
strategy that, contrary to what we are often told, Japan has never lacked grand strategists.
And in a study of the 2011 triple disaster in Tohoku, it helped to compare the national dis-
course of failure in Japan to the one after Katrina in the United States in 2005 and to the one
in Sichuan in 2008 (Samuels 2013). These histories and these comparisons have always been
the most reliable guides to know what questions to ask about Japan—at least for me. As I fig-
ure it, if one does not know what questions to ask, any answer will suffice. I have long had the
sense that effective scholarship on Japan depends on how the scholar engages with—and
knows—what is truly sui generis and what is merely a variation on a widely shared problem.
423
Richard J. Samuels
Other contributors to this volume have spoken on the issue of how to collect data, and I have
addressed briefly how I try to know what data to collect. But this raises a next order—and
equally critical—question: How do we make sense of the data we collect? Must we be brave
here too? The short answer is ‘Yes.’ The longer answer is ‘Absolutely.’ It takes guts to ignore
data that one has collected often at great personal cost in terms of time and energy. I have
found that tossing materials that are original to my work is equal to the most difficult decision
I have to make, and I have discovered that when I am writing I have had to make those deci-
sions many times each day. Outlines are useful, but can only take the author just so far. The
true organisation of collected data only emerges when one sits down to write. This is when
data prove their worth—or their irrelevance. One must be undaunted by the fact that much of
what one has collected inevitably falls, as filmmakers say, to ‘the cutting room floor’. It takes
guts and is always painful to let material go.
My colleagues and students are always intrigued by how old-fashioned I am regarding the or-
ganisation of what I learn. And, I am indeed ‘old school’; I use a system I learned in high
school, at a time when we used slide rules, rather than computers. (I mean it when I say ‘old’; I
wrote my first book on a portable typewriter.) Still today, rather than store everything on a
computer, I do what I have always done: transcribe facts and interview notes on what we in
the States call ‘3 x 5 note cards’. I make no claim that my system is as efficient as Niklas Luh-
mann’s famous ‘Zettelkasten’, but it has worked for me. Certainly one size does not fit all. No
two scholars approach their analysis the same way. I urge my students to be pragmatic, to use
what works and perfect it in their own way. But, for me, it has always been the note card. I
would not claim that index cards produce a manuscript or enhance one’s bravery quotient, but
in my experience, they do help produce a first draft by making it easier to sort and toss.
There are several reasons why this is so. One benefit of the note card system is that it is nearly
impossible to fill any single card with more than a single idea or set of data. This means that
once it is used to transfer ideas or facts from card to a screen, it can be filed (and even forgot-
ten) behind a divider labelled ‘used’. It can also be filed under an omnibus divider labelled ‘un-
used’—the author’s cutting room floor. Another benefit is that note cards can be numbered
and cross-referenced.
The genius of the system is not its user, of course, but its utility. In particular, I have found
note cards to be amenable to migration in two ways: The first is when cards that are at first
filed behind a divider that is labelled ‘Japan’ are re-sorted behind a divider labelled ‘Japan—
Prewar’, and then, as the data inevitably grow, are moved to ‘Japan—Prewar Military Strate-
gy’, before being further subdivided into ‘Prewar Strategy—Imperial Army and Imperial
Navy’, and so forth. Collected and organised this way, note cards are almost amoebic. They
have a way of not only forming themselves into new topics and subtopics, but into whole
paragraphs as well.
The second aspect of the mobility of cards is that they are portable. Once these amoebae have
formed a critical mass of ideas/facts/data—and only an author can judge when that occurs—
they can travel with the author far from the field or their home institution. It is awkward to
say so, but there are benefits to being able to write at a distance from one’s subjects, colleagues
and students. One can be as fond of all of them as I am, but still must confess that being in
their midst is suboptimal for communing with one’s note cards.
Everyone has their own system, and most of us can benefit from learning more about those
developed and deployed by other scholars. Indeed, here is where Professor Pye comes back in-
424
to the picture for me. I do not recall if he used note cards or not—I only remember his long
yellow legal pads (notepad)—but he was astonishingly prolific and always willing to explain
his productivity to graduate students. The secret, he revealed, had two steps. First, he would
block out several hours every day for writing. Usually, that was at his desk at home. No tele-
phone calls were allowed to intrude and, of course, email was not a problem in his day. And
second, he made sure never to leave his desk without writing the first sentence of the next
paragraph of whatever manuscript he was wrestling with at the time. That way, he pointed
out, he never had to spin his wheels trying to find traction during the rare and dear moments
he was free to compose text.
Of course, none of this applies to an indifferent or craven scholar. At the end of the day, moti-
vation is the equal of bravery as an important ingredient. After all, one must awaken each
morning eager to continue wrestling with ideas and generating text. Often—too often, perhaps
—this is not much fun. But unless it is always stimulating, it is not worth doing. Nor does any
of this apply to a scholar who is content to till well-furrowed rows. To be an effective scholar
in any field, one should be a bit of a ‘Contrary Mary’, my father’s favourite term for me. As in
any other discipline or Area Study, in the case of Japanese Studies, this involves reflexively
questioning what we think we know and what we have been told is true. After all, ‘conven-
tional wisdom’ is conventional for any number of reasons, only one of which may be because
it is true. Keep in mind that like bureaucrats, politicians, activists and everyone else, scholars
have an agenda. Interrogate it, but not just for the sake of interrogation. A healthy and civil
commitment to questioning what we think we know is the only sure way to improve upon
what we actually do know. This applies not just to Japan, but to any other topic of study, and
ought to lead us to generate better knowledge. This is, after all, the business to which scholars
must commit—and serially recommit—themselves.
425
Further reading
General
Elbow, Peter (1998): Writing with power: Techniques for mastering the writing process. Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
Fernandes, Sujatha (2017): Curated stories: The uses and misuses of storytelling. New York, NY: Oxford
University Press.
For PhD students

Bolker, Joan (1998): Writing your dissertation in fifteen minutes a day: A guide to starting, revising, and
finishing your doctoral thesis. New York, NY: H. Holt.
Lewin, Beverly A. (2010): Writing readable research. A guide for students of Social Science. London:
Equinox.
For new faculty members

Boice, Robert (2000): Advice for new faculty members: Nihil nimus. Boston, MA: Allyn and Bacon.
Caro, Sarah (2009): How to publish your PhD: A practical guide for the Humanities and Social Sciences.
Los Angeles, CA: Sage.
Germano, William P. (2013): From dissertation to book. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press.
Kelsky, Karen (2015): The professor is in: The essential guide to turning your Ph.D. into a job. New York,
NY: Three Rivers Press.
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Chapter 16
How to conduct reliable and fair research:
Good research practice
1. Introduction
Throughout the research process researchers need to employ good research practice, academic
integrity and research ethics. These can include properly quoting sources, ensuring fairness
and respect towards the work and findings of colleagues or protecting the privacy of intervie-
wees. Ethical considerations related to scholarship on Japan have only been discussed infre-
quently within the international scholarly community (Bestor et al. 2003; Reiher 2018;
Robertson 2007), but the March 2011 tsunami, earthquake and nuclear disaster in Japan have
somewhat spurred discussions about ethics, the perceptions of the role of researchers and their
responsibility towards those being studied (Gill 2014; Numazaki 2012; Yamashita 2012). But
reliable and fair research encompasses more than just fieldwork ethics, and we must adhere to
the fundamental rules of good research practice in general, no matter what kind of research
we conduct.
In this chapter we will provide an overview of these rules used by academic institutions and
funding organisations worldwide. We think that ethical considerations are particularly impor-
tant for Japan researchers because of the multiple translation processes throughout the re-
search process, including the translation of legal, technological and social norms during field-
work or literally translating scholarly literature written in Japanese. Therefore, this chapter
aims at introducing readers to guidelines for good research practice, raising awareness about
research ethics and encouraging researchers and students to critically reflect on their own re-
search practice(s).
After discussing what constitutes reliable and fair research in general, we will provide an
overview of good research practice in the study of Japan throughout the research process and
particularly in three different stages: 1. research design and data collection, 2. data manage-
ment and 3. the writing process. The chapter closes with a discussion of open scholarship in
the Japanese Studies community. In order to break down the sometimes abstract rules, we will
discuss examples from research on Japan, drawing on our own experiences and the three es-
says accompanying this chapter (see this chapter, Gagné, Ch. 16.1; Gerteis, Ch. 16.3; Slater et
al., Ch. 16.2). While advanced scholars will be familiar with some parts of the chapter, we ad-
dress all scholars using sources from Japan or conducting research in/on Japan. The chapter
can be used as an introduction to research integrity by lecturers teaching undergraduate classes
or when planning your own PhD or research project.
428
Chapter 16 How to conduct reliable and fair research
2. What constitutes reliable and fair research?
Research is a social activity and involves numerous people, such as colleagues, students, re-
search participants or funding organisations. It is often characterised by unequal power rela-
tions in a field of complex responsibilities. Ethical challenges lurk in almost every stage of the
research process, and it is necessary to make—sometimes difficult—choices and constantly as-
sess their consequences (AAA 2012, pp. 2–3). Although most people would agree that research
should rest on international and interdisciplinary principles (DFG 2013, p. 67), it is not al-
ways easy to define and to follow these principles to ensure reliable and fair research. They
differ from country to country and among organisations and disciplines. Things get even more
complicated when, as is the case in the study of Japan, research is conducted transnationally,
possibly in international teams from several universities located in different countries.
By now, most universities, funding organisations and academic associations have adopted ethi-
cal guidelines or principles. For example, All European Academies (ALLEA 2017), the Japan
Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS 2019) and the Ministry of Education, Culture,
Sports, Science and Technology (MEXT) (2014) in Japan have decided on standards for re-
search integrity, rules of good scientific practice and measures against misconduct. Most uni-
versities around the world have established their own ethics guidelines. Universities and fund-
ing organisations often have ethics committees and ethical review boards—or institutional re-
view boards (IRB), as they are called in the U.S.—to which researchers have to submit their
research proposal for approval in order to undertake fieldwork. This is common practice in
the U.S. and is becoming increasingly common in European countries and in Japan.
Despite the plurality of guidelines for and definitions of fair and reliable research, there are
some values that are universally shared across national borders and disciplines (DFG 2013, p.
67). They rest on an understanding of research as ‘the quest for knowledge obtained through
systematic study and thinking, observation and experimentation’ that aims ‘to increase our un-
derstanding of ourselves and the world in which we live’ (ALLEA 2017, p. 3). Because re-
search is foremost about creating knowledge and not about individual researchers and their
careers, all researchers have a responsibility to comply with the principles of research integrity.
The European Code of Conduct for Research Integrity (ECCRI), for example, introduces the
following fundamental principles of good research practice.
Principles of good research practices

‘Reliability in ensuring the quality of research, reflected in the design, the methodology,
the analysis and the use of resources
Honesty in developing, undertaking, reviewing, reporting and communicating research
in a transparent, fair, full and unbiased way
Respect for colleagues, research participants, society, ecosystems, cultural heritage and
the environment
Accountability for the research from idea to publication, for its management and orga-
nisation, for training, supervision and mentoring, and for its wider impacts’
(ALLEA 2017, p. 4)
429
Ethical guidelines and principles can be helpful in making informed decisions in difficult situa-
tions, sensitising researchers to ethical issues and encouraging students and researchers to re-
flect and be critical. This is particularly important when using digital methods and the Inter-
net1 for data collection on human subjects. Thus, students and researchers should familiarise
themselves with their own institution’s as well as their host institution’s and their discipline’s
guidelines and procedures for good research practice (O’Reilly 2012, p. 62).2 But why should
students care about these ethical guidelines? Because the guidelines address not only fieldwork
ethics, but also how to present other researchers’ findings in a term paper or dissertation in a
fair and transparent manner. Therefore, it is also the responsibility of university teachers to
convey these principles to their students and young researchers (DFG 2013, p. 67).
Why is it important to follow these rules? Research misconduct can have serious consequences
for research participants, researchers, a researcher’s institution and sometimes the discipline or
academia as a whole. Falsification of data is prominently and frequently featured in interna-
tional media. In Japan, for example, a researcher from Nobel laureate Yamanaka Shinya’s
stem cell research team was found to have published falsified data in 2018 (Reuters 2018). In
Germany, PhD plagiarism scandals have ended the careers of several high-ranking politicians.
In times of increasing mistrust in research and decreasing budgets for Social Science in particu-
lar, incidents like this shake people’s trust in research and harm academia as a whole. The con-
sequences for violators of good research practice differ among institutions. Students caught
plagiarising may fail their exams or be expelled, researchers can lose their jobs or be stripped
of their qualifications long after being awarded them. Nonetheless, the harm caused to others
by misconduct is even worse.
The American Anthropological Association’s Principles of professional responsibility (AAA
2012; see also Tagsold/Ullmann, Ch. 8) provides more hands-on rules that help researchers to
stay honest and true to the fundamental principles of good research practice.
American Anthropological Association’s principles of professional responsibility

1. ‘Do no harm.
2. Be open and honest regarding your work.
3. Obtain informed consent and necessary permissions.
4. Weigh competing ethical obligations due collaborators and affected parties.
5. Make your results accessible.
6. Protect and preserve your records.
7. Maintain respectful and ethical professional relationships.’ (AAA 2012)
These rules apply to all steps in the research process from identifying a topic to publishing
your work, and we will explain the ethical considerations involved in each step below.
1 For more information on ethics in Internet research, see for example AoIR (2019) and NESH (2019).
2 There are great differences between countries and institutions; thus readers should check the ethics guidelines of
their own country, university, scholarly association or funding body.
430
3. Good practice during the research process
Doing research is a process of many different steps that are often carried out in a circular
rather than a linear manner. Research often begins with a research question and the designing
of a research project and continues with the collection and analysis of information and data,
eventually culminating in the researcher reporting the results. Acting in a fair and reliable
manner throughout all these steps constitutes ‘scientific integrity’, which makes research ‘trust-
worthy’ (DFG 2019, p. 7). The freedom of research guaranteed by most countries’ constitu-
tions comes with responsibilities for every researcher, who should take them into full account
(ibid.). The following sections look in more detail at the challenges all researchers face when
trying to adhere to the standards of good academic practice during research. We discuss exam-
ples of scholarly misconduct, such as plagiarism and abusing the trust of colleagues and part-
ners, but also give positive examples of good research practice.
3.1 Research design and data collection
Ethical guidelines are just that—guidelines, and there is no one-size-fits-all solution. Therefore,
researchers have to solve the various ethical problems they encounter on a case-by-case basis
(O’Reilly 2012, p. 62). This begins when defining a research topic and question and continues
when collecting data, particularly when this happens via fieldwork (see McLaughlin, Ch. 6).
When beginning a project, students especially wonder if they can work on a research topic
others have already written about or are still working on. The answer is ‘yes’, but the first step
is to review the scholarly literature on what has already been done in your respective field (see
Zachmann, Ch. 4) in order to decide what you want to and actually can contribute to ongoing
debates. It is the responsibility of every researcher to explain the selection of research topics,
question, designs and cases honestly and in a transparent manner and to respect their col-
leagues’ work (see Gerteis, this chapter, Ch. 16.3). For example, asking similar questions or
analysing issues from a similar perspective as other scholars is okay as long as you reference
their work and your research produces new insights. This might be the case when you ask the
same questions to analyse a different time period or different empirical materials.
When collecting data, researchers are confronted with more ethical challenges. Social scientists
collect data about people and organisations through surveys, interviews, experiments and ob-
servations. But because ‘people are not your data’ (see McLaughlin, Ch. 6) ethical standards
and legal norms must be observed to protect their rights and autonomy when collecting per-
sonal data. Researchers must obtain permission to collect their data and grant them the right
to anonymity (GESIS 2018, pp. 1–2). When collecting data through fieldwork in or outside
Japan, researchers should reflect on ethical challenges and obtain approval from their institu-
tions’ ethical review board, if required (Bestor et al. 2003, p. 13).
Although the rules of good research practice claim universality, there are some specifics to the
Japanese setting where trust is very important. Theodore Bestor et al. (2003, p. 14) explain in
detail how borrowing trust from a host institution or people willing to act as ‘social guaran-
tors’ creates sensitive social relationships affected by your behaviour in the field. This is true
for your informants, yourself and the person who made the introduction, since the latter is the
431
one research subjects will complain to if difficulties arise. Not considering the importance of
trust relations can cause harm in various ways. Imagine, for example, you introduce a col-
league to several of your research participants from Japan during a workshop. The colleague
later visits your informants to conduct research similar to your research in the same places
without telling you but pretends to the informants she came based on your introduction. Later
you receive emails from your research partners, who complain about your colleague’s be-
haviour, alleging she had not shown up for appointments or had asked inappropriate ques-
tions during interviews. It will take you quite some time to restore their trust and to sort
things out. This example shows how the behaviour of one researcher in the field can harm the
trust relations between research participants and another researcher, whom they considered to
guarantee the trustworthiness of the other researcher. You should always keep this in mind
when being introduced to research participants through others.
However, this example also raises another question: Is it okay to conduct research at another
scholar’s field site? Theoretically, yes, because scholars do not own a field site, but it is impor-
tant to talk to the colleagues who are already conducting research there, especially if they are
working on a similar topic. Ignoring their work or behaving in a way that discredits them is a
serious violation of good research practice. You need to mention previous research. Just imag-
ine anthropologists conducting research in Suye Mura or Onta without mentioning the work
done by John Embree (1946) or Brian Moeran (1997). Collaboration is always best, but it can
be difficult at times, for example, when senior researchers ask you to share your informants’
contact details. This reflects how unequal power relations can affect fieldwork ethics. In such
a case, the protection of your research partners’ privacy and the hierarchies within academia
can conflict with each other, and it is important to talk to supervisors, colleagues or an om-
budsman to solve ethical problems that may arise.
Trust is not only important for gaining access to a field site, but throughout fieldwork. This is
particularly true for anthropologists who live with people and develop intimate and reciprocal
relations with their research partners. Trust, vulnerability, and reciprocity are often closely
linked. Researchers might try to gain their interlocutors’ trust by sharing their own experi-
ences, but this makes researchers themselves vulnerable (Alexy/Cook 2019, p. 236). This vul-
nerability can be emotional, when listening to disturbing stories, or sometimes physical, when
entering dangerous situations (ibid, pp. 246–247). The vulnerability of the people we conduct
research with is just as important. They might be vulnerable because they are poor, discrimi-
nated against or have been traumatised by a disaster (Gerster 2018). Research on minors
comes with particular ethical issues as Kathryn E. Goldfarb (2019, p. 252) explains, drawing
on her research about foster care, adoption and life within Japanese child welfare institutions.
Although she had received clearance to interview children and even prepared a child-friendly
oral informed consent form, she realised that ‘informed consent’ in this context was ‘meaning-
less and misleading’, because the ‘children were already documented and traced in so many
ways they could not control’ and she decided not to write about them in a language they did
not know (ibid.).
This example shows that even when informed consent is obtained, ethical questions remain.
Yet, most guidelines for good research practice strongly recommend seeking written consent
432
from research participants (see Slater et al., this chapter, Ch. 16.2).3 In Japan, written con-
tracts cannot always be used because they ‘would call into question the researcher’s cultural
understanding and trustworthiness’ (Bestor et al. 2003, p. 14). While introductions and the
trust they create might still suffice in some research contexts in Japan, many universities or
funding organisations require written consent. No matter how research participants’ consent is
documented, it is necessary to obtain your research participants’ permission to conduct re-
search.
There are cases where gaining the full consent of the research participants is not possible and
they might not know that they are being observed. This is called covert research. Ideally re-
search is conducted openly—overtly—and all participants know about the researcher’s iden-
tity. Social Science associations and funding organisations advise against covert research be-
cause it can harm research participants through ‘deception, dishonesty, invasion of privacy and
lack of consent’ (O’Reilly 2012, pp. 64–65). But some scholars call for ‘situated ethics’ in the
field, because there are cases in which information can only be collected through covert re-
search (Calvey 2008). In reality, the distinction between covert and overt research is blurred
and depends on the type of research and its goal (see Yoshida, Ch. 5).
Using social media during the research process, for example to gain access to the field, to learn
about research topics and important actors in your field site or to keep in touch with your in-
formants after fieldwork ends raises new ethical problems (AoIR 2019). Even if you don’t
maintain an online presence to stay in touch after leaving Japan (see McLaughlin, Ch. 6), the
importance of protecting your own privacy and that of your interlocutors, and critically re-
flecting on fieldwork ethics for online research is indisputable. Levi McLaughlin (see Ch. 6)
gives valuable advice on how to protect interlocutors’ privacy online. Julia Gerster (2018) re-
veals how in her research on social relations in municipalities in the Miyagi and Fukushima
prefectures after the March 2011 triple disaster, online and offline worlds merged and affected
social relations within the communities she studied and between her and her research partici-
pants. When one is researching controversial topics, openly sharing photographs or the names
of informants online can cause problems for researchers and informants alike. Through social
media, it might be easier to find out who talked to whom about what, but ‘researchers are less
in control of how information is shared and who will be able to access it’ (Gerster 2018, p.
30). While recommendations by ethics committees help to address some of these issues, many
problems related to social media are not yet covered by such guidelines.
Online research and staying in touch with informants via social media pose new challenges in
terms of the protection of interlocutors’ privacy and their anonymisation, but anonymisation
was not particularly easy before the emergence of the Internet. While it is important to ensure
informants’ anonymity in order to encourage them to speak frankly, during her research in ru-
ral Japan, Cornelia Reiher experienced that anonymisation can be tricky when everybody
knows each other (Reiher 2014; Reiher 2020). Sometimes, even pseudonyms do not ensure
anonymity, and researchers have to think about additional ways to protect their research par-
ticipants from personal or professional harm in their local community. This can include addi-
tionally anonymising the name of places or organisations. But such decisions have to be made
carefully, because too much anonymisation limits the explanatory power of research results.
3 Examples of informed consent forms in Japanese are provided in Japanese introductions to Social Science re-
search and fieldwork (Nishiyama et al. 2015, pp. 133–135).
433
3.2 Data practices and management
During the data collection process and once you are back from the field, you face the chal-
lenge of storing and managing your data following ethical principles. These are particularly
important against the backdrop of the digital transformation in scholarship and with the Inter-
net as an ‘integral tool for scholars across disciplines’ (Mai/Repnikova 2018, p. 2). Here, the
responsibilities for students and researchers alike start with storing all your research files and
data according to your institution’s basic IT-security guidelines to ensure their confidentiality,
integrity and availability. Research data is all ‘evidence used to inform or support research
conclusions’ (CESSDA Training Team 2017–2020), for example, transcribed observations, au-
dio or video files, written text, software or photographs (University of Sheffield n.d.).
Good research practice with regard to data management in the digital age means ensuring
that, despite the short life span of hardware and software and research project websites, the
sources your published findings are based on stay comprehensible and verifiable in the long
run. For a term paper this might mean saving a digital copy of a cited website, while for a dis-
sertation or a research project where empirical research is conducted, more profound and
elaborate data management has to be applied to the questionnaire, audio files, anonymised
transcripts, data coding tables or digitised manuscripts/objects. If you are applying for funding
for a research project from a research funding organisation like the European Research Coun-
cil (ERC), for example, you are requested to prepare a data management plan (DMP) for your
project. This plan should address how you will ‘handle, organise, and structure your research
data throughout the research process’ (ERC Scientific Council 2019, p. 3).
Research data management (RDM)

• begins with your initial considerations regarding what will be necessary for using or
collecting your particular type of data;
• includes measures for maintaining the integrity of the data, making sure that they
are not lost due to technical mishaps, and that the right people can access the data
at the appropriate time;
• looks toward the future, making it clear that you should provide detailed and struc-
tured documentation to be able to share your data with other colleagues and pre-
pare the data for long-term availability (CESSDA Training Team 2017–2020).
The ‘FAIR Guiding principles for scientific data management and stewardship’ (Wilkinson et
al. 2016) have become internationally acknowledged guidelines for making research data
FAIR (F-indable, A-ccessible, I-nteroperable and R-eusable). This also applies to the Social Sci-
ences, where funding agencies, journals, academic associations and institutions are now advo-
cating data transparency and preservation through discipline-specific data management agree-
ments and best practice (see Arrington, Ch. 13). If you are doing empirical research for your
PhD or planning an empirical research project, look for research data management (RDM)
policies or ongoing discussions in your discipline4 and your university. RDM consulting ser-
vices might be available at the university library (Purdue University Library 2019), your local
eResearch support or your university’s central research administration department.
4 For Anthropology, see Pels et al. (2018), Imeri (2018, 2019) and Huber (2019).
434
In Japan, the introduction of research data management (kenkyū dēta kanri) as a means of
good research practice was initiated by the Cabinet Office in 2013 and is closely connected to
the open science movement (see below). Social Science research centres like the Centre for So-
cial Research and Data Archives (CSRDA) at the Institute of Social Science at Tokyo Universi-
ty and its Social Science Japan Data Archive (SSJDA) have long established their best practice
recommendations for the use of their data.
In order to enable a joint national infrastructure for data management and data sharing, the
National Institute of Informatics (NII), as the central research infrastructure provider in Japan,
has recently taken the lead and developed a technical framework called ‘GakuNin’ (see text
box below), which all research institutions in Japan can use to foster RDM at their institution.
Furthermore, a ‘Guideline for the establishment and operation of research data repositories’
(in Japanese; CAO 2019) has been published and together with the NII’s repository (cloud)
platform software ‘WECO3’ constitutes the basis for the setting up of open access repositories
at the majority of universities in Japan.5 Whether the availability of a technical infrastructure
will lead to a new culture of research data management and sharing in all academic disciplines
remains to be seen in Japan and elsewhere. Although a central hub for accessing social science-
related research data on Japan is still lacking, the chances are good that it will become easier
for students and scholars to access research data from Japan to inform their own empirical
studies on Japan (see Hommerich/Kottmann, Ch. 10).6
Resources on research data management

Europe
• ‘Data Management Expert Guide’ of the Consortium of European Social Science
Data Archives: www.cessda.eu/Training/Training-Resources/Library/Data-Manage
ment-Expert-Guide
• German Data Forum: https://www.ratswd.de/en/content/start
• GESIS Leibniz Institute for Social Sciences: https://www.gesis.org/en/research/resea
rch-data-management
• GO FAIR initiative (France, Germany and the Netherlands): www.go-fair.org/
• King’s College London Guide on ‘Managing Research Data’: https://www.kcl.ac.uk
/researchsupport/managing
5 For more details on WECO3, see RCOS (2017b). As of April 1, 2020, the Japan Consortium for Open Access
Repository (JPCOAR) (2020) lists 630 member universities on its website.
6 Rikkyo University’s Data Archive (RUDA) for social research provides a list of Social Science data archives in
Japan (RUDA n.d).
435
U.S.
• American Political Science Association’s DA-RT-initiative: https://politicalscienceno
w.com/data-access-and-research-transparency-initiative-da-rt/
• Purdue University Library Subject Guide on Sensitive Research Data Management:
https://guides.lib.purdue.edu/sensitivedata
Japan
• Tokyo University, Centre for Social Research and Data Archives (CRSDA): https://c
srda.iss.u-tokyo.ac.jp
• National Institute of Informatics (NII), Research Center for Open Science and Da-
ta Platform, GakuNin-Framework: https://rcos.nii.ac.jp/en/service/rdm
As we write this chapter, the discussion on good RDM practices in the context of Area Studies
and Japan-related research has only just begun. But three main issues are currently being criti-
cally debated: First, the debate about what long-term, preservable research data in qualitative
research actually are—especially in anthropological research (Imeri 2018; Imeri 2019; Huber
2019)—is important when thinking about RDM. Because of the complexity of research data in
the Humanities and Social Sciences (field notes, transcripts, coded data, interview recordings,
software, etc.), there is no one-size-fits-all solution when storing data and their digital repre-
sentation. However, organisations responsible for creating infrastructures for RDM might not
be aware of this (Edmond et al. 2019). Therefore, researchers should communicate about the
plurality of research data to funding organisations, universities and libraries. This will help
them to co-develop solutions when it comes to good ‘digital’ research practice together with
the researchers by taking into account that in Area Studies as well as in the Humanities and
Social Sciences research in general, research data are socially produced in a specific context
(Imeri 2018, p. 222; Knorr-Cetina 1988). Thus, when such data are stored, ‘adequate proce-
dures and strategies for the documentation of contexts’ (Imeri 2018, p. 229) of these different
materials are needed.
Second, this plurality of research data is intimately linked to the question of the ‘reuse’ of
qualitative research data in a methodologically sensible and ethically correct way. Many fund-
ing organisations now expect researchers to produce reusable data. But as noted above, be-
cause data—especially in qualitative research—are co-created by the researcher and the re-
search participants in a specific place, time and constellation, it is difficult for other re-
searchers to simply use them again outside the original context. In this respect, ethical ques-
tions of protecting research participants’ privacy and the aim of more openness and trans-
parency by sharing data conflict with each other. This raises questions about whether reusing
qualitative data is possible at all and what kind of informed consent would be necessary to
cover the various ways of reusing the data, or whether the reuse of anthropological research
data should be declined per se (Imeri 2018; Imeri 2019; Huber 2019). Would there be self-cen-
sorship by the researcher when she co-produces data with their reuse in mind? And how does
software used for curating and analysing data change them?7 Questions like these increasingly
concern Japan scholars as well and should be discussed further in order for them to make in-
formed decisions when confronted with the issue of reuse.
7 For a critical self-assessment about using coding software in a PhD-project, see Müller (2019).
436
Third, questions and criticism surround how the FAIR principles of Japan-related research da-
ta can be achieved in research infrastructure environments that are not prepared for the use of
non-Latin scripts like Japanese. Research infrastructures for Area Studies in the Anglophone
IT-sphere of higher education institutions and libraries in Europe and the U.S. often do not
(sufficiently) support the use of multilingual data curation tools and the discovery of metadata
in non-Latin scripts (Asef et al. 2019). This makes not only the discovery of and access to re-
search data from countries like Japan difficult, but also searching for data sources in Japanese
outside Japan (see Peucker/Schmidtpott/Wagner, Ch. 9). Furthermore, Area Studies researchers
have also reported on practices of academic journals discriminating against the use of non-An-
glophone references in papers and therefore making research in other languages invisible and
undetectable. This reveals again the dominance of Anglophone research in the digital sphere.
More lobbying for multilingualism in academia from Area Studies scholars to their home insti-
tutions, funding organisations and journal editors is necessary.
Against this backdrop of emerging debates on RDM, it is important to be aware of its growing
importance in order to protect your data, collaborators and research participants and to pos-
ition yourself when confronted with demands to make your data reusable and to be ready to
develop a data management plan for your next scholarship or research grant application.
3.3 Presenting research results: Things to remember before and while writing
Once your data have been collected, safely stored and analysed, it is time to write down your
results. In publishing, fair and reliable research means finding ‘the appropriate balance of dif-
ferent voices, and translating grounded data into theoretically engaged […] knowledge’
(Gagné, this chapter, Ch. 16.1). Thus, the first thing you should make sure of is to reference
and cite other scholars’ publications about your research topic (see Zachmann, Ch. 4). This
also includes selecting scholarly works and data that do not support your argument. It also
means that you must not ignore academic work or data that have already addressed the issues
you are discussing, possibly making your own work look less original. We understand research
as a collective endeavour in which researchers acknowledge each other’s work and try to con-
tribute to previous work by adding knowledge rather than focusing on (often artificially creat-
ed) research gaps they are trying to fill, sometimes by ignoring work that has been done in the
field.
An easy way to realise this kind of scholarship is through referencing other scholars’ work. Al-
though everybody knows that references are important, let’s reconsider their functions: Refer-
ences provide authority for cited arguments and enable readers to check the accuracy of and
further information about the point cited. They can also point readers to additional sources
and give credit to the original author of ideas, arguments or words (Language Log 2007). If
you fail to provide adequate references for your sources, this is called plagiarism. Plagiarism is
defined as ‘the unacknowledged borrowing of someone else’s idea or the unacknowledged bor-
rowing of someone else’s words […] without giving proper credit to the original source’ (AL-
LEA 2017, p. 8). Because such behaviour violates the original authors’ rights to their intellec-
tual outputs (ibid.), it does not matter whether this happens on purpose or by accident. It can
result in the withdrawal of scholarships or funding (JSPS 2019, p. 2) or expulsion from your
university. Yet, plagiarism happens more often than you might think.
437
Why would people plagiarise? Plagiarism might occur due to time pressure (a fast-approaching
deadline, end of funding, pressure to raise funding, for example), problems during the research
process (insufficient data, a lack of data analysis skills) or simply because people realise that
research is actually a lot more work than they thought and they are not willing or able to de-
vote that much energy and time to it. Sometimes, international journals are sceptical of re-
search conducted in languages other than English, and researchers don’t want to jeopardise
their chances of getting published, so they use the ideas of foreign colleagues anyway without
citing them. However, plagiarism severely harms other researchers (emotionally and sometimes
even their careers), relationships between researchers and the research itself. It damages the
reputation of an institution or academia as a whole and can expose ‘research subjects, users,
society or the environment to unnecessary harm’ (ALLEA 2017, p. 9). Thus, to avoid acciden-
tal plagiarism, we will highlight the different types of plagiarism and give advice on how to
avoid them.8
Direct plagiarism
You copy someone else’s work word for word without using quotation marks. You can
avoid it by using quotation marks!
Paraphrasing without a source
Although you don’t copy other authors’ texts word for word, you use key ideas from differ-
ent works, but don’t cite the sources of those ideas that are not your own. Accidental plagia-
rism is frequently caused by paraphrasing without a source but can be avoided by properly
citing the sources (Streefkerk 2018). Sometimes, people paraphrase content they have read in
Japanese (or other foreign languages) sources without citing the source, because plagiarism
software cannot detect it easily. However, your instructors, supervisors and reviewers can, so
don’t try it!
Copy-and-paste plagiarism
Similar to paraphrasing without citing a source, but through copying and pasting different
texts together, you create a new text. This can include ‘rewording pieces of sourced material
while keeping the structure of the original texts. This type of plagiarism requires a little more
effort and is more insidious than simply paraphrasing a source’ (Streefkerk 2018). So why
don’t you use this extra time to just properly do your work instead?
Citation plagiarism
Citation plagiarism refers to ‘the citation of a reference without acknowledging that it came
from another source’ (Language Log 2007). This means that you must not pretend to have
read all the literature somebody else has nicely summarised in her literature review, for ex-
ample, without mentioning that you owe parts or all of it to this author. But you can easily
solve this problem by reading the source yourself. If you really cannot obtain the original
source because it is not available, cite like this: ([Author xyz] cited in [Author xyz] [year]: p.
xx).
However, plagiarism is not only something every researcher should avoid, but also a phe-
nomenon researchers can fall victim to. Plagiarism can happen to PhD students whose ideas
8 Self-plagiarism is another, yet controversial, type of plagiarism. The discussion about whether self-plagiarism is
possible at all is ongoing. Self-plagiarism refers to a situation in which an author uses parts of her own work in
another publication without citing the previous work. This can be particularly problematic for PhD students who
don’t know whether they can include parts of already published material in their PhD thesis. When in doubt,
check the regulations for obtaining a PhD at your university. In addition, the University of Glasgow (n.d.) pro-
vides a good overview of the types and possible consequences of self-plagiarism.
438
appear in their supervisors’ publications without them properly acknowledging their origin,
but PhD students can also plagiarise senior colleagues’ work. Imagine there is a junior col-
league who works on similar topics and you send your publications to this colleague to discuss
them. When you are asked to sit on this person’s PhD committee and read the thesis, you find
out that your colleague has plagiarised your (and other scholars’) work in several ways (from
the research question and research design to an unreferenced patchwork copy of at least three
of your articles). Although you voice your concerns to the committee and to an ombudsperson
for good research practice, nothing happens, and your junior colleague is awarded a PhD.
Such an experience of being unsuccessful in protecting your rights, however, should not pre-
vent you from reporting breaches of good research practice. If you become a victim of plagia-
rism, contact the ombudsperson of your university or funding organisation and/or your super-
visor to ask for help. Don’t just let the perpetrator get away with it. This can lead to super-
vised mediation with the perpetrator or even a warning and will certainly affect the perpetra-
tor’s career. Experiencing plagiarism can also be an important motivation to teach research
ethics to undergraduate and graduate students and to write about it.
How to prevent plagiarism?

Organise your research process in a transparent way. Begin when you start reading and
taking notes. Always add all the bibliographical information to every note you log on
your computer. You can use software like Citavi or Zotero. Create a system that en-
ables you to write down page numbers and bibliographical information and to distin-
guish other people’s ideas and arguments from your own. This will save you so much
time when you write out your work (see Gerteis, this chapter, Ch. 16.3) and don’t have
to look up every source you read again because you cannot remember where the infor-
mation you are using came from. Give credit to other researchers whose ideas or re-
sults you are (re)using (Tóth-Czifra 2020a).
4 Closing remarks: Towards open Japan(ese) Studies
Once you finish your paper or thesis, you might want to publish it. Among the many publica-
tion avenues available (see Farrer/Liu-Farrer, Ch. 17), open access books and journals as well
as institutional repositories that aim to distribute research outputs online without access barri-
ers have been increasing in number. These journals are part of a larger open science/open
scholarship movement that is trying to liberate academic scholarship from paywalls built high-
er and higher through the market power of a few publishing houses which therefore became
an increasing burden for university library budgets. At the same time, it aims at increasing the
accountability and reliability of research, for example, by making research results, research da-
ta and software accessible to everybody. We want to close this chapter by briefly introducing
the open science/open scholarship movement as food for thought about how it can nudge the
Japanese Studies community and its research culture towards more openness and fairness and
address some ethical challenges related to open scholarship.
439
Open science is being discussed in the international scientific world, including Europe and
Japan (FOSTER portal; RCOS 2017a), and covers a wide range of topics ‘ranging from the
democratic right to access publicly funded knowledge (e.g. open access to publications) or the
demand for a better bridging of the divide between research and society (e.g. citizen science) to
the development of freely available tools for collaboration (e.g., social media platforms for sci-
entists)’ (Fecher/Friesike 2013, p. 1). In its most general sense, open science is about creating
new commons of knowledge in the digital sphere (from sharing preprints of papers and open
access publications of dissertations in institutional repositories to open peer review or more
open research data and copyright licences), but so far mainly in the (Natural) Sciences. Dis-
course about open scholarship in the Humanities and Social Sciences started just recently
(Knöchelmann 2019, pp. 1, 9–13). Critics, however, point to the limitations of the open sci-
ence/open scholarship movement in changing academia into a community focusing on good
arguments rather than on the ‘mad run rush for more publications, conferences and research-
projects’. They identified the latter as the ‘major force to prevent a more open research culture’
(Rosa 2010, p. 55).
We can already access resources for research through public data sets and software from the
Center for Open Data in the Humanities (CODH) or data archives like the SSJDA or GESIS.
The opportunities the open science movement offers to researchers in Area Studies and
Japanese Studies in particular to communicate outside traditional publication avenues are vi-
tal. For example, research blogs like Hypotheses (see below) seem to be a promising new
medium of open communication in scholarly communities. But we also think that the poten-
tial of open scholarship, including open research data, should be carefully discussed with an
eye on the characteristics of the Japan Studies community and its possible ethical challenges
(see GIDA’s CARE principles in text box below). This includes thinking about how we want to
collaborate with each other within and across national and disciplinary communities in the fu-
ture and how we want to make research results more widely accessible. Against this backdrop,
it is also important to ‘ensure that crucial decisions about knowledge creation and sharing
such as to whom it will be accessible, for how long, how interactions take place, etc. remain
indeed in the hands of those who create this knowledge’ (Tóth-Czifra 2020b) and not with
proprietary platforms like ResearchGate or Academia.edu (ibid.).
Open science/open scholarship resources

• FOSTER portal (introductory e-learning platform for open science): https://www.fo
steropenscience.eu
• Global Indigenous Data Alliance (GIDA): CARE Principles9 for Indigenous Data
Governance: https://www.gida-global.org/care
• Hypotheses (Blog): https://hypotheses.org, i.e. https://dariahopen.hypotheses.org
• National Institute for Informatics (NII), Research Center for Open Science and Da-
ta Platform (RCOS): https://rcos.nii.ac.jp/en/
• NII/The Institute of Statistical Mathematics: Center for Open Data in the Humani-
ties (CODH) http://codh.rois.ac.jp
9 The CARE principles advocate researchers’ commitment to reciprocity towards research participants, especially
when Indigenous Peoples’ rights and interests are concerned, and two-way open communication beyond academ-
ic circles. They call for C-ollective benefit, A-uthority to control, R-esponsibility and E-thics of research data.
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Open access publishing of a preprint copy of a paper or a dissertation in one’s institutional

repository or writing blog posts are attractive to some, but sometimes conflict with the re-
quirements in tenure procedures or traditional publisher’s copyright requirements. Therefore,
more scholarly community awareness and action are needed, because openness could also fos-
ter transparency in tenure procedures and could encourage the promotion of junior scholars.
These are only a few issues regarding openness in Social Science research in/on Japan and
Japanese Studies that could and (as we believe) should be discussed.
In summary, considering the diverse contexts in which researchers make the ethical decisions
introduced above, we want to stress that—although ethical standards are guidelines that
should be adjusted to the individual research context—there are some hard rules when it
comes to preventing harm to research participants, your colleagues and yourself that you must
follow. These include reliability, honesty, respect and accountability at all stages of the re-
search process. When adhered to, these rules help to preserve academic freedom.
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16.1 Fairness in research and publishing:
The balancing act of cultural translation
Isaac Gagné
What is fair and reliable research practice, and what is particular about it when studying
Japan? While this is usually discussed in relation to institutional research and publishing ethics
and regulations, this chapter explores two somewhat different perspectives through my experi-
ence as an anthropologist with religious groups, and my experience working with peer-re-
viewed Japanese Studies journals.
‘Fair and reliable research’ involves negotiating and striving for fairness in both research and
publishing as part of the dynamic process of ‘cultural translation’. This requires recognising
how our research is part of a (fieldwork) process where we enter into the local worlds of our
informants, and extends to the writing process, which ‘is inevitably enmeshed in conditions of
power—professional, national, international’ (Asad 1993, p. 190). Specifically, 1. in fieldwork,
this means understanding the ‘local moral worlds’ and interpersonal dynamics in our respec-
tive field sites, and establishing fair relationships with informants. 2. In publishing, this means
finding the appropriate balance of different voices, and translating grounded data into theoret-
ically engaged (anthropological) knowledge.
Navigating ‘local moral worlds’
In Anthropology, practising fair research starts from the moment that you begin interacting
with potential field sites, and especially the ways in which you negotiate with your field sites.
This is the beginning of your enmeshment in the local networks of your informants—the ‘local
moral worlds’—that consist of the values and stakes of individuals within their local networks
of relationships.
Arthur Kleinman (1992, pp. 129–130) defines ‘local moral worlds’ as the ‘the social psycho-
logical and moral processes’ that anchor individuals’ personal experiences, including the pat-
terns of life, sociality, ethics and values, to their social worlds. As researchers, of course, we
must follow the ‘institutional moral worlds’ of our funding agencies and research ethics
boards, which are concerned with issues of transparency, liability and safety. Yet as fieldwork-
ers working on Japan, where trust, long-term relationships and social context are of prime im-
portance, we must also negotiate with and within the ‘local moral worlds’ of our informants
(see Alexy, Ch. 7.3; Brumann, Ch. 7.1; Gagné, Ch. 6.1; Yoshida, Ch. 5).
Thus, in addition to following institutional research ethics, it is equally important to recognise
the local dynamics in our field sites and be able to adapt to local ethics in interacting with in-
formants. In my fieldwork with members of ‘new religions’ (shin-shūkyō) and ‘self-cultivation
organisations’ (shūyō-dantai) in Japan, I spent the first twelve months doing participant obser-
442
vation with several different organisations, participating in daily, weekly and monthly activi-
ties, rituals and informal get-togethers (Gagné 2011; Gagné 2017). As my informants them-
selves reminded me, religious beliefs and spiritual practices cannot be grasped just through
words, but they have to be experienced through practice. I was frequently told, ‘you don’t
have to believe, just experience it.’ According to them, even without professing belief at first, if
one subjects one’s body to the practice, one’s heart will eventually follow. This echoes observa-
tions that belief in Japan is based on orthopraxy, ‘right practice,’ rather than orthodoxy, ‘right
doctrine’ (Shields 2010). Thus, to enter the local moral worlds of my informants I had to first
subject myself to the same routines and daily experiences.
Specifically, through spending time with other participants, waking up early for 5 a.m. meet-
ings, taking long-distance pilgrimage bus trips to religious headquarters, participating in inten-
sive overnight ‘training camps’ and kneeling (seiza) for hours on tatami mats during meetings,
the local members and the leaders came to see me as part of their ordinary contexts and their
local networks. This was especially important given that participation is gendered as well as
private and discreet in Japan—roughly two-thirds of the active members are women, and
many never disclose their participation to their own family. In addition, joining what infor-
mants called ‘difficult’ and ‘demoralising’ activities such as door-to-door solicitation not only
diffused the burden but also blurred the distinctions between the members and me as a re-
searcher. Consequently, by subjecting myself to the same experiences, not only did this help me
to understand relationships and social dynamics in the field, but it also helped me to gain ac-
cess to their private worlds of beliefs by immersing myself in their orthopraxy.
While participating in rituals and meetings alongside other members was important for me to
gain access to local moral worlds, religious participation also brings out irresoluble tensions
between belief and money. This raises the question: How much are you expected to partici-
pate, and how far are you expected to be involved in rituals—especially their monetary entail-
ments?
In Japanese religious practice, belief and money are often intricately connected and reinforce
each other. Thus, the money you spend also reflects your degree of respect for the religion and
the other members, and this brings conflicting challenges for a fieldworker. While you must
enfold yourself within the local moral worlds of their relationships, these consist of ‘contesta-
tions and compromises that actualise values both for collectives and for individuals’, and en-
gaging in these contestations and compromises requires careful navigation and setting limits
(Kleinman 1999, p. 71). In my fieldwork, it seemed unethical to ‘buy’ their trust by paying my
way into their organisations. This required constant negotiation, as I had to explain my inter-
est in understanding their beliefs while maintaining my position as an ‘outside’ researcher.
Participation by payment might seem unethical to some; however, I found that fair participa-
tion in this context requires payment. Thus, it would have been contrary to my informants’
cultural logic for me to not pay anything to participate in their ritual practices and spaces. In-
deed, members constantly solicited my payments, and I needed to set a limit, so I paid the
standard fees for rituals as ‘entrance fees’. Yet, members frequently paid more than was ex-
pected in order to demonstrate and deepen their commitment and participation. Moreover, as
members grew to know me, I found that some even paid voluntary donations in my name by
proxy without consulting with me. Of course, members are aware that one cannot buy belief,
and instead they pay as a sign of gratitude for their connection (go-en) with fellow members.
In this sense, whether they are paying for themselves or for others, their money became a cur-
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Isaac Gagné
rency of sincerity which demonstrated their belief, gratitude and commitment to their peers
and the organisation, while my own payments were likewise necessary to demonstrate my re-
spect for their values.
Writing ethnographies and balancing voices
Fair research practice extends beyond the field, as the next step in understanding local life-
worlds is to ‘translate’ them to a wider audience. When you are analysing, writing and pub-
lishing your findings, you are no longer dealing with just informants and local moral worlds,
but you are dealing with very different interlocutors—informants, scholars and reviewers—
and negotiating with how to translate across different moral worlds with very different stakes.
This phase can be referred to as ‘cultural translation’ (Asad 1993): making local lifeworlds
and cultural logic intelligible to a broader scholarly public.
Cultural translation is a complex process that includes identifying often implicit meanings in
informants’ practices and words (rather than just official doctrine or explicit discourse) during
fieldwork, and then theorising the implicit patterns and meanings within cultural practices for
an audience that may not necessarily care about your informants’ local moral worlds, but
which is looking for academic meanings and insights. As Talad Asad (1993, p. 159) notes,
[w]hen the anthropologists return to their countries, they must write up ‘their people,’ and
they must do so in the conventions of representation already circumscribed (already ‘writ-
ten around’, ‘bounded’) by their discipline, institutional life, and wider society.
To take the example of money and belief mentioned above, a cultural translation of this mon-
ey–belief dynamic involves contextualising members’ self-understanding of such transactions
through the theoretical concept of ‘representational economy’ (Keane 2003), in which money
acts as a ‘tangible operator’ for the transvaluation of internal states (i.e. members’ sincerity in
their prayers) into recognisable material forms, reinforcing the former in the process.
For Asad (1993), this process of cultural translation was made difficult by the fact that an-
thropological subjects often had no power to speak on their own, and thus he reminds us to be
sensitive about becoming the sole voice for other cultures. Thus, writing ethnographic articles
involves multiple voices: engaging with existing literature and theories, reflecting on ethno-
graphic findings, and developing your own analysis and contribution—often wrestling with
the tensions between your ethnographic material and scholarly presumptions or established
theoretical paradigms.
Moreover, researchers on Japan inevitably encounter informants and popular media using cul-
tural idioms to explain certain social dynamics, cultural practices and individual psychological
processes in Japan. While we might hear explanations for behaviour or practices based on cul-
tural idioms like honne/tatemae (inner feeling/social face), shūdanshugi (collectivism), amae
(indulgent dependency), etc. and while there is cultural saliency in those idioms within their
moral worlds, either taking these terms at face value or dismissing our informants’ use of these
terms as explanatory mechanisms altogether is equally problematic. The former risks falling
into the trap of nihonjinron—culturally essentialist and tautological explanations of ‘why the
Japanese do things’, while the latter ignores the importance of local logic and personally
meaningful explanations by our informants—the stories that they tell themselves to justify or
explain beliefs and practices.
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Critical analysis involves analysing why such idioms are invoked, how they help informants to
make sense of their local worlds and the limits of such explanations. The meaning and con-
texts behind such usage are more important as they give more clues about what informants
mean than the semantic content of the idioms themselves. Yet, there are many cases in which
authors take cultural idioms at face value—or reject them outright—and reviewers are often
quick to identify this fatal flaw and tear apart a paper, even if it has good ethnographic data
and academic potential.
In sum, fair research includes critical engagement with cultural idioms within the context of
moral worlds that shows the nuances on the ground as well as the implicit cultural logic and
dynamic processes that make cultural idioms so powerful for individuals in Japan. Ultimately,
the most powerful ethnographies are those which translate local meanings and logic into theo-
retical analyses that force us to interrogate our assumptions about structural influences, indi-
vidual agency and creative action in cultural fields. This is how we ‘test the tolerance of [our]
own language for assuming unaccustomed forms’ (Asad 1993, p. 190). To rephrase it simply,
how does the ethnographic evidence force us to reconfigure our own language of knowledge?
Final thoughts: The balancing act of cultural translation
Writing on the process of cultural translation, Asad (1993, p. 180) suggests ‘the anthropolo-
gist’s translation is not merely a matter of matching sentences in the abstract, but of learning
to live another form of life and to speak another kind of language’. To extend his insights, we
can say that this is true of the two registers discussed above. As researchers engaged directly
with our informants’ moral worlds, we must grasp the ‘form of life’ of our informants, engag-
ing with the logic and entailments that animate their local worlds and relationships, while also
recognising the relations of power and our responsibility to represent local lifeworlds and cul-
tural logic intelligibly. As scholars, we must translate these experiences into a new language of
academic knowledge production by weaving and reanimating our informants’ narratives into
the scholarly register of disciplinary and theoretical debates. Doing both requires a constant,
delicate balancing act of translating ‘local moral worlds’ into global discourses of knowledge
production, while staying attuned to our informants’ sensibilities within the ongoing conversa-
tions in our fields.
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16.2 Digital oral narrative research in Japan:
An engaged approach
As long as our research goals are primarily focused on collecting data for purely academic
publication, our research priorities usually involve efficiency and verifiability. But once we
open the goals and audiences up to something larger than academia, the idea quite quickly be-
comes complicated. This is a short outline of some of the considerations that arise when re-
searchers work not only with and for other academics, but also work as participants in their
own research site, as members of a collaborative process of collection, and on analysis and dis-
semination of material relevant to a wider audience around topics of shared social and schol-
arly significance. We might call this ‘engaged research’ (Van de Ven 2007). This article outlines
some of the ways an ongoing research team based at Sophia University, Tokyo, has attempted
to develop some consistent and productive practices over the last ten years. We draw upon
multiple related projects under the collective name Voices from Japan project. These include an
oral narrative archiving project with disaster survivors from the 2011 triple disasters in To-
hoku, Voices from Tohoku (2019); anti-nuclear activists from Mothers Against War and youth
protesters in the SEALDs movement in Tokyo (Slater et al. 2015); homeless men in Yotsuya;
and currently refugees coming to Japan seeking asylum. While this work is primarily qualita-
tive and ethnographic, and somewhat specific in its own conceptualisation and execution, we
hope that the underlying principles can be applied to a wider range of approaches, disciplines
and research themes on Japan.
Selection of topic
The first and most basic question involves the focus and goals of the research itself. Does your
data, or some part of it, address relevant social issues in Japan around which people have a
stake in the outcome? One way to conceptualise a topic is to begin with society, broadly con-
ceived, and to identify issues that are of importance to individuals and groups in your field site
and beyond. Our Voices from Tohoku is a digital video archive of more than 500 hours of
first-person oral narratives of the 2011 triple disasters in Tohoku, with hundreds of shorter
clips on an open website that tell the story of the disaster and recovery to other survivors and
to wider audiences of policymakers and the public at large. Since there was no similar sort of
research work done on these topics when we began, it was easy to see how we might make
some scholarly contribution. But our priority was to engage in serious work that was a direct
response to urgent and relevant social and political events. The point of identifying the partic-
ular desired social contribution at the start is often important in order to build the scholarly
outcomes into our research design, especially through the specification of data we target for
collection and for the way we plan to disseminate this data to a wider audience.
446
Methodologically, it was somewhat challenging. We knew that part of the research output
would be a public website with our narrators’ voices on it, which we called nama no koe (gen-
uine voices). Thus, we decided to use the far more expensive and cumbersome collection
method of digital video (rather than just audio) because it would be more impactful as a pub-
lic site. This was made possible due to the close physical proximity of us being in Tokyo, hav-
ing a large undergraduate research team of interviewers coming into the project each term, and
some budget. Nevertheless, it was only because we had conceptualised our research as ‘en-
gaged’ in some way that we were able to produce the archive at all.
Modes of engagement
Within this larger framework, there are many modes of engagement that might guide the con-
ceptualisation of our work, as different parts of our ongoing project illustrate. Some work is
unabashedly advocacy aimed at the development of a self-consciously ‘politically committed,
morally engaged’ (Scheper-Hughes 1995, p. 415) research agenda (see Ganseforth, Ch. 4.2).
This sort of advocacy includes the scholarly dissemination of some research findings to politi-
cal activists seeking a transformational end. So, for example, when we researched political
movements (mothers and youth), we shared our interviews with the activists for them to use
for their own purposes (of course, only with the written consent of the individual narrators).
Alternatively, we might imagine ourselves as a sort of ‘supporter’ or ‘volunteer’ for the individ-
uals and groups with whom we are working. We often bring some useful labour, specialised
linguistic or technical knowledge or skill to the field, sometimes with which we barter for re-
search information. In Tohoku, we did disaster relief work (in rough chronological order: de-
livering food, digging debris, and rebuilding structures) as we collected data. When we work
with homeless people and with refugees in Tokyo, we do volunteer work in the soup kitchens
or ‘refugee café’ respectively (Ando 2019). Because we work through the regular curriculum of
an undergraduate programme, we established this as ‘service learning’, but the same principles
apply to individual graduate or professional projects: we seek to ‘give back’ to a community or
group in exchange for their taking the time to be interviewed for our project (see Prochaska,
Ch. 17.2). Some sort of reciprocity is necessary in any engaged research.
However we imagine our particular mode of engagement, it requires us to identify stakehold-
ers and their interests, and to articulate how our research, in both process and product, might
address these interests. Thus, rather than the ideal of ‘disinterested’ research that might be
used by others in whatever way they wish in the future, we extend our own responsibility for
our research outcomes, to ask how we ourselves address the interests of different stakeholders.
Often it is not entirely clear who all of the stakeholders might be, and where your topic in-
volves conflict, different stakeholders could have different and equally valid conflicting inter-
ests. Engaged research requires some tolerance of such messiness.
Contact and research design
We always involve our community stakeholders in the design stages of the project. The advan-
tages of such an approach are often a plan that is more clearly relevant to those involved,
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which is one of the requirements of any engaged research, but also more robust scholarly
work. The more participants in your field site know about your research, the more they can
direct you to issues, data and people you might never have thought about. Moreover, we share
preliminary findings, allowing us to identify alternative interpretations, and even refocus mid-
project. For example, showing some of our video footage to volunteers in the soup kitchen for
homeless men using this facility allowed us to generate a number of areas that required further
study. Unexpectedly, this data sharing session also established some dialogue between the vol-
unteers and the men themselves about how to improve the service provided by the soup
kitchen—the first time that had happened. This sort of collaborative effort also led to a more
durable and committed set of relationships as our project developed in new ways. In our case,
these same support agencies introduced us to refugee populations in need.
Relationships with stakeholders, collection of data and written release forms
It is our personal commitment to make some substantial portion of our own research as col-
laborative as possible, and since 2011 we have only selected projects where this is possible.
These sorts of collaborative arrangements blur the distinction between researcher and subject
in productive ways, but in many disciplines and national traditions, this can be a cause of lo-
gistical anxiety, scholarly confusion and even academic discredit. In some scholarly contexts,
there is an assumption that the line between researcher and research subject must be main-
tained to preserve the ‘objectivity’ or even the independence of the scholarly practice. In some
cases, collaboration and/or the production of some engaged research can lead to questions
about the degree of credit the researcher can claim for her or himself.
In part to address these concerns, it is necessary to be unambiguous about the legal ownership,
control and responsibility of data from the moment the collection process begins. For us, the
interviewee retains all rights to the content of the interview, and as such can withdraw permis-
sion for the use of this data at any time (during, just after or weeks after the interview). We
always use a written release form (dōisho), a sort of contract that gives us explicit but limited
permission to use some parts of the data, in some specified forms and context, to a particular
audience and under clear attribution. Use of a release form is an opportunity to clearly com-
municate the goals of the research project to research subjects, to explain that we acknowledge
the value of their stories and experiences, and that we take their privacy seriously. While some
may think providing informants with the full rights to their own data could make the re-
searcher vulnerable, we can only say that in thousands of hours of interviews, we have only
once had someone ask us to withdraw their data from our archive.
Many Japanese and foreign researchers seem to have misunderstood research relationships,
which has led them to suggest one cannot use written consent or release forms with infor-
mants in Japan. This is untrue. In most cases, difficulty with release forms occur when
scholars have not spent the time required to develop strong enough relationships of trust with
informants. When used correctly, a formal release form is an important research tool that en-
sures clear communication, facilitates honesty and serves as a licence to speak freely.
448
Dissemination of research results
While most ethics reviews require that the production of scholarly articles be shared with in-
formants, the final publication of scholarly articles rarely has much impact on this audience.
Such articles are usually written in English or other languages besides Japanese, in a style that
even most native speakers cannot decipher, in journals in libraries, often beyond digital pay-
walls. Even if these articles could be accessed, they are oriented towards a set of scholarly
rather than social issues. Taken together, these considerations comprise social relevance or
meaningful consumption by those from your field site or other stakeholders. Today, more than
ever before, there are a large number of publishing options that are open and accessible, so if
researchers learn how to write in open and accessible ways on topics of broad social impor-
tance, our work will be recognised by a larger Japanese public as relevant and important (see
Farrer/Liu-Farrer, Ch. 17; Steger, Ch. 17.3).
In Voices from Japan, we have gone a step further by making our original source material ac-
cessible. Of our 500 hours of digital oral narrative interviews in Tohoku (and about 150 hours
in each of our other projects), where people talk about their community, the disaster and its
survivors, and their hope for the future, we shared all of them with the public. From the larger
data—which we share with other researchers working on these topics—we have selected hun-
dreds of short clips of one to three minutes, arranged according to geography and narrator,
and tagged by theme and time for easy navigation. These have so far gained more than 80,000
hits, exponentially more than any researchers’ article is usually read. Making a public archive
might seem like an extreme step, but it has already proved to be hugely useful for scholars
young and old, the NPO and other community groups. While there will surely be some who
are reticent about us making ‘our data’ accessible to all, once we see this data as the result of
collaborative work between us and those who we once thought of as ‘research subjects’ en-
gaged in something larger than the scholarly project, we might imagine this not only as an
obligation but even as an opportunity.
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16.3 Writing for publication: Eight helpful hints
Christopher Gerteis
Research writing is central to the career of all scholars. While there are increasingly diverse
formats in which to present your research, all rely on your ability to present your thoughts in
writing. Indeed, good writing is central to the practice of research, and while styles of presen-
tation differ, good research writing practices will be central to your success as a scholar.
This essay will lay out some basic advice I ask less experienced authors to consider as they pre-
pare their research for publication. I serve as an editor for both an academic journal and a re-
search monograph (book) series. Most manuscripts that cross my desktop conform to disci-
plinary conventions in terms of style, content and methodology. However, I occasionally come
across a piece of scholarly writing that transgresses good research practice. Such instances are
rare and usually rectifiable so long as the intervention is early enough during the review pro-
cess. Occasionally, however, I am surprised by authors who decline to revise their manuscript
despite the advice of their colleagues, peer-reviewers and editors.
1. The quality of your writing counts. Be sure that your writing is clear and helps the reader
come to your conclusion. The number of poorly edited manuscripts that come across my
desk is stunning. While I have myself made the mistake of submitting a poorly edited
manuscript or two, allow me to advise you to avoid that mistake. Edit, edit again, then
edit one more time. And if you are still not sure, engage the services of a professional copy-
writer. It is very much worth the investment. The right copyeditor brings fresh eyes to your
project and can see where you are not being clear. Your publisher is not going to do that
work for you. The burden is on you to make it read well and align with conventions. A
good scholar must write in a style with which the reader is familiar and trusts.
2. Whatever your discipline, absolutely make certain you are compliant with established re-
search ethics and have overtly identified any potential conflicts of interest. Social scientists
and scientists most commonly work within an awareness of the interrelated issues of ethics
and conflicts of interest. Yet, in an increasingly privatised university research environment,
all scholars, in the Humanities especially, need to clearly identify potential conflicts of
interest that can arise from sources of funding and family connections. Failure to do so
greatly undermines your credibility as a scholar and causes serious harm to the profession
broadly.
3. Accurate source attribution is key. One of my earliest influences as a scholar gave me the
best advice I have yet heard: ‘always cite the source you used, not the source that you
wanted to use.’ At its core, this advice identified one of the greatest temptations for any
writer: the desire to look smarter than you are. This can lead to serious breaches of re-
search ethics, which is why established writing-up practices help keep all of us honest.
Showing the shoulders your work stands on establishes your credibility. Each author cited
serves as a mnemonic that helps your reader understand where your argument fits into the
research literature they have already read. It also helps you explain your thought process in
450
a logical and coherent fashion by your using secondary literature as signposts to make it
easier for the reader to follow the development of your argument. Showing a logical link-
age between what has come before, and where you are going, also lays the foundation of
credibility upon which you build the totality of your write-up.
4. Your job as a writer is to persuade the reader of your point of view. Ours is an evidence-driven
profession, but presenting evidence of the human condition in written form is a Sisyphean
challenge. My doctoral thesis supervisor spilt a great deal of red ink on my draft manuscript,
and one recurring phrase was ‘show me, don’t tell me.’ A simple laundry list of assertions will
fall flat, and a simple narrative description of events will make no significant contribution to
the field. Scholarship is empirical. Make sure the evidence lines up with and leads to the con-
clusion you intended. Your primary job is to show the reader with evidence and well signpost-
ed how you arrived at your conclusions.
5. Keep your notes well organised by using a consistent and easy to access filing system. I often
advise my students to use the software tools Evernote and Zotero to help keep their work or-
ganised, but there are a number of equally robust software packages that are just as good. The
key thing is to have a set of digital tools that allow you to organise your ongoing research
notes and evolving bibliography. In a book length research project, your data set is going to
become unwieldy very quickly. So, make sure you start your project with a clear organisation-
al system in place, and be certain to make regular backups to a cloud storage account or an
external hard drive. You do not want to lose your research to a system crash; it happens more
often than you want to know.
6. Do not exaggerate a gap in scholarly literature. As a journal editor, I have mentored many
first-time authors who felt obliged to carve their niche in the field by overstating their case. A
minor gap can still be significant enough to warrant an article—indeed article length projects
often do examine the smaller problems within the human condition. While your colleagues
do not want to meditate on minutiae, it is nonetheless important for us to know when some-
thing small is important. Show us how that is the case, but do not feel like you have to make
it bigger than it is.
7. Criticise, critique or revise, but do not attack. It can be remarkably attractive to want to use
your manuscript as a vehicle to attack a scholar or public figure. Discretion is often the better
part of valour, especially for an early-career scholar, so keep your discourse civil. You may
even find that your thinking changes over time and it will be easier to look back at your work.
8. One final piece of advice: write with passion. Try to write about subjects which you are inter-
ested in and feel strongly about. Passion can inform writing and help to keep the reader’s at-
tention. While you want to avoid flowery language—adjectives and adverbs especially—pre-
cise imagery and vivid narrative can engage and hold a reader long enough to hear you out.
You do not want to manipulate the reader, but you do want their attention. And skilful, pas-
sionate prose can help you do that.
The advice I have laid out in this essay will help you establish a good basic framework for
thinking about writing, and leaves room for you to develop your own approach to research
writing along the way. Your career is yours, and your personal style—your approach—should
be distinctive and unique. Following established writing practices is going to be central to your
career, and establishing good practices early on will make it all the easier to succeed, but it is
just as important that you blaze new paths and explore new intellectual territory. Be yourself.
You are your own best asset.
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Further reading
Corti, Louise (2020): Managing and sharing research data: A guide to good practice. Los Angeles: Sage.
Haviland, Carol Peterson/Mullin, Joan A. (eds.) (2009): Who owns this text? Plagiarism, authorship, and
disciplinary cultures. Logan, UT: Utah State University Press.
Iphofen, Ron/Tolich, Martin (2018): The SAGE handbook of qualitative research ethics. London: Sage.
Suber, Peter (2016): Knowledge unbound: Selected writings on open access, 2002–2011. Cambridge, MA:
The MIT Press.
Whiteman, Natasha (2012): Undoing ethics: Rethinking practice in online research. New York, NY:
Springer US.
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Chapter 17
How to present findings: Presenting and publishing
1. Introduction: Reaching your audience
Research is intended not only to produce results but to convey them to someone. But who is
your audience? And how do you best reach them? As important as these questions are, the an-
swers—usually multiple—are often not well thought-out. In our experience, a great many
wonderful research projects—including many MA and PhD theses—are never published be-
yond the initial thesis, and a chief reason is that young scholars fail to consider their audience
beyond their committee members. For the purposes of this chapter, we will divide audiences
into two types: the professional and the public. Both of these are important, but they also pull
your project in different directions, and we urge young scholars to think clearly about their
relative importance at different stages in their careers.
2. Think about your audience(s)!
Defining a desired audience can be daunting. Should I write for sociologists? For Japanolo-
gists? For the general public? Considering that years or even decades of your life will be spent
on a project, thinking dynamically and flexibly about different audiences can keep a project
alive and relevant. In our experience, it is all too easy to lose sight of the goal of publishing
during the research project. To stay on target, it is best to begin presenting and publishing very
early in the research process. The professional audience is nearly always the primary one for
academic researchers, and is usually a requirement for career advancement or landing a first
academic job. Therefore, young scholars need to familiarise themselves with the ‘tricks of the
trade’ of international academic journal publication. Mentors and senior colleagues are good
sources of advice in this process, but sometimes young scholars are on their own.
Beyond the academic audience, academic research typically addresses problems of public im-
portance. Scholars who receive public support for their research often have an obligation to
present findings of interest to a broader public. Giving a public face to their research may also
help scholars integrate their academic research more closely with teaching and community ser-
vice. Mentors and senior colleagues are often less help here. The Internet offers many tools for
reaching new far-flung audiences, but it is not foolproof. For example, we have found our-
455
selves facing the headache of keeping online scholarship alive beyond the few years in which a
particular online platform survives.
One lesson of this chapter is that publishing and research should be thought of as a recursive
process in which earlier publications—including conference presentations, working papers and
preliminary journal articles, but also non-conventional formats such as blogs and public data
sets—are all different ways of framing and reframing an ongoing academic project. A project
may have a much longer life, and reach many more interested people, if all these outlets are
part of a process of developing ideas.
3. Reaching an academic audience
Most scholars who start doctoral programmes aim to become career academics or professional
researchers, i.e. working for a university or research institute. The core audience for their re-
search is therefore fellow academics and researchers. This section focuses on three typical aca-
demic outlets for research, ordered along the most common temporal sequence: conferences
and workshops, academic journals and books.
3.1 Conferences and workshops
There are numerous conferences and workshops, ranging from gigantic to miniature, available
to researchers around the world. While all conferences are places to present our research find-
ings, they also assume different functions for participants. In our experiences, they can be
roughly categorised into three broad types: disciplinary, Area Studies and thematic confer-
ences. Because Japanese Studies is interdisciplinary, Japanese Studies scholars often seek to
contribute to a discipline while also reaching an interdisciplinary Japanese Studies audience. It
may be necessary therefore to present different versions of their work at these two types of
conferences. Both disciplinary and Area Studies conferences announce their conference themes,
venues and dates one or two years ahead of time through their organisational websites. The
application deadlines are often eight months to even a year before the conference dates.
For young scholars, large disciplinary and Area Studies conferences are exciting, because they
are opportunities to be exposed to the best and most cutting-edge research in the disciplines as
well as the area. They also confer a sense of professional belonging. Presenting at such confer-
ences initiates one’s membership in the academic community. Such conferences are also places
where one networks, identifies potential collaborators, and receives information related to re-
search and career development. Sometimes job recruitment activities are conducted alongside
the conferences. Because of their sheer sizes and diversity, however, such big conferences are
often less productive in terms of receiving feedback for our work. There are simply too many
parallel panels to choose from, and we might not see as big an audience for our own presenta-
tions or have a chance for deeper discussions. The purposes of large conferences is often pro-
fessionalisation, whereas focused academic discussion is often more productive, in our experi-
ence, at smaller thematic workshops and symposiums.
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Chapter 17 How to present findings
Participating in smaller thematic conferences, on the other hand, is a very productive way for
scholars to establish themselves in a field as well as to foster publication projects such as edit-
ed volumes and journal special issues. However, it is not always easy to find them. Once we
start to participate in academic events, we tend to receive ‘Call for Papers’ (CfPs) for thematic
workshops and symposiums circulating via various mailing lists we have signed up for. There
are some big thematic conferences; the ones we receive the most insightful feedback, however,
are the smaller symposiums and workshops organised by an institution or programme with
specific interests. They are often the most productive in terms of producing publications and
building long-term research collaborations. Such workshops are also more likely to fund par-
ticipants’ travel: the conveners make the call often because they have received a grant for the
event they propose to host with the goal of advancing a particular research agenda. The con-
veners are also interested in producing journal special issues or edited volumes out of such
workshops. Both authors have had several publications produced through such workshops
and symposiums (Farrer 2010; Liu-Farrer 2010). Information on smaller workshops and sym-
posiums are posted through professional association websites and mailing lists (see this chap-
ter, North, Ch. 17.1, for some of these websites).
Checklist for conference presenters

• Articulate a puzzle: The most effective presentations are those that pique the audi-
ence’s interest with a puzzle and then focus on presenting the findings that solve the
puzzle.
• Minimise preliminaries: Many people, veteran researchers included, spend too
much time on literature reviews and methodology, and run out of time before they
can say anything exciting.
• Time yourself: Conference presentations usually last 15 to 20 minutes.
• Filter advice: Conferences are where new concepts and ideas are circulated. Audi-
ence members will throw all sorts of theoretical advice at you, or recommend new
jargon. Stay calm and grounded. Seek advice that truly enhances the interpretive
power of one’s own empirical findings.
• Do not waste a conference paper: Conferences are places where we get feedback on
our ongoing research. We should utilise such opportunities to improve a paper and
try to get it published in a professionally recognised journal
In short, though their functions and productivity vary, conferences and workshops are neces-
sary places to present our research findings, to be known as researchers specialised in particu-
lar subjects and areas, to build professional identities, and to enter relevant research networks.
Young scholars should try to participate in all these different types of conferences and work-
shops.
3.2 Academic journals
When we choose a journal, we are also choosing an audience. Sometimes, conveners of the-
matic workshops or symposiums will organise journal special issues, saving the authors’ time
and energy in locating the appropriate journals. More commonly, however, we make indepen-
457
dent submissions to international journals. Given the increasing number of journals, how do
we find the right one to submit to?
For a Japan Studies scholar, typical journal outlets can be lumped into the following five broad
categories:
• Subject journals—interdisciplinary journals that deal with the specific subject areas of our
research, such as International Migration Review and Sexualities.
• Area Studies journals—in this case, interdisciplinary journals focusing on Asia and Japan,
such as Journal of Asian Studies, Contemporary Japan and Japan Forum.
• Disciplinary journals—such as American Journal of Sociology.
• Journals that are dedicated to specific methodological approaches, such as Journal of Con-
temporary Ethnography.
• Crossovers—journals that are combinations of methodological and disciplinary approach-
es, such as Qualitative Sociology, or of a specified discipline and subject, such as Medical
Anthropology. Social Science Japan Journal, as the name suggests, combines both disci-
plinary and area specifications.
Most articles could potentially fit into any of these categories of journals. The choice of jour-
nal is a judgement about how well our research speaks to a specific audience. By choosing a
specific journal, we are expected to engage the intellectual conversations that are typical of
that genre of journal. In other words, one needs to reference the literature in that field, and
often in that journal. Different journals call for attention to different types of literature (see
McMorran, Ch. 15). For example, when Gracia drafted a paper about the emigration of rich
Chinese, she saw this migration phenomenon as something emerging in a changing China and
decided to submit it to a China journal (Liu-Farrer 2016). As a result of this choice, she need-
ed to include the body of literature on class structure and social stratification in Chinese soci-
ety as well as that on the logic of migration. If she were to publish it in a migration journal,
much more effort would be needed to engage literature on emerging patterns of migration. If
she had aimed to write for a sociological journal, she would have needed to consider how the
empirical study could make original contributions to the discipline of Sociology, which would
have resulted in a different theoretical discussion emphasising disciplinary significance.
As empirical researchers who have been working in specific subject fields with a geographic
focus, we find subject as well as Area Studies journals easily correspond to our work. Your
direction may depend on your professional goals. If you are aiming at employment in a partic-
ular discipline, you may need at least some publications in recognised disciplinary journals.
Regardless of whether you favour area-based or discipline-based publications, in the era of
academic globalisation, it is generally wise to consider publications that are regarded as having
broad recognition in the field (either through quantitative or qualitative measures).
458
Checklist: Preparing a journal article

The main aim of a journal article is to engage in the conversations with specific academ-
ic communities by indicating how our original research fills an empirical gap and ad-
vances theoretical development. It is therefore always important to ask yourself the fol-
lowing questions:
• Who is the audience of this article? Does it correspond to the audience of the journal
we are considering?
• What is the state of the field and how does your article contribute to it?
• What is your main argument? Keep in mind that you have only several thousand
words, so ONE clear argument is preferred.
• Does your evidence support your argument? Young scholars always wonder how
much data, especially the number of interviews, is needed for a journal article. There
are no fixed criteria. It depends on both your methods and the field you contribute
to. Instead, ask whether you are confident that the evidence you present illustrates
your argument.
When preparing a journal article, make sure that it incorporates the following before
sending it out:
• A clear and informative abstract that indicates the main research question and main
argument: The abstract is of great importance because it is the first thing the journal
editors and the anonymous reviewers read. A paper is more likely to be reviewed
when it piques a reviewer’s intellectual interest. A well-written abstract attracts at-
tention and also indicates the quality of the paper.
• A clear structure: When receiving a paper submission, the first decision a journal ed-
itorial board makes is whether it is worth sending out for reviews. A paper that does
not look like a journal article is most likely to be rejected without even entering the
review process.
• The style that fits the type of journal it is submitted to: Some journals might want
policy analysis, while others prioritise theoretical contributions. Make sure you are
familiar with recent issues of the journal.
The above procedures should be applied to ensure that your paper does not end at desk rejec-
tion, and actually gets sent out to external reviewers. Once it enters the anonymous review
stage, you have an increased chance of having it published because the editors have already
invested in your paper. Upon receiving review results, as Scott North (see this chapter, Ch.
17.1) explains, do not get flustered but read the reviews again and again. A major revision
means that the editors hope to eventually publish it. Even a rejection does not mean the end of
the paper. You will receive valuable comments from experts on the paper and revise it accord-
ingly to submit it again or somewhere else. Sometimes, it is okay to disagree with the review-
ers. Then, when resubmitting, state the reasons why you disagree with the reviews. It is
through such (repeated) revision processes that our scholarship improves.
The whole process from submitting a journal article to receiving the notice about its final sta-
tus can take somewhere between six months to a year. The initial review process might take
three to four months. If you do not hear from the journal editors after three months, do not
459
hesitate to enquire. The author is then given six to ten weeks to revise their work. Depending
on whether another round of reviewing is required, it might take another two to three months
to hear back from the editors. Depending on the editorial decision, the paper might need fur-
ther revision. When it is officially accepted as a publication, the online version often appears
much earlier than the paper version. Many popular journals are so backlogged that an article
accepted in 2021 might be intended for an issue planned for 2023. If you are building a career,
do not just work on one piece at a time. It is best to have multiple pieces ‘in the pipeline’.
3.3 From dissertations to books
For qualitative researchers, the first book often develops out of their dissertation.1 When con-
sidering publishing monographs, we face the choice of university presses versus commercial
presses. The former tend to be more selective, have fewer titles and take a longer time to pub-
lish. The commercial ones, in comparison, publish many more titles, are more aggressive in so-
liciting submissions and publish more quickly. However, in order to make a profit on the limi-
ted number of copies they sell, their book prices are usually much higher than those from uni-
versity presses. In some academic circles, university presses are considered superior because of
their selectivity. However, good works have emerged from both forms of presses. Sometimes,
excellent work is rejected by cash-strapped university presses because of the concern that it
lacks a sufficient market. The choice of commercial press also has to do with time constraints,
the broadness of the field, as well as what is required to advance one’s career. Regardless of all
this, one rule of thumb by which to judge suitability is to take a look at your own bookshelf:
which press publishes most of the books in your field?
To publish a book, one needs to send publishers a book proposal (or prospectus) together with
sample chapters and, in the case of most university presses, a complete manuscript. One can
find samples for such proposals on the Internet, or ask one’s colleagues who have published
books. Each press might also specify different content. Upon receiving successful anonymous
reviews, the author is then offered a book contract. From the time one submits a full
manuscript, it takes more than a year for a book to be published. Academic presses take
longer. Gracia delivered the full manuscript of her book Immigrant Japan to Cornell University
Press in July 2018. A year prior to that, she had contacted the Asian Studies editor about her
book project, and showed him several sample chapters and received comments. She received
both anonymous reviews by the end of October 2018, and the book contract in late Novem-
ber. She turned in the revised manuscript in February 2019. The book then entered produc-
tion, and was published in early 2020 (Liu-Farrer 2020). It took over one and a half years
from submitting the manuscript to the book finally coming out, and much longer if her initial
contact with the press is taken into account.
1 Please note that the rules and procedures for publishing dissertations vary in different national contexts and
across universities.
460
3.4 Beware of predators
Because of the importance of all these formats for academic careers, businesses have emerged
which prey on scholars by inventing conferences, journals and presses. With the increasing
pluralisation of academic outlets, sometimes it is difficult to tell the legitimate ones from those
that are not. When in doubt, play it safe. Stick to conferences that have a longer running histo-
ry, and stay away from those that have several disciplines or fields in the same title. Publish in
journals that have been around for more than ten volumes (years). Shun presses that you have
never heard of. It is always a good idea to consult with veteran researchers.
3.5 Promoting your publications
Your work is published. Congratulations! But you should also think of sharing your publica-
tions (including the ones to a broader public, which is covered in the next section). Even to
reach a greater professional audience, we recommend using websites such as Academia or Re-
searchGate to promote pre-publication drafts or links to your publications. Social media out-
lets such as Twitter and Facebook are also effective tools. Nando Sigona (2019), a researcher
studying migration and refugee issues, provides useful advice and practical tips for promoting
research through social media. Updating institutional web pages or personal academic web
pages also increases visibility and provides additional content such as photographs or blog
posts that cannot be included in academic formats. James runs a web page (2017) in order to
publish images from ongoing fieldwork as well as links to publications. Consistently promot-
ing one’s publications online will greatly increase their availability to other academics. How-
ever, note that for young scholars, non-refereed papers published on such web pages are gener-
ally not counted as academic publications.
4. Reaching a broader audience
Nearly every academic research topic has an audience beyond professional academia, and it is
rarely reached simply by writing an academic book with a catchy title. Different approaches
are called for to reach a non-specialist audience. Moreover, non-specialist writing can typically
reach a broader audience of academics as well, and may be very useful in undergraduate
teaching. Broadly speaking, there are two ways of finding this larger circle: letting others do it
for you or doing it yourself. We will start with the former, but focus on the latter.
4.1 Talking with journalists
For many topics, sitting for an interview with a journalist or blogger may be the most effective
way of getting your ideas across to a larger audience of readers or listeners. This may be true
even for topics that are not already in the news, a situation described by Brigitte Steger in rela-
tion to her research on Japanese sleeping practices in her essay for this chapter (see this chap-
461
ter, Ch. 17.3). The benefits of letting journalists write about your work are obvious: minimal
effort from you and greater impact through professional writing, editing and marketing. Good
interviewers may even find ways of framing your ideas that you would not have thought of
yourself, or bring out elements of one’s research that are buried inside a long monograph.
Given the brevity of many media interviews, however, we may worry that journalists will mis-
report our findings or garble our ideas. For scholars working on politically or socially sensitive
topics, this is a common concern. To control the quality of the messenger, Steger recommends
working with reporters from established or reputable journalistic outlets. Also, for reports in
which you are the main source, she recommends checking over texts before publication. Both
authors of this chapter have been interviewed numerous times about our research in media
formats ranging from mainstream television and newspaper reporting to community-centred
blogs and papers. We rarely refuse an interview. In our experience, even the journalistic ques-
tions we do not like—because they seemed biased or presumptive—may be an important indi-
cator of ideas or findings that we should highlight more clearly in our academic writings. It is
always possible to help the journalist rephrase the question to better match your expertise and
to make sure the answers you provide are what you intend.
The most productive way of working with journalists, we have found, involves bringing them
more closely in contact with our research, and discussing the project over multiple meetings.
James did a 30-minute television special with NHK World based on his Japanese neighbour-
hood food research (NHK World 2019). The first meetings with the producer aroused his sus-
picions, since the producer seemed to want to focus the programme on his personal life as a
foreigner in Japan. However, in discussions with the producer he refocused the segment on
James’s research project on neighbourhood foodways. Working with the producer at all stages
of production from editing the script, choosing people to interview and (to a more limited ex-
tent) discussing the final product, ensured that the production represented the ideas of the re-
search project extensively and fairly, while still achieving the goals of the producer (to create
an entertaining introduction to a Tokyo neighbourhood).
4.2 Publishing for a general audience
While working with journalists may be one of the most efficient ways to reach a broad audi-
ence, a deeper approach to reaching the public may require producing your own texts. Pub-
lishing books for the general reader used to be considered a career-killing move—particularly
among North American social scientists—but it has always been the case in Japan that
scholars write for a broad reading public. And especially when one is writing in the Japanese
language, popular writing may be a more effective way of reaching a Japanese audience than
aiming at narrow Japanese-language academic journals.
Young scholars are generally cautioned against jumping into popular book writing, but some
have used popular writing to further their academic research agendas. For example, Patrick
Galbraith, an anthropologist who teaches in the School of Law at Senshu University in Tokyo
is the author and editor of many books on Japanese media and popular culture, both in popu-
lar and academic formats (Galbraith 2014). When asked about the advantages of appealing to
a broader audience, he replied:
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By translating your academic research into popular publications and vernacular, you can
reach more people, meet them where they are and potentially impact ongoing discussions
and debates. I feel that this is incumbent on those working on issues of public interest and
social importance. We really shouldn’t just be talking to one another inside the institu-
tions of the university and the adjacent publishing industry (Galbraith, email interview
June 2019).
Galbraith suggests that we social scientists have an ethical obligation to reach a broader audi-
ence with our ideas, and not limit them to a ‘handful of people’ with institutional library ac-
cess. In short, Galbraith argues, not only can we reach a broad audience as academics, but we
should also try to do so. The practice of writing for a general audience may actually help us
clarify our academic writing as well.
4.3 Film and video
Another method of reaching a broader audience is through film and video, an approach with
even greater potential impact through the rise of YouTube and online streaming services. Is-
abelle Prochaska-Meyer (see this chapter, Ch. 17.2) writes in detail about the process of pro-
ducing a documentary on ageing people in rural Japan. Even early career scholars also find
this approach rewarding. One Japanese Studies scholar who took this approach is Dipesh
Kharel, who in his PhD research at the University of Tokyo blended traditional ethnography
with videography in studying the transnational lives of Nepali restaurant workers in Japan
and their connections with their family in Nepal. This resulted both in his PhD dissertation
and his documentary film Playing with Nan (2012). When asked about the advantages of this
approach to presenting his data, Kharel replied:
Certainly, conducting visual ethnographic fieldwork, recording data and editing more
than 600 hours of ethnographic footage into a coherent ethnographic film was very time-
consuming and took me several years, which is one of the shortcomings of this approach.
However, I have learned that ethnographic film is the best way to disseminate research
findings to the larger audiences (Kharel, email interview June 2019).
As Kharel’s case shows, documentary films may not only be created by senior scholars with
substantial institutional resources but also by postgraduate students as part of their disserta-
tion research. In some academic degree programmes, a documentary film may be presented as
an alternative to a traditional thesis. For example, Miki Dezaki produced the documentary
film Shusenjo (2019) on the controversies surrounding the wartime ‘comfort women’, which
completed his MA degree in Global Studies at Sophia University. We asked Dezaki about the
advantages of this approach to presenting data:
A comment I often hear regarding my film is that they have read quotes by the people in
my film before, but seeing them say these things on screen is much more powerful and
impactful. It seems that one of the biggest advantages to making a documentary film over
a written thesis is that video interviews when coupled with music and other types of visu-
als can make the project more appealing to a wider audience compared to a written thesis
(Dezaki, email interview June 2019).
Dezaki also pointed out, however, that this type of project can be quite challenging for a
young researcher with limited funding and time. Echoing Meyer-Prochaska in this volume,
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Dezaki replied that producing a documentary can be like an additional ‘full-time job while you
are taking classes’ (Dezaki, email interview June 2019).
Dezaki, Kharel and Meyer-Prochaska all find their films have reached a broad audience, which
most scholars will never achieve through academic writing alone. This exposure brings acco-
lades and (sometimes critical) attention, though also costs a lot in terms of time spent and the
stress of production and publicity. Translating visual data to textual formats also poses chal-
lenges. As Jamie Coates, another young academic film-maker, wrote back to us, it may be ‘dif-
ficult to translate your observations and findings into more widely recognised formats’
(Coates, email interview June 2019; see also Coates, Ch. 3.2). Therefore, as intriguing as film-
making is, whether visual data can be simultaneously used for producing traditional publica-
tions (transcribing and coding may be necessary) is a concern for academics. It is also incum-
bent upon senior academics to inform junior colleagues how a film, video or podcast will be
treated in career evaluations.
4.4 Sharing data
Social Science research inevitably produces far more data than can be represented in even a
long book or film. Publicising your research, therefore, can also go far beyond a final authored
product; it may also involve sharing the data itself, either in its raw or a highly curated form,
or somewhere in between. David Slater, a Japan Studies scholar and anthropologist at Sophia
University in Tokyo, created a curated project on the aftermath of the Tohoku Earthquake, in
which interviews conducted by faculty members and students have been shared online, allow-
ing researchers all over the world access to it. The resulting Voices of Tohoku is an oral narra-
tive project of more than 500 hours of semi-structured interviews captured on digital video
from survivors of the 2011 earthquake, tsunami and nuclear disasters in northern Japan
(Tōhoku kara no koe 2019; see also Slater et al., Ch. 16.2). Slater explained the goals and
principles behind the online project:
We developed a collaborative principle whereby anyone who contributed to the archive
would be entitled to gain access to the full corpus of data, making it a very valuable re-
source to many MA, PhD and post-doctoral students who used this data for their own
research projects (Slater, email interview June 2019).
Despite its academic and public benefits, Slater cautioned that producing this type of public
scholarship may be costly for younger scholars and is ‘best led by a senior scholar with more
resources and job security’ (Slater, email interview June 2019). In short, as with all forms of
public scholarship, early career scholars should consider their audience early and consult with
institutional leaders about whether this type of public-benefit scholarship is recognised in their
institution.
4.5 Connecting with a community
Another goal of public scholarship is not only to share data and findings, but also to foster
interaction and dialogue with the community one is studying. This is the idea behind James’s
(2019) Nishiogiology Urban Food Studies project. This project centres on a webpage that doc-
464
uments the experiences of small-scale culinary entrepreneurs in the Nishi-Ogikubo district of

Western Tokyo. The web page is produced in both English and Japanese so that local residents
can also easily access the information, which also provides some benefits for the interviewees
in terms of providing information and publicity about their businesses. Many members of the
local community follow the web page through social media. Creating the project has not only
allowed James to connect with informants but also other people involved in community jour-
nalism and place-making. The web page thus functions not only as a form of academic knowl-
edge in urban studies, but also as a project to support the community that it studies. One con-
sideration in public scholarship in Japanese Studies is the language of publication. For Nishio-
giology, publishing in Japanese was essential but also very challenging. For James, working
very closely with a Japanese editor and research assistant was key to the success of the bilin-
gual project.
5. Conclusions: Balancing goals
In this chapter we have covered publications aimed at a professional and a broader general au-
dience. Both may be essential for fulfilling careers as academics, though only the former is sys-
tematically recognised by institutions. This presents a dilemma for researchers that we can on-
ly point to here. In the era of increasingly strong pressure to either ‘publish or perish’, it is im-
portant for young scholars to inform themselves of what forms of publication are expected.
Increasingly, peer-reviewed journal articles are preferred by academic institutions, sometimes
with specific requirements for the types or ‘ranks’ of journals that are acceptable. Therefore, if
data is gathered in a video format, we have to think not only of visual presentations, but also
how we can code the data for presentation in a standard article. If we are collecting copious
interview data, we should consider how this can be properly stored as a future public data
archive that will benefit many researchers. Yet, early career scholars also need to be clear
about how their participation in the group project will lead to publication. Finally, in the age
of electronic publication, there are many new technical dilemmas. We have to consider not on-
ly archiving our raw data but sustaining archives and publications that we have created online.
For any online publications or data we create, it is also best to back them up in various ways
to ensure their survival if the original platform goes offline. Ironically perhaps, paper may still
be the most reliable medium with which to ensure our publications will be available not only
in a year, but in a hundred years.
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17.1 Finding an audience:
Presenting and publishing in Japanese Studies
Scott North
I am a sociologist interested in labour, gender, law, social movements and quality of life in
Japan. The issues I study are common in industrialised societies. Like most academics, I have
concentrated on presenting my findings at professional conferences and publishing in peer-re-
viewed publications because they are the coin of the intellectual realm. But my research topics
are also news, so there are parts of my research that I can hive off as newspaper articles or op-
eds. Regardless of discipline or field, I think publicly funded scholars are obliged to try to
reach multiple audiences and to put things happening now in a theoretical–historical context.
Choosing where and how to publish or present
It is best to have a long-term plan for getting your research into print. Writing with a particu-
lar journal in mind is probably the way to proceed. Each journal has a particular mission and
audience. Unless your paper suits the journal, it will not be reviewed. Also, each journal has its
own style guide. Preparing an article to meet the style requirements for publication is time-
consuming. So knowing the style and writing the piece in line with those guidelines from the
start is efficient.
That said, even if you do not have a plan, the world of academic publishing is an unexpectedly
forgiving place. Do not be afraid to submit your work because you fear rejection. Conversa-
tions with journal editors have taught me that journals sometimes struggle to find enough de-
cent submissions. I submitted a paper based on my doctoral dissertation to a major Japanese
Studies journal in 2005. It was rejected. Chastened by the referees’ comments, I put the paper
away for a year or so while I licked my wounds. Then the editor wrote to ask if I was still
working on it. It seems that the editorial board thought the paper showed more promise than
the reviewers did. Energised by the idea that the journal felt there was an audience for the pa-
per, I buckled down, doing more research and drastically changing the content of my piece. It
was re-reviewed and, since finally being published (North 2009), it has become one of the
most frequently read articles in that journal. I have to credit both sets of reviewers for their
clear-eyed appraisal, and the editors for their continuing interest, without which I might have
‘abandoned the manuscript to the gnawing criticism of the mice’, as Marx and Engels said of
their failed effort to publish The German ideology (Tucker 1995, p. 146).
Here is another example of how failure sometimes works in a writer’s favour. As a doctoral
student, I submitted a paper to The Journal of Japanese Studies. It was based on research for
my Master’s thesis about karōshi, death caused by overwork. Although the paper was rejected,
one of the referees sent helpful comments, which succinctly identified a very common struc-
466
Chapter 17 How to present findings: Presenting and publishing
tural weakness in graduate student papers and offered an elegant solution. Despite this advice,
again I put the paper away for a time. Then came a chance to participate in a small workshop-
style conference organised by one of the International Sociology Association research commit-
tees. The papers had to be submitted prior to the workshop. As in the first example, the antici-
pation of an audience for the work provided the motivation needed to revise the manuscript,
which, in its improved form, eventually found a home in a Sociology journal (North 2011).
One lesson from these examples is that when reviewer’s comments arrive, we need to remem-
ber that they are suggestions rather than orders. Do not be dismayed by the words ‘major revi-
sions’. Instead, negotiate your way to publication. First, negotiate with your feelings to reach a
dispassionate understanding of reviewers’ comments. With each successive read, emotions di-
minish and the constructive aspects of the criticisms shine through. Remember also that no
matter what reviewers say, the paper is yours: you do not have to address every criticism or
meet demands for revisions that you disagree with. But you must justify your response. When
you resubmit the paper, provide a letter in which you explain which comments you addressed
and how, or did not address and why. Resubmissions may be read by editors instead of blind
peer reviewers. Their incentives differ. Whereas blind peer reviewers doing unpaid labour are
sometimes harsh in defence of disciplinary integrity or ideas that they may favour, the editors
want to put out a journal. Editors may be less likely than reviewers to act as disciplinary gate-
keepers because they want well written, stimulating contributions that will attract a broad au-
dience to the journal.
Should you publish only in peer-reviewed journals? I say, ‘Yes.’ And you should aim at higher
quality journals because, even if you are rejected, their reviews are more likely to show you the
way forward. Also, the better journals tend to be able to offer quality editorial processing
(proofreading and copyediting) and they are more experienced at negotiating compromises.
That said, however, some open-access, online-only journals are also worth considering as out-
lets for your work. Examples include The Electronic Journal of Contemporary Japanese Stud-
ies and The Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus. Both are non-profit organisations that review
manuscripts quickly and upload articles to their sites continuously, ensuring speedy publica-
tion of your work, in full text and with free access. Because they are online publications, these
journals are more flexible about inclusion of graphics and colour plates. And do not forget
publishing in newspapers or magazines; they occasionally pay their contributors. Wherever
you decide to publish, if you are asked to pay a fee to see your work in print, it is probably
best to walk away.
Conference presentations
Most of my published papers started as conference or workshop presentations. Preparing for

professional meetings causes you to focus on some portion of your research, and submission
deadlines concentrate your attention on getting words on paper. In addition to the large, annu-
al disciplinary conferences in Europe and North America, there are numerous intimate oppor-
tunities throughout the year. I think you are more likely to get helpful feedback at workshops,
roundtables and smaller conferences. To have conference opportunities delivered to your desk-
top, subscribe to Japanese Studies mailing lists or website feeds (e.g. the British Association for
467
Scott North
Japanese Studies, the European Association for Japanese Studies, H-Japan, Social Science
Japan Forum and the Society for East Asian Anthropology).
The bar for conference presentations is lower than for publication, so conferences are good
places to try out new ideas and learn how to position and market your work. Moreover, con-
ference attendees, such as journal editors, scholars with plans for edited volumes, publishers
looking for scholars with manuscripts in hand, organisers of panels for future conferences and
university job search committee members may see your presentation or find the title of your
paper in the programme. Networking at conferences sometimes yields invitations to contribute
to forthcoming projects. Browsing the book exhibits is another way to sense how broad the
audiences for your work might be.
Some publishing problems: Edited volumes, language concerns
Edited volumes may take longer to appear than journal articles. In 2000, I eagerly participated
in a panel with other authors of a proposed edited volume on law and social change in Japan.
By time the book came out (Steinhoff 2014), from a cash-strapped university press, the cases
were history. Delay is not ideal for young scholars, who need to publish in order to find work
or gain promotion.
Two papers on Japanese fatherhood in edited books offer an illustrative contrast. The first ex-
ample (North 2012) shows how edited volumes can obscure your work. The publisher’s des-
cription states, ‘Taking an international focus, Men, wage work and family contrasts [...] paid
work and non-work domains in industrialised countries in Europe, North America, and Aus-
tralia’, but although my contribution is entitled The work-family dilemmas of Japan’s salary-
men, Asia is omitted from the blurb! The second publication (North 2014), however, was su-
perbly organised. The editors had a strong vision for the volume, for which they recruited
draft chapters and secured funding to bring the authors together for two days of critical dis-
cussion. Following revisions, the volume was submitted to the publisher for blind review, lead-
ing to another round of revisions, professional proofreading and editing and, finally, publica-
tion, all in just two years.
My experience with edited volumes in Japanese, however, has been uniformly good. I have no
hope of ever writing perfect Japanese. This is strangely liberating, even if the writing is quite
difficult and time-consuming. I do not make an English draft, but write directly in Japanese
from an outline consisting of key words. All of my contributions to edited volumes in Japanese
have gone from draft to publication in a single fiscal year.
General advice
To sum up, do not hesitate to submit a more or less completed manuscript, or to consult jour-
nal editors about a proposal for a paper based on your in-progress research. Editors encourage
writers and help them understand how to position their work to find an audience. So take
some risks: write a fast draft of your paper, and then submit the abstract or first section of the
paper with a letter introducing the work to the editors of a journal that seems to publish the
sort of thing you are working on. If they express interest, then slowly and carefully rewrite
468
and edit your draft to meet the journal’s style. Follow the excellent advice of Adam Pzreworski
and Frank Salomon (1995) about appealing to the inner needs of reviewers by making the
contribution of your paper clear: in the title if possible, but certainly by the end of the first
page. If your paper is sent out for review, it may take months for the comments to come.
While you wait, turn your attention to other projects; find a conference or workshop in which
to present the work. Be patient. If after six months no news is forthcoming, send a polite in-
quiry to the editors.
Study the academic art of Social Science writing. Read classic texts about long-form writing to
learn how others pursue their craft (e.g. Becker 2007; Bolker 1998; Lamott 1995). Treasure
your graduate school papers. With revision, they become the basis for future publications. Join
(or create) a writing group that corresponds to your needs. Finally, write simply and avoid jar-
gon. Remember Reinhardt Bendix, who said, ‘You know, a little bit of theory goes a long way’
(Stinchcombe 1968, p. v). And always think of your readers—the audiences that you hope to
reach.
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17.2 Ethnographic film and fieldwork on active ageing
in rural Japan
One thing that I have always found fascinating about fieldwork is that it affords the researcher
access to people and places that they may not have been able to experience otherwise. Simi-
larly, documentary filmmakers often gain access to environments that lie outside their usual
surroundings, enabling them to observe and comment on the conditions, conventions, views
and feelings of members of a group or setting. This essay outlines the process of making the
documentary film 65+ Being old in rural Japan (Kieninger/Prochaska-Meyer 2014). It was pro-
duced as part of the ethnographic project Aged communities and active ageing—A case study
of rural villages in the Japanese Alps, headed by Sepp Linhart. The project was carried out by
Pia Kieninger and me and funded by the Oesterreichische Nationalbank’s Anniversary Fund.
The research project focused on the experiences of elderly people in rural municipalities in
Japan and analysed how different actors deal with the issue of ageing and depopulation. We
wanted to produce a film during our fieldwork to portray the situation in our research sites
and to show the life of senior citizens in rural Japan to a broader audience in and outside
Japan. Our research included two fieldwork stays of four months in total (two months in au-
tumn and two the following summer) in three municipalities in the Nagano and Yamanashi
prefectures. Through these two stays we hoped to develop closer relationships to our infor-
mants and gain a better insight into the topic. Starting from the pre-production stage, through
shooting and post-production until the movie was finally released, this essay summarises both
the challenges encountered during the fieldwork phase, the making of the ethnographic film
and what we learned from this project.
Pre-production: What story did we want to tell?
Before the first shooting phase, we only decided on the style of the documentary and left the
more specific film pitch for later in order to carry out our research inductively. Nevertheless,
we decided on a few things before going to the field: For example, we agreed that we would
not put ourselves into the picture and defined the approximate length of our film. It turned
out to be a great advantage that we had planned two fieldwork and shooting phases. During
the first fieldwork phase, we were able to be open to a broad spectrum of topics and locations
in order to get to know the characteristics of the villages and the activities of the elderly people
there. For the second fieldwork phase, we already had a clearer image of how our film would
look and had established trust relations with the informants. The tentative script that we de-
signed for our second stay focused on the portrayal of active senior residents in different living
situations in order to discuss the concept of active ageing (WHO 2002). We met elderly people
living on their own or in three-generation households, as well as retired men who had returned
470
to their rural home village in order to care for their mothers. After the first fieldwork phase,
we applied for funding for the post-production of the documentary film. We already had visu-
al references for our film and a clearer outline of the planned documentary’s working title,
length, target audience, main focus and goal.
Luckily, we were able to rely on close cooperation with the municipal offices at the respective
study sites. Before meeting senior residents for interviews, we participated in communal activi-
ties or observed specific organised courses (e.g. a gymnastics course, chorus rehearsals, etc.) to
meet elderly community members. During these activities, the course leader always knew in
advance that we would be present, and we asked for consent to observe and film the activities.
For the first few days, we spent time exploring the hamlets of the municipality and filming dai-
ly scenes: people working in their fields, the shop that sold everyday food items and agricultur-
al tools, or scenes of nature like kaki fruits hanging from leafless trees, etc. In these shooting
situations, we were also able to spontaneously meet people and have informal talks. In total,
we conducted interviews with 32 elderly people. The interviews outlined several main points
of interests, such as participation in municipally organised group activities for the elderly, mo-
bility, social interaction, etc. In addition, we also conducted expert interviews with municipal
administration and health care representatives.
Our initial film pitch was to portray senior citizens in various living conditions. However, in the
end, we selected only two single senior residents, who lived on their own, as the main protago-
nists for our film: 84-year-old Shimako-san from Minamiaiki, who talks with a husky voice,
grows vegetables and whose passion is gateball (a Japanese team sport inspired by croquet); and
93-year-old Genichi-san from Kitaaiki, the oldest villager with a driving licence, who composes
short poems on daily events. We decided to focus on their stories during our second stay in the
two neighbouring municipalities. Both Shimako-san and Genichi-san were very hospitable and
open, so we were able to get an intimate glimpse into their daily lives. We accompanied them to
their vegetable plots, to the supermarket or at home drinking tea with neighbours.
Post-production: What story were we going to tell?
After screening all the interviews and scenes of participant observation, we transcribed and trans-
lated all the conversations with our main informants and identified important topics that provid-
ed hints as to a potential structure for the film. We then realised that we wanted a narrator in the
film in order to explain the context of the research and to show the community life of senior vil-
lagers in general. The narrator would describe the overall situation in the study sites so that the
focus would periodically shift between the individual perspectives (Shimako-san and Genichi-
san) and the total picture (group activities, daily routine in the villages). Rather than commenting
on the situation in our study sites from our subjective perspective as researchers, we chose a pro-
fessional ‘neutral-voiced’ narrator, who recited our text in German. We added subtitles in English
and Japanese as well as in German when the two protagonists spoke on camera. All other inter-
views, as well as the expert interviews, were recorded and translated, but in the post-production
phase, we decided that only the voices of our two main informants and the narrator would be in-
cluded in the film. The expert interviews contributed to an understanding of the topic, but in the
end we did not include them as original comments in the film.
471
An important process during the post-production phase was getting feedback at test screen-
ings. This helped us to become aware of potential misunderstandings. Our opening scene is an
empty street in the morning. In the background, municipal loudspeakers broadcast the morn-
ing melody, which announces the time of day to local residents. After a preview of the rough
cut, a colleague did not recognise the melody as an original sound in the background, but
rather asked us why we had chosen such a ‘childish melody’, which emphasised the image of
the elderly as childlike. This was a very important remark for us, because in our view the con-
text seemed clear as we had also explicitly shown a close-up shot of the loudspeaker. Conse-
quently, we included a commentary in the subtitles which explained that the melody in the
background was being broadcast through the municipal loudspeakers.
Challenges and what we learned
As amateurs in the film-making world, we were not aware of the workload an ethnographic
film involves. On the one hand, this was good because we approached the film-making with a
broad interest and shot on any occasion possible. On the other hand, we returned from our
fieldwork with an enormous amount of visual and sound material, totalling more than 4,000
files with ca. 1.3 terabytes, from which we could only use a fraction for the final documentary.
A more defined film pitch could have facilitated the shooting process so that we would have
decided more precisely during the second shooting phase which scenes we would have liked to
include in the film.
The schedule for our first fieldwork stay was definitely too full. On one day, for example, we
started with the senior citizens’ chorus rehearsal in the community centre. Afterwards we
drove to the day-care centre, where we conducted an interview with the director and then with
a nurse. We then drove to another hamlet where we had previously arranged an interview with
an 83-year-old man who was still engaged in commercial farming. In the evening, we visited
the community centre again, this time to observe the hula dance course, in which all the par-
ticipants were in their 70s or older. The schedule for this day was obviously too intense, and as
a result we did not have enough time to reflect and recharge our batteries—both literally and
figuratively. We therefore decided on a maximum of three activities per day. During our sec-
ond fieldwork stay, we also planned days off as part of our schedule. We allowed more time to
transcribe or at least organise the interview memos while on location and to keep the research
journal up to date and more reflective.
During interviews there were also some points we had to keep in mind while filming. Contrary
to standard qualitative interviews, where affirmative comments and reactions help the intervie-
wee to keep on talking (see Kottmann/Reiher, Ch. 7), we had to switch to ‘silent affirmation’
by nodding or employing facial gestures that expressed surprise or amusement in order not to
have our comments or distracting sounds picked up in the recording. When filming our main
informants during informal conversations, we also needed to keep the camera running and
capture silent moments. On the other hand, we deliberately switched off the cameras and mi-
crophones in situations when our interpersonal relationship with the informant was in the
foreground rather than the intended subject matter of the ethnographic film project. Examples
of this included when we helped Genichi-san with his farm work or when we cooked a West-
ern meal together with Shimako-san in her kitchen.
472
Sometimes, while on location, you tend not to see the wood for the trees. For example, in both
the research and fieldwork phases, we encountered the problem of abandoned houses in rural
areas. However, back in the editing studio, we had difficulty finding cuts showing an aban-
doned house, because although we saw abandoned houses every day on location, we had sim-
ply forgotten to intentionally film such a house. It would have been helpful to make an explicit
list of important topics and terms related to our research beforehand and to collect related vi-
sual material, just in case.
Conclusion: It’s a wrap!
The documentary film project made me more aware of the subtle techniques you can use in
editing, with visuals, cuts and sounds in order to trigger a certain reaction (e.g. smiles) among
the audience. A documentary film is always a ‘subjective construct’ (Rabiger 2009, p. 18), not
only through the editing process, but also with the camera (Engelbrecht 1995, p. 153). There-
fore, at all stages, from pre-production until editing, the film-making process (as in every other
project) demands reflection and discussion. Having a camera during fieldwork also allowed us
to print out and give pictures to our informants. While this strengthened our relationships
with people, it was also our way of showing gratitude for their cooperation (see Gagné, Ch.
6.1; Klien, Ch. 8.1). We realised the powerful function of photographs as memories of events
and people when we learned during our second visit that one of our informants had passed
away a few months before.
The documentary was shown at film festivals, Japan-related events, lectures and conferences.
After the screening, we were also able to discuss the wider context of the research project, and
we received feedback from colleagues who had shown the film in class. One Austrian viewer
found Shimako-sans remark that she was looking forward to her old age in order to join the
gateball group very surprising and impressive—as in our Western society getting old is rarely
associated with something positive and desirable. In general, audiences in Europe thought the
film was positive and that the senior citizens were portrayed as physically and mentally very
active, while we also received remarks from some Japanese viewers that it was sad to see elder-
ly people living alone in the countryside. They were rather worried about the future of elderly
people in rural areas ten or twenty years ahead. In one study site, the documentary was broad-
cast on the municipal TV channel. Our main informants also received a DVD copy of the film
and were satisfied with the results. We uploaded the film to YouTube, where it can be watched
and commented on by an ‘unlimited audience’ anywhere, any time. Our aim of introducing
the topic of active ageing in rural Japan to a broader audience had therefore been realised.
473
17.3 Weird and wonderful: Popularising your research on Japan
Brigitte Steger
Do you want to be in the news? In the 1990s, that question was tricky. Aspiring academics
feared for their reputation when their name appeared in the popular press. Academia is sup-
posed to be respectable. That attitude reminds me of the neo-Confucian scholar Ogyū Sorai,
who, in 1715, criticised a new entertaining lecturing style that ‘mixes in a few funny stories to
wake up sleepers’ as unsuitable for the training of serious scholars. The practice ‘degrades the
teacher’s character and corrupts the student’s intellect’ (Dore 1965, p. 140). It was thought to
be impossible to dumb down serious research results, and if you could do it, that was hardly a
sign of sophistication. However, today, the mood has certainly changed. No one now doubts
the importance of getting your research into the news. After all, universities have to legitimise
their use of taxpayers’ money. To secure further funding, we need to make an impact. Making
our research known in popular media also benefits us directly. Most students—and even pro-
fessional academics—first learn about academic work outside their narrow speciality from the
media or via a Google search. Of course, media responses and public comments will often be
thoughtless or plain stupid, but constructive feedback can be very helpful. Moreover, relying
on academic journals alone to get the word out is not ideal as it requires expensive subscrip-
tions that not all libraries are able to buy; and in some countries, access to academic literature
is further restricted by censorship.
How do you get started? What format should you choose? Or perhaps I should say, how do
the media choose us? Anyone can, of course, publish their work on the Internet; and it is very
useful to have information on your research projects and publications online. Make sure that
journalists googling for experts find you if they suddenly become interested in your topic.
However, not every topic is equally ‘sexy’ for a general readership. Since anyone can publish
on the Internet and much of what we do is not obviously topical, it is hard to get attention for
your latest findings when you want or need it. Do not underestimate the reach of university
newsletters and magazines or academic society websites. For instance, the JAWS website
japananthropology.org welcomes reports by young scholars introducing their research on
Japanese society, both on published work and work in progress. They might not have popular
appeal at first sight, but good academic journalists regularly monitor these magazines and
might recognise the ‘newsworthiness’ of your story. These outlets are also trusted, and do not
require you to write for dummies or reduce sophisticated arguments to sensationalist head-
lines. It makes a lot of sense to pay attention to the quality of an article you might publish in
such formats. In fact, some of my most important media appearances were based on university
publications. When I was invited to give a lecture at the Technische Universität in Berlin in
2004, my recently published PhD thesis on social and cultural aspects of sleep (Steger 2004)
was reviewed in their newsletter. A journalist from the weekly newspaper Die Zeit read this,
did her research and contacted me. She read the whole book and travelled from Hamburg to
Vienna for an interview, which resulted in a full-page article introducing me and my research
474
(Etzold 2004). Not many media organisations can afford such expenses, but Die Zeit is sub-
scribed to by other newspapers, magazines or TV stations, so the story spread quickly.
More recently, in 2016, I was asked by the Cambridge University alumni magazine CAM to
write something about my research on public napping. Over the years I had learned to present
my findings on inemuri (to be present and sleep) to general audiences, so I complied. Several
of my colleagues and former students told me that they had read the article; for the first time
they knew what I was doing. That was nice, but a few months later, an editor of BBC Future
acquired the rights to publish the article on the BBC Worldwide network (Steger 2016). In
hindsight, I should have negotiated a higher fee for that article, as it proved to be immediately
popular and was selected to be part of the ‘Best of Future 2016’. By November 2018 it had
received about 1.4 million individual browser hits in English alone. BBC Worldwide is a huge
network, and the article was translated into Albanian, Arabic, Azeri, Chinese, Greek, Hausa,
Indonesian, Persian, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Swahili, Turkish and Vietnamese. I also
found summaries or excerpts of it in many other languages, which were copied and discussed
in private blogs and which inspired people to design napping devices, put together quizzes
about napping habits or use the term inemuri as their music band’s name. True, most of this
did little to further my career, but it is nevertheless good to see that the ideas inspired other
people. A number of media outlets, such as the New York Times, the Guardian, Dagens Ny-
heter or Russian RenTV, have since contacted me for interviews.
The most common way for your research to get into the news is by means of an interview
when a journalist has found you as a useful source of information or to provide ‘sound bites’
for their radio programmes. Interviews are usually edited to a few seconds or minutes at most.
Some journalists ask questions through which they obviously want you to feed their stereo-
types. It can be difficult to get your own message across. You need to be careful and selective.
How serious is the request? Some journalists send a catalogue of questions by e-mail; you sit
down and think of thoughtful answers, only to find out that they have just a line or two to
write about what you say. Ask how they will use the interview; if it is longer and you are their
main informant or the story is about you, ask them to send you a draft to confirm. Generally
speaking, it is better to concentrate on well-known quality media; not only do they have more
space to write and a readership which will be happy to read sentences exceeding eight words,
but these journalists are also better trained and ask interesting questions. Some of them can
even be inspiring, making you think of a new angle on your research.
When you write the story yourself, you have ‘message control’, but there are a few basics to
keep in mind, in particular, the structural difference in writing academic essays and stories for
a general public. Academics try to find ‘the truth’ about certain phenomena, and then they
think of how to present their results. Journalists are looking for good and topical stories and
information that help to explain. They talk about the ‘7 W’ questions: who, what, where,
when, how, why and where from. When we write a story, we should always check whether we
have answered all these questions. In fact, this is not only a requirement for more popular
writing. We academics work for many years on one topic and thus tend to take the most obvi-
ous information for granted. So it helps to remind yourself of those questions. Journalists also
ask: Does this article fulfil the ‘breakfast criterion’? In other words, would you continue read-
ing this article if you came across it while flipping through the newspaper and having your
morning coffee? If anything, in the age of clickbait, this has become crucial—and demanding.
475
Brigitte Steger
While we usually think of the title right at the end of the writing process, to a reader it is the
start; the hook. A good title has to catch the attention of a potential reader, and the first para-
graph (as well as the rest of the text, of course) needs to be clear and engaging. I once heard
the story of a man who researched the most popular words in bestseller titles; they were ‘cat’,
‘golf’ and ‘sex’. He subsequently published his own book, including all three terms in the title.
Lo and behold, the book sold very well. Of course, your title needs to deliver on the argument
of your research, but it also needs to reach the readers on an emotional as well as an intellec-
tual level. I understand that not every topic is easy to sell and it is a question of timing. The
global interest in the 3.11 disasters has declined, in diametrical opposition to the excellent re-
search that has been produced. The intricacies of Heian period (794–1185) court protocol or
of recent changes in Japanese waste disposal law might sound rather dry, catering to minority
interests. It is the researcher’s job to show the significance of these seemingly detailed ques-
tions and make it relevant for local and international audiences today. A royal wedding or ab-
dication in Japan provides a great opportunity to ‘sell’ your research, as does any kind of envi-
ronmental discussion. It is as much about how you write as what you have to say. The same
goes for visuals. Beautiful, witty, puzzling, ironic or iconic, there are many reasons a picture
speaks to us. A good picture should make potential readers curious of what you have to say.
Of course, copyright issues also need to be considered.
There is also the ‘grandma criterion’. Can your grandmother understand your article? It is al-
ways better to write for one specific person you care about than trying to make everyone hap-
py. Your text will get some immediacy and it will be easier for your readers to connect with it.
Being able to write for an intelligent but non-specialist audience is a useful skill to acquire, in
particular for job and grant applications, but even for your academic work. It can be quite a
challenge to simplify what you have to say. Sometimes seemingly boring details are necessary,
and not all audiences are able and willing to follow lengthy and detailed arguments. Keep
those for your peer-reviewed articles. Moreover, in everyday language, fancy theories sound
far less sophisticated. Getting rid of all the 50 dollar words, we may look like the emperor in
his new clothes. However, simplifying and abbreviating force you to think precisely and do not
mean that you need to avoid all technical terms. If your Japanese terms are the most precise
with which to describe an issue, explain them well. In fact, your audiences will like to learn
intriguing Japanese terms.
When you write for a general audience, make sure that it is clear and ‘flows’. In fact, this is
useful advice for any kind of text. Reading academic work—and especially students’ essays—I
sometimes feel like I am chasing a rabbit. When rabbits try to escape a fox or dog, they dodge
and jink right or left very suddenly. The dog falters and then turns to take up the chase again.
Jinking is a useful skill for a rabbit, but it is better if your readers can catch you and follow
your arguments; you can and should captivate them. Finish your thought before starting a new
one and do not cram several thoughts into one sentence! I am quite aware how difficult this
can be, especially when you are struggling with a word count. Read your article out aloud and
listen to yourself.
Of course, even today, working with the media and popularising your knowledge is not with-
out risks. Japan-related topics are often published under the category ‘weird and wonderful’.
The media cater to stereotypes, both by feeding them and by provoking contradiction (such as
in my case, about diligent Japanese who take a nap at work). Not everything is in our control,
but trying to get the stories out ourselves as clearly written as possible and being aware of how
476
the media work do help us to avoid the most serious pitfalls. Go for quality media outlets;
they ask better questions and allow you more time and space to develop your arguments. Talk
about work that is already published, so that people can buy your books or read your articles,
and no one can simply steal your research ideas! The main problems and biggest risks are real-
ly the demands on your time and how you organise and prioritise. But neglecting media work
is no longer an option.
477
Further reading
Becker, Howard S. (2007): Writing for social scientists: How to start and finish your thesis, book, or arti-
cle. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
Curry, Mary Jane/Lillis, Theresa (2013): A scholar’s guide to getting published in English: Critical choices
and practical strategies. Blue Ridge Summit, PA: Multilingual Matters.
Klingner, Janette K./Scanlon, David/Pressley, Michael (2004): How to publish in scholarly journals. In: Ed-
ucational Researcher 34, No. 8, pp. 14–20.
Moxley, Joseph Michael (1992): Publish, don’t perish: The scholar’s guide to academic writing and pub-
lishing. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press.
Pzreworski, Adam/Salomon, Frank (1995): On the art of writing proposals. www.ssrc.org/publications/vie
w/7A9CB4F4-815F-DE11-BD80-001CC477EC70/, [Accessed 18 August 2020].
Rosenthal, Alan/Eckhardt, Ned (2016): Writing, directing, and producing documentary films and digital
videos. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press.
Wellington, Jerry J. (2003): Getting published: A guide for lecturers and researchers. London: Routledge-
Falmer.
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Dezaki, Miki (dir.) (2019): Shusenjo [film]. 120 min., No Man Productions LLC.
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Notes on contributors
Shinichi Aizawa is an Associate Professor at Sophia University. His main research interests in-
clude the Sociology of Education, social mobility and social class. He recently published High
school for all in East Asia (Routledge, 2019) and Sōchūryū no hajimari: Danchi to seikatsu-
jikan no sengoshi [The rise of all-middle-class society: Postwar history of public housing com-
plex and time-use] (Seikyūsha, 2019, co-edited with Watanabe).
Noor Albazerbashi is a MEXT Fellow at the Graduate Program in Global Studies at Sophia
University. Her work is on Syrian refugees and immigration support in Tokyo.
Daniel P. Aldrich is Director of the Security and Resilience Studies Program and Professor of
Political Science and Public Policy at Northeastern University. He received his PhD from Har-
vard University and his main research interests include the role of social networks during
crises and disasters, nuclear energy and environmental politics. He recently published Black
wave: How networks and governance shaped Japan’s 3/11 disasters (University of Chicago,
2019).
Allison Alexy is an Assistant Professor at the University of Michigan. She received her PhD
from Yale University and her main research interests include intimacy, family, law and divorce
in contemporary Japan. She has recently published Intimate disconnections: Divorce and the
romance of independence in contemporary Japan (University of Chicago Press, 2020).
Celeste L. Arrington is the Korea Foundation Assistant Professor of Political Science and Inter-
national Affairs at George Washington University. She holds a PhD from the University of Cal-
ifornia, Berkeley. Her main research interests include law and social change, legal profession-
als, social movements and comparative policy processes. She recently published ‘Hiding in
plain sight: Pseudonymity and participation in legal mobilization’ in Comparative Political
Studies (2019) and ‘The mechanisms behind litigation’s “radiating effects”: Historical
grievances against Japan’ in Law & Society Review (2019).
Verena Blechinger-Talcott holds a PhD from Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München and is

Professor of Japanese Politics and Political Economy at Freie Universität Berlin where she was
also one of the founding directors of the Graduate School of East Asian Studies. Her research
interests include Japanese politics and international relations in comparative perspective, par-
ticularly the role of institutions. She recently co-edited a special issue on Dimensions of Sino-
Japanese rivalry in a global context in The Pacific Review (2019) (with Schulze).
Christoph Brumann is Head of Research Group at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthro-
pology, Halle and Honorary Professor of Anthropology at Martin Luther University Halle-
Wittenberg. His most recent research has focused on the urban Anthropology of Kyoto, in par-
ticular urban conservation and development and the current condition of Buddhist temples.
He published Tradition, democracy and the townscape of Kyoto (Routledge, 2012) and co-
edited World heritage on the ground: Ethnographic perspectives (Berghahn, 2016). His mono-
graph on the UNESCO World Heritage Committee is currently under review.
Genaro Castro-Vázquez is Professor of Sociology at Kansai Gaidai University where he teaches

courses related to Medical Sociology and Sociology of Education. He obtained a PhD from the
University of Tsukuba and undertook postdoctoral studies at Keio University. His research in-
terests include sexuality, gender, health and education and Latin Americans living in Japan.
Recent publications include Male circumcision in Japan (Palgrave, 2015), Intimacy and repro-
duction in contemporary Japan (Routledge, 2017) and Masculinity and body weight in Japan:
Grappling with metabolic syndrome (Routledge, 2020).
David Chiavacci is Professor in Social Science of Japan at the University of Zurich where he
also obtained his PhD. His research covers political and economic Sociology of contemporary
Japan from a comparative perspective. His recent publications include Japanese political econ-
omy revisited: Abenomics and institutional change (Routledge, 2019) and Civil society and the
state in democratic East Asia: Between entanglement and contention in post high growth (Am-
sterdam University Press, 2020).
Jamie Coates holds a PhD from Australian National University and is a Lecturer in East Asian
Studies at the University of Sheffield. His research interests include the Anthropology of me-
dia, mobility and imagination in China and Japan. He recently published ‘The cruel optimism
of mobility: Aspiration, belonging and the “good life” among transnational Chinese migrants
in Tokyo’ in positions: asia critique (2019).
Emma E. Cook holds a PhD from the University of London and is an Associate Professor in
the Modern Japanese Studies Program at Hokkaido University. Her main research interests in-
clude issues related to food, health, risk, emotion, gender, family and intimacy. She recently
published a special issue with De Antoni titled Feeling (with) Japan (Asian Anthropology,
2019) and an edited volume with Alexy titled, Intimate Japan: Ethnographies of closeness and
conflict (University of Hawai‘i Press, 2018).
Laura Dales obtained her PhD from the University of Western Australia where she is a Senior
Lecturer in Asian Studies. Her main research interests include agency, sexuality, friendship and
dating across Asia, as well as singlehood and marriage in contemporary Japan. She recently
published the co-edited collection Configurations of family in contemporary Japan (Routledge,
2015) with Dasgupta and Aoyama.
Andreas Eder-Ramsauer is a PhD Candidate and Junior Research Fellow at the Freie Universi-
tät Berlin. He holds an MA in Japanese Studies from the University of Vienna. His main re-
search interests include Japanese politics, democratic thinking in postwar Japan and populism
in Japan.
James Farrer is Professor of Sociology at Sophia University in Tokyo. His research focuses on
the contact zones of global cities, including ethnographic studies of sexuality, nightlife, expa-
triate communities and food. His recent publications include Shanghai nightscapes: A noctur-
nal biography of a global city (co-authored with Field, University of Chicago Press, 2015), the
edited volume Globalization and Asian cuisines: Transnational networks and contact zones
(Palgrave, 2015) and International migrants in China’s global city: The new Shanghailanders
(Routledge, 2019).
481
Flavia Fulco is Assistant Professor at Tohoku University in the International Research Institute
of Disaster Science (IRIDeS). She has a PhD in American Studies and has conducted research
on the cultural memory of the 3.11 disaster. She is a collaborator on the Voices from Japan
digital oral narrative project based at Sophia University. She recently published ‘Voices from
Tohoku: From digital archive of oral narratives to scientific application in disaster risk reduc-
tion’ (with Slater and O’Day) in Digital Archive Basics 2 (Bensei Ed., 2019).
Isaac Gagné is a Senior Research Fellow at the German Institute for Japanese Studies (DIJ) in
Tokyo and Managing Editor of Contemporary Japan. He holds a PhD from Yale University.
His research interests include morality and ethics, religion and globalisation, mental health
and social welfare, gender and popular culture. His publications include ‘Religious globaliza-
tion and reflexive secularization in a Japanese new religion’ (Japan Review, 2017) and ‘Dislo-
cation, social isolation, and the politics of recovery in post-disaster Japan’ (Transcultural Psy-
chiatry, 2020).
Nana Okura Gagné is a cultural anthropologist and Associate Professor at The Chinese Uni-
versity of Hong Kong. Her research explores how global capitalism impinges upon local ide-
ologies and social and gender relations, family relations, socio-economic and class relations
and individual subjectivities. She holds a PhD from Yale University and has published in Amer-
ican Ethnologist, Anthropological Theory, Ethnography and the Journal of Contemporary
Asia. Her book, Restructuring and resilience: Changing men at work and play in neoliberal
Japan is forthcoming (Cornell University Press).
Sonja Ganseforth is a Principal Researcher at the German Institute for Japanese Studies (DIJ)
in Tokyo and received her PhD from Leipzig University. Her research interests include the so-
cial and economic geography of the globalisation of agrifood systems, rural livelihoods, devel-
opment politics and discourses and social movements in Japan. She recently published Occu-
pations: Japanese development spaces in Palestine (Transcript, 2016). She is the co-editor of a
volume on the socio-politics of sub-national spaces in Japan (Routledge, forthcoming).
Sheldon Garon is Nissan Professor of History and East Asian Studies at Princeton University.
He completed his PhD at Yale University and his research interests include state-society rela-
tions in modern Japan and transnational history that spotlights the flow of ideas and institu-
tions between Japan, Europe and the United States. His publications include Beyond our
means: Why America spends while the world saves (Princeton University Press, 2012).
Julia Gerster is Assistant Professor at the International Research Institute of Disaster Science
(IRIDeS) at Tohoku University. She holds a PhD from Freie Universität Berlin and her main
research interests include the dynamics of social relations after disasters, recovery processes,
negative heritage, identity and community building. She has recently published ‘Hierarchies of
affectedness: Kizuna, perceptions of loss and social dynamics in post-3.11 Japan’ (Internation-
al Journal of Disaster Risk Reduction, 2019).
482
Christopher Gerteis is an Associate Professor of Modern and Contemporary Japanese History

at the University of London. He is the founding series Editor of the scholarly monograph se-
ries SOAS Studies in Modern and Contemporary Japan, published in association with Blooms-
bury, and he was Chief Editor of Japan Forum. He currently holds a five-year residence as As-
sociate Professor and Academic Editor for the International Publishing Initiative in Humani-
ties and Area Studies at the Institute for Advanced Studies on Asia, at the University of Tokyo.
Roger Goodman is Nissan Professor of Japanese Studies at the University of Oxford where he
also obtained a DPhil. His main research interests include Japanese education and social poli-
cy. He recently published (with Breaden) Family-run universities in Japan: Sources of inbuilt
resilience in the face of demographic pressure, 1992–2030 (Oxford University Press, 2020).
Markus Heckel holds a PhD from the University of Duisburg-Essen and is a Senior Research
Fellow at the German Institute for Japanese Studies (DIJ) in Tokyo. His research interests in-
clude monetary policy, the political economy of central banks and labour economics. He re-
cently published an article about labour contracts in Japan and the World Economy (with
Genda and Kambayashi, 2019).
Steffen Heinrich received a Doctorate from Heidelberg University and is Visiting Professor of
Japanese Politics and Political Economy at Freie Universität Berlin. His main research interests
include welfare and labour market policies in Japan from a comparative perspective. He re-
cently published the book chapter ‘The politics of balancing flexibility and equality: A com-
parison of recent equal pay reforms in Germany and Japan’ (Springer, 2019).
Joy Hendry holds a DPhil from the University of Oxford and is Professor Emerita of Social
Anthropology at Oxford Brookes University. Her research interests include rural Japan, mar-
riage and family life, child-rearing, politeness and presentation (wrapping) and cultural dis-
play. She recently published a fifth edition of Understanding Japanese society (Routledge,
2019), a collection of her many articles appeared in An anthropological lifetime in Japan
(Brill, 2017) and she is working on an illustrated account of forty-five years of fieldwork enti-
tled An affair with a village.
Swee-Lin Ho is Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology at the National University

of Singapore. She received her PhD from the University of Oxford and her research interests
include the neoliberal transformations of work, gender, friendship and urban space in Japan;
the globalisation of Korean popular culture; and the growing importance of western classical
music to Asia. Among her recent publications are Friendship and work culture of women man-
agers in Japan: Tokyo after ten (Routledge, 2018), and Women managers in neoliberal Japan:
Gender, precarious labour and everyday lives (Routledge, 2020).
Barbara Holthus holds PhDs from the University of Hawai‘i and Trier University. She is a soci-
ologist and Deputy Director of the German Institute for Japanese Studies (DIJ) in Tokyo. Her
main research interests include marriage and the family, childcare, happiness and well-being,
media and demographic change. Her publications include Life course, happiness and well-be-
ing in Japan (Routledge, 2017, co-edited with Manzenreiter) and Japan through the lens of the
Tokyo Olympics (Routledge, 2020, co-edited with Gagné, Manzenreiter and Waldenberger).
483
Carola Hommerich is Associate Professor at Sophia University in Tokyo since 2019. She re-
ceived her PhD from the University of Cologne and her research focuses on how people evalu-
ate their place in society, on whether their objective living situation matches their subjective
experience and how that in turn affects their subjective wellbeing, attitudes and behaviour.
Her recent publications include ‘Movement behind the scenes: The quiet transformation of
status identification in Japan’ (with Kikkawa) (Social Science Japan Journal, 2019).
Katharina Hülsmann is a PhD Candidate at Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf where she
previously taught Japanese Culture at the Department of Modern Japanese Studies. Her main
research interests include Japanese popular culture, representations of gender and sexualities
and fan cultures. She recently co-edited the volume Japanische Populärkultur und Gender
[Japanese popular culture and gender] (Springer VS, 2016).
Jun Imai is Professor of Sociology at Sophia University in Tokyo. Before joining Sophia, he
gained a PhD from Stony Brook University and taught at the University of Duisburg-Essen,
Tohoku University and Hokkaido University. His major field of research is the development of
employment relations and its consequences on social inequalities. He recently published
‘Struggling men in emasculated life-course: Non-regular employment among young men’ in
Heinrich and Galan (eds.) Being young in super-ageing Japan (Routledge, 2018).
Hanno Jentzsch is Assistant Professor (postdoc) in East Asian Studies at the University of Vien-
na. His research interests include central-local relations, agricultural politics and the welfare
regime in Japan. He holds a PhD from the University of Duisburg-Essen and has recently pub-
lished on the local origins of national farmland consolidation policies (Social Science Japan
Journal, 2017) and regional revitalisation in Yamanashi Prefecture (Routledge, 2020). He is
the co-editor of a volume on the socio-politics of sub-national spaces in Japan (Routledge,
forthcoming).
Aya H. Kimura is Professor of Sociology at University of Hawai‘i-Mānoa. She received her

PhD from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and her research interests include agrifood,
sustainability and gender. Her book Radiation brain moms and citizen scientists: The gender
politics of food contamination after Fukushima (Duke University Press, 2016) was the winner
of the Rachel Carson Award from the Society for Social Studies of Science. She recently pub-
lished Science by the people: Participation, power, and the politics of environmental knowledge
(Rutgers University Press, 2019) with Kinchy.
Emi Kinoshita is Research Assistant (postdoc) at the Faculty of Education, Leipzig University,
where she also obtained her PhD. Her main research interests include pedagogical profession-
alism and biographical approaches in the field of comparative education, history of education
and qualitative teaching research. She recently published ‘Modern education and biography’
(Comparative education: bulletin of the Japan Comparative Education Society, 2010, in
Japanese) and ‘Reception of lesson study (jugyō kenkyū) abroad’ (Annual Journal of the Asian
Cultures Research Institute, 2020).
484
Susanne Klien is Associate Professor at Hokkaido University. She obtained her PhD from the
University of Vienna and her main research interests include the appropriation of local tradi-
tions, demographic decline and alternative forms of living and working in post-growth Japan.
She recently published Urban migrants in rural Japan: Between agency and anomie in a post-
growth society (State University of New York Press, 2020).
Nora Kottmann is a Senior Research Fellow at the German Institute for Japanese Studies (DIJ)
in Tokyo and received her PhD from the Heinrich Heine University in Düsseldorf. Her re-
search interests include the interrelation of intimacy and space/mobility, personal relationships,
gender, (not) belonging and lifestyles abroad. She is author of Marriage in Japan: Romantic
and solidary relationship worlds in flux (Springer VS, 2016, in German). Recent publications
include book chapters on relationship worlds of unmarried individuals (2019) and on
Japanese women working abroad (2020).
Gracia Liu-Farrer obtained her PhD from the University of Chicago and is Professor of Sociol-
ogy at the Graduate School of Asia-Pacific Studies and Director of the Institute of Asian Mi-
grations at Waseda University. Her main research interests include cross-border migration and
social mobility in Asia and Europe. She recently edited (with Yeoh) the Routledge handbook
of Asian migrations (Routledge, 2018) and published the monograph Immigrant Japan: Mobil-
ity and belonging in an ethno-nationalist society (Cornell University Press, 2020).
Patricia L. Maclachlan holds a PhD in Political Science from Columbia University. She is Pro-
fessor of Government and Mitsubishi Heavy Industries Professor of Japanese Studies at the
University of Texas. She currently conducts research on the political economy of Japanese agri-
culture. She has published Consumer politics in postwar Japan: The institutional boundaries of
citizen activism (Columbia University Press, 2002) and The people’s post office: The history
and politics of the Japanese postal system, 1871–2010 (Harvard University Asia Center, 2011).
Wolfram Manzenreiter is Professor of Japanese Studies at the Department of East Asian Stud-
ies, University of Vienna where he also obtained his PhD. His main research interests include
physical culture, happiness, mobilities and the diversity of lifeways in the peripheries of a glob-
alised world. He recently published a co-edited volume with Lützeler and Polak-Rottmann on
Japan’s new ruralities: Coping with decline in the periphery (Routledge, 2020).
Kenneth Mori McElwain is Professor of Comparative Politics at the Institute of Social Science,
University of Tokyo. His research focuses on comparative political institutions and, most re-
cently, on differences in constitutional design across countries. His work has been published in
a number of edited volumes and journals, including American Journal of Political Science,
Journal of East Asian Studies, Social Science Japan, Chūō Kōron and the Journal of Japanese
Studies.
Levi McLaughlin is Associate Professor at the Department of Philosophy and Religious Stud-
ies, North Carolina State University. He is co-author of Kōmeitō: Politics and religion in Japan
(IEAS Berkeley, 2014) and author of Soka Gakkai’s human revolution: The rise of a mimetic
nation in modern Japan (University of Hawai‘i Press, 2019).
485
Chris McMorran holds a PhD from the University of Colorado and is Associate Professor of
Japanese Studies at the National University of Singapore. He is a cultural geographer of con-
temporary Japan with research interests in tourism, gendered labour, mobilities and the ge-
ographies of home. He co-edited Teaching Japanese popular culture (Association for Asian
Studies, 2016) and co-produces Home on the Dot, a podcast about the meaning of home in
Singapore through the lives of NUS students.
Caitlin Meagher is Visiting Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Skidmore College in

Saratoga Springs, New York. She obtained a DPhil from the University of Oxford and her
main research interests include changes to the home and family in contemporary Japan. Her
book Inside a Japanese sharehouse: Dreams and realities is forthcoming (Routledge, 2020).
Lynne Y. Nakano is Professor at The Chinese University of Hong Kong where she has been
teaching since 1995. Her main research interests include gender, family, disability and experi-
ences of marginality. She holds a PhD from Yale University, is the author of Community volun-
teers in Japan: Everyday stories of social change (Routledge, 2004) and has written on the ex-
periences of single women in Shanghai, Hong Kong and Tokyo. She is currently conducting
research on special education in Japan.
Scott North obtained a PhD from the University of California at Berkeley and is a sociologist
of family life and labour. His publications on Japan include studies of work styles, overwork
and karoshi, fatherhood, leisure, the gendered division of household labour and reforms to
employment and labour law. He was Professor of Sociology in the Graduate School of Human
Sciences at Osaka University from 2002 to 2021.
Robin O’Day is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of North Georgia. He

holds a PhD from the University of British Columbia and his main research interests include
Japanese social movements. He recently co-authored the chapter ‘Mass media representations
of youth social movements in Japan’ with Slater and Uno in Social movements and political
activism in contemporary Japan edited by Chiavacci and Obinger (Routledge, 2018).
Kaori Okano obtained her PhD from Massey University and is a Professor at La Trobe Univer-
sity. Her research interests include education, social justice and the politics of difference, multi-
culturalism, gender, life course, sociolinguistic variations, ethnography and longitudinal de-
signs. Her recent publications include Nonformal education in civil society (Routledge, 2016),
Discourse, gender and shifting identities in Japan (Routledge, 2018), Rethinking Japanese
Studies: Eurocentrism and the Asia-Pacific regions (Routledge, 2018) and Education and so-
cial justice in Japan (Routledge, forthcoming).
Robert J. Pekkanen is Professor at the Henry M. Jackson School of International Studies at the
University of Washington. His research interests lie in electoral systems, political parties, inter-
view methods and nonprofits or civil society. He has published articles in Political Science
journals such as The American Political Science Review and The Journal of Asian Studies. He
has published ten books in English on electoral systems, American nonprofit advocacy,
Japanese civil society and Japanese elections and political parties.
486
Saadia M. Pekkanen is the Job and Gertrud Tamaki Endowed Professor at the University of
Washington in Seattle. She works at the intersection of international relations and internation-
al law, specialising in the economic, legal, and security policies shaping the space industry. She
also investigates contemporary geopolitical change through the lens of infrastructure invest-
ment relations among countries. Her regional expertise is in the foreign affairs of Japan and
Asia. She is interested in the teaching and practice of qualitative research methods and is
working to extend them to big data studies in the Social Sciences.
Theresia Berenike Peucker obtained her Doctorate from Martin Luther University Halle-Wit-
tenberg. As a trained librarian, she has been serving at the Campus Library of Freie Universität
Berlin since 2012. She manages the Japanese studies collection and assists with library and
archive searches and academic writing. Her research interests include memory politics as well
as information retrieval and information literacy.
Isabelle Prochaska-Meyer is an Assistant Professor (postdoc) at the Department of East Asian

Studies at the University of Vienna where she also obtained her PhD. Her main research inter-
ests include religion (especially religion in Okinawa), rural Japan and ageing. She recently pub-
lished the documentary movie (co-directed by Pia R. Kieninger) ‘65+. Being old in rural Japan’
(2014).
Cornelia Reiher is Professor of Japanese Studies at Freie Universität Berlin and holds a Doctor-
ate from Leipzig University. Her main research interests include rural Japan, food, globalisa-
tion and Science and Technology Studies. Her recent publications include a special issue on
Fieldwork in Japan: New trends and challenges (2018) and book chapters on transnational
protest movement(s) against preferential trade agreements in Asia (2019), the governance of
radionuclides in food in post Fukushima Japan (2020) and urban-rural migration (2020).
Nancy Rosenberger is Professor Emeritus at Oregon State University. Her main research inter-
ests in Japan are women’s changing lives, organic farmers and rural revitalisation. Her publica-
tions include Gambling with virtue (University of Hawai‘i Press, 2000) Dilemma of adult-
hoods (University of Hawai‘i Press, 2013) and ‘Young organic farmers in Japan: Betting on
lifestyle, locality, and livelihood’ in Contemporary Japan (2017).
Richard J. Samuels is Ford International Professor of Political Science and Director of the Cen-
tre for International Studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In 2015–2019 he
was Albert Einstein Visiting Fellow at the Freie Universität Berlin, where he completed his
most recent book Special duty: A history of the Japanese intelligence community (Cornell Uni-
versity Press, 2019), named by the Council on Foreign Relations’ journal Foreign Affairs one
of the ‘Best of Books, 2019’.
Annette Schad-Seifert is Professor of Japanese Studies at Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf

and holds a PhD from Freie Universität Berlin. She has served as Vice President of the German
Association of Social Science Research on Japan and Specially Appointed Professor at the In-
stitute for Gender Studies at Ochanomizu University. Her major research areas are Japanese
society, demographic change, family policy and gender issues. She recently published Family
life in Japan and Germany: Challenges for a gender-sensitive family policy (Springer, 2019).
487
Katja Schmidtpott is Professor of Japanese History at Ruhr-Universität Bochum. She specialis-

es in the social and economic history of modern Japan, and her main research interests include
urbanisation, modernisation of everyday life and the economic relations between Japan and
(West) Germany. She recently published The East Asian dimension of the First World War:
Global entanglements and Japan, China and Korea, 1914–1919 (Campus, 2020, co-edited
with Schmidt).
Tino Schölz obtained a PhD from Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg and is a Post-
doctoral Research Fellow at Freie Universität Berlin. His main research interests include the
political and military history of modern Japan. His publications include ‘Die Gefallenen be-
sänftigen und ihre Taten rühmen’: Gefallenengedenken und politische Verfasstheit in Japan seit
der Mitte des 19. Jahrhunderts (De Gruyter Oldenbourg, 2016).
Kai Schulze is a Postdoctoral Researcher at Freie Universität Berlin where he also obtained his
PhD. His main research interests include foreign policy analysis, interstate rivalry, cross-re-
gional relations, Japan's foreign and security policy, Sino-Japanese relations and East Asia-
Middle East relations. He recently co-edited a special issue on Dimensions of Sino-Japanese ri-
valry in a global context in The Pacific Review (2019) (with Blechinger-Talcott).
Kay Shimizu holds a PhD from Stanford University and is a Research Assistant Professor in
the Department of Political Science at the University of Pittsburgh. Her research focuses on
comparative politics, especially fiscal and financial politics, of Japan and China. Her publica-
tions include Cultivating institutional change: Economic liberalization, demographic decline,
and the reform of Japan Agricultural Cooperatives (forthcoming, co-authored with Maclach-
lan), as well as articles in Socio-Economic Review, Journal of East Asian Studies, Current His-
tory and Social Science Japan Journal.
Karen Shire holds the Chair for Comparative Sociology and Japanese Society at the Institutes
of Sociology and East Asian Studies at the University of Duisburg-Essen. Her research com-
pares the transnationalisation of labour in Asia and Europe. She holds a PhD from the Univer-
sity of Wisconsin-Madison. Recent publications include the Transnationalization of labour
(Springer, 2018, co-editor), ‘The social order of migration markets’ (Global Networks, 2020),
and ‘Who are the fittest? The question of skills in national employment Systems’ (Journal of
Ethnic and Migration Studies, 2020, co-author).
David H. Slater is a Professor of Cultural Anthropology at Sophia University, Tokyo. He has

recently worked on the practice and politics of post 3.11 nuclear disasters in northern Japan
and runs the Voices from Japan project. He is now researching homeless and refugee popula-
tions in Tokyo.
Celia Spoden is a Research Associate (postdoc) at the Institute for History, Ethics and Philoso-
phy of Medicine at Hannover Medical School and holds a PhD in Japanese Studies from Hein-
rich Heine University Düsseldorf. Her research focuses on bioethical questions using a qualita-
tive approach. She recently published ‘Deciding one’s own death in advance: Biopower, living
wills, and resistance to a legislation of death with dignity in Japan’ (Contemporary Japan,
2020).
488
Brigitte Steger is a Senior Lecturer at the University of Cambridge. She studies the social and
cultural embeddedness of seemingly natural, bodily matters and daily life such as sleep, time,
cleanliness, waste disposal and shelter life. Steger holds a PhD in Japanese Studies and recently
published ‘The stranger and others: Life and legacy of the ethnologist Oka Masao’ (Vienna
Journal of East Asian Studies, 2019) and Beyond kawaii: Studying Japanese femininities at
Cambridge, co-edited with Koch and Tso (Lit, 2020).
Nicolas Sternsdorff-Cisterna is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Southern Methodist

University. He holds a PhD from Harvard University and his main research interests include
the study of food, risk, science and technology. He is the author of Food safety after Fukushi-
ma: Scientific citizenship and the politics of risk (University of Hawai‘i Press, 2019).
Christian Tagsold is Professor at the Department for Modern Japan at Heinrich Heine Univer-
sity Düsseldorf. He has been researching Japanese gardens in Europe and the USA since 2006.
His book Spaces of translation: Japanese gardens in the West (Pennsylvania University Press,
2017) was awarded with the Abbott Lowell Cummings Award by the Vernacular Architecture
Forum in 2019. His other research interests include the aging society in Japan, the Tokyo
Olympics 1964/2020 and the Japanese diaspora in Düsseldorf.
Akiko Takeyama is an Associate Professor of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at the
University of Kansas. Her research interests include changing gender, sexuality and class dy-
namics in contemporary Japan. Her first book, Staged seduction: Selling dreams in a Tokyo
host club (Stanford University Press, 2016) was a finalist for the 2017 Michelle Rosaldo Book
Prize (Association of Feminist Anthropology). She is currently working on her second book
project Involuntary consent: Sexual labor and violence in Japan’s adult video industry.
Katrin Ullmann is a trained systemic counsellor and works at the University of Applied Sci-
ences in Düsseldorf. She obtained her PhD from Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf, where
she worked at the Institute for Cultural Science and Media. Her research interests include gen-
erational and family research, Global and Mobility Studies, as well as counselling research
that integrates aspects of Cultural Studies. She recently published the monograph Genera-
tionscapes: Conceptual framework and empirical findings of a global generation (Transcript,
2017).
Gabriele Vogt holds the Chair of Japanese Studies at Ludwig-Maximilian-Universität

München. Her main research interests include international labour migration and demograph-
ic change, local politics, social movements and Okinawan Studies. She holds a PhD from the
University of Hamburg and has recently published Population aging and international health-
caregiver migration to Japan (Springer, 2018) and co-authored the article ‘Identity politics in
Okinawan elections: The emergence of regional populism’, with Hijino (Japan Forum, 2019).
489
Cosima Wagner has a PhD from Goethe University Frankfurt and is academic librarian at
Freie Universität Berlin, serving as liaison to the East Asian Studies faculty with a special focus
on Digital Humanities, Research Data Management and Open Science. Her research interests
include a Science and Technology Studies approach to library infrastructure management, mul-
tilingualism and non-Latin scripts in the digital space, Area Studies librarianship as well as
critical algorithm studies and social robotics in Japan Monograph: Robotopia Nipponica.
Recherchen zur Akzeptanz von Robotern in Japan (Tectum, 2013).
Daisuke Watanabe is an Associate Professor at Seikei University. His main research interests
include the Sociology of aging, health and life course. He recently published Sōchūryū no haji-
mari: Danchi to seikatsu jikan no sengoshi [The rise of all-middle-class society: Postwar histo-
ry of public housing complex and time-use] (Seikyūsha, 2019, co-edited with Aizawa) and
‘Older adults’ integration in the labour market: A global view’ in Ageing and society (2019).
Daniel White is a Senior Researcher in the Graduate School of East Asian Studies at Freie Uni-
versität Berlin and a visiting scholar in the Department of Social Anthropology at the Universi-
ty of Cambridge. He obtained a PhD from Rice University and conducts work on the intersec-
tions of politics, technology and affect, with a current research emphasis on artificial emotion-
al intelligence in Japan and the U.K. His publications and research projects can be found at
www.modelemotion.org.
Anna Wiemann is Assistant Professor (postdoc) at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München

since 2019. Her main research interests include social movements, social network theory,
Japan’s foreign and domestic policy and collective memory. Her dissertation titled Networks
and mobilization processes: The case of the Japanese anti-nuclear movement after Fukushima
was published in 2018 by Iudicium.
Tomiko Yamaguchi is a Professor of Sociology at International Christian University in Tokyo.

She studies social controversies surrounding safety, such as issues related to GMOs and to haz-
ards such as radioactive nuclides in food. Her current project deals with discourses surround-
ing the use of gene editing technologies. She has published numerous articles in journals like
Science, Technology and Human Values and Food Policy. Her most recent publication is a
book entitled Simulation, prediction and society: The politics of forecasting (2019).
Akiko Yoshida holds a PhD from the University of Oklahoma and is an Associate Professor of
Sociology at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater. Her main research interests include sin-
glehood, gender role views and parental involvement in childrearing. She recently published a
monograph entitled Unmarried women in Japan: The drift into singlehood (Routledge, 2017)
and a refereed article, ‘Gender role attitudes: An examination of cohort effects in Japan’ (Jour-
nal of Marriage and Family, 2019, co-authored with Piotrowski et al.).
490
Urs Matthias Zachmann is Professor of Modern Japanese History and Culture at Freie Univer-
sität Berlin. Prior to that, he was the inaugural Handa Professor of Japanese-Chinese Relations
at the University of Edinburgh. His main research areas are the cultural, intellectual, legal and
diplomatic history of modern Japan within the East Asian regional context. He is the author
of China and Japan in the late Meiji period: China policy and the Japanese discourse on na-
tional identity (Routledge, 2009) and Völkerrechtsdenken und Außenpolitik in Japan, 1919–
1960 (Nomos, 2013).
491
Index
abstract 36, 78, 85–87, 153, 177–179, 186, Area Studies 36, 40, 42, 78, 109, 112, 114,
242, 278, 300, 303, 341, 351, 355, 357, 117, 121, 122, 238, 260, 264, 283, 334,
371, 378, 386, 396, 415, 416, 421, 428, 360, 367, 369, 377, 408, 416, 417, 436,
445, 459, 468 437, 440, 456, 458
academic career 72, 75, 114 audience
actors 35, 41, 46, 62, 121, 122, 147, 175, – academic 124, 160, 161, 330, 455, 456
179, 184, 227, 231, 232, 243, 253, 286, – broader/wider 174, 444, 446, 461–463,
293, 294, 301, 304, 345, 349, 354, 364, 470, 473
365, 371, 378, 381–383, 385–387, 390, bias 96, 110, 175, 221, 230, 240, 265, 274,
433, 470 277, 307, 319, 320, 327, 365
affect 30, 39–42, 66, 71, 137, 167, 211, blog(s) 232, 349, 354, 421, 440, 441, 456,
219, 221, 232, 234, 343, 360, 393–396, 461, 462, 475
416, 432, 439 buisiness card(s) (meishi) 56, 107, 162, 165,
age 31, 32, 55, 65, 88, 133, 136, 140–142, 189, 202, 216
187, 192, 219, 238, 239, 271, 274–276, buzzword(s) 73, 385, 389–391, 397, 398,
289, 326, 339, 344, 390, 434, 465, 473, 400, 401, 418
475 Call for Papers (CfP) 457
agency 33, 35, 36, 147, 148, 157, 232, 257, CAQDAS (computer assisted qualitative
287, 310, 354, 386, 387, 409, 416, 445 data analysis software) 301, 305–307,
ambiguity 124, 319, 400 359
American Anthropological Association CARE principles 440
(AAA) 112, 159, 217, 430 career 46, 72, 75, 87, 102, 114, 127–129,
analysis 139, 229, 264, 272, 287, 332, 337, 377,
– comparative 83, 303, 316 405, 422, 439, 450, 451, 455, 456, 460,
– qualitative 71, 306, 308, 312, 352, 356 462–465, 475
– quantitative 278, 284, 285, 289, 315, case selection 68, 71
318, 349 case study, case studies 37, 54, 60, 78–82,
– secondary 259, 260, 273, 277 85–87, 91, 95, 97, 98, 122, 125, 127,
– thematic 85, 302 128, 283, 285–287, 290, 318, 336, 365,
approach(es) 408, 409, 416, 470
– actor-centred 62 – multiple 79, 82, 85
– analytical 301, 303 – single 82, 85, 87
– interpretative 374 citation(s) 118, 193, 194, 241, 311, 361,
– positivist 229, 353 414, 438
archive(s) 80, 118, 119, 157, 238, 242–255, co-author(s) 71, 95, 174, 246, 323, 361,
259, 260, 274, 361, 391, 423, 440, 416
446–449, 464, 465 code(s) 86, 212, 233, 251, 303–305, 309,
– business 248–250 315, 324–332, 335–337, 339–342, 344,
– data 243, 259, 260, 274, 440, 465 345, 352, 355, 358, 359, 361, 364, 365,
– newspaper 391 372, 393, 436, 465
– private 251 – key 328, 329, 331, 332
– public 238, 244–247, 449
493
Index
coding 267, 301, 305, 323–336, 339–341, context

343–346, 349–351, 353, 355, 357–366, – contextualisation 110, 123, 124, 169,
434, 464 179, 287, 288, 355, 372
– axial 339 – historical 37, 295, 380, 466
– focused 325, 329, 331, 334 – sociocultural 328, 378
– in vivo 324, 329, 330, 333, 344 contingency 97, 124
– inductive 364, 365 continuum 85, 86, 185, 303
– initial 323–325, 328, 329, 331, 333, 334,
copyright 239, 361, 440, 441, 476
339
counselling 220, 412, 413
– open 327, 328, 332, 339
– selective 323, 331, 332, 340 court record(s) 251
– substantive 324, 332 cultural baggage 31
– theoretical 323, 332, 334 cultural translation 342, 442, 444, 445
collaboration 71, 124, 147, 174, 218, 281, curiosity 54, 67, 125, 212, 216
309, 423, 440, 448 data
communities 35, 36, 44, 46, 91, 110, 112, – accuracy/uniformity of 288
126, 128, 152, 157, 165, 166, 190, 194, – empirical 73, 86, 177, 179, 258, 270,
217, 226, 233, 258, 281, 330, 343, 344, 279, 301, 341
433, 440, 459, 470 – OECD 146, 244, 258, 273
– academic 110, 157, 233, 459 – qualitative 74, 79, 132, 134, 141, 177,
– online 165 265, 267, 268, 277, 289, 300, 301, 303,
– scientific 281 305–309, 323, 324, 328, 344, 345, 359,
comparison 36, 73, 89, 90, 144, 148, 151, 363, 365, 366, 436
153, 198, 248, 256, 267, 268, 288, 345, – quantitative 45, 63, 79, 96, 97, 137, 256,
352, 369, 423, 460 259, 264–268, 271, 277–280, 293, 310,
– comparative studies 95 311, 319, 323, 328, 361
– research 135, 218, 310, 434–437, 439,
concept development 355
440
conference(s) 36, 58, 71, 112, 113, 151,
– sharing 436
158, 175, 200, 256, 312, 415, 440, 456,
– storing 164, 436
457, 461, 466–469, 473
– UN 146, 258
consent 81, 185, 193, 198, 217, 228, 277, – World Bank 258
311, 352, 400, 430, 432, 433, 436, 447,
data analysis 58, 59, 63, 134, 194, 267,
448, 471
268, 277, 278, 285, 286, 300–309, 314,
– informed 228, 311, 352, 430, 432, 436
319, 320, 337, 353, 366, 368, 373, 381,
– written 193, 432, 433, 447, 448
438
constructivism 302
data collection 58, 59, 63, 81, 84, 94, 132,
content analysis 81, 134, 135, 303, 305, 134–138, 141, 179, 266–268, 273, 274,
306, 318, 319, 349–355, 357, 359, 360, 277, 281, 300–307, 323, 324, 344, 349,
362–366, 368, 371–374, 380, 383, 386 351–353, 358, 361, 362, 368, 381, 385,
– qualitative 349, 350, 353–355, 357, 360, 387, 428, 430, 431, 434
362–366, 371, 372, 374
debate(s) 30, 40–42, 57–59, 64, 67, 73, 74,
– quantitative 349, 359, 363
85, 102–104, 112–114, 125, 129, 217,
292, 341, 342, 349, 356, 369, 390, 398,
494
Index
399, 407, 409, 415, 418, 431, 436, 437, ethics 81, 137, 165, 193, 198, 217, 233,
445, 463 290, 310, 428–430, 432, 433, 439, 442,
deduction/deductive 63, 79, 85, 86, 292, 449, 450
303, 305, 316, 357, 359, 364, 365 – fieldwork 165, 428, 430, 432, 433
development of theoretical models 301 – research 290, 428, 439, 442, 450
disaster 44, 66, 188, 194, 224, 330, ethnicity 32, 55, 139–142, 377
343–345, 354, 364, 377, 379, 382, 387, ethnography 66, 92, 94, 134, 135, 157,
408, 423, 428, 432, 433, 446, 447, 449 173, 176, 214, 219, 221, 227, 229, 230,
disciplines 32, 36, 37, 42, 58, 61, 65, 78, 266, 323, 335, 354, 407, 416, 463
91, 93, 110, 114, 125, 185, 195, 200, – affective 219, 221, 227, 229, 230
265, 312, 323, 349, 361, 415, 429, 434, – multi-sited 92, 176
435, 446, 448, 456, 461 – virtual 214
– disciplinary conventions 185, 450 – visual 94, 134, 135
discourse 73, 74, 81, 84, 106, 121, 123, evidence 42, 70, 74, 78, 81, 85, 127, 148,
124, 179, 287, 288, 303, 315, 317, 318, 185, 255, 284, 285, 300, 314–316, 331,
320, 340, 341, 350, 354, 368, 369, 371, 344, 346, 351, 352, 354, 355, 358, 399,
373, 377–392, 394, 395, 397, 398, 401, 434, 445, 451, 459
423, 444, 451 expressions (of interviewees) 123, 133, 151,
– counter-hegemonic 387 184, 190, 191, 193, 194, 225, 226, 258,
– economic 317 311, 319, 330, 340, 341, 344, 369, 370,
– political 371, 377, 380, 397 396, 399
– popular 288 fairness 428, 439, 442
– threads of 390 fellowship 44, 45, 405
discovery system 240 field site 47, 92, 93, 169–171, 177–180,
dissertation 29, 41, 44, 92, 102–105, 108, 214, 218, 224, 225, 344, 432, 433, 446,
113, 115, 116, 121, 132, 177, 179, 285, 448, 449
313, 314, 343, 345, 367, 405–408, 412, fieldnotes 49, 92, 104, 111, 112, 115, 135,
413, 430, 434, 441, 460, 463, 466 139, 162, 164, 165, 191, 193, 194, 211,
document analysis 81, 292 213, 220–222, 304, 311, 324, 325, 327,
documentation 250, 251, 289, 352, 434, 343, 344, 385, 405, 414, 418, 436
436 – interview 414, 424
editor(s) 56, 63, 117, 174, 355, 360, 362, – notetaking 164, 326
385, 398, 417, 437, 450, 451, 459, 460, – taking notes 49, 111, 112, 191, 193,
462, 465–469, 475 197, 198, 211, 213, 439
efficiency 134, 318, 446 fieldwork 157–159, 161–166, 168–176,

178–180, 231–234, 393–396, 470–473
elevator pitch 38, 56, 57, 158, 160
– long-term 91, 166, 171, 198
engaged scholarship 124, 387 – multi-sited 169
ethical concern(s) 134, 157 – qualitative 121, 289, 290, 307, 355
ethical principle(s) 167, 434 film 93, 463, 464, 470–473
ethical review 429, 431 – documentary 463, 470, 471, 473
– ethnographic 93, 463, 470, 472
flexibility 65, 141, 169, 294, 295, 406, 420
focus group 133, 134, 186, 200, 302, 350
495
Index
frame analysis 349, 350, 352–357, 359, interpretation 85, 102, 105, 106, 191, 193,
360, 362, 380, 383, 386, 387 229, 249, 267, 268, 292, 293, 296, 300,
framing 206, 349, 350, 355–357, 360, 389, 309, 330, 342, 350, 354, 356, 359, 361,
400, 401, 406, 414, 456, 462 363, 369, 370, 372
– diagnostic 400 interviewee(s)
functionalism 314 – interview partner 191, 193
gatekeeper 187, 188, 225 interview(s)
gender 30–32, 40, 55, 65, 79, 82, 83, 134, – biographical 367, 368
136, 139–142, 187, 192, 215, 219, 225, – couple 133, 186
227, 231, 258, 271, 274, 276, 289, 294, – episodic 186
310, 314, 315, 325, 326, 331, 344, 389, – expert 178, 186, 187, 293, 294, 471
392, 408, 466 – group 133, 134, 186, 193, 225
Gender Studies 287, 312, 389 – in-depth 133, 200, 227, 278
– narrative 186, 304, 339, 369, 449
generalisation 85
– online 188
gift(s) (omiyage) 40, 41, 45, 48, 139, 163, – qualitative 73, 132, 133, 136–138, 140,
171, 172, 189, 196, 206, 216, 409, 410, 141, 151, 184, 185, 195, 200–202, 280,
422 290, 301, 302, 308, 472
grounded theory 63, 80, 81, 86, 187, 270, – questions 79, 178, 198, 233, 277, 414
305, 323–325, 329, 331, 339, 344, 368 – semi-standardised 186
hegemony 379, 380 – semi-structured 143–145, 148, 186, 287,
hierarchy 140, 160, 162, 172, 250, 336, 305, 343, 365, 464
373 – structured 34, 93, 94, 133, 143–145,
history 148, 186, 192, 287, 305, 343, 365, 464
– global 252–254 – unstructured 34, 133, 169, 186
– life 133, 136, 201, 367, 368 introduction(s) 31, 45, 48, 49, 97, 98, 107,
– oral 142, 368 112–114, 118, 119, 132, 157–161, 163,
– transnational 244, 252, 254 171, 187, 190, 202, 206, 211, 213, 243,
honesty 441, 448 248, 250, 253, 256, 264, 267, 276, 300,
Human Research Ethics Committee 289 301, 307, 309, 341, 377, 406, 408, 420,
428, 431–433, 435, 462
hypothesis, hypotheses 40, 60, 63, 80, 81,
– self- (jiko shōkai) 158, 161
86, 87, 97, 136, 186, 251, 265, 268, 270,
276, 278, 285, 314, 328, 332, 353, 440 iteration 332, 358, 362
ideology 379, 382, 386, 387, 466 Japan Studies 117, 118, 120, 128, 146,
148, 150, 323, 330, 440, 458, 464
inequality 33, 73, 267, 286, 292, 295, 379,
397, 400 Japanese Studies 29–31, 36–38, 40, 41, 53,
79, 105, 109–114, 121, 150, 152, 175,
informed choices 225
239, 241, 242, 247, 260, 310, 312, 346,
Institutional Review Board 167
407–409, 413–415, 417, 422, 425, 428,
interdiscursivity 386 439–442, 456, 463, 465–468
interlocutor(s) 47, 127, 158, 159, 161–164, Japanology 31, 36
166–168, 189, 191, 192, 196–199, 205,
journalist(s) 35, 41, 187, 286, 288, 320,
206, 224–226, 327, 395, 432, 433, 444
341, 382, 390, 392, 461, 462, 474, 475
(inter)personal relationships 287, 327
496
Index
journal(s) methodology 38, 39, 63, 78, 111, 173, 195,

– disciplinary 122, 458 196, 232, 286, 300, 309, 316, 323, 363,
– journal article(s) 117, 118, 241, 360, 368, 381, 422, 429, 450, 457
406, 408, 412, 413, 456, 459, 468 – cosmopolitan 78
– peer-reviewed 109, 465, 467 – methodological nationalism 146
key documents 254 – methodological triangulation 265
knowledge production 78, 85–87, 102, 124, methods
169, 171, 392, 445 – comparative 260
Latin scripts 238, 240, 241, 437 – interview 152
– non-Latin scripts 238, 240, 241, 437 – mixed 34, 37, 97, 132, 264–270, 272,
library 43, 45, 57, 97, 106, 107, 112, 117, 278–282, 287, 292
118, 120, 122, 238–243, 247, 249, 251, – qualitative 34, 45, 63, 132, 137, 142,
253, 259, 434, 439, 463 179, 264, 265, 272, 283, 284, 286, 306,
life story 133, 191, 368 309, 416
– quantitative 34, 94, 132, 223, 264, 267,
literacy
268, 270, 271, 273, 275–278, 280, 283,
– digital 238, 239, 247
284, 286, 353, 355, 362
– information 239
mobilities 128, 146, 173–175, 214, 294,
literature
408
– Japanese 48, 108, 128, 367, 368
– secondary 59, 103–106, 108, 111, 112, mobility 33, 91, 92, 126, 146–149,
117, 118, 124, 147, 284, 451 173–175, 260, 292, 294, 400, 408, 424,
471
literature review 54, 57, 64, 102–104, 106,
narrative(s) 37, 66, 79–81, 103, 113–115,
112–117, 125–127, 129, 406, 407, 409,
122, 126, 142, 186, 191, 196, 205, 224,
438
225, 279, 280, 292, 295, 304, 310, 325,
location 47, 92, 93, 121, 138, 144, 145, 327, 333–335, 339, 343, 354, 360, 361,
157, 167, 175, 188, 189, 472, 473 369, 394, 408, 418–420, 445, 446, 449,
magazine(s) 120, 135, 254, 255, 287, 391, 451, 464
421, 467, 474, 475
National Diet Library (NDL) 107, 118,
management 104, 113, 232, 233, 244, 292, 242, 257, 259, 400
294, 359, 361, 405, 423, 428, 429, 434,
native speaker 110, 158, 162, 164, 204,
435, 437
308
market research company 289 – non-native speaker 110, 308
MAXQDA 199, 345, 352, 359, 365 network(s)
measurement levels 271 – social 44–46, 139, 153, 160, 178, 187,
MeCab 320 194, 273, 350, 358, 364, 417
mechanisms 35, 68, 109, 167, 283, 354, – systemic 315
444 newspaper 40, 117, 119, 120, 318, 350,
media work 477 351, 355, 356, 360, 362, 391, 398–400,
memorial sites 250, 251 414, 419, 462, 466, 474, 475
memory 104, 164, 193, 198, 212, 220, 250, note cards 424, 425
304 optical character recognition (OCR) 98,
359
mental health 166, 412, 413
oral narrative 446, 449, 464
497
Index
Orientalism 121, 288 publishing 36, 109, 158, 280, 391, 430,
originality 56, 57, 59, 60, 64 437, 439, 441, 442, 444, 449, 455, 456,
othering 234 460, 463, 465–468
– open access 119, 243, 435, 439, 440
outreach 412
participant 34, 45, 79, 88, 93, 133, 137, Python 319, 320
138, 142–145, 159, 163, 169, 170, 200, quality 57, 66, 69, 104, 108–110, 113, 120,
204, 205, 211–214, 216–221, 223, 227, 154, 162, 163, 194, 199, 241, 281, 301,
228, 286, 287, 294, 302, 311, 314–316, 302, 307–309, 316, 364, 412, 416, 417,
325, 327, 343, 385, 414, 442, 471 422, 429, 450, 459, 462, 466, 467, 474,
475, 477
patience 54, 116, 118, 143, 188, 211, 213,
215 questionnaire(s) 34, 79, 133, 184, 188, 190,
196, 198, 274, 276, 277, 279, 335, 434
personality 138, 141, 142, 190, 197, 206,
race 31, 61, 65, 140, 141, 219, 285, 408
207, 217–220
rapport 134, 203, 212, 216, 223, 228, 230
perspective(s)
– comparative 41, 70, 73 reasoning 63, 133, 136, 143, 196
– historical 293, 423 reciprocity 172, 194, 218, 221, 432, 447
plagiarism 111, 430, 431, 437–439 recorder 50, 163, 193, 194, 205, 206
politics 30, 31, 40–42, 45, 53, 54, 68–71, – recording device 164, 189–191
82, 96, 119, 121, 123, 153, 170, 205, recordings 105, 162, 198, 199, 206, 304,
256, 258, 349, 352, 371, 382, 385, 389, 344, 436
394, 397, 398, 400, 401, 412, 423 reflexivity 30, 93, 124, 192, 215, 285, 301,
– comparative 68, 71, 349, 352 307, 326, 334, 342, 387
– Japanese 40, 41, 53, 54, 68, 69, 71, 371, – reflexive 30, 58, 145, 171, 396
397, 398, 401 reform 40, 41, 55, 60, 68, 69, 74, 95,
– party 68, 70 177–179, 283, 284, 292, 293, 318, 385,
positionality 65, 78, 124, 140, 141, 192, 397–400
204, 207, 229, 230, 326 relevance 56, 57, 60, 64, 67, 103, 104, 114,
post-modernism 30, 302 122, 140, 186, 187, 238, 240, 241, 256,
practice 327, 328, 331, 381, 385, 416, 417, 449
– good research 54, 428–432, 435, 439, – sociological 416
450 reliability 137, 274, 276, 280, 307, 361,
– writing 104 364, 439, 441
pragmatism 265, 304 repository 151, 273, 435, 441
process tracing 286, 354 representation(s) 63, 69, 105, 111, 234,
public opinion 70, 71, 385, 399 243, 275, 315, 337, 371, 373, 383–385,
public space 231, 248, 250, 251 387, 389, 393, 394, 398, 436, 444
publication 73, 109, 240, 241, 247, 256, research

280, 308, 323, 367, 372, 429, 439, 440, – action 134, 135, 142
446, 449, 450, 455, 457, 460–462, – archival 132, 134, 135, 169, 244, 247,
465–468 248, 255, 351
– assistant(s) 164, 175, 192, 290, 352,
361, 465
– budget 120, 145
498
Index
– comparative 44, 70, 71, 95, 169 responsibility 124, 129, 172, 194, 217, 218,
– design 54, 58, 61, 64, 73, 74, 78, 84, 90, 233, 337, 428–431, 445, 447, 448
93, 95–98, 111, 146–148, 239, 264, 270, review
272, 273, 278–281, 319, 344, 349, 353, – ethical 429, 431
355, 365, 377, 380, 387, 428, 439, 446, – literature 54, 57, 64, 102–104, 106,
447 112–117, 125–127, 129, 406, 407, 409,
– empirical 40, 42, 323, 367, 434 438
– engaged 446–448 – peer 57, 109, 241, 440
– exploratory 54, 136 rigour 54, 56, 58–60, 64, 110, 124
– gap 57, 72, 122, 301 salience 68, 70, 288, 398, 399
– multi-method (MMR) 283, 355
sampling 71, 91, 96, 174, 175, 187, 188,
– observational 132, 135, 137, 141
232, 268, 274–277, 279, 281, 339, 342,
– participatory 204
349, 352, 353, 355, 359, 361, 362
– process 59, 75, 84, 86, 117, 118, 194,
– convenience 276
217, 218, 250, 266, 267, 278–281, 300,
– non-probability 276
301, 303, 306, 307, 333, 349, 357, 363,
– sample size 137, 267, 275, 277, 355
367, 373, 381, 410, 419, 428–431, 433,
– snowball 187, 232, 276
434, 438, 439, 441, 455
saturation 296, 302, 305, 325, 331, 332,
– puzzle 29, 38
339
– qualitative 34, 55, 63, 125, 128, 129,
– theoretical saturation 325, 331, 339
132, 135–137, 141, 144, 146, 150, 184,
187, 200, 256, 264, 267, 273, 277, 279, scholarship in Japanese 129, 465
281, 289, 290, 300–302, 305–309, 323, science 102, 114, 124, 212, 246, 265, 314,
352, 357, 359, 360, 364, 366, 368, 419, 381, 387, 416, 417, 435, 439, 440
436 – open 246, 435, 439, 440
– quantitative 34, 55, 63, 135, 136, 147, Scrivener 420
153, 264, 266, 267, 270, 275, 278, 280, self-reflexivity 342
289, 305, 307, 308, 319, 419
seminar (zemi) 113, 158
– question 53, 54, 56–65, 67, 72–75, 78,
serendipity 47, 48, 84, 91–94, 169, 215
81, 84, 103, 114, 137, 138, 141,
184–188, 191, 200, 215, 256, 265, 267, silence 191, 193, 197
270, 272, 273, 276, 281, 283–286, 296, social change 61, 62, 72, 73, 258, 294, 468
301–304, 306, 342, 349, 350, 352, 353, social media (platforms) 93, 138, 144, 157,
355, 357, 358, 360, 362–366, 377, 379, 159, 162, 165, 166, 188, 194, 221, 310,
381–383, 385, 431, 439, 459 332, 351, 354, 357, 410, 433, 440, 461,
– survey 271, 355 465
– team 147, 148, 280, 430, 446, 447 source(s)
– topic 29, 40, 59, 68, 78, 97, 105, 121, – information 178
185, 187, 190, 215, 301, 326, 329, 343, – primary 102–106, 119, 122–124, 165,
381, 382, 384, 385, 431, 437, 461 251, 284, 371, 372
– traditions 267, 302 – secondary 106, 110, 117, 118, 120,
– transnational 146, 147, 150 122–124, 238–240, 243, 244, 251, 285,
respect 138, 140, 151, 152, 160, 202, 233, 286, 288
234, 244, 251, 286, 315, 363, 367, 389, statement of support 157
428, 431, 436, 441, 443, 444
499
Index
statistics 79, 88, 108, 110, 137, 146, 147, test(s) 55, 62, 63, 66, 68–71, 78–80, 85–87,
178, 228, 243, 256–259, 273, 277, 279, 95, 98, 136, 186, 198, 199, 229, 250,
308, 320, 355 267, 268, 270, 271, 277, 278, 285, 286,
– descriptive 277, 355 312, 328, 331, 353, 364, 382, 419, 445,
– official macro 259 472
Statistics Bureau 259, 273, 274 text analysis 200, 355, 359, 377, 386
stereotypes 215, 216, 234, 475, 476 text mining 319
stories 93, 98, 119, 133, 135, 136, 142, text(s)
152, 173, 175, 184, 185, 191, 192, 195, – elicited 325, 326
196, 201, 202, 204, 225, 336, 349, 367, – extant 324–327
410, 418–421, 432, 444, 448, 471, theme(s) 85–87, 93, 133, 224, 258, 268,
474–476 288, 290, 302, 304–306, 325–333, 337,
story 54, 59, 60, 93, 120, 133, 139, 338, 344, 352, 390, 394, 407, 411, 414,
173–175, 191, 203, 214, 218, 253, 446, 449, 456
335–338, 356, 368, 369, 418–421, 446, – theme maps 337, 338
470, 471, 474–476 theoretical concept(s) 186, 328, 339, 340,
storyline 119, 418, 420 351, 368, 370–372, 444
strategies 41, 43, 53, 64, 66, 106, 107, 109, theorising 40, 315, 316, 323, 324, 341,
116, 137, 140, 157, 167, 185, 187, 188, 354, 444
197, 215, 254, 307, 309, 318, 323, 325, theory building 55, 79, 85–87, 266, 334
329, 353, 362, 380, 383, 386, 387, 394, theory testing 85, 86
401, 416, 436
theory (theories) 33–35, 37, 45, 53, 68, 69,
– rhetorical 394
71, 72, 80, 81, 85–87, 89, 95, 98, 104,
stress 56–59, 113, 186, 197, 199, 204, 272, 121, 125–128, 211, 213, 215, 266, 270,
312, 373, 387, 409, 412, 441, 464 303, 305, 308, 313, 323, 334, 339, 341,
study 353, 354, 357–359, 367–369, 377–381,
– descriptive 54, 179 388, 407, 409, 416–418, 444, 476
– ethnographic 81–83, 314 – grounded 63, 80, 81, 86, 187, 270, 305,
– longitudinal 83, 271 323–325, 329, 331, 339, 344, 368
– multiple case 79 thick description 40, 212, 360
– panel 79, 83
time
– qualitative 97, 268
– frame 272, 290
– single case 82, 85, 87
– management 113, 405
– wave 79, 83
timeliness 67, 74
subcode(s) 339
timing 188, 201, 267, 339, 341, 476
subcultures 136, 310
tool(s)
survey 46, 71, 72, 108, 117, 126, 133, 151,
– digital 239, 312, 345, 451
153, 198, 252, 257, 259, 260, 264,
– reference 238, 242, 247
266–268, 271–274, 276–280, 289, 290,
transcription(s) 174, 184, 193, 199, 240,
294, 351, 355, 398
241, 280, 281, 290, 293, 301, 304, 327,
– national 289
352, 365, 369, 411
– original 274, 280
– transcribing 193, 194, 352, 359, 365,
symbolic interactionism 380
464
tabulation 349
500
Index
transcultural 310, 367, 369, 370 verbal expression(s) 133, 151, 184, 190,
translation(s) 111, 162, 174, 216, 240, 255, 191, 193, 194
277, 280, 281, 330, 339, 341, 342, 354, – non-verbal expression(s) 133, 191, 193,
358, 367, 369, 419–421, 428, 442, 444, 194
445 verifiability 124, 446
transnational 92, 127, 137, 146, 147, 150, video(s) 134, 135, 138, 162, 188, 193, 304,
190, 219, 244, 252–255, 358, 384, 463 344, 345, 392, 434, 446–448, 463–465
transparency 124, 218, 239, 280, 359, 361, visual image(s) 135
366, 434, 436, 441, 442 vulnerability 432
triangulation 132, 265, 266, 283, 288, 292, White Paper 256–258
293, 295 work-life balance 258, 318, 405, 412, 413
trust 63, 80, 141, 145, 152, 157, 159, 171, workshop(s) 58, 71, 112, 113, 359, 367,
172, 187, 194, 198, 216, 217, 228, 233, 370, 432, 456, 457, 467, 469
234, 312, 406, 430–433, 442, 443, 448, writing 227, 229, 230, 252, 405, 406,
470 408–418, 420–422, 424, 425, 450, 451
turn(s) writing group(s) 411, 415, 469
– linguistic 418
writing habits 405, 410
– spatial 122
writing routines 410
validity 124, 137, 280, 283, 307, 316, 361,
364, 371
variables 31, 32, 40, 55, 63, 67, 85, 267,
270, 271, 274, 276, 294, 338, 354, 419
– independent 271
501

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Nora Kottmann | Cornelia Reiher [eds.

BUT_Kottmann_5085-6.indd 3 16.11.20 13:18

The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

1st Edition 2020

BUT_Kottmann_5085-6.indd 4 16.11.20 13:18

Chapter 1 How to begin research: The diversity of Japanese Studies ....................... 29

1.2 Let the field be your guide ....................................................................... 43

1.3 Studying marriage in Japan: A social anthropological approach ....................... 47

Chapter 2 How to ask: Research questions ....................................................... 53

2.1 Your research questions may change and that is ok ....................................... 65

2.2 Studying Japanese political behaviour and institutions ................................... 68

2.3 Capturing social change in Japan .............................................................. 72

Chapter 3 How to organise research: Research designs ........................................ 78

4.2 Ambiguity and blurred boundaries: Contextualising and evaluating heterogeneous

Chapter 5 How to collect data: An introduction to qualitative Social Science

5.2 Transnational research in Japan Studies—an oxymoron? Studying cross-border

6.1 The cosmology of fieldwork: Relationship building, theoretical engagement and

6.2 A mobilities approach to ‘Japan’ fieldwork .................................................. 173

Chapter 7 How to interview people: Qualitative interviews .................................. 184

7.2 The art of interviewing: A Japanese perspective ............................................ 200

7.3 Talking through difficult topics ................................................................ 204

8.1 Of serendipities, success and failure and insider/outsider status in participant

8.2 Doing and writing affective ethnography ..................................................... 227

9.2 Writing transnational history through archival sources .................................. 252

Chapter 10 How to combine methods: Mixed methods designs .............................. 264

10.1 Reflections on multi-method research ......................................................... 283

Chapter 11 How to analyse data: An introduction to methods of data analysis in

11.3 Studying economic discourse ................................................................... 317

12.1 Cresting the wave of data ....................................................................... 335

Further reading ..................................................................................... 347

13.2 Analysis of biographical interviews in a transcultural research process ............... 367

Chapter 14 How to understand discourse: Qualitative discourse analysis .................. 377

14.1 Media buzzwords as a source of discourse analysis: The discourse on Japan’s

14.3 From buzzwords to discourse to Japanese politics ......................................... 397

Chapter 15 How to finish: Writing in a stressful world ......................................... 405

15.2 Writing stories ...................................................................................... 418

15.3 Writing about Japan .............................................................................. 422

16.3 Writing for publication: Eight helpful hints ................................................. 450

Chapter 17 How to present findings: Presenting and publishing .............................. 455

Notes on contributors .................................................................................... 480

Index ......................................................................................................... 493

Figure 1.1: Heuristic overview of sociological theory 33

Figure 5.1: Bullseye chart in practice, three examples 154

Figure 10.1: Three core mixed methods designs 269

Figure 14.1: Three concepts related to discourse 379

Figure 14.2: Key steps in discourse analysis 381

Figure 14.3: Questions in Social Science discourse research 383

Figure 14.4: An overview of Critical Discourse Analysis 384

Table 5.1: What to consider in choosing data collection methods 138

Table 9.1: List of main White Papers in Japan 257

Table 12.1: The process of coding 324

Table 12.2: Elicited and extant text 327

But reflexivity is also needed in intercultural qualitative research as a continuous exchange

Nora Kottmann and Cornelia Reiher

Nora Kottmann and Cornelia Reiher

2. Why this handbook and why now?

3. What this handbook is about

Transnational collaboration is often enabled through recent technological innovations ranging

5. How to use this handbook

6. Structure and content of this handbook

7. Summary and future perspectives

2. The importance of personal biography