This volume taps the expertise of North American and European specialists on the practicalities of conducting long-term research in the social sciences and cultural studies. In first-person accounts, they discuss their successes and failures doing fieldwork across rural and urban Japan in a wide range of settings: among religious pilgrims and adolescent consumers; on factory assembly lines and in high schools and wholesale seafood markets; with bureaucrats in charge of defense, foreign aid and social welfare policy; inside radical political movements; among adherents of
New Religions ; inside a prosecutor’s office and the JET Program for foreign English teachers; with journalists in the NHK newsroom; while researching race, ethnicity and migration; and amidst fans and consumers of contemporary popular culture.