2001 Volume 65 Issue 4 Pages 376-391
Few Japanese anthropologists study either native or overseas Japanese. Those who study Japanese culture are mostly folklorists who, in their turn, avoid to conduct overseas fieldwork. Cultural anthropology is usually denned as the study of "other cultures." I understand, however, that studying different cultures is just one of the anthropological methods for our heuristic purpose, not being a sole goal nor its ultimate raison d'etre. We study other cultures in order to understand better ourselves and at the same time the nature of Man. The "anthropology at home" is not a recent acquisition in the anthropological body. The study of other cultures in conjunction with the study of one's own culture is, I think, the best way to figure the nature of Man out. Is there any specific positive reason for the Japanese to conduct anthropological research about the overseas Japanese ? Being barred out from doing fieldwork in mainland China, Sinologist Freedman found in result better research domains among the overseas Chinese for him to develop new anthropological paradigns. Inspired by reading Tristes Tropiques by Levi-Strauss, I went to Brazil in 1961 with an idea of making anthropology among Indians. Traveling all over Brazil for about a year, my interest shifted from tribal anthropology to modern urban polyethnic Brazilian situations. After a two-years fiedwork as full-time researcher in a project investigating the acculturative processes of the ethnic Japanese in southern Brazil, I studied cultural anthropology in the Ph. D program at Cornell University. I have never been acculturation-oriented in theory. In 1971 I started a fieldwork for investigating social networks, informal groupings, and ethnic associations in an industrial middle-sized city in Sao Paulo. My main intention was to make anthropology of ordinary middle-class Brazilian people. At the start I tried not being too much involved in the local Japanese community, because I understood that I had already had much experiences of doing fieldwork about the Japanese in Brazil. But soon I realized the fact that I could participate in the local community and conduct fieldwork only as a Japanese, because the local people classified me primarily as "a Japanese," and only secondarily as "an anthropologist." It was, to my view, an intrinsic epistemological issue of doing ethnographic fieldwork in a polyethnic situation in which an ethnic Japanese group was present. I understood that my fieldwork was fundamentally conditioned by my being a Japanese and that the local ethnic situations could be seen better by my Japanese eyes through the local ethnic Japanese window. Then I changed my research strategy accordingly. I started to participate actively in the Japanese communitry affairs. I organized a drama group in the local Japanese Association, wrote a bilingual, three-act play based on the local social problems. Actors were chosen from the members of the Association as well as from non-member university Nisei students. During the long period of stage training and dress rehearsal, we discussed intensively about the local ethnic problems. Through these experiences of "active participation" of organizing a group, rather than of ordinary "participant-observation," I learned much of the real functioning of social networks, informal groupings within the ethnic and associational frameworks. This experience gave me a good insight for furthering my fieldworks among the local non-Japanese Brazilians. The ideology of Nation-State and the assimilationist policy then dominant among the Brazilians was largely responsible for structuring ethnic and national identities of the Japanese. The State was present in their individual identities. Their personhood of being ethnic Japanese in Brazil was, in my understanding, interpretable only taking their subjectivity and the presence of
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