Ethnicity and the Anthropologist: Negotiating Identities in the Field

Abstract

In this article I address the problematic relationship between the anthropologist's self-identity and the fieldwork process through a self-reflexive discussion of my field experiences in a factory employing both and Japanese-Brazilian migrant workers. I examine how the constant and contested negotiation of identity between fieldworkers and informants influences rapport, acceptance, and differential access to ethnographic information. Because of the multiple social roles that anthropologists assume in the field for research purposes, the social distance between self and other continually shifts in productive ways. The resulting psychic tension and dissonance that they experience between their external role behavior and inner sense of self can contribute to their continued self-development and is linked to the emergence of analytical and theoretical frameworks. [fieldwork methods, identity and self, ethnicity, Japan] Introduction: A Hot Summer Day It was a September day when I stepped off the train into the scorching heat after a three-hour trip from central Tokyo to Ota city in Gunma-prefecture. I had arrived in Japan just four days earlier to start phase two of my fieldwork after close to nine months in Brazil. As I walked out onto the station platform, I looked up at the imposing structure of the shopping center that towered over the station, which brought back fleeting memories of those grand and massive shopping centers in Brazil (os shoppings). However, I had no time to reminisce. I was in Japan - a completely different society, culture, people, and language - and I had changed my mentality accordingly. Unlike Brazil, which had been a completely foreign country for me, Japan was very familiar, and as a descendent from the United States, I always felt I belonged here. Compared to the uncertainty I felt when stepping off the plane in Brazil, I was a partial insider in Japan and knew how to behave, how to adapt and mix in with the Japanese, and what to expect. Usually, I could be ethnically Japanese enough to get by without any problems and avoid some of the difficulties that complete foreigners would conceivably have. Yet, I did not expect the disorienting confusion that would confront me in the coming weeks of fieldwork - a disorientation that would result not because of my status as a foreigner, but precisely because I was not completely foreign in Japan. Ota city, as well as the adjacent Oizumi-town, are industrial towns in the Tokyo countryside which have received considerable media attention because of their high concentration of foreign migrant workers. Most notable and prominent among the numerous groups of foreigners that have flocked to the region in recent years are the JapaneseBrazilian (former emigrants and their descendants born abroad). These workers have return-migrated to Japan in large numbers to work in labor-deficient factories as dekasegi (temporary migrant workers) because of a severe and prolonged Brazilian recession in the late 1980s. Since a vast majority of them are of the second and third generations who were born and raised in Brazil, they are culturally Brazilianized to a considerable degree and have become Japan's newest ethnic minority. Being a nikkeijin myself (second-generation Japanese-American), I had decided to work in a factory with the Brazilian as a dekasegi in order to conduct participant observation in the true anthropological spirit. From what I had heard so far, however, my prospects of getting a factory job as a researcher did not sound very encouraging. After arriving in Japan, I had already come once to Ota city in order to speak with a local government official responsible for foreign workers affairs, Mr. Honkawa. He had kindly agreed to contact employers on my behalf but had not yet succeeded in placing me in a factory. Armed with a bunch of shokaijo (letters of introduction), which are a basic necessity in Japan if one wishes to get anything done, I had returned to Ota city again in order to discuss any possibilities with him. …