To interview or not to interview

If the title of my previous post was referring to time as a peculiar thing, words can be even more peculiar. Communication is consists basically of one person sending a message to another. Simple, right? However, as we know, there are many obstructing factors in this process, such as outside factors. In addition to outside distractions, the prior understanding of both sender and receiver can cause misunderstanding of the message.

The pictures in this post are more or less irrelevant for the topic of interview.
They are snapshots from different activities, events and Yamamoto-related things. Here is the new year's first  inspection of local volunteer fire fighters (消防団, shouboudan).

A single word, such as interview, can have different connotations. The fieldwork guides suggest that the word interview (インタビュー, intaabyuu or 面接 mensetsu) might bring rigid and formal image to mind for many Japanese. If one wants unstructured theme interview spiced up with informal chatting, one should use the word お話 (ohanashi, talk, chat, conversation).

I have spent here few months already and tried first to familiarize myself to the situation of the town, chatted informally and at the same time make myself useful by trying to help in different activities. Moving on fully from this sort of hang-around-ask-stupid-questions-researcher's role to credible hey-let's-do-an-interview-researcher's role has not been completely straightforward.

Illumination at Kodaira, Yamamoto. Me and my husband participated in peparations.

Asking for ohanashi has worked quite well here. However, it is quite possible that the interviewee is expecting only a brief chat in case of ohanashi or, in contrast, strictly structured questions if participating to interview. In worst-case scenario, asking for any kind of chat is intrusive and scares the person away. For instance, there is this one professor from Tsukuba university coming to Yamamoto and doing a rather similar research than I am. He has officially looking interview request and interviews are made by either students or the professor himself. He might get more interviewees faster and more efficiently (being a professor and native in Japanese language is a benefit…) and I admit getting rather depressed as he got more contacts in five minutes than I did in five months - literally. However, I want to get to know my interviewees and their context first and learn what they are doing first and later apply relevant questions in formal interveiws. Despite of this, in order to get potential interviewees to understand that I really want an Interview, might require some formality. So, there is a kind of trade-off between formality and having tea and chatting -type of interview and I still have to learn define the best balance - and make sure that the person to be interviewed also shares that understanding. Well, this is a learning process after all. In this process, I need to learn to take more straightforward role.

Yamamoto is promoting it's strawberry farming and industry. One strawberry product is strawberry wine and
 there is also strawberry sparkling wine. 

Then there is the language. The Japanese, I mean - boy, these Japanese here are fluent in Japanese! Despite the fact that I have some what limited language skills and that I absolutely hate hearing my voice on record, I have found that I nowadays I can bear easier 1vs.1 interviews than social gatherings, events etc. The latter can be quite overwhelming and include lots of repetition of how Finland is full of Muumins and it is always cold. Gatherings are nice, but I might have used this year's reserve of socialization. Sorry friends, do not expect lot from me when I get home.

Then there are some practical challenges. Setting a time and place for ohanashi has been a bit challenging. Not so many elderly use e-mail and a short phone call with my prepaid-keitai can cost up to 10€. I know, this is why I get money for research, but it is still unreasonable. Everyone is always busy and asking time for meeting in events has not proven to be successful method. Furthermore and ironically, as I am interested in place research, I do not have good place for interviews. Those who are willing to invite me to their home, are okay, but for others I have limited selection of places. I have not yet figured a sustainable solution for this problem.

Sometimes you have to be prepared for unexpected.
I encountered this imperial guy in one of volunteer networking meetings in Yamamoto.
Got also a selfie with him. 

I have a bad tendency to speak about problems - or challenges, as they should be called, I heard - but there have been good times as well. Gradually, the amount of the conducted interviews is growing and I have heard interesting insights about local reconstruction. The next prob... challenge is transcribing all my recordings.

時間があれあば... Time is a peculiar thing

When I left to Japan, I brought with me 100 名刺 (meishi, namecard, which are vital in Japan. Not least for the reason that your katakana name might cause some confusion if not seen in written form. After the first four months, I had run out of meishis and was only in half way of my stay here. Of course, I gave cards also to people that I never contacted nor have they contacted me. But for the sake of argumentation, let us say that to 60% of those who I gave my card to have either sent or will be sending some sort of greeting by e-mail, mainly in Japanese. (I'm bad at mathematics and estimating numbers, so this is truly hypothetical estimation.) Perhaps around 35-40 of those have stayed more or less regular contacts, either through e-mail exchange or Facebook contacts. (I will write more about Facebook and the role of a researcher later.) Writing an e-mail in Japanese takes me 10-45 min, depending on the familiarity of both the topic and the receiver. So, writing a short mail to all of the 100 people I gave my meishi would take 1000-4500min, from 16 hours to 75 hours. Now I survive with, let's say 600-2400min for one round, since not everyone uses e-mail.

So, you can imagine, there have been days during which I have mainly responded to e-mails or tried desperately figure out a way to express something in written form. I do not remember any fieldwork guide mentioning this, but, then again, I might be wrong.  Lately, I have not been able to do even that, since I have been commuting to Yamamoto nearly daily and I do not have internet access there. At this point somebody might note that there was a promise of finishing an article draft during my stay here... Getting there, it is all ready in my head!

Mobile mornign coffee in train. We have lived through good and bad times together with this thermos bottle bought from my previous trips to Japan. We have grown together. 

Before having "all the free time" to commute to Yamamoto (3-4hours per day, during which I write mail drafts or notes or simply practice the previously-mentioned train meditation, which I have become rather good at.) I had my hands full with homework from Japanese classes. Classes stimulate brain, you learn new words etc., but in exchange you have to cut off time from your research (e-mail correspondence?). So, I ended up multitasking, doing everything a bit and dreaming about long hours in archive, throughout preparation for field trips and intensive studying. 

Now the Japanese classes are over and I can fully concentrate to research. Not studying Japanese has reduced my language skills closer to survival level, but frequent visits to Yamamoto during the studies have paid of: lately I have noticed that the circle of my contacts has grown. More often than once I have met acquaintances in different events and on the way to here and there in the town. It does give you certain sense of place and connections, when every now and then you can accidentally bump into a person you know or when your contact from different contexts are connected to each other, usually for everyone's surprise. However, this has lead to rather positive time management problem: there is a lot going on in Yamamoto, so deciding to which activities to take part, is rather difficult. Altough the net is tightening around the most active key persons in the town, there is still a bias in my contacts: In addition of these extrovert and active people - mostly elderly or citizen activists - there is a more silent population, such as people unwilling to move out of temporary houses, young families that are busy taking care of their jobs and children and all those people, who are not willing to take part in different recreational circles. These people who do not participate in community-building are still a bit out of my reach.

I did imagine being able to do a lot more, also personally: dragged my basketball shoes here (Of course I would join the university's team!) and packed also tennis rackets (Of course me and my husband would play every weekend!). In reality, we played once and both the rackets and shoes travelled back home... To be able to fully concentrate and work on foreign language (which is, to be honest, quite exhausting), I personally need a good night sleep. The more busy and tired I am, the more slower my brain get. (This post was written in the last train to Sendai and returning tomorrow morning on seven o’clock train on iPad and ublished few days later. Please excuse possible typos. )

Mobile morning coffee in bus connecting Watari-station to Yamashita-station, since the Joban-line damaged by tsunami will be reopened in 2017.

The lesson to be learned from this posting is not to make the writer to sound like a martyr, tough some sort of enlightenment of the true meaning of "being busy" is reached. Furthermore, as the name of this blog suggests, I am for the first time on the field for a longer period and do everything alone, so the there is probably a more economical way of doing this - money-, time- and energy-wise. There is also a certain endemic uncertainty embedded to all my conducts here. Part of the business, I guess...

The main point is that there are only 24 hours in one day and time management and preparation before going to field is important. And despite all this, you will be busy! At least I feel like gold panner... Or like eating with only one chopstick: doing lot of things in vain, consuming energy, but finally the result of all efforts combined will be something good. I hope. This might make somebody less skeptical to believe in some sort of predestined fate: some visits to Yamamoto seemed meaningless or even frustrating at the time, but they paid of later. For instance, by participating in different local meetings I showed my face (and determination) and was offered a great accommodation solution for the last two months here by an acquaintance. What is even better, the accommodation is in Yamamoto, so I can use my commuting hours to something else! Praises go also to my husband, who has been understanding, keeping our place in Sendai clean, laundry washed and managed to even feed himself, while I have been in Yamamoto. And, oh yes, I have a new set of 100 meishis, of which nearly half is already "in the circulation" already.

Ps. The reason for using time to write this post is to have sometimes an opportunity to express my thoughts in more or less comprehensible manner in foreign language. I am feeling like a superwoman when speaking, reading and writing in English! From time to time I forget that I can communicate with foreign language at ease. And I do love Japanese local trains, could ride them endlessly. It is the stuff outside the trains that makes me tired.

First time researcher's survival package: painkillers (for chronic headache), calcium (dairy products are expensive), omega and magnesium tablets (to prevent heart palpitation caused by stress and lack of sleep), electronic dictionary in iPad (name of the application is Midori) and most important of all, mobile morning coffee. (Forgot interview recorder from this picture.)

第一印象 First impression

Remember when you were in elementary school and had your annual swimming classes in the nearest swimming hall? The place, where you would practice basic swimming skills and later as older student perhaps get permission from the teacher to try jumping from the platform. The place, where you would choose a bit too high of a platform, where you would stand looking down into water, feet shaking and heart pumping way too fast. Hoping that you would have paid a bit more attention to instructions and regretting that you would never had climbed so high. And everybody behind you is waiting for you to finally jump.

This was more or less what I felt like on the morning I was going to The Field for the first time. I have never liked jumping into dark waters. Or any waters, for that matter. Actually, the only time I jumped as a kid in the swimming hall was from springboard and I have never jumped since, but let’s not go into details here... Luckily this time I did it, since the waters here in Japan seem to be pretty warm, as also my dear husband has observed during his own frequent fieldtrips to nearby swimming hall. (For some reason warm water temperature everywhere here is set to mystical 42 decrees – these people have indeed read their The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.)

Debris inside a house damaged by tsunami

For those who are not acquainted with my current location and work:  I'm a doctoral candidate for Centre for East Asian Studies and currently studying as an exchange student in Tohoku University while simultanously doing my fieldwork for my PhD research. My research theme is reconstruction  process in Yamamoto-town after the disaster of 3.11. (Edit. Here's a link to a report that touches similar issues that I'm currently working on: housing and community rebuilding.)

When meeting my supervisor here at Tohoku University for the first time, he introduced me to a graduate student, who was doing volunteer work once a month as teacher in computer circle for elderly people in Yamamoto-town. Fortunately, this kind of connection existed and I was able to join the circle after being in Sendai only for few weeks. I did manage to understand instructions when and where to meet in order to commute to Yamamoto: The route consists of either bus or train ride to the Sendai station, from where it is possible to take either direct highway bus or JRtrain - substitute bus combination, since the railway is not operating in Yamamoto due to tsunami damage. The trip to Yamamoto takes altogether around 1,5 hours, during which one has time to discuss Japanese and Finnish foods and research aims in clumsy Japanese (when travelling in company) or to practice traditional Japanese train meditation a.k.a. sleeping (when travelling alone).

Left: ocean. Picture taken standing on a seawall, "The Great Wall of Japan". Right: tsunami zone.

So, on a sunny October morning, I opened the door of our apartment, closed my eyes and jumped (metaphorically). The jump might not be as elegant as the professional divers' jumps, but nevertheless it was worth it. I stayed in Yamamoto for Saturday and Sunday, during which I met many interesting people, got a bunch of wonderful experiences ranging from welcoming lunch including local specialty harako-meshi, visit to locals’ soba-noodle workshop, tour around Yamamoto by two different contacts, all the way to live interview on the local radio station - in Japanese, of course! Talking about extreme experiences… One remarkably absurd feeling followed me through whole intensive weekend: I’m actually here, in the place that was no more than pictures and text in the computer screen only few months ago. I saw the plain costal areas that used to be villages and the place, where the rescued and cleaned photographs were kept - the original reason for me to get interested in Yamamoto in the first place. I even met some people that I had only stalked in the internet thus far. Of course, the weekend was also full of feelings of disbelief and sadness when seeing the tsunami damages - or what was left from it. All in all, I felt that this was a good beginning for my fieldwork. 

Soba-workshop and its products.

The only thing about diving is that one kind of should be able to reach the surface and swim to the shore. In other words, one must either learn to swim or drown. Although the latter is an unfortunate risk for the students thrown into the deep and murky waters of ethnographic fieldwork, I decided that if my husband had learned how to swim well by practicing few months intensively in the local swimming hall, so will I in the field. Thus, the topics of my following posts (if there will be some) will practical fieldwork observations and frustrations as well as Yamamoto, a little-known small tsunami town. Yamamoto, that as a choice of case study topic creates curiosity even among the locals. Yamamoto, where apples, strawberries and Sakhalin surf clam (hokkikai) are praised local products. Yamamoto, that has luckily easy kanjis in its name: 山元!

Harako-meshi.

Rescued pictures in Omoide Sarubeeji's archives.

"One hill, two causeways, three islands, and five lakes" - West Lake, Hangzhou

Nihao everyone! Annamari asked me to add some photos and comments to our blog, so here they come. :) I spent most of July in Shanghai because I attended a summer school arranged by Fudan University's Nordic Centre. The trip was wonderful experience and I was totally thrilled by Shanghai.

It was quite difficult to choose which photos (of those around 300 I took during the trip...) to add here, but finally I decided to choose a few photos from our weekend trip to Hangzhou. We visited Hangzhou's main tourist attraction, the famous West Lake 西湖，which was a really beautiful place. We took a boat to the small man-made island called 小瀛洲 and enjoyd the hot summer day and the beautiful scenery of Three Ponds Mirroring the Moon ( 三潭印月) and Green Greeting Pavilion.




A traditional entrance in 小瀛洲 island.














Qian King Temple











































Zigzag bridge to Green Greeting Pavilion.













Green Greeting Pavilion














Leifeng Pagoda













Baochu Pagoda