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Theodore
C. Bestor is Professor of Anthropology and Japanese Studies at Harvard
University, and is past president of the American Anthropological
Association’s East Asian Studies Section and the Society for Urban
Anthropology. His many publications include: “Neighborhood Tokyo” (1989),” Doing
Fieldwork in Japan” (co-editor, 2003), and his most recent, “Tsukiji:
The Fish Market at the Center of the World” (2004). His current research
looks at the development of Japanese food culture and his ongoing project
on “Global Sushi” examines the “global reach” of
Japanese seafood markets, their impact on markets and fish industries,
and the popularity of sushi and other types of Japanese foods..
1.
Background
2.
Neighborhood Tokyo: Miyamoto-cho
3.
Tokyo's Tsukiji: The Fish Market and the Center of
the World
4.
Japanese Food Culture: Looking at Sushi as a Japanese
Food and Icon
5.
Issues of Food Safety and Hygiene
6.
Lessons to be Learned from the Field: Linking Kansas
with Japan
7. Concluding
Thoughts
Neighborhood
Tokyo: Miyamoto-chô
L: We are moving ahead in time--your dissertation
became the award-winning 1989 book, "Neighborhood
Tokyo." Could you tell us first how you came to
choose "Miyamoto-chô"?
B: Well, because I had the experience of living in
Tokyo before, I kind of had this intuitive sense that
urban communities were interesting places. I didn't
have a particular place in mind but I wanted to find
an area somewhere off the beaten track. Not a busy
urban center but a quiet backwater neighborhood. I
wanted to find a place that didn't have anything particularly
special about it. Nothing famous--no landmarks--nothing
that someone would go out of their way to come and
see. So that the neighborhood really contained things
that were by and for the people of that community.
And that sort of cut it down to 10,000 neighborhoods.
Fundamentally, it was by accident and good
luck. My wife and I were staying with a friend of
ours who happened
to have some extra space. He and his family let us
stay for a couple of weeks while we were searching
around to find a spot for research. We talked to him
over dinner about what we were interested in and finally
he said, " You know, sounds like you're talking
about the kind of neighborhood I grew up in. Why don't
you go look at this place?"
He gave us directions and gave us some introductions;
we went walking around an spent a couple of afternoons
looking around and went, "Oh, yeah, this very
. . . [is what were looking for]. It's remarkably difficult
to say, "I'm looking for an ordinary place." I
mean, nobody wants to say, "We're ordinary." And
it's very hard to define what ordinary is. So finding
an ordinary place was really tricky. But in any case,
through the good offices of our friend, we ended up
being introduced to this neighborhood and looked around
and very quickly decided this was the right kind of
place.
L: And the key was this idea of networks, right?
B: I wanted to do research in a neighborhood where
people had some degree of connection with one another.
They weren't just commuting strangers. Where people
interacted on a daily basis.
What we ended up doing was renting an apartment over
a pharmacy on a shopping street in the middle of the
neighborhood. And so, from my apartment window, I could
look down and watch the ebb and flow of shopping. The
housewives going off in the late afternoon to the local
grocery stores and butcher shop, and other stores.
And in the morning, the kids going off to school and
the husbands going off to offices over there. So we
were right in the middle of this little community and
had a sense of it ebbing and flowing throughout the
day and throughout the year.
L: You had mentioned in some of your articles about
mapping the scene and looking for labels as clues for
understanding what Miyamoto-chô was all about.
Could you elaborate on this and how this applies to
your later research on Tsukiji?
B: It works in any community whether it's Japanese
or not. The number of things you can understand about
a place--just watching the patterns of where people
go in the course of a day. How they do different things
at different places. To getting a spatial sense of
how people spend time. You can get a sense of what
is and what is not important to them.
In Japan, perhaps more than in the United States,
people kind of do wear their identities on their clothing.
The school kids wear little badges that tell what school
they go to, what grade they're in, what class they're
in. Sometime, even what bus or train they take in commuting
to school. Employees of companies wear little badges
on their lapels that say what company they're a part
of. People in different occupations have different
styles of dress.
I became quickly attuned to watching what people were
wearing. Looking for all the subtle labels that would
give me the idea of who they were and what they did.
And also, where would I find, in terms of mapping out
spaces, how people use their social time and their
social space. Just noticing what kind of people end
up in what kind of places.
L: You had mentioned about the community bulletin
boards as great sources of information too.
B: Yes, just as if you go into a grocery store
in the United States and you spend twenty minutes
reading
the bulletin board by the checkout counter. You know--there
are notices of church lunches, school bazaars, a play
that some people are sponsoring, a little league game,
people selling used baby furniture--you're not going
to learn everything about the community but it gives
you a sense of what kinds of things are happening—who’s
involved, who’s not.
L: Which is why to do research, for anthropologists,
you've got to be there. What were your surprising discoveries
about Miyamoto-chô? Things that perhaps you had
assumed and then realized otherwise.
B: If I went in with any preconceived notion, they
were typical North American notions--that neighborliness
is a rural phenomenon--people who live in towns and
cities are supposed to be less involved with their
neighbors. And certainly in the case of Tokyo, at least
at that time, that wasn't the case. So, I suppose one
of the things that really surprised me is, the extent
to which even in the middle of busy, crowded, highly
populated metropolitan area, there is an incredible
amount of to-ing and fro-ing between neighbors and
people who really know each other's lives quite intimately.
L: And, there is an order to it.
B: Yes, exactly. It’s not chaotic interaction
like billiard balls bouncing back and forth but they
actually organize their lives around each other's activities.
And they are attuned to the rhythms of each other's
lives and so forth. In that sense, from a North American
perspective, there was a really small town feel even
in the middle of Tokyo. People knew their neighbors,
knew their neighbors' children.
L: Everyone is in close proximity.
B: Right.
Next: Tokyo's
Tsukiji: The Fish Market and the Center of the
World
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