Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
The night before this meeting with the young men in West Tokyo, Kamio
had asked me to say something about being a SGI member in the UK, which
according to him these young men wanted to hear about. After having lis-
tened to their intimate conversations where they revealed what was di
cult
for them, I found myself unable to give a
speech about my role as a
researcher who was studying their political participation. I found myself
talking more as a Soka Gakkai member than a scholar does and at their level
of intimacy. I talked about personal things such as what it was like coming to
Japan to do my PhD research with a six-month-old baby. It felt natural to
respond to their more personal level of conversation instead of just talking
about my academic interests. Treating them as distant subjects for my
research, with whom I should not connect at a personal
'
detached
'
level because I
needed to maintain some sort of
distance, seemed unnatural.
Anything less than a sense of personal human connection would have felt
arti
'
professional
'
cial. Indeed, the feeling of human connection may have been why these
young people had gathered here on a Sunday morning when they could have
done so many other things.
As I conducted a group interview with six of them afterwards, my
'
observer role set the mode for the interview as they openly expressed their
personal likes and dislikes about their political engagement, despite the pre-
sence of Kamio, who, of course, worked for Komeito. While they gave their
full support to Komeito this did not mean they agreed with everything the
party did. Had I been less open about myself, they might have responded with
more standardised answers, answers that I could
'
attached
find in the Komei Shinbun,
the Komeito daily newspaper. Telling me why they supported Komeito, they also
expressed doubts about Komeito
s decision to send Japanese Self-Defence
Forces (SDF) to Iraq (discussed in
Chapter 3
).
'
Going canvassing
Apart from calling people on the phone to try to convince them to vote for
Komeito, which I describe in the next section, some supporters would go and
talk to people they knew directly. I had the opportunity to join Nami, the
person with whom I stayed in Hachioji, on such an excursion. The person we
were trying to meet, Yamada, was a man who had delivered a second-hand
washing machine to our
flat about three weeks before the November 2003
election. He was a chatty person and had talked to Nami when she went to
the store where he worked, a second-hand shop frequented by many students
in the area. During one of these conversations, the subject of politics had
come up and she had said she was voting for Komeito. When he delivered the
washing machine, Nami was out. Yamada was a man in his late
fifties and, as
Nami had said, he liked talking. We chatted for 20 minutes about the
upcoming election. Yamada was generally worried
'
about
the future of
Japan
cient funds in the pension
system. Sixty is the retirement age in Japan and he was retiring in a few years
'
, which meant he was worried about insu
'
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