Conversations about Otokorashisa (Masculinity/‘Manliness’): Insider/Outsider Dynamics in Masculinities Research in Japan

Abstract

This chapter draws upon my fieldwork experience conducting research about ‘masculinities’ in Japan for my doctoral dissertation in the late 1990s. As I outline below, I returned to an area of Japan where I had lived in the past, had spent some of the most significant years of my life, and had extensive personal as well as more formal networks and relationships. However, this time I returned in a new guise — almost a new incarnation — that of ‘researcher’. This, as well as my often ambiguous ‘insider/outsider’ position, provided challenges, as well as added richness, to the research project. Adding to the complexity (and richness) of these insider/outsider dynamics was the gendered and sexualized undercurrents informing the research process. I was a male researcher, and, in addition to that, a male researcher who was constructed by his informants as sharing a gendered world view that, at least in terms of its public articulations, was essentially a heteronormative one. How these intersecting and interacting cross-currents informed the research process is something I would like to reflect on in this chapter. The sociocultural context of this chapter is a non–Euro-North American-Australian-New Zealand one. In this regard, the chapter provides a much needed spotlight on the complexities of conducting masculinities research in a ‘non-Western’ setting. At the same time, Japan is an affluent, urbanized, industrialized society, and hence, there may well be crossovers with ‘Western’ sociocultural contexts.