This volume taps the expertise of North American and European specialists on the practicalities of conducting long-term research in the social sciences and cultural studies. In first-person accounts, they discuss their successes and failures doing fieldwork across rural and urban Japan in a wide range of settings: among religious pilgrims and adolescent consumers on factory assembly lines and in high schools and wholesale seafood markets with bureaucrats in charge of defense, foreign aid and social welfare policy inside radical political movements among adherents of ''New Religions'' inside a prosecutor's office and the JET Program for foreign English teachers with journalists in the NHK newsroom while researching race, ethnicity and migration and amidst fans and consumers of contemporary popular culture.
