2. Fieldwork

My field research was conducted from July 1995 to January 1997. While preparing for fieldwork, I was encouraged by a friend to visit the Tokushima prefecture at the periphery of the great industrial expansion of the Inland Sea (Osaka to Kagawa). According to my informant, it was a ‘rural’ place where I could pursue most of my interest in gifts and wrapping. My plan was to travel around the prefecture for few weeks and find a village of less than 4,000 inhabitants in which to carry out fieldwork. The search for a location proved difficult. In the first two weeks I was turned down by all the towns and villages in the prefecture I visited. I only arrived in Kamikatsu by letting other people ‘wrap’ me into their groups and associations. The Tokushima International Association wrote me letters of introduction and directed me towards the southern areas of the prefecture where Kamikatsu lies.

On my first visit to Kamikatsu, I met Hiraoka San at the yakuba or town’s office. He read my letters and kindly drove me to Fukuhara village to the onsen (hot-spring resort) where he introduced me to Mr. Abe, also from the town’s office. After offering me tea and biscuits they discussed who could offer me a homestay (a short residence in a home). I was treated to a meal, offered a bath, and given some omiyage (souvenirs). In the meantime Mr. Abe mediated my requests with Mr. Mima, the head of the onsen. I left the town with a month’s homestay at Mr. Mima’s annexed house, after which I had no guarantee of remaining in town.

On the last day of my homestay with Mima’s family I met Diana, an artist from New Zealand married to a Japanese man, who introduced me to their acquaintances, the Watanabe family in Yokomine district. The Watanabe family took me in with ease. They had lived in Nepal for several years, and their experience enabled them to understand the nature and needs of my research. As we talked in the porch of their house, we discovered that Gufodh, my host, and Professor Hiroshi, who had offered me the research affiliation, had both lived in the same house in Nepal in the same year, knew of each other but had never met. The coincidence amazed us. It was hard to believe that of all places and of all the people I could have met in Japan, I met them. En, as they call the chances of destiny, marked our relation. I moved into their house few days later. Our arrangement was informal; they offered me a room free of charge in their annexed house, on top of the room where Gufodh San made his pottery. They only charged me for board, which was minimal. I shared their vegetarian diet and organic homegrown products. Their initial three month period become a full year, in gentle transition from stranger to resident in their home. I mostly helped in domestic arrangements. I taught Spanish to Junco, their 10-year-old daughter, as she was home taught. I spent many hours in their kitchen learning about recycling, gardening, and organic agriculture. Their life-style put them in a marginal position in the town, which I shared to some extent during my time with them.

The research process was less eclectic after I settled in Yokomine. I spent my first two months visiting the five villages that compose the town in order to understand the internal composition of the villages. I realised that the villagers no longer organised their daily activities solely around their districts or villages except for festivals in the autumn. Nearly everybody depended to some extent on the town’s municipal administrative services. It was the town that was of paramount importance in centralising and organising everyday life for the villages. I decided that it was essential to understand the town and the internal division of villages simultaneously rather than as units apart, or as units within. I concentrated on getting maps and tracing out the distinct areas, keeping the unity of the town as a general administrative framework (see Figure D).

The bulk of my research on gift and wrapping took place at the town’s more than 54 festivals. They are the largest occasions for public wrapping and gift exchange. Additionally, I participated in private gift giving through my main informants. I carried out most of my research in Kamikatsu except for short visits to the neighbouring towns of Sanaguchi and Katsuura, their libraries, the prefecture library of Bunkanomori and the capital Tokushima. On two occasions, I made short visits to the University of Tokyo to consult its libraries. The study of gift giving put me at the centre of what Harrison has described as ‘an intense familiarity with a wide cross-community of people’ (Harrison 1993: 6). The system of gift-exchange practised in Kamikatsu and other parts of the region made me the recipient of multitude donations, from the gift of two cars, to clothes, a video camera, stationery, money and food. I kept a formal record of all prestations that I received and I witnessed. I photographed all of them and their wrappings. I videotaped with permission over 160 hours of ceremonial activities,

Figure C. Map of Kamikatsu and its five villages. Location of main sites of fieldwork: Shrines, temples, administrative buildings, informants, close informants, and my neighbourhood.


Figure D. Actual Map of Kamikatsu. It is a 3A page, doubled in two A4 parts
meetings, festivals, and the gift exchange in these contexts. As to my relationship with the villagers of the five villages, I tried to balance my participation in each of them. Most of the quantitative data that appear in these pages refer to samples taken from each district and village. The group of people that I came to know best were a number of fifteen houses dispersed over the five villages, of different economic and social status and neighbours (see Figure C). I had informants both in the central areas of the local administration and at the periphery, although I came to be mostly associated with those at the ‘margin’ (not geographical, but social) of the town. Geographically I was placed in a very advantageous position. I lived at a close distance to one of the main crossroads in the town (see figure D). Each family in their knowledge of gifts and their positions of centrality and periphery plays a prominent role in the thesis.