糖心传媒

Upon my arrival in Tokyo as a visiting researcher, I anticipated a deep immersion in data. After all, ethnographic fieldwork requires attention and presence: extended periods of listening, observing, and trying to see what can at times feel like the world around you with fresh eyes. Instead, I found myself inhabiting a space that felt both intensely full and quietly isolating at the same time鈥攎oving through classrooms, trains, and moments of reflection where immersion and distance seemed to coexist. What I was not prepared for was what that immersion would demand of me intellectually, relationally, and emotionally 鈥� and in ways I couldn鈥檛 articulate.

Each week followed a rhythm. I took the train from the international researchers鈥� housing complex, almost two hours each way, to the main school where I was doing my fieldwork. These trips to and from the field were also part of my research: transition spaces between observation and note-taking, between movement and stillness. Sitting among commuters, I often found my thoughts already turning toward the day ahead 鈥� what might emerge, and what might remain just beyond reach.

One moment remains particularly vivid. I was seated at the back of a classroom observing a class of students work on an inquiry task. The room hummed with activity. Students lowly voiced hypotheses and musings about their project 鈥� chatting, thinking out loud, actively working.

The teacher asked a question and then paused, not withdrawing, but holding the space. It was the opposite of silence. It was active presence: a type of intentional pedagogical placement. One that left space for students to learn with and through each other, rather than run to the teacher for validation.

“Maybe it’s this part鈥�” a student murmured, leaning slightly over the triangulated desks.

There was no immediate response from the teacher. Instead, a pause settled across the group. The teacher walks away…

Students turned slightly toward one another. Quick, curious glances. Intent gazes at their worksheets and tablets. It appears they silently debated each other. Another voice came seconds later: 鈥淥r鈥� could we do it this way?鈥�

I found myself waiting for a clearer intervention 鈥� something more recognisable as direction or evaluation. But what unfolded was different. The teacher waited attentively, pulling back so that thinking could percolate through the students. It was then that I began to realize that what I was witnessing was not a lack of engagement, but rather a different form of it.

Understanding these moments required more than observation alone. It involved returning to classroom interactions through video, engaging in reflective conversations with teachers and STEM leaders, working through documentary materials 鈥攅ach offering a different way into the practices I was trying to make sense of.

In addition to visits to schools, I was also engaging鈥攑resenting and attending lectures, seminars, workshops鈥攁t Hosei University, my host university. Eventually, these inputs began to feed into the field as well: opportunities to share ideas, challenge assumptions, and collaboratively improvise on them in-the-moment. I realized the line between observer and participant is often messier than the methodological texts suggest.

The classrooms themselves were rich with activity. Students engaged in interdisciplinary inquiry, moving across ideas, discussing, negotiating, and constructing knowledge together. I was there to observe, to listen, to document. And I did so carefully. Intently. Almost relentlessly.

But ethnographic immersion does not conclude when one leaves the classroom.

Back in my apartment, I found myself still “in the field.” Fieldnotes demanded attention. Data required revisiting. Literature called for engagement. There was no natural boundary between being in the research and stepping away from it 鈥� the work followed me into the quiet of the evening and the early hours of the morning.

In this sense, I was not only immersed. I was, at times, many times, submerged.

And yet, this experience carried a familiarity.

I had lived and studied in Japan before, as a postgraduate research student in a different part of the country, hundreds of miles away. I had continued working there as an educator for several years before beginning my PhD. In many ways, the language, the culture, the rhythms of institutional life were not entirely unknown to me. But familiarity did not translate into ease, unfortunately. If anything, it complicated my position. I was navigating a context I recognised, but from a role I had not previously occupied.

I was no longer a student situated within a system of learning. I was now a researcher 鈥� observing, interpreting, and standing both within and slightly apart from the spaces I was studying. Classrooms that might once have felt like places of belonging now felt, at moments, like sites of careful, conscious analysis.

This duality was not always easy to hold.

At the same time there was another register 鈥� more intimate and harder to name. Distance from my family back home in the UK was a low hum of dislocation. Of course, we were able to keep in touch but always at negotiated times 鈥� late night or very early morning calls. Full presence was always on hold.

At one point during my time away, I also lost another member of my close family. There is a certain texture to grief at a distance. But even putting that experience aside, I kept coming back to a sense that had emerged prior to receiving that news. A quiet sense of heaviness that I couldn鈥檛 fully explain to myself. How much of what I was feeling was circumstantial and how much was constituted by fieldwork itself?

Was it information saturation 鈥� being surrounded day in and day out by data, analysis, and sense-making?  

Was it something inherent in the ethnographic role 鈥� the researcher as observer, participant, and interpreter, navigating multiple positions simultaneously?

Or was it the solitude of working alone, even in one of the busiest, most socially connected cities in the world?

Tokyo often gets described many ways: energetic, vibrant, exciting, and never sleeps. And it certainly is. The city moves with a kind of collective momentum: trains run on time, crowds flow through spaces, and systems function with remarkable coordination. Everything runs efficiently together like clockwork. However, among all of this motion there is stillness too. A silence that comes not from lack of movement but from being by yourself amidst it all.

Methodological conversations about ethnographic research often focus on immersion. Being close to the field, spending quality time with participants, being aware of context. But less frequently do we attend to the affective dimensions of this immersion 鈥� the ways in which it shapes not only what we see, but how we feel, how we think, and how we come to understand ourselves within the research process.

To be immersed is not just to watch others; it is also to discover oneself anew.

Moving through the field, I found it harder to think of myself as detached from what I was seeing. Observer and observed were not fixed positions; rather, they were emergent 鈥� made and remade by presence and engagement, interpretation and introspection. In this sense, the practice of knowing and the experience of being there could not be easily separated (Bourdieu, 1990).  

This brought into sharper focus something that Donna Haraway (1988, p. 581) has argued compellingly: that what we see and understand is always shaped by where we stand. What I came to notice, and how I made sense of it, felt inseparable from how I was positioned within these spaces 鈥� as a researcher, as a former insider, and as someone navigating the field from a place of both proximity and distance.

As someone working in comparative and international education, such experiences push us to think about fieldwork differently. Fieldwork is relational. Fieldwork is contextual. Fieldwork happens within educational systems and ecosystems that are cultural, institutional, and personal. In a context like Japan’s Super Science High Schools, where global STEM aspirations meet distinctly local pedagogical cultures, this matters. What I observed in those classrooms could not be adequately understood through the lens of comparison alone 鈥� it required sustained presence, genuine uncertainty and curiosity, and a willingness to be unsettled by what I found.

Ruth Behar (1996) argues that ethnography is not only about understanding others 鈥� it is also about how the researcher is transformed in the process. That transformation, in my experience, was not dramatic or easily defined. It was quieter than that 鈥� something that accumulated through immersion, through encounter, through moments of clarity and uncertainty alike. It resides now in the way I see, question, and attend to the world, both within and beyond the field.

I doubt the person who entered this fieldwork is the same as the one who returned six months later.

So now, I find myself sitting with questions I cannot yet fully answer:

Where does the field truly begin and end?

What does it mean to be fully present in a space while also observing it?

And how do we carry what we have lived 鈥� not just what we have recorded?

That experience sat somewhere between immersion and isolation 鈥� and perhaps it is precisely in that in-between space that the most honest knowledge is made.

To live the field, not only as a site of data but as a space that transforms the researcher, is to accept that the knowledge we go on to produce will always carry something of that experience within it.

REFERENCES

Behar, R. (1996) The Vulnerable Observer: Anthropology That Breaks Your Heart. Boston: Beacon Press.

Bourdieu, P. (1990) The Logic of Practice. Cambridge: Polity Press.

Haraway, D. (1988) ‘Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective’, Feminist Studies, 14(3), pp. 575鈥�599.

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