Hokkaido University Guest Lecture:Insider-outsider-foreigner-Native

Just last week I had the opportunity to go to Hokkaido University to give a guest lecture at the Modern Japanese Studies Program about my lifestyle and work in Omori. While I was writing my thesis back in college, I met Professor Klien (in the picture above) who gave me lots of valuable advice and information on the topic of lifestyle migration and new forms of work. Even after I finished writing my thesis and graduating college, we kept in touch and a few months ago she asked me if I wanted to do a talk at Hokkaido University.

First of all, I was simply excited to go back to academia and involve myself in that community once again. Anyways, I always take up these opportunities to do presentations because it is such a golden opportunity to organize my own thoughts, look back on what I have done, and to find out what I am lacking in the process of relaying information to others. Not to mention, it’s always good to have a presentation that you can always just tweak depending on the audience. Tomi-san, the chairwoman of my company, has this one power point that she always uses which she slightly edits for every audience she presents for. I find that for Tomi-san, that presentation becomes the core for her storytelling and also a tool for self-reflection. I think how Tomi-san uses her presentation is such an effective and clever tool for getting her message across and as a process for self-improvement. So, I took this opportunity to take a page out of her book and make a presentation for myself as well. 

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After thinking about what I have been doing in both my lifestyle and work here in Omori, I decided that I should make the theme of my presentation about my positionality in the town. First of all, it was really hard trying to organize all the projects I have done under one theme like “food” or “town development” and etc. Instead I focused more on the “why” and the “how” I decided or actually went about doing these projects. Hence the title “What an Insider-Outsider-Foreigner-Native can accomplish in the Inaka”. I felt that the reason why and the how I ended up doing these projects was very dependent on my identity and point of view. I have constantly been moving around, from Japan to the US, West Coast to East Coast, city to countryside, that I developed a flexible and fluid positionality that has allowed me to constantly look at things from a different perspective. Having the “native” perspective is not always ideal, nor is always having an “outsider” perspective as well. To be honest, having such a bizarre combination of perspectives can be a little confusing or frustrating at times, however; if you are able to take advantage of it and work it to your benefit, it can give you an edge on matters. Well at least for me it has. As such, I arrived upon the idea to do a presentation about having all 4 perspectives in Omori and how I use these various perspectives to navigate my daily life and go about doing my work. 

I first started my presentation with photos of the types of work I do in Omori and now in Tokyo. Considering the variety of work that I do, trying to come up with some overall category tends to result in some bumbling mess. One thing I wanted to avoid doing was going on some conceptual rant about my work and lifestyle (which sometimes I tend to do) and focus more on real life examples. Hence why I focused on showing photos for each project or assignment that I am currently doing or have done. For each example I tied in various combinations of my 4 positionalities to explain why I decided to do that work or how I was able to complete that job. Within this section of my presentation, I also wanted to present to the students that working and living in the countryside will come with its own set of challenges that I needed to overcome.

For example, coming from an American education system, discussing is an important part of my work and life habits I have. In my experience of Japan, there is a culture of placing harmony of the community above having discussions which may disrupt that sense of unity. Being in a small village, these social patterns can be frequent and a bit of a curveball for me. I think these challenges that I brought up were points of concern for many for the students listening to my talk because almost all of them were coming from abroad to study in Japan. It was interesting for me to hear them wanting to work in Japan after their graduation, and so they seemed interested to hear what I went through so they could get an idea of the possible challenges they might also face as they prepare for finding work here in Japan. 

After speaking about some of the specifics of my lifestyle and work in Omori, I wanted to pull back a little and talk about the thesis I wrote at Berkeley. I think I was keen to put this in my presentation to show that even if you major in something as obscure as Asian Studies, you can still do something with your life… However, for me I feel like it was more about the process of getting my bachelors that has led to my life here in Omori, and less about the actual degree. So I wasn’t trying to justify majoring in Asian Studies, but more of a way to say “it’s what you make of it”. I also wanted to make a point that being a researcher and a resident are two completely different things. Having experienced being both, I realized that there were things which I just was not able to observe or understand as a researcher. The types of information, the amount, and your relationship with the field starts to change when you shift from being an outsider to an insider. In my case, for example, coming to live in the town with the image of it created through my research, there were many things I had to reconfigure in my mind about the town. I thought that some of these students may be wanting to write a thesis and do field work, so I wanted to let them to be aware that a field changes depending on your perspective and positionality. I think when I was writing my thesis, I was aware that my positionality gave me access to certain information, but I was not as aware that my understanding of said information would be affected by that same positionality as well. 

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For my final slide, I decided to do something a little different from the usual “in conclusion” act and showed the students a little life plan I made for myself using this opportunity. I like to think that presentations are not just for the benefit of the audience, but a good opportunity for the presenter to test out ideas to a wide variety of people as well. I was thinking of something like this chart below where I want to essentially have 4 components to my future career. First, I want to be a content creator who is on the ground interacting with people as an insider. I feel like I have this part down at the moment, but the next 3 parts are what I need to work on. The second part of this is academics. Being in academia while in college and writing my thesis, I know that there is a lot of really informative research being done. However, I feel like a lot of that information is just circulating within the academic community and is not being disseminated to the people who could use this information for their activism. Not to mention having to get through some of the academic jargon may be a little challenging if you’re not familiar with the language. I want to essentially become or create a pipeline between academia and the field, where some symbiotic relationship can be realized, specifically in the study of the rural. I think at the moment there are key players like this in Japanese Academia who are already doing this. However, there aren’t as much of this integration between academics from foreign countries and the field. I think this exchange can be useful since good research is informative no matter what language it is in. The third part is business, which essentially becomes the engine to this whole life plan. Personally, I think for sustainability you need to create some sort of business plan out of it. I’m not for some uncontrolled profit-making machine for the sake of making profit, but if used as an engine to drive your activities it's very useful tool. It can also be used to fund others who want to take part in what you are doing. The final part of this chart is the most important, which is my social mission. This social mission will essentially become the core to everything I do and will not be economically driven. I have a feeling this won’t be place dependent because I bounce around everywhere and be something more universal and applicable to wherever I go. 

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Me at Gungendo two years ago

After this bumbling attempt to present some “where do you see yourself in 5 years”, we moved into Q&A from the students. I was surprised to hear most questions were about how the students themselves could get opportunities that I have stumbled upon. They seemed to want to hear about some equation that I have that allowed to end up to where I am right now. Honestly though, I had to tell them there is no equation or a set of instructions for what I have been doing. The best advice I could give was to first visit the field which you are interested in, instead of just reading about it on the internet or in a book. Another thing is to make sure to maintain and develop social networks even if it does not seem as if it will bear fruits in the near future. Visiting physical locations allows you to not only collect a wider variety of information, but also interact with it. In other words, there is both consumption of information as well as the production of information. You can observe, feel, taste, smell the field by going there, and you can produce new information from the reaction created through the interaction with the people and the environment. This way you are not simply an objective observer, but also a subjective actor or an insider and an outsider. 

The second piece of advice, which is to maintain and develop social networks, is more of a long-term game. When I first started to visit Omori, I was not planning to work or live here, but I kept messaging the people in the town even while I was back in the states. I think it is important to not drop out of people’s radars and to maintain some link, even if it is slightly tedious. I usually find that these thin strands of social relations I maintained bloom into something larger when the right time comes around. 

When I write this down, it sounds like I am saying just leave things to chance. In a way though, it’s another way of saying set yourself up for chances that may come your way.

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Overall, the presentation went fairly well, and I was able to get the general gist out about what I do in Omori. I did think that I really could work more on my transitions between slides and the larger thematic storyline. On the same train of thought, I definitely need to make my presentations from the point of view from the audience because concepts which may seem easy to understand from my standpoint may be a PowerPoint slide full of jargon for others.   

Other than that, this was a such a great opportunity to organize my thoughts, to get myself involved in an academic community once more, and a chance to make a PowerPoint presentation that I can use for pretty much any occasion with slight tweaks. I hope that I can keep getting myself out there through the small accumulation of these sort of events. Apparently, the students wrote reports about what they thought about my talk, so I’m looking forward to reading them soon!

Until Next Time!