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At Sophia University, Faculty of Liberal Arts, the anthropology and sociology courses put special emphasis on fieldwork—getting the students to use what they have learned in the classroom and apply it to the world around them. In this class, we take that one step further by making the results of our research efforts into a public website for our classmates, researchers and scholars, urbanist and ethnographers, or else interested to see what is happening right now, today, on the streets of our great city, Tokyo.
After looking around, we noticed that there are very few sites devoted to the fieldwork of Tokyo—despite its unquestioned status as a great Global City! Fewer still are ethnographic.
As Roland Barthes reminds us,
“This city can be known only by an activity of an ethnographic kind: you must orient yourself in it not by book, by address, but by walking, by sight, by habit, by experience; here every discovery is intense and fragile, it can be repeated or recovered only by memory of the trace it has left in you."
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Of our class of 34 students, we broke up into seven groups of about 5 students each, each with different subsections of Shinjuku that engaged different themes and theory. This enabled our class to cover a wide range of places and topics, while still being able to link to each of the other group’s work.
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