Fieldwork and Methodology

JCars is a large Japanese multinational manufacturer (with around 30,000 staff). The head office is based in the bustling northern quarter of central Osaka City with the site limited to clerical work. During fieldwork,1 living alone in my parents’ home in Nara City (Nara Prefecture), which lies in a valley to the Southeast of Osaka City, for 12 months, from February 1998 to February 1999 (with a month’s break in May), following a precise daily routine, I commuted into Osaka City every weekday as a full-time office worker (9AM to 6PM). I invite you, dear reader, to accompany me on this journey. The routine enforced on our bodies is important insofar as it gets us to work on time, and that it puts us in a certain productive and motivated frame of mind, but contained in such commonplace are thoughts, feelings, and activities that escape its grip; we are never simply at the mercy of spatiotemporal coercion endemic to corporate life. My experience and skills of the commute (learned semiconsciously, with an awareness of cultural differences that structure this learning) can be read to mirror that of other members of JCars as well as the commuter body as a whole. I do not claim to know other commuters’ thoughts or that my thoughts would resemble theirs accurately; nonetheless there is a certain commonality of bodily experience. Thus, by this description, I bring together the particular and the general, the micro and the macro, or the individual and common experience: the dual perspective that tends to orient studies of everyday phenomena (Highmore 2002: 5).