“Make Japan Great Again” #3_Methods

A Philanthropic Scholarship Program and Transnational Youths’ Yaritaikoto for “Social Good”

12 min readMay 30, 2022

This is an excerpt from my 81-page anthropology thesis titled “‘Make Japan Great Again’: An Emerging Class of Transnational Youths and Their Yaritaikoto for ‘Social Good’.”

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3. Collaborative Methodology

Research methods are never merely knowledge-production techniques; rather, they indirectly convey an author’s intended outcomes. By prioritizing certain types of information over others, a particular methodology inevitably shapes the ultimate conclusion. In other words, methods often represent a researcher’s end goals as much as — or perhaps more than — the actual content does. Therefore, before discussing my research findings, I would like to illustrate my methodological approach to this public anthropology project. Rejecting the scientific obsession with “objective Truth,” I shed light on how my subjectivity (e.g. personal backgrounds, academic and professional training, and pre-existing relationships with my informants) might have influenced this research. In this chapter, I hope to highlight the fact that my analysis directly reflects my subjective perspectives and therefore I never claim my findings to be a universal truth.

To be transparent about my research approach, I will first discuss the concept of engaged/collaborative scholarship. Then, I will situate myself in the Yanai community as well as the broader study-abroad community in Japan. Finally, I will explain four major sources from which I collected my data: (1) my own experiences within the Yanai community, (2) Tadashi Yanai’s autobiographies, (3) the Scholarship’s official website, and (4) semi-structured interviews with 24 scholars and three program administrators.

3–1. Public Anthropology as a Method

Public anthropology falls under the broad category of engaged anthropology, which seeks to inform the general public about how the current world works, and sometimes, how it could be improved. When contextualizing her notion of abolitionist anthropology as an engaged method, Savannah Shange describes public anthropology as “high-minded but accessible engagement with current events” (2019: 10). In a similar genealogy, she introduces applied anthropology and activist anthropology: the former usually proposes concrete solutions for a client and the latter aims to support the vision of a specific social movement. My current research attempts to inform Japan’s study-abroad community about institutional and individual practices of the Yanai Scholarship program, including staff and scholars. Through my past conversations, I learned that many Yanai scholars share a certain degree of frustration about the program. However, rather than assuming that I could offer a meaningful solution, I ask: What systemic patterns contribute to such troubles and what can individual scholars do to mitigate their own frustrations? Given the complexities of the scholarship program, I do not believe in providing immediate solutions; instead, I aim to prompt more specific and nuanced questions in order to better understand the Yanai community’s discourses around “social good.”

That said, the primary audience of my research is current and future Yanai scholars, many of whom are confused about the Foundation’s ambiguous expectation for “social good.” In addition, I aspire to inform the program administrators and the board of directors about the scholars’ lived experiences abroad — hopefully my research contributes to future policies that are more congruent with scholars’ needs. Beyond the Yanai community, I also aim to engage with Japanese people in the transnational higher education community. Given the rapidly growing popularity of study abroad (especially in U.S. universities), I see the Yanai Scholarship program only as one fraction of a larger trend in Japan. With the non-academic audience in mind, I attempted to make my writing accessible enough for high school seniors who have not received secondary education in English. In doing so, I provided either brief explanations or alternative expressions for vocabulary that is often unexplained in academic anthropology (e.g. “ethnography,” “positionality,” or “neoliberalism”). Furthermore, I italicized academic concepts that are likely foreign to my audience so that they can differentiate such words from common English expressions (e.g. “participant observation” or “thin description”). Although this study focuses on a small community of the Yanai Scholarship Program, I argue that this project is applicable to anyone who participates in the broader study-abroad industry in Japan. My friends who attend a university abroad without the Yanai scholarship find most of my interviewees’ narratives relatable. Furthermore, I will later discuss how Japan’s post-war political economy facilitated Japanese elites’ desire for higher education abroad.

3–2. My Positionality as a Yanai Scholar

As an incredibly fortunate Yanai scholar myself, I occupy the intersectional position both as a researcher and a member of the community being researched. The particular methodology for studying one’s own community has a robust trend in the discipline of anthropology, which originally contributed to colonial motivations through the researcher (read: a white, upper-middle-class, man) investigating a remote, marginalized community as an outsider (Davis 2018: 48). With this approach, researchers critically reflect on their complex position as an insider to demonstrate accountability to the community as well as irreproducibility of their research. In contrast to traditional anthropology, which often objectifies research participants for their curiosity, my study does not intend to expose scandalous issues to those outside of the community. Rather, I actively collaborated with my interviewees, whose humbling feedback always reminded me that I as a researcher do not know any better about the topic than other members of the Yanai community.

My subjectivity in this study particularly reflects my family and educational backgrounds. I would like to discuss the familial and educational influences on my notion of “social good” and “study abroad” because several of my interviewees asked me why I am passionate about this topic and they too discussed how their family and secondary education shaped their perspectives. Especially due to my education background, I have frequently felt detached from other Japanese international students, which partially motivated me to conduct this research.

Parented by two middle school teachers in the Tokyo public education system, I grew up hearing their mistrust about the business world and the rich in power. For example, they would often complain about private cram schools for prioritizing students’ admission outcomes over their individual well-being. Also, media consumption in my household has encouraged me to fight against inequality by helping vulnerable people. Since my grandparents’ generation, my family has subscribed to leftist newspapers, which I began reading daily in middle school without knowing the existence of other political views. Out of all family members, my mother has particularly shaped my opinion about “social good,” whether by explaining her motivation to work in the public school system for supporting all children regardless of their socioeconomic backgrounds or volunteering to remove debris in Fukushima after the Great East Japan Earthquake in 2011. As a result of my exposure to skewed social ideologies, until this research, I never critically questioned my skewed assumption that helping the vulnerable was “social good.”

Growing up with public education in suburban Tokyo, I never knew the option of receiving higher education abroad because no one around me considered such a path. In order to prioritize my athletic aspirations over academics after middle school, I chose a private high school where nearly 75% of graduates go straight to the affiliated university in order to avoid intense college entrance exams in the regular admission process. Since I was the very first student who applied to 4-year colleges in the U.S., I taught myself and my teachers how to complete the Common App. Statistically speaking, my high school is still ranked in the top 0.05% among all Japanese high schools (High School Ranking net. 2021), yet throughout my K-12 education, I rarely met anyone who dreamed of attending top schools in Japan, let alone institutions abroad. The idea of studying abroad seemed so foreign and unattainable to me that I even considered not applying at all until the end of junior year in high school.

Given my subjective perspectives about the Yanai community as a scholar, it is critical yet challenging to identify whether I am voicing as an informant or researcher. In order to prevent my preconceived opinions about the community from directing my conclusions, I applied two strategies in my data collection. First, I selected a diverse range of interviewees. Based on previous interactions, I could expect how some of my close friends would answer my questions. Therefore, I mostly invited scholars who had never discussed the research topics with me to interviews. Second, when my informants shared opinions that conflicted with my personal values, I suppressed my urge to argue against them by asking follow-up questions to elicit their underlying thoughts. Despite those strategies, however, I acknowledge that my interviews lean more towards casual conversations than formal investigation; I sometimes shared my own opinions and experiences on topics of discussion rather than solely asking questions.

Similarly, my switching voice between an informant and a researcher blurs the difference between everyday discourses and analytical language. On one hand, I use direct quotes from my interviews in order to describe what people are saying ethnographically. On the other hand, I refer to certain terms to discuss my observations analytically. The most notable example of such complication is the idea of “social good.” Ethnographically, the program administrators and scholars often apply ambiguous terms without specifying their actions and target populations for “social good.” Examples of such expressions include “contributing to society” (社会に貢献する), “improving/bettering society” (社会を良くする) and “changing the world” (世界を変える). In order to mitigate confusion between my ethnographic and analytical terms, I strictly apply the phrase “social good.” Compared to other expressions mentioned above, “social good” carries a highly vague nuance that does not explain who does what for whom. Therefore, I hope to differentiate my analytical voice from ethnographic expressions by intentionally applying the phrase which few people use in everyday discourses.

3–3. Observant Participation

As I draw on my own experiences within the Yanai community, one of my central methods is observant participation, an approach characteristic to narrative-based research (Tedlock 1991) and qualitative research in organizational settings (Moeran 2009). Inspired by black anthropologists of education (Gordon 2007; Shange 2019), I too modified the traditional method of participant observation to emphasize my lived experience as a Yanai scholar over observation. In doing so, I hope my research will provide critical and thought-provoking perspectives beyond academia.

When I first entered the community in 2018, I felt completely out of place. Compared to the majority of Yanai scholars who have graduated from the most esteemed high schools in Japan and abroad, I lacked prestigious academic and extracurricular credentials. During the first-year orientation, I also learned the very existence of the Gold Card from other scholars whose family members each possess one. As a result of my socioeconomic background, I have been able to notice unique discourses in the Yanai community. The subtle disparity between my “norms” and others’ inspired me to question what it means to be “elite” for transnational students. With such curious eyes, I interacted with other scholars in a number of ways, including attending a three-day orientation program for first-year students, participating in social events both online and offline, and assisting information sessions for prospective students and parents. After the freshman orientation, I used social media to keep in touch with a handful of scholars, with whom I talked over Zoom a few times a year and met up in person. However, since the vast majority of our infrequent communication happens online, any information exchange between scholars is inherently fragmented, decontextualized, and/or intentionally curated.

The nature of our digital lives in the Yanai diaspora reflects what John Jackson (2013) calls a thin description — the idea that it is impossible for anthropologists to fully know everything about a given social life. Jackson argues that in a digital age, we “slice” into each other’s everyday lives from various perspectives, scales, and contexts (Jackson 2013: 16). In other words, thin description represents an act of “nonknowing that disentangles the [researcher’s] will to know everything from an [informant’s] … will to disclose everything (Jackson 2013: 153, emphasis original). Therefore, I embrace the inherent impossibility of knowing everything about the Yanai diaspora as well as my interlocutores’ refusal to share everything with me as a critical framework for my analysis, rather than a methodological limitation.

3–4. Tadashi Yanai’s Autobiographies

Since the Yanai Scholarship is funded by Tadashi Yanai’s personal assets alone, it is crucial to unpack how his life experiences and personal ideologies have impacted the Scholarship. To do so, I have consulted his autobiographies with the assumption that it would be unfeasible to schedule a live-interview with him. Among his nine publications (Wikipedia 2022), I selected Face the Reality [現実を視よ] (2012) and Get Out of This Country [この国を出よ] (2013) for three reasons. First, in anticipation of my application, an older Yanai scholar advised me to read those books so that I could better understand what types of applicants the Foundation was looking for. Second, the Scholarship’s first promotion video featured my lengthy comment about how his books had inspired me to contribute to Japanese society. Finally, since Yanai published Face the Reality and Get Out of This Country a few years before launching the Scholarship in 2016, I expect to see his values and ideas that played critical roles in the development of his new foundation.

3–5. Official Website

In order to understand what the Yanai Foundation promises to the public, I have examined written and visual communication on the scholarship website. Around the end of 2021, the Foundation updated its official website with an entirely new formatting and contents. This study solely focuses on the new version so that my readers can reference the existing website.

To understand the meaning-making process on the website, I used semiotic analysis, inspired by linguistic anthropologist Bonnie Urciuoli’s (2014) study of college marketing tactics. Semiotics, or the science of signs, provides a set of useful frameworks to analyze representations of sign systems, such as language, images, and even the organization of website design. A sign is anything that stands for something else, and its representation mechanism depends on the socially constructed perspective of the observer (Cullum-Swan & Manning 1994: 466). To produce meaning, a sign requires a particular context, or interpretant in an academic term. Thus, when relevant context changes, signs communicate different meanings (Cullum-Swan & Manning 1994: 466). Using these semiotic toolkits, Urciuoli (2014) investigated a college website to understand brand-building processes of the Good Student — a desirable student body that does not necessarily reflect the lived experiences of the school. Borrowing this semiotic approach to “brand promise” (Moore 2003; Urciuoli 2014), I critically engaged with ways in which the Yanai Foundation frame the website to publicly display its alleged commitment to “social good” and current scholars who embody such a mission.

3–6. Semi-Structured Interviews

To deepen the data from observant participation and discourse analysis of Yanai’s books and the scholarship website, I have conducted semi-structured Zoom interviews with 24 Yanai scholars and three program administrators. Hoping to learn about diverse experiences, I reached out to a wide range of scholars in terms of gender, class year, school type, pre-college educational background, curricular and extracurricular interests, and career prospects (see Table 1). Originally, I planned to interview only 15 scholars who were recent graduates, current seniors, or juniors who took a gap year, assuming that they had more experiences regarding college and career search than did underclassmen. However, many of my informants told me during the interview that scholars after the first two cohorts might hold different perspectives about yaritaikoto, because the admission criteria changed after the Class of 2022 (i.e. the second cohort). According to the program administrator, the original criteria focused on prestigious accomplishments, whereas the new one emphasizes applicants’ potential for “social good.” Moreover, program administrators encouraged me to reach out to a few graduates who have been pursuing yaritaikoto that is directly connected to “social good.” Thus, I conducted eight more interviews to hear from younger and/or recommended scholars.

Most of the interviewees were my close friends or at least familiar acquaintances, yet I did reach out to a few scholars I had never talked with before. Although I scheduled most interviews for 60 minutes, a handful of them lasted over two to three hours. Throughout the conversation, I asked 10 to 15 open-ended questions. In order to protect my interlocutors’ confidentiality, I used pseudonyms that they chose at the end of the interview. I also modified some irrelevant contexts in my informants’ comments that might reveal their identity, especially due to the small size of the Yanai community. After writing my drafts, I asked my interviewees for feedback so that they can make sure that their anonymity is fully protected and that I accurately captured nuances they had conveyed.

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