My First Visit to Schools

I visited F Elementary and Junior High Schools. At the elementary school I talked with Mr. H about logistics to implement my research. As we went over details of my study, it seemed possible to give survey questions to all students in 2nd and 6th grades; if I can do that, N for each age group will exceed 100. Then I can conduct additional in-depth interviews with some of the students in the two grade levels.

F Junior High School was closed for a holiday. So the principal, who has all the letters that I have sent, was not around to talk with me about arrangements for my research. But one of the school administrators Mr. I received me warmly and we had a pleasant talk. He encouraged me to visit the school anytime I want. In fact, I will go to the school tomorrow morning to meet with the principal.

My father called my cousin who is a junior-high school teacher in another city. He works with a professor at a nearby teachers college who is also a principal at a college-affiliated junior-high school. According to my cousin, this professor is willing to help me recruit college seniors for my research. I hope to meet with him through my cousin by the end of this month.

For the past two days—I was busy preparing to move from Ann Arbor to Japan—I started taking notes of my presuppositions about how Japanese develop cognitions of their own and other countries. I believe that it’s important to dwell upon and therefore uncover one’s preconceptions. As Heidegger and Gadamer convincingly argued, our presuppositions are not the obstacle but the very condition of possibility of understanding. (Later in his life Husserl reached the similar conclusion by abandoning phenomenological reduction in favor of investigation of the lifeworld. Interestingly, “Wittgenstein II”—of Philosophical Investigation—also sought the grounding of understanding (of rules of language games) in socially shared presuppositions in our everyday life.) In the next few weeks I will try to post in this blog presuppositions that I have about Japan/Japanese and, in particular, the field in which I am conducting research. In this respect, my blog shall be a “counterpoint” to my fieldnotes (which I cannot post here for privacy and confidentiality reasons); it shall enable me to self-reflexively examine my hermeneutic horizon through which I take fieldnotes. (And, of course, I hope to write down transformations of my horizon throughout fieldwork.)