My queer career : coming out as a 'researcher' in Japan

I have been trying to write this paper on and off for some years now. It has been an attempt to tell an account of my personal experiences of carrying out my doctoral research in Japan among self-identified Japanese lesbians. When I tell snippets of the story to friends and colleagues, overwhelmingly the response is 'you must write it down, it's as interesting as the research itself.' In fact it is intimately associated with the content and form the research finally assumed. But, the notion of intimacy is not one usually taken up in writing about our fieldwork experiences. The more obvious difficulties I faced were first, working within a non-Anglo-European lesbian community and second, coming out as a lesbian within the research process and the final text. On the other side of the same coin was a more unusual situation. In contrast to lesbian and gay researchers who usually hide or disguise their identity my dilemma became how to come out as a researcher within a Japanese lesbian community. As explained further, the first twelve months I worked with ten women with whom I carried out between three or four open-ended semi-structured interviews. I also undertook several one-off interviews throughout this initial period. The problem was that after spending the first twelve months working, playing, interviewing and generally falling in love with a Japan I previously didn't know existed, the last three months of my stay turned my world upside down. Several women withdrew from the project and as these events slowly unfolded over a number of weeks I was faced with the possibility of abandoning the project altogether. In the end I didn't, but inevitably these issues and experiences continue to have a profound effect on the way I think and carry out social action research. This story, however, is not one of my woes, nor is it one of justifying my naivety or the misunderstandings that took place. Rather, it is an attempt to explore some of the issues around undertaking academic research in a context where I regularly declared that I was 'losing the plot'ââ"šÂ¬Ã¢â‚¬Âa claim I now realise was non-sensical simply because there was no plot to follow as a lesbian doing research in Japan, or, for an Australian researcher working within a Japanese lesbian community.