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Paper short abstract

Japanese police are a highly visible presence in everyday life, yet ethnographic research on policing remains limited. This presentation examines how issues of access, language, and positionality have shaped both historical and contemporary research on the Japanese police.

Paper long abstract

With more than 6000 kōban (neighborhood police boxes) and 6000 chūzaisho (residential police boxes) distributed across urban and rural areas, police boxes are an iconic feature of the Japanese streetscape. Paradoxically, despite the visible presence of police officers in everyday life, detailed ethnographic studies of the Japanese police remain few and far between, and there has been no coherent inquiry into the process of conducting such research.

This presentation is divided into two parts. In the first, I discuss how issues of access, language, and positionality were addressed in pioneering ethnographic studies of the Japanese police conducted by three foreign scholars during the latter half of the 20th century. The second part turns to a contemporary case, reflecting on how my positionality as an "in-betweener" (Milligan, 2016) has shaped both the negotiation of access and the collection of data from Japanese police respondents in the context of my ongoing PhD research on multisectoral responses to image-based sexual abuse in Japan.