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Quite a few Japanese have told me that their culture does not encourage self-expression, but in my ethnographic research in the country, I have never managed to confirm this stereotype. On the contrary, and in a play on Roland Barthes (1970), I consider Japan the empire of interviews: many Japanese are familiar with this kind of interaction, even if only from the mass media, and are sufficiently polite, patient and curious to try and subject themselves to the exercise even when it is for the first time in their lives. Interviews can therefore be a valuable tool for social research in Japan. In the following, I will reflect on my experiences with this method, hoping that this will provide ideas and encouragement for the reader’s own practice.

As a social anthropologist, I have used interviews in all my ethnographic research projects, be it on Japanese utopian communes and their histories and current conditions (Brumann 1996 …