Mitch Sedgwick’s first ethnographic fieldwork – a study of a home for the elderly in Tokyo – led to a BA Honours Thesis in Anthropology at the University of California, Santa Cruz. He has also conducted research with Japan’s Korean minority, and returns regularly to friends around Takayama, in the Japan Alps, where he lived for two years. Since the early 1990s, however, the bulk of Mitch’s research has concerned the Japanese state’s core actors – multinational corporations – and includes fieldwork at Japanese corporations’ ‘subsidiary’ factories/offices and their surrounding communities in Thailand, in France, on the Tex-Mex border, and, of course, in Japan itself. The project has variously addressed cross-cultural dynamics in mass production labour relations; authority, autonomy and personhood at work, and leisure, among members of huge organisations; and networks of communication and ‘control’, especially regarding engineering knowledge, in the context of technological evolution and change in the global political economy.
In 1991-92, while at Tokyo University with Japanese Education Ministry (Monbusho) funding, Mitch conducted research at headquarters of Japanese multinational corporations in Tokyo, among managers responsible for the recent burgeoning of overseas production in Southeast Asia. A second phase of fieldwork on this project took him to Thailand as a Fulbright Scholar (1992–94), where he focussed on Japanese manager/engineers and their Thai counterparts, who work together without the benefit of sharing the same language. (The project also compared cross-cultural conditions at Japanese manufacturers with those at Western subsidiaries, also operating in Thailand. Follow-up research in Thailand has been conducted in 2001, 2004 and 2010.) – Fieldwork at a Japanese subsidiary in rural France (1996-97) was the basis of his PhD in Anthropology at Cambridge, and led to the monograph, Globalisation and Japanese Organisational Culture: An Ethnography of a Japanese Corporation in France. – In 2011-12, Mitch was an Abe Fellow of the US-based Social Science Research Council, researching among Japanese, Mexican and American members of a Japanese corporation whose operations straddle the highly-militarised Tex-Mex border. This project also included fieldwork at the subsidiary’s, so-called, ‘mother factory’ in northern Japan. Tragically, early in the fieldwork this site and the community surrounding it were decimated by Japan’s 11 March 2011 earthquake and tsunami. Unexpectedly, Mitch has turned increasingly toward ‘disaster anthropology’, with a long term account of personal and organisational recovery in northern Japan on-going, including fieldwork in 2014.
Having followed particular informants for many years, Mitch has come full circle on his original fieldwork on Japan’s aged. He has a long term project called Life after ‘Lifetime Employment’, which assesses both the experience of Japanese salarymen and their families in anticipation of and during retirement, and problems of old age generally in contemporary Japan, the world’s most rapidly aging society.
Mitch came to the ÐÓ°ÉÂÛ̳ in October 2013, having taught at Oxford Brookes University since 1999, supporting its well-known programme in Japan anthropology. At Oxford Brookes he was Director of the Europe Japan Research Centre, and served for two years as elected academic staff member on the university’s Board of Governors. While writing his PhD at Cam