Geography of Gender and Qualitative Methods in Japan: Focusing on Studies that have Analyzed Life Histories

This article tries to advance the discussion of the efficacy of qualitative methods often used in the geography of gender in Japan, in particular by focusing on narratives obtained through interview surveys and analyzed using discourse analysis. It can be said that around the year 2000 was a turning point in Japanese geography for research methods such as life-history research. The life-history research made it possible to hear the voices of subjects who have been placed in minority positions and have not been able to easily speak and to deepen the study of geography from various standpoints and to include the perspectives of minorities. Analyzing narratives in informants’ life histories encouraged geographers to clarify the structures of space/place by focusing on gender relations acted out as power. The studies which adopted the life-history research could be positioned with the field of gender studies in geography, as all of them reveal the social relations in local communities and of groups within particular spaces—which is to say that they demonstrate the gender relations preserved by the patriarchy and hegemonic masculinity. With geography, it has become possible to point out issues that are found only “here” and cannot easily be generalized by questioning “where,” including micro-scale spaces that cannot be mapped or visualized. This can be called “local knowledge” that is generated from the perspective of a “somewhere” that is rooted in people’s lives, as proposed by McDowell (1993).