Japan and the anthropology of departure and return

Abstract

This  article  is  a  personal  and  auto-biographical  reflection  on  “returning”  after  a  fifteen-year  stay  in  Japan.  The  goal  is  to  make  conscious  and  explicit  the  interconnection  between  “going”  and “coming” in the process of anthro-pological  research.  In  particular,  it  at-tempts  to  show  how  efforts  to  assume  alterity -that is, to adopt the perspective of the Other- can lead to a dissolution of self-identity that finds expression in an  inability  to  return  to  and  function  socially in one’s culture of origin as the same  person  who  left  it.  Through  an  autoethnography of the author’s return to  Spain  from  Japan,  this  article  ex-plores challenges both of a professional nature and also in the broader context of  everyday  life.  If  departure  involves  the  experience  of  Otherness  (“going  native”),  return  opens  the  door  to  an  anthropology chez  nous  in  which  the “self ”  is  rediscovered  through  difficul-ties  similar  to  those  entailed  in  departure.