This is not interesting or new information for those who’ve been doing dissertation research in Japan. But there is an incredible amount of previous studies on almost any issue on East Asian history here. While I was in the US, I wished I had had more access to Japanese journals for that reason, but the excitement of being able to get all of them in Tokyo has quickly turned into the major reason why I already feel overwhelmed about my research.
The very first two weeks of my stay in Tokyo, I collected about 100 journal articles that looked relevant during the search of my key words, including youth groups, reservist groups, agrarianism, and local politics in the colonies. The list of articles that I should look at still keeps growing. Collecting and reading these articles takes my time, and I had to make a decision when I stop doing this. After all, I am not working within Japanese academia. The expectation is different.
I sat down and thought of why I need secondary sources:
1. Because they direct me to important primary sources.
2. Because they help me fill up the information that I cannot do primary source research for by myself: e.g. activities of other youth group organizations, agricultural development, policy-making at the central government etc. In other words, this is research to get background information.
3. In order to understand “historiography” and how the previous studies have developed in Japanese academia.
My topic already has many conceptual threads and I have already given up “situating” my own work in any particular field. If I have to, I see myself within the global history of modern empires, for which I should read more on other empires, rather than narrowly focusing on East Asia. I decided to put aside articles that I read for no.3.
Now I try to focus on articles for no.1, which are not a lot in number. I should collect more articles in Korean and Chinese for this purpose.
The problem is the articles that I want to read for reason no.2. I am staying in Tokyo only for half a year and I would want to collect as much information as possible. I need a little clearer idea of what my chapters will look like in order to collect background information, however. And that requires me to read more primary sources beforehand. This is my dilemma right now.
Probably the solution is to work on my primary sources more now and come back to background research later. If you have any advice on this, I’ll appreciate that.