Negotiating access. My first job was to negotiate access to Hoshūkō as a researcher. Although it was easy for me to gain partial access as a parent helping in the library, access to the classrooms proved problematic. I feel that negotiating access was ‘the most difficult phase in the entire process of ethnographic research’ due to the multiple negotiations that needed to be performed with the numerous gatekeepers (Gobo, 2008, p. 118). This is partly because it was a cross-cultural environment so it had to be negotiated through third party native Japanese speakers and partly because it had to be negotiated three times: twice at Figsbury Hoshūkō and once at Appleton Hoshūkō. At Figsbury Hoshūkō, the intermediary, my partner, negotiated access. This was because as well as being a Japanese native speaker, he also knew the senior teachers at Hoshūkō. After having helped in the library six times between September and December 2009, the intermediary explained my research intentions to the kōshya chō (which I am calling the deputy head teacher) at the beginning of January 2010 and he gave all the information to him. He in turn passed all the information onto the kōchō sensei (head teacher of the three London sites) who was based on a different site. He wanted all the documents translated into Japanese so that they could fully understand them. This was something which I had previously overlooked as I had wrongly assumed that the senior teachers would be able to understand written English. The intermediary was told that the matter would have to be discussed internally. He was also told that a lot of similar requests are made and that they are not in a position to say yes to everyone, which did not sound very promising. I felt that my research was being subjected to ‘close scrutiny’ by the gatekeepers (Gobo, 2008, p. 122), which may have been because to them I was an ‘unwanted stranger’ (Xxxxx, 1984). My experience of gaining access to Hoshūkō was similar to Fry’s as she reported: In general the schools [full-time Japanese day school and Hoshūkō] were very cautious about such non- government-related research - some were reluctant to participate at all […] (Fry, 2009, p. 371). However, this was in contrast to Xxxxxxxxxx and Xxxxxx’x (2010) ESRC funded research into Chinese59, Bengali, Gujarati and Turkish complementary schools in the UK whereby the researchers were positively received and the schools were pleased that they had been selected by the research team. A week passed since acces...
