No one plows the field just by thinking about it.

Then, as we turned the final curve past the abandoned little hamlet of Ballydubh, with the village almost out of sight, he forced me to turn around and take in the full sweep of the mountains and the sea. 'And there', he said, 'is your An Clohan. You had best said good-bye, now.

We hope that general readers with an interest in Japan will find in these accounts of fieldwork a wide spectrum of illustrations of the grassroots realities of everyday life in contemporary Japanese communities, companies, institutions, and social movements.