SIDA in practice (1): interviewing

In acknowledging these assumptions and their impact on my research, I sought to gather data from a wide variety of sources: not only official USG and GOJ policy-related publications, press releases, and public speeches, but also academic texts analysing these, media interviews with officials and anti-base activists (and their affiliates), and audio-visual materials (including

121 _{McSweeney 1996, p. 164.}

122 _{Howarth and Stavrakakis 2000, pp. 15-16; Hajer 2003, p. 105.} 123 _{Hajer 2003, p. 104; Wagenaar and Cook 2003; van Dijk 1997.} 124 _{Schmidt 2008, p. 321.}

125 _{Hay and Wincott 1998, p. 956.} 126 _{Wagenaar and Cook 2003, p. 171.} 127 _{Fischer 2003a.}

documentaries and data collected on trips to sites of interest). Primarily, however, I conducted in- person interviewsin the US and Japan, as these are cited as one of the primary means by which data is collected under interpretive policy analysis as outlined by Fischer. In conducting them, he says, ‘the analyst seeks to test his or her assumptions about the boundaries of the interpretive

communities, the significance of particular artefacts, and the meaning of stories that community residents share with one another’.128 _{In speaking to policymakers specifically, an interview can help}

‘determine how they interpret the policy consequences of policy-relevant events’ (for example, an accident occurring near a military base involving US forces).129 _{In doing so, again, the point of}

conducting an interview with any actor – policymaker or not – is not to access a more ‘truthful’ account of the circumstances under study or which attitudes and beliefs are ‘correct’, but to create a space ‘for identifying and exploring participants’ interpretative practices’.130

By identifying these ‘communities of meaning’, relevant discourses, and points of conflict, the analyst can thus ‘teas[e] out of everyday “sensemaking” the puzzles and tensions which have presented themselves through actions and events that contradict the analyst's knowledge and expectations at the time’.131 _{Hajer likewise recommends conducting interviews in order to ‘enable}

the researcher to construct the interviewee discourses and the shifts in recognition of alternative perspectives’.132 _{Practically speaking, open-ended interviews of the kind I conducted in my own}

research – wherein they are guided by general topics and themes, giving the interviewee the

freedom to decide to what level of detail they would like to discuss their experiences and make their arguments – allow for a higher degree of control over the material collected from participants than does natural interaction or observation, though this same control may have the effect of ‘obscur[ing] just how much the participants’ “responses” are a product of various activities (some very subtle) on the part of the interviewer’.133

Nevertheless, the original interviews I conducted and materials collected in both Japan and the US gave me access to firsthand sources of knowledge about how the USJA functions not only on a day-to-day basis internally, but also how these functions are felt by ‘everyday’ actors outside of the institution. These interviews also aided my understanding and interpretation of the sometimes

128 _{Fischer 2003a.}

129 _{Campbell 2002, p. 32.} 130 _{Potter 1996, p. 15.}

131 _{Fischer 2003a; Yanow defines ‘communities of meaning’ as ‘policy-relevant groups — community residents,} cognate and competing agencies and professionals, interest groups, potential clients, unheard or silent voices [… which] may interpret the policy differently from legislators' intent (if that can even be established as a single meaning)’ (2003, p. 238).

132 _{Sally Hewitt, ‘Discourse Analysis and Public Policy Research’, Centre for Rural Economy Discussion Paper}

Series, No. 24 (2009), pp. 1-16, available online at:

http://www.ncl.ac.uk/cre/publish/discussionpapers/pdfs/dp24Hewitt.pdf, p. 12. 133 _{Potter 1996, pp. 15-17.}

opaque language found in public speeches and written statements from politicians and activists alike, as the more conversational style I employed in speaking with participants allowed for them to use ‘their own vocabularies and cultural repertoires of knowledge’.134 _{I did this by, as often as}

possible, posing questions which invited interpretative responses. Examples include: what does ‘security’ mean to you? What do you consider to be a ‘threat’ to your security, and to the country’s security? To what extent can the USJA be considered an ‘institution’?

I also asked more specific questions – including about the recent US ‘rebalance’ policy to Asia, or on the reactions of officials from both countries to the policies of the Hatoyama

administration (see Appendix 3 for full list) – and with these, my aim was to put into sharper focus the processesbehind decision-making for policymakers and, for activists and other ‘everyday’ actors, how they conceptualise their role within the USJA. Generally speaking, these questions fell under three broad categories related to the case study of this research: 1) the USJA; 2) Okinawa; and 3) MCAS Futenma Air Station. Individual questions under these categories were formulated based on the literature(s) reviewed in Chapter 1.135 _{Depending on each individual interviewee, his/her}

background, and his/her preferred style of speech, questions would not necessarily be posed in the order outlined above—or the interviewee would respond to multiple questions in a single, longer answer. The duration of each interview, therefore, ranged from 15 minutes to 3 hours.

Furthermore, where many activists and ‘experts’ employed at think tanks were comfortable having their comments ‘on the record’, many current and former government officials preferred being quoted anonymously (if at all). While it is true, as Leheny comments, that many of these officials ‘relied on relatively safe political rhetoric’136 _{while on the record, others – especially those}

unrelated to government – were more frank in their assessments. Where some analysts might see little value in including quotes from an interview which repeats ‘talking points’ from government policies, however, it is this exact dynamic that is of interest to my research. This is because, as White noted, it is not just the content of a discourse that matters, but the form—and when government

134 _{Nick Vaughan-Williams and Daniel Stevens, ‘Vernacular theories of everyday (in)security: The disruptive} potential of non-elite knowledge’, Security Dialogue, (2015), pp. 1-19, p. 7.

135 _{On the USJA (1), my inquiries revolved around a) the nature and evolution of the alliance; b) the design and} structure of the alliance compared to other US alliances; c) USJ relations today versus yesterday; d) USJ relations today versus tomorrow; and c) the role of public deliberation in crafting the alliance. For Okinawa (2), questions were formulated based on the following points: a) the contrast between Okinawan security

concerns/priorities and those of Japanese and American political-military officials; b) the ‘security’ value of the bases; c) how officials have responded to the protests both with regard to framing the alliance and with regard to the alliance itself; d) how the protest movement has responded to official statements; e) the likelihood of a given solution’s success to the base issue (i.e. more rapid reduction in military land use); and f) the

role/involvement of local officials in elite talks. On Futenma (3), the points were: a) whose agenda does the relocation plan reflect?; b) environmental problems and the relocation site, possible and past; c) other alternative relocation sites and the obstacles in moving Futenma to them; d) the potential for the protests to influence policymaking; e) the relationship between citizens/activists and the political/military establishment. 136 _{Leheny 2006, p. 21.}

officials, ‘experts’, academics, and activists alike are repeating narratives in similar styles using similar symbols and referring to the same overarching myths, it clearly shows the successes and failures in the (re)production of a discourse cutting across socioeconomic and professional backgrounds. There need not be some great ‘uncovering’, as Jonathan Potter says, of the ‘real’ motivations behind certain government policies or activist activities via the interview process; rather, its purpose is to provide further support to the idea that ‘the very act of taking part in debates around national security [can be] disruptive of what they [participants] considered to be politically possible’.137