ABSTRACT
People sometimes find themselves unexpectedly in a lasting relationship with a particular town or city. My relationship with Kobe-city has been one of those. More than 17 years ago in early 1989, as a novice researcher I chose the city as the location for my PhD fieldwork for nothing more than pragmatic reasons, to carry out my study on working-class high school students’ decision-making about post-school destinations. I was looking for an urban area that offered many employers who absorbed high school graduates, where a relatively large minority population resided (although their presence was not conspicuous to casual observers), and where I could live relatively inexpensively. Since then I have been involved in other projects, and it was one of these projects that again brought me back to this city in 2006 to spend a year on sabbatical. I am extremely pleased that I amwriting the final stages of this longitudinal study in Kobe-city where it all started. Just being here brings back fond memories of many encounters and conversations over the last 17 years. In this chapter, I set out the context for what follows. There are three tasks. I
will briefly describe Kobe-city, where I first met the women in this study as high school students and which is the setting for their lives as detailed in this book. This description includes a brief illustration of the 1995 Hanshin-Awaji earthquake that affected the city and these women and their families in many different ways. I shall then explain my relationship with the women, which has evolved gradually over the years, since this is crucial for understanding the nature of the data that I collected and how I interpreted them.
