"Inside Japan's Churches - Findings and Tentative Conclusions from my 1st phase of Fieldwork"
Abstract
My dissertation project is concerned with the constituents of atmosphere in Japanese church spaces. I therefore conducted interviews and participant observation in three churches in Tokyo and three churches in Fukushima, Sonobe and Shizuoka in the summer of 2022. During my three-month long fieldwork trip (phase 1 out of 2), I was able to not only participate in a variety of different church services and document them photographically for later image analysis, but also gather important information on how the participants and pastors/priests think about each church’s atmosphere from their personal or professional perspective. In my presentation, I will present my case studies and first tentative results from my analysis of the pictorial and textual material.
