This talk introduces a decade-long public ethnography of independent restaurants in the Tokyo neighborhood of Nishi-Ogikubo. Represented through a bilingual community website, the Nishiogiology project experiments with public ethnography as a form of collaborative knowledge production with neighborhood business owners and other community stakeholders. Rather than treating restaurants solely as sites of consumption or entrepreneurship, the project examines how small owner-operated eateries function as everyday urban infrastructures of care, or what feminist scholars describe as diverse or community economies (Farrer 2024, Gibson-Graham 2008). Proprietors frequently describe their work not only in terms of culinary craft but also in terms of cultivating relationships with customers and other businesses, creating small-scale “micro-publics” that provide sociability, emotional support, and informal mutual aid.

The talk focuses in particular on the methodological implications of this work. Drawing on more than one hundred restaurant case studies and field observations, the research documents how neighborhood restaurants operate within dense networks of social relations shaped by Tokyo’s fragmented urban geography and the increasing atomization of urban life. Public ethnography—conducted through accessible writing, community collaboration, and iterative feedback from participants—allows us to document urban social infrastructures that are often overlooked by conventional urban research. The project proposes a model for studying everyday urban economies that foregrounds care, face-to-face conviviality, and community knowledge rather than top-down planning and digital technologies. The talk concludes by reflecting on how this public ethnographic approach can inform comparative research on small businesses as social infrastructures in other contexts.

References
Farrer, James. 2024.”Urban foodways and social sustainability: neighborhood restaurants as social infrastructure.” Food, Culture & Society 27(5): 1377-1393.
Gibson-Graham, J.K. 2008. “Diverse Economies: Performative Practices for ‘Other Worlds.’” Progress in Human Geography 32(5): 613–632.

James Farrer

James Farrer has been observing and writing about urban life in Asian cities since he first arrived in Taipei in the late 1980s. For the past two decades, his research has focused on urban life in Shanghai, Tokyo, and other cities. His recent publications include The Global Japanese Restaurant: Mobilities, Imaginaries and Politics (with David Wank), Globalization and Asian Cuisines: Transnational Networks and Contact Zones, and Shanghai Nightscapes: A Nocturnal Biography of a Global City (with Andrew Field). For over a decade, he has been producing a public ethnography project on neighborhood Tokyo foodways (www.nishiogiology.org), the basis of his current book project. He received his PhD from the University of Chicago and is Professor of Sociology and Global Studies at Sophia University in Tokyo. He is a frequent contributor to media programming on urban life in Asia, including NHK World’s “Dive in Tokyo.”

Introduction by Anna Greenspan, Director of the Center for Artificial Intelligence and Culture, Associate Professor of Contemporary Global Media, NYU Shanghai.