#i do research irl and have used terminology which is technically for something else

[chumbalie]

Hi! I was wondering if you would be okay discussing how you approached your research on The Tale of the Peach Blossom Prince? I've been doing some research for a fic and there are some topics where I keep running into vague references to certain things (like the institution of slavery) with no real explanation of how that worked and the citations are all for Japanese language texts.

Hi, hello!!

So, it should be noted first and foremost that my irl career involves qualitative research, and how I approach research comes a lot from that background. Lots of the things I found through my research was through an academic search engine hosted by my U's library. That being said: the best way to approach any research is to start with broad strokes, and then single out problems/questions to examine more deeply.

In the case of Tale, I started with a mixture of encyclopedias of Heian Japan, and my own existing knowledge. From there, I could then focus on the minutiae, things like how the government of the country functioned, if it had codified law, and how that influenced other bits and bobs - because you're right! There's lots of small references which don't have explanations. That's the body of the research, particularly for something like a cultural touchstone in an historical period. If you do manage to get your hands on academic papers on your subject, check the footnotes! There are links sometimes, but more reliably, they have authors and titles, and you can hunt through those primary sources to see if they have more information for you.

If I couldn't find an academic source on something I didn't understand, I'd go and peruse public data bases (google scholar isn't bad for this, and, bizarrely, tourism agencies/guides) and try to find an explanation which was consistent across multiple sources. Good ways to search for this sort of thing is through the key phrases of what you're looking for. In the case of what you mentioned, searching for "slavery in Japan" is a good keyword approach. It'll net the most results, and if you're using a data bank, you can add more filters, such as time period, class relations, etc., to narrow your results. This is a lot harder on public search engines. But the point is to start from a broad "N" (lots of sources and shallow depth of information) and move to narrow "n" (few sources, highly dependent on subject, with a deep depth of specific information and nothing else) sources for details. You technically never have to leave a N based approach, and just gloss over fiber detail.

Tragically, one of the biggest limitations I ran into with Tale was that most the good, primary, sources, are in Japanese and haven't been translated into English. I had an instance in Tale where I genuinely couldn't find something, BC the information didn't exist in English (the fucking. Colour. BDNFJDNDMD.) Barring learning Japanese, an incredibly difficult language, I recommend gravitating toward anything written by, or with, Japanese authors, just going off of surnames or given names! This is a very common issue in all humanities research in regards to East Asian content: we don't have a lot of great information in English. Tragically, I can't offer a solution, and can only gripe abt the Eurocentrism.