Millie Creightonis not appropriate to ask questions about. In the following story, I dis-
cuss questions that I refrained from asking, even if they pressed fully
in my mind while listening to someone’s story. This woman’s story
can be seen as a yarn, in this case a silk yarn that unraveled over time,
in the course of a long engagement in the field. I switch to the word
“yarn,” with its double meaning of “story” and “thread” intention-
ally, because the narrative thread of this woman’s life was truly a silk
yarn. Like the previous stories, this yarn emerged in the midst of a set
research project with a set research purpose—however, one directed
at something else.
In this particular research, my purpose was to collect ethnographic
“facts” about weaving workshops conducted as leisure hobby pur-
suits for women in today’s Japan. This research was about identity
issues in terms of reclaiming the lost Japan and the place of pursuits
traditionally done by women, but not necessarily controlled by them,
such as silkworm raising (sericulture) and silk weaving. The research
was about the intersections of the modern economy with gender roles,
women’s lives, consumerism, and the tourism industry. It focused on
the repackaging of “fun” (travel to the Japanese Alps of Nagano Pre-
fecture) into commodified forms of edutainment (a combination of ed-
ucation and entertainment, see Creighton 1994 ), cloaked in the guise
of education (learning about silk weaving and Japanese cultural iden-
tity) as a co-optation of persisting Confucian social values emphasiz-
ing work and education, including self-development. Nothing in the
research proposal I wrote prepared me for what I was to learn about
surviving the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, or the need for a woman
to find meaning in life as the surviving child of another woman who,
as a hibakusha (atom-bomb survivor), resulting single mother, and
convert to Christianity had also struggled to find meaning in her own
life. All three of these definitions (hibakusha, single mother, and Chris-
tian) were atypical things to be in postwar Japanese society, one that
then, even more than now, exerted pressures for individuals and fam-
ilies to conform to “normal” expectations.^6
I had been involved in this research project over a number of years,
starting while a graduate student living in Japan. I joined weaving
sessions held in Nagano Prefecture, historically a major area of the
silk-weaving industry in the Meiji area that had helped propel Japan