Matthews Hamabata got off to an unpromising start when he first arrived in Japan to study influential business families. An unmarried, third-generation Japanese-American graduate student, he was there to learn about business executives in their roles as male principals and heads of households. Some Japanese were less than hospitable and often downright rude to him, and the souvenirs bearing the Harvard University emblem that he had brought along for gifts proved to be inappropriate within the highly ritualized system of Japanese gift-giving. In this engaging and personal narrative, we watch Hamabata in the first disappointing six months of his fieldwork as he attempts to map the boundaries of culture, class, and sexuality. 'I became my own biggest fieldwork problem,' he writes. 'Was I inside or out? When I thought I was in, I was actually out, but when I acknowledged the fact that I was out, I was let in.' He soon recognized the importance of marital and filial relations in