by Cornelia Reiher

As is customary, the “Berlin’s East Asian Foodscape” methodology course included a visit to a Japanese restaurant this semester. Armed with participant observation assignments, the students headed to a restaurant one Friday in June that serves sushi and Japanese home-style dishes, such as donburi.

When we arrived at the restaurant shortly before noon, a crowd had already gathered, waiting for it to open. Since reservations are not accepted, we had arrived right on time and were glad to find a table for our large group among the groups of employees and Japanese women. The waiters immediately placed cups of hot green tea, chopsticks, small bottles of soy sauce, and the menus on the table.

First, we ordered food and ate. During and after the meal, the students observed and documented how the staff communicated with customers and how the restaurant organized its workflows. They noticed the multilingual environment and observed that many of the servers spoke German, English, and Vietnamese. They also found the large number of service staff and the busy takeout service, which operated simultaneously and was quite popular, interesting.

The students took notes after the meal, and in some cases, even during and before it. Due to the large crowd at lunchtime, the table was cleared immediately after we finished eating. Seeing more guests waiting in the entrance area, we left after an hour. This experience taught us that participant observation sometimes occurs under time constraints, as observers must adapt to others‘ schedules.

A week later, we were back in the classroom. We compared and discussed our field notes and findings. Some students had used their phones to take notes, while others used notebooks and pens. The most important insight was that field notes must be rich and precise in order to produce text for a thesis or paper months later. Keeping this in mind, I sent the students off to complete their next observation task: the Ethnographic Scavenger Hunt, this time on their own. They will share their experiences in blog posts in July and August.