It has been more than twelve years since this project began.This book draws upon seventeen months of fieldwork conducted in Tokyo between summer 1997 and fall 2001 followed by frequent research visits in the years that followed.Research and writing were supported by the American Bar Foundation, a Howard Fellowship, an American Council of Learned Societies Fellowship, a residential fellowship at Girton College, Cambridge, and research grants from the Social Science Research Council, the Japan Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Humanities.During that time, I held visiting positions at the University of Tokyo Faculty of Law, the Department of Anthropology at Keio University, and the Institute of Social Science at the University of Tokyo.I am grateful to each of these institutions for their hospitality, and in particular to professors Yoshiko Terao, Satoshi Tanahashi, and Yuji Genda, respectively, for making each of these affiliations possible.展开