James Farrer is Professor of Sociology and Global Studies at Sophia University in Tokyo, where he has taught since 1998 after receiving his PhD from the University of Chicago. He has been watching and writing about urban life in Asian cities since he first arrived in Taipei in the late 1980s. For more than three decades he has done ethnographic fieldwork in Shanghai and Tokyo on youth sexual culture, nightlife, migration and, more recently, food. His books include Opening Up: Youth Sex Culture and Market Reform in Shanghai, Shanghai Nightscapes: A Nocturnal Biography of a Global City (with Andrew Field), Globalization and Asian Cuisines: Transnational Networks and Contact Zones, and The Global Japanese Restaurant: Mobilities, Imaginaries and Politics (with David Wank), which won the 2024 book award of the Association for the Study of Food and Society. He also serves on the editorial collective of Gastronomica: The Journal for Food Studies. He often appears in media programming on urban life in Asia, including NHK World’s „Dive in Tokyo.“ For over a decade he has also run Nishiogiology (www.nishiogiology.org), a bilingual public ethnography of the restaurants, bars and cafés of Nishi-Ogikubo, a neighbourhood in western Tokyo. In 2023, Japan’s Agency for Cultural Affairs recognised the project as an example of how knowledge of food culture can be put to use.
At KWI, Farrer is working on two related projects. The first asks what migrant-owned restaurants do for cities beyond feeding people. In Tokyo, his research follows restaurateurs from South and Southeast Asia, Africa, Latin America and Europe. Their restaurants serve as meeting places, informal job centres, community halls and nightclubs. They are also sites where Japanese customers and newcomers not only live alongside one another, but also form tight associations. So how do such small, precarious businesses become part of a city’s social infrastructure? And what kind of social world do owners build inside them, with their regulars, staff and co-ethnics? A new comparative project, funded by the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (2026–29), takes these questions to Germany. It compares migrant restaurants in smaller rural towns in Germany and Japan. It asks how and to what extent migrant restaurants work as intercultural infrastructure in places that are rarely seen as global cities, and how different histories of labour migration, integration policy and local sociability shape what they can become. His second main task in Essen is finishing a book based on the Nishiogiology project, working title Seeking the Good Life in Tokyo. The book looks at how cooks, bar owners and their customers use independent small businesses to build lives, livelihoods and a sense of community in one neighbourhood.