Sounding Ethics

My paper will focus on an ongoing research project which centres on a farm that is surrounded on all four immediate sides by the complex of Narita International Airport. The farm is an organic small-holding with fields of fruit and vegetables, pens of pigs and a barn with egg-laying hens. The farm is one of only two that remain from the 360 families who settled to cultivate what was once forest in the aftermath of the Second World War: the other families having been driven out when the Japanese Government requisitioned the land, an action which provoked prolonged and bitter protest. The research - conducted in collaboration with an anthropologist, a health scientist and an environmental scientist – will culminate in an 'installed documentary' at the Whitworth Museum in Manchester. I will be particularly focusing, in this paper on the ethical implications of working across the borders of culture and language, of working collaboratively, and of negotiating 'truth' between authenticity and artifice.