Once a year, Associate Professor Hendrik Meyer-Ohle of the National University of Singapore flies his students to Tokyo to shop. Prof. Meyer-Ohle is not a fashionista with too much money and time on his hands—rather, he runs JS2880A, a class on Japanese fashion based almost entirely on fieldwork done in Japanese retail stores.
The Covid-19 pandemic throws a wrench in this arrangement. With restrictions on cross-border travel, Prof. Meyer-Ohle has had to come up with a new way to conduct these field studies. With his friends and collaborators Profs. Kazuo Kikuchi and Takahiro Nishi from Meiji University, they came up with the somewhat paradoxical “Virtual Field Study.”…