This article considers over 25 years of ethnographic fieldwork, conducted among members of a Japanese multinational corporation, their families and surrounding communities, as an entwining of informants' and an anthropologist's biographies both across time and in widely dispersed locations: Japan, Thailand, France and on the US-Mexico border. The research also required analysis of the re-contextualisation of relations of a particular set of interlocutors at multiple sites, further suggesting the productivity of long-term ethnographic work that mimics the lives of informants, in this case within their global corporate network. It is suggested that the challenges shared by Japanese 'salarymen' and their families (and the anthropologist as de facto participant) in managing lives and work (and research), including with different sets of 'foreign' co-workers at different sites across the globe, for years at a time, created family-like co-dependencies. The relevance of felt relations unfolding under day-to-day conditions over a long period of time is further revealed in the article through a detailed ethnographic account of a traumatic event and its aftermath -the 11 March 2011 Great East Japan earthquake and tsunami -which profoundly, and tellingly, further entwined the lives of the anthropo logist and his informants.Key words long-term and multiply-sited ethnography, multinational corporations, disaster research, US-Mexico border, Japan
I n t r o d u c t i o nThis article is based on ethnographic research that I have conducted across a quarter century among members of a large, elite Japanese multinational corporation, their families and surrounding communities. It examines the relevance of the co-creation of biographies among informants and their anthropologist interlocutor across time, and argues that attention to this de facto intertwining of respective career and life pathways can lead to important analytic insights into the lifeworld of corporations. My longterm fieldwork has been conducted in widely dispersed locations -Japan, Thailand, France and on the US-Mexico border -making it an unusual ethnographic project in terms of its temporal and spatial dynamics. The research trajectory has also required the building of relations with new informants at new, if related, corporate sites as well as the re-contextualisation of relations with particular informants at multiple sites. The productivity to anthropological knowledge of ethnographic relations experienced across the very long term, and with a spatial dynamism that, literally, evokes contemporary globality, is suggested.Analytically, it is notable that among Japanese 'salarymen' the global network constituting parts of the corporation that are of most significance to them is drawn together through the language of kinship. Furthermore, the challenges shared by