The Chrysanthemum and the Sword

For the Mad Men episode, see The Chrysanthemum and the Sword (Mad Men).
The Chrysanthemum and the Sword

First edition
Author Ruth Benedict
Original title The Chrysanthemum and the Sword: Patterns of Japanese Culture
Country United States
Language English
Subject National Characteristics, Japanese
Genre History/Anthropology
Publisher Houghton Mifflin
Publication date
 1946
Media type Print (Hardcover)
Pages 324 pp (first edition)
ISBN 978-0-395-50075-0
OCLC 412839
952 19
LC Class DS821 .B46 1989

The Chrysanthemum and the Sword: Patterns of Japanese Culture is a 1946 study of Japan by American anthropologist Ruth Benedict. It was written at the invitation of the U.S. Office of War Information, in order to understand and predict the behavior of the Japanese in World War II by reference to a series of contradictions in traditional culture. The book was influential in shaping American ideas about Japanese culture during the occupation of Japan, and popularized the distinction between guilt cultures and shame cultures.[1]

Although it has received harsh criticism, the book has continued to be influential. Two anthropologists wrote in 1992 that there is "a sense in which all of us have been writing footnotes to [Chrysanthemum] since it appeared in 1946".[2] The Japanese, Benedict wrote, are

both aggressive and unaggressive, both militaristic and aesthetic, both insolent and polite, rigid and adaptable, submissive and resentful of being pushed around, loyal and treacherous, brave and timid, conservative and hospitable to new ways...[3]

The book also affected Japanese conceptions of themselves.[4] The book was translated into Japanese in 1948 and became a bestseller in the People's Republic of China when relations with Japan soured.[5]

Research circumstances

See also: Empire of Japan

This book which resulted from Benedict's wartime research, like several other OWI wartime studies of Japan and Germany,[6] is an instance of "culture at a distance," that is, study of a culture through its literature, newspaper clippings, films and recordings, and extensive interviews with German-Americans or Japanese-Americans. These techniques were necessitated by anthropologists' inability to visit Nazi Germany or wartime Japan. As one later ethnographer pointed out, however, although "culture at a distance" had the "elaborate aura of a good academic fad, the method was not so different from what any good historian does: to make the most creative use possible of written documents."[7] These anthropologists were attempting to understand the cultural patterns that might be driving the aggression of once friendly nations, and hoped to find possible weaknesses or means of persuasion that had been missed.

Americans found themselves unable to comprehend matters in Japanese culture. For instance, Americans considered it quite natural for American prisoners of war to want their families to know they were alive, and to keep quiet when asked for information about troop movements, etc., while Japanese POWs, apparently, gave information freely and did not try to contact their families.

Reception in the United States

Between 1946 and 1971, the book sold only 28,000 hardback copies, and a paperback edition was not issued until 1967.[8] Benedict played a major role in grasping the place of the Emperor of Japan in Japanese popular culture, and formulating the recommendation to President Franklin D. Roosevelt that permitting continuation of the Emperor's reign had to be part of the eventual surrender offer.

Later reception and criticism

More than two million copies of the book have been sold in Japan since it first appeared in translation there.[9]

John W. Bennett and Michio Nagai, two scholars on Japan, pointed out in 1953, that the translated book "has appeared in Japan during a period of intense national self-examination — a period during which Japanese intellectuals and writers have been studying the sources and meaning of Japanese history and character, in one of their perennial attempts to determine the most desirable course of Japanese development."[10]

The Japanese social critic and philosopher Tamotsu Aoki said the translated book "helped invent a new tradition for postwar Japan". The book helped increase the momentum of a growing interest in "ethnic nationalism" in the country, shown in the publication of hundreds of ethnocentric nihonjinron (treatises on 'Japaneseness') published over the next four decades. Although Benedict was criticized for not discriminating among historical developments in the country in her study, "Japanese cultural critics were especially interested in her attempts to portray the whole or total structure ('zentai kōzō') of Japanese Culture", as Helen Hardacre put it.[10] C. Douglas Lummis has said the entire "nihonjinron" literature stems ultimately from Benedict's book.[9]

Her book began a discussion among Japanese scholars about "shame culture" vs. "guilt culture" which spread beyond academia, and the two terms are now established as ordinary expressions in that country.[9]

Soon after the translation was published, Japanese scholars, including Kazuko Tsurumi, Tetsuro Watsuji, and Kunio Yanagita criticized the book as inaccurate and having methodological errors. American scholar C. Douglas Lummis has written that criticisms of Benedict's book 'now very well known in Japanese scholarly circles' include that it represented the ideology of a class for that of the entire culture, 'a state of acute social dislocation for a normal condition, and an extraordinary moment in a nation's history as an unvarying norm of social behavior'.[9]

Japanese ambassador to Pakistan Sadaaki Numata said the book was a "must reading for many students of Japanese studies".[11]

According to Margaret Mead (the author's former student and a fellow anthropologist), other Japanese who have read this work found it on the whole accurate but somewhat "moralistic". Sections of the book were mentioned in Takeo Doi's book, The Anatomy of Dependence, though he is highly critical of her analysis of Japan and the West as respectively shame, and guilt, cultures.

In a 2002 symposium at The Library of Congress in the United States, Shinji Yamashita of the department of anthropology at the University of Tokyo, added that there has been so much change in post-World War II Japan that Benedict would not recognize the nation she described in 1946.[12]

C. Douglas Lummis has written: "After some time I realized that I would never be able to live in a decent relationship with the people of that country unless I could drive this book, and its politely arrogant world view, out of my head."[9] Lummis, who went to the Vassar College archives to review Benedict’s notes, wrote that he found some of her more important points were developed from interviews with Robert Hashima, a Japanese-American native of the United States who was taken to Japan as a child, educated there, then returned to the U.S. before World War II began. According to Lummis, who interviewed Hashima, these circumstances helped introduce a certain bias into Benedict's research: "For him, coming to Japan for the first time as a teenager smack in the middle of the militaristic period and having no memory of the country before then, what he was taught in school was not 'an ideology', it was Japan itself." Lummis thinks Benedict relied too much on Hashima, who he said was deeply alienated by his experiences in Japan. "[I]t seems that he became a kind of touchstone, the authority against which she would test information from other sources."[9]

Reception of the book in Taiwan and China

The first Chinese translation was made by Taiwanese anthropologist Huang Dao-Ling, and published in Taiwan in April 1974 by Taiwan Kui-Kuang Press. The book became a bestseller in China in 2005, when relations with the Japanese government were strained. In that year alone, 70,000 copies of the book were sold in China.[5]



See also

Notes

  1. ↑ Ezra F. Vogel, Foreword, The Chrysanthemum and the Sword (Boston: Houghton Mifflin 1989)
  2. ↑ Plath, David W., and Robert J. Smith, "How 'American' Are Studies of Modern Japan Done in the United States", in Harumi Befu and Joseph Kreiner, eds., Otherness of Japan: Historical and Cultural Influences on Japanese Studies in Ten Countries, Munchen: The German Institute of Japanese Studies, as quoted in Ryang, Sonia, "Chrysanthemum's Strange Life: Ruth Benedict in Postwar Japan", accessed January 13, 2007
  3. ↑ Ruth Benedict, The Chrysanthemum and the Sword, page 2, 1946
  4. ↑ Kent, Pauline, "Japanese Perceptions of the Chrysanthemum and the Sword," Dialectical Anthropology 24.2 (1999): 181.
  5. 1 2 Fujino, Akira, Tribune News Service, 'Book on Japanese culture proves a bestseller in China", The Advocate of Stamford, Connecticut, January 8, 2006
  6. ↑ Robert Harry Lowie, The German People: A Social Portrait to 1914 (New York: Farrar & Rinehart, 1945); John F. Embree, The Japanese Nation: A Social Survey (New York: Farrar & Rinehart, 1945
  7. ↑ Vogel, Foreword, p. x.
  8. ↑ Johnson, Sheila (2014). "Letters: Unfair to Anthropologists". London Review of Books. 36 (7). Retrieved 6 April 2014.
  9. 1 2 3 4 5 6 Lummis, C. Douglas, "Ruth Benedict's Obituary for Japanese Culture", article in Japan Focus an online academic, peer-reviewed journal of Japanese studies, accessed October 11, 2013
  10. 1 2 Hardacre, Helen, "The Postwar Development of Japanese Studies in the United States", (Brill: 1998), ISBN 90-04-08628-5 via Google Books; the Bennett-Nagai quote may be from John W. Bennett and Nagai Michio, "The Japanese critique of Benedict's The Chrysanthemum and the Sword," American Anthropologist 55 :401-411 [1953], mentioned at Web page titled "Reading notes for Ruth Benedict's The Chrysanthemum and the Sword (1946)" at the Web site of William W. Kelly, Professor of Anthropology & Sumitomo Professor of Japanese Studies, Yale University; both Web sites accessed January 13, 2007
  11. ↑ "Ambassador Numata's Speech at Flower Show 25 Nov 2000". 2006-01-11. Archived from the original on 2006-01-11. Retrieved 2011-11-24.
  12. ↑ Wolfskill, Mary, "Human Nature and the Power of Culture: Library Hosts Margaret Mead Symposium", article in Library of Congress Information Bulletin, January 2002, as accessed at the U.S. Library of Congress Web site, January 13, 2008

Further reading

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