The Chrysanthemum and the Sword
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| The Chrysanthemum and the Sword | |
| Author | Ruth Benedict |
|---|---|
| Original title | The Chrysanthemum and the Sword: Patterns of Japanese Culture |
| Country | United States of America |
| Language | English |
| Subject(s) | National Characteristics, Japanese |
| Genre(s) | History/Anthropology |
| Publisher | Houghton Mifflin |
| Publication date | 1946 |
| Media type | Print (Hardcover) |
| Pages | 324 pp (first edition) |
| ISBN | ISBN 0395500753 9780395500750 |
| OCLC | 412839 |
The Chrysanthemum and the Sword (ISBN 0618619593) is an influential ethnography written by Ruth Benedict after the defeat of the Japanese in World War Two regarding the society and culture of Japan. It was first published in 1946 in the United States and later in translation in Japan, China and elsewhere.
The book was influential in educating Americans about Japan during the occupation of that country after World War II, and it filled a vacuum in Western studies of Japan. There was no extensive cultural study of Japan before The Chrysanthemum and the Sword, according to Sergei Alexandrovich Arutiunov, head of the Department of Caucasian Studies at the Institute of Ethnology and Anthropology at the Russian Academy of Sciences.[1]
Although it has received criticism (including harsh criticism), the book has continued to be influential among American anthropologists. "[T]here is a sense in which all of us have been writing footnotes to [Chrysanthemum] since it appeared in 1946", two anthropologists wrote in 1992.[2]
The book also affected Japanese conceptions of themselves when it was translated into Japanese in 1948. In 2005, 15 years after it was translated into Chinese, the book became a bestseller when Chinese-Japanese relations soured.[3]
Contents |
[edit] Research circumstances
Benedict's war work included a major study, largely completed in 1944, aimed at understanding Japanese culture.
This book, incorporating results of Benedict's wartime research, is an instance of anthropology at a distance. Study of a culture through its literature, through newspaper clippings, through films and recordings, etc., was necessary when anthropologists aided the United States and its allies in World War II. Unable to visit Nazi Germany or Japan under Hirohito, anthropologists made use of the cultural materials produced studies at a distance. They were attempting to understand the cultural patterns that might be driving their aggression, 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. Why was that? Why, too, did Asian peoples neither treat the Japanese as their liberators from Western colonialism, nor accept their own supposedly obviously just place in a hierarchy that had Japanese at the top?
[edit] Criticism
One critic[who?] has written that The Chrysanthemum and the Sword is "long since... discredited since Benedict had no direct experience in Japan" and described it as "considered shallow and overtly racist".
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."[4]
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." [4]
[edit] Reception of the book in the United States
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.
[edit] Later reception of the book in Japan
More than two million copies of the book have been sold in Japan since it first appeared in translation there.[4]
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."[5]
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" (treateses on "Japaneseness") published over the next five 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 kozo') of Japanese Culture", as Hardacre put it.[5] C. Douglas Lammis has said the entire "nihonjinron" literature stems ultimately from Bennett's book.[4]
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.[4]
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 Limmis 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".[4]
The Japanese ambassador to Pakistan called the book "must reading for many students of Japanese studies".[citation needed]
Other Japanese who have read this work, according to Margaret Mead, found it on the whole accurate but somewhat "moralistic". Sections of the book were mentioned in Takeo Doi's book, The Anatomy of Dependence, where he uses some of her concepts to expand upon his ideas, as well as giving a critique of the concepts covered in the book.[citation needed]
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.[1]
[edit] Reception of the book in China
The book became a bestseller in China in 2005, when relations with the Japanese government were strained. In 2005, 70,000 copies of the book were sold in China. A translation by Lu Wanhe first was published in China in June 1990 by Commercial Press.[3]
[edit] Notes
- ^ a b [1]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
- ^ [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 Kriener, 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
- ^ a b Fujino, Akira, Tribune News Service, 'Book on Japanese culture proves a bestseller in China", as the article appeared in The Advocate of Stamford, Connecticut, January 8, 2006
- ^ a b c d e f [3]Lummis, C. Douglas, "Ruth Benedict's Obituary for Japanese Culture", article in Japan Focus an online academic, peer-reviewed journal of Japanese studies, accessed January 13, 2007
- ^ a b [4]Hardacre, Helen, "The Postwar Development of Japanese Studies in the United States", (Brill: 1998), ISBN 9004086285 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 [5]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
