Ruth Benedict Revisited
From a recent Internet article by Akira Fujino, one learns that The Chrysanthemum and the Sword, a book written by U.S. cultural anthropologist Ruth Benedict in 1946 to shed light on Japanese culture, has become a bestseller in . . . China!
Yes, China. The book was actually translated into Chinese about 16 years ago, but never sold in huge numbers . . . until now.
Fujino says he believes that “Chinese people have become more interested in finding out what the Japanese are like because the relationship between the two countries has been strained by Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi’s visits to the war-related Yasukuni Shrine as well as other historical problems.”
“I think the deteriorating bilateral relationship has caused many people to think about the problem and want to better understand it,” says one observer.
Says another: “I believe the boom of The Chrysanthemum and the Sword is closely connected with recent comments by Japanese politicians and central government officials, and the rise of the conservatives in Japan. Chinese people want to understand Japanese people and their society.”
...
that in ancient china if you were REALLY fat that meant you were...
omg i feel so bad for a that monkey help it some one plzzzz
It is not at all reassuring that the Chinese, especially now, would settle on this particular book for revealing insights into the Japanese mind. It was written during Second World War on behalf of the U.S. Office of War Information and remains one of the most pervasive but inaccurate studies of Japanese society ever published.
I write more about it here, but The Chrysanthemum and the Sword is essentially a paean to the fruits of Machiavellianism. Benedict limited the scope of her research to such narrow objectives that in order to justify her conclusions she had to integrate the substance of a civilization reaching back two thousand years into the product of a man-made ideology less than a century old.
Benedict’s work was undoubtedly a major reason why SCAP bought so completely into the emperor system that in fact had only existed since 1868. The whitewashing of imperial involvement in the war continues to this day to be the major source of diplomatic conflict between Japan and her neighbors.
And in the case of China, this all does sound hauntingly familiar. But by blaming culture and not politics, Benedict’s book only confirms comforting ethnic stereotypes, and does not illuminate the true source of the conflicts in the more prosaic world of political gamesmanship and manipulation of public opinion.
January 15th, 2006 at 2:01 amBut by blaming culture and not politics
January 15th, 2006 at 9:10 amBut doesn’t culture at least partly determine politics? You write as if one could be cleanly divorced from the other, but the idea that Japan’s preceding 700+ years of domination by samurai militarism had nothing to do with the course of its history between 1868 and 1945 is ridiculous.
Since the launch of the Chinese version of the book in June 1990 by Beijing-based publisher Commercial Press, up to 9,999 copies were printed each year until 2004.
However, in 2005, sales of the book sharply increased. The publishing firm reprinted 9,999 copies each in February and May then 49,999 more copies in June. By the end of the year there had been 14 reprints which resulted in 123,999 copies of the book being printed.
January 15th, 2006 at 11:31 amNotice that that article originally appeared in the righwing conservagtive newspaper Yomiuri in Tokyo, written by Yomiuri reporter named AKIRA FUJINO….
http://gainesville.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20060108/DAYBREAK/60107025/1015/living
January 15th, 2006 at 11:38 amWell, of course, “culture at least partly explains politics.” It works both ways, hence the pun: “Does Great Britain have a July 4th?” Whenever “cowboy” is used to describe GWB, the reference point is a stereotype largely invented by the popular press during the 19th century and later enhanced in Hollywood. This doesn’t invalidate it, but emphasizes that “culture” is not a genetic formulation bred in the bone.
(This is known as essentialism: “[T]he view that all people of a particular race [or culture] inherently possess a particular negative characteristic,” a philosophical approach later adopted by the Nihonjinron school of cultural apologetics.)
Similarly, the modern concept of the “traditional” samurai was largely invented during the Tokugawa Era, when, for 250 years, the samurai didn’t have much to do (after Shimabara).The shogunate itself relied on Neo-Confucianism to justify authoritarian rule that turned the emperor into an incidental figurehead. Neo-Confucianism also influenced the interpretation of Bushido, along with Zen, another Chinese import.
During the Meiji era, at the same time Bushido was being rekindled in order to energize Japan’s expansionist goals, its politicians were looking to Prussia to sculpt a constitutionally active role for the resurrected Imperial Household Agency. And though it might seem silly in comparison, why do seifuku look the way they do? Not centuries of Japanese tradition. Same source.
C. Douglas Lummis, professor of political philosophy as Tsuda University, puts it more bluntly: Benedict’s interviewees all reflected the totalitarian patterns she anticipated because those patterns “had been pounded into them by a modern, highly organized, state-controlled school system, and by all the other 20th century techniques of indoctrination which the government had available to it.”
January 16th, 2006 at 3:38 amWasn’t Douglas Lummis the man who translated the book titled “IF THE WORLD WAS A VILLAGE OF 100 PEOPLE?”
January 16th, 2006 at 10:03 pm