The Chrysanthemum and the Sword: Patterns of Japanese Culture
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The Chrysanthemum and the Sword: Patterns of Japanese Culture
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a b c d e 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 There are a variety of situations in which Japanese people have to fulfill one’s duty, such as in the relationship of master and servant, in family, and in helping each other in the community during weddings and funerals. A mother-in-law teaches her daughter-in-law the etiquette of the house, and the whole village comes together to welcome a daughter-in-law from another village. If you do not fulfill these duties, you will be treated coldly by others. That said the knowledge she draws from other books is quite decent and the section on ON is very interesting and worth a read.
Having read it and feeling a slight hesitancy about it I will begin properly with respect and honour. It is a solid achievement. Benedict was a US anthropologist pottering about when she received a commission in 1944 from the government to write a study of the Japanese with a view to whether they would surrender, and if militarily defeated, if they would fight on, or rebel, or just generally cause a nuisance, and more generally to help get under the Japanese skin which might help an occupation to progress smoothly. Starting from scratch with no knowledge of Japanese she laboured on and the book was published in 1946, so I guess it represents twelve to eighteen months of contentious and solid work. Which is an achievement. The work consisted of reading the secondary literature on Japan, noting things she didn't understand, interviewing Japanese Americans, taking them with her to watch Japanese films and asking them to explain why the plots seemed so strange, reading novels, school books and memoirs - from one of these she cities the daughter of a samurai family who allowed in a missionary school a patch of garden to grow what ever she likes, experiences wild joy at planting potatoes while all her school-fellows plant flowers. Dated to say the least with some factual inaccuracies, such as her statement that the Tang Dynasty had a classless society which the Japanese did not adopt, however the Tang had a well documented class system. Although it must be said that the Japanese did adopt a multitude of things from the Chinese as Kanmu was a great admirer.Kent, Pauline, "Misconceived Configurations of Ruth Benedict", Japan Review 7 (1996): 33-60. JSTOR 25790964.
Needless to say, Japan now is not like how Benedict saw it. Many aspects of the country's people and culture have evolved. Nevertheless, this book offers a good study of where the country was in the author's time. And what a chaotic time it was... The first half of the book was not very interesting because of the difficult expressions, so I summarized my impressions of the second half. 義理(giri): Fulfill your duty.c) the country being analyzed was, in many years of its history, closed to the outside world (Was it James Michener who claimed that Japan had put up one of the most effective iron curtains in the history of mankind?)? By training one can attain selflessness and enlightenment. Observing self, eliminating shame, and living as if you were dead is what the Japanese yearn for. Benedict is an anthropologist -- though I've read a good amount of anthropology, I had never read Patterns of Culture. And I was somewhat skeptical, remembering the bland cover of Patterns on the old copy my father had when I was a child. But Benedict writes with such depth and intelligence and broad vision that I now see that her reputation is fully deserved. She is brilliant..., and humane. Furthermore, historically, the feudal system as a ruling structure and the penetration of Confucian teachings from China spread the hierarchical patriarchal system to the warrior class in the family. The subsequent institutionalization of the Meiji period (1868-1912) spread the patriarchal family system throughout the country, creating a society in which it was easy for the authorities to convey the rules and regulations that people had to follow and the premise in the community(空気, kuki) in which they had to follow them, which may have led to a society that was increasingly concerned about others. Unfortunately, I have never been exposed to people from other countries except for traveling and English conversation schools, so I can’t really feel it. Training
jicho-suru, to self respect, to be prudent)” means to consider the factors that affect your situation and refrain from saying or doing anything that will be criticized by the public. It means to be cautious of the consequences of one’s actions. The overall knowledge level and assuredness of the text is not there as she constantly has to state a colleague or friend informed her and she freely admits to never visiting Japan. Which I find a huge flaw as I have known people who have traveled to China and have BA's in Chinese and no one could understand a word of Mandarin they spoke, but they were assured by their Chinese professors that they were learning pure mandarin when it turned out to be Cantonese or Dongbeihua. Cultural notes from afar are never quite acceptable. Also while I realise it was just after the war, the book talks about America far too much and a little too pro-American for a book discussing another culture. I was wondering... Could a treatise on an entire country and its people, no matter how beautifully worded and presented, be objective if... This book which resulted from Benedict's wartime research, like several other United States Office of War Information wartime studies of Japan and Germany, [6] is an instance of "culture at a distance", the study of a culture through its literature, newspaper clippings, films, and recordings, as well as extensive interviews with German-Americans or Japanese-Americans. The techniques were necessitated by anthropologists' inability to visit Nazi Germany or wartime Japan. One later ethnographer pointed out, however, that 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] Anthropologists were attempting to understand the cultural patterns that might be driving the aggression of once-friendly nations, and they hoped to find possible weaknesses or means of persuasion that had been missed.A classic of Japanese cultural studies . . . With considerable sensitivity, she managed both to stress the differences in Japanese society of which American policy makers needed to be aware and to debunk the stereotype of the Japanese as hopelessly rigid and incapable of change.”— The New York Times When did Japanese people start to have this characteristic? It is not written in “The Chrysanthemum and Sword”. I think that, to begin with, Japan is a closed island nation that is geographically difficult to interfere with from abroad, and since the nation land is mostly mountainous and there are few plains where people can live, the country and each village were isolated without much interference, and there was a foundation of strong ties within communities.
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