b) the author is from the victorious country (Who was it who said that history is written by the victors?) 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 that are "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." [10] It's a total secret, but the island nation of Japan and I have one of those "if we’re both single in 2015 let's get married" things. If it comes to that, and on the strength of "The Chrysanthemum and the Sword", I've decided that Ruth Benedict can do the reading. 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

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 reason why Japanese people behave modestly with these values is because they were taught in the home at that time. During childhood, children are raised freely, but as they grow a little older and become more sensible, they are taught the rules of the world and trained to follow them. If they don’t follow these rules, even their family will be cold to you. In the past, the family had patriarchal and the power of the father was absolute, and the rules of the world were strictly taught. Nowadays, families have changed and couples work together to raise their children, and although they teach general rules, manners, and etiquette, they do not raise their children as harshly as they did in this era. Summary and my impression 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 since World War II in Japan that Benedict would not recognize the nation she described in 1946. [13] Ruth Fulton Benedict (June 5, 1887 – September 17, 1948) was an American anthropologist and folklorist.

I’m giving this work more stars that it might deserve because it was an early effort to understand Japan, started perhaps when WW II was still raging, but finished in the aftermath when American forces had occupied Japan and, in 1946, were still trying to understand what the best way to administer the country would be. It had been a terrible war, ending in the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the fire-bombing of Tokyo and other cities. After that, Americans predicted that there would be fierce resistance. It didn’t happen. The acceptance of American occupation contrasted startlingly with the brutality of Japanese forces during the war. Why? We can say that Ruth Benedict, an anthropologist who did not speak Japanese and did not have the opportunity to go to Japan, wrote an amazingly insightful book in such a situation. Whether all her observations were true or if they still hold water today is entirely another subject. Doi, Takeo (1973). The Anatomy of Dependence. Tokyo, New York: Kodansha International. p. 48. ISBN 0870111817. d) the author didn't speak the language of the said country. (I did see the movie Lost in Translation. And a lot can get lost in translation sometimes. I should know. Over two decades here in Japan and I still get lost in Shinjuku Station, never mind the biggest hospital in my neighborhood.) The same characteristic of Japanese society was also written in “Kuki no nyumon”. It says that Japanese people read the situation around them and speak or act in a way that does not disrupt the situation. Pay attention to your surroundings. 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.Essential reading for anyone interested in Japanese culture, this unsurpassed masterwork opens an intriguing window on Japan. The World War II–era study by the cultural anthropologist Ruth Benedict paints an illuminating contrast between the people of Japan and those of the United States. The Chrysanthemum and the Sword is a revealing look at how and why our societies differ, making it the perfect introduction to Japanese history and customs. More than 2.3 million copies of the book have been sold in Japan since it first appeared in translation there. [4] 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. The principal issue that she identified was that Japanese live within a network of obligations and duties, analogous to owing money to many different and competing creditors, one may temporarily satisfy some to a certain extent, but only at the cost of not satisfying others, perhaps by this point I had already become more crazy than ever because this seemed to me entirely natural, the debt to ones parents for life and upbringing, to kin for occasional indulgences, to the bastard bank for the mortgage, duties of citizenship and humanity. This network of obligations she notices provides for really satisfying unhappy endings in Japanese fiction, and she suspects this means that happinesses, like that lovely warm bath, tend to be postponed or avoided in favour of meeting some obligation or other (such as to the family, or benefactor and the Emperor). Shame is felt so extremely, that ideas of revenge against people who insult you is taken extremely seriously - here I did wonder if she had read too many novels featuring samurai in the course of her research but then again it perhaps is a fair point about the culture of early twentieth century Japan and its search for international prestige through colonialism. For a brief instance while reading I did feel deeply that her discussion of all these circles of duty made sense of the Olympus scandal, but then I thought that all businesses take their reputation and image extremely seriously and generally seem to prefer to cover up, evade, or lie rather than to come clean about mistakes - and in that sense perhaps corporations are people after all. The Japanese people today are much more diverse in their ways of thinking and values than in the era depicted in “The Chrysanthemum and the Sword”. Especially now, with the spread of social networking services, people are clashing in the internet with each other in a variety of opinions and arguments without worrying about the world.