Name: The Chrysanthemum and the Sword
ISBN: 9780395500750

Ruth Benedict

A recognized classic of cultural anthropology, this book explores the political, religious, and economic life of Japan from the seventh century through the mid-twentieth, as well as personal family life.

Patterns of Japanese Culture

The Chrysanthemum and the Sword

Gavin

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.
  


- obviously I had to read the book this sentence refers to,
and pay it much more heed than I otherwise would've


War anthropology! That is, anthropology conducted by the opposite side of a total war, for predictive military purposes of the highest consequence. She was of course robbed of the moral superiority of field work by an ocean and a bunch of tanks and whatnot, so this is all based on expat interviews and extremely secondary sources. I'm still struggling to overcome my deep suspicion of cultural anthropology; thus I was actively drawn to Benedict by this hatchet job, by a modern relativist anthropologist. 

Sadly the book's only ok, very nicely written but falsely general. She introduces the key terms of the toxic wartime Inazo-Satsuma-Shówa ideology, but mislabels this particular modernist system as "the Japanese worldview". Even so, in the one truly essential passage, Benedict lays out (and later tries to ameliorate) a popular reified caricature of the Japanese: as morbid, conformist, and paradoxical:

  the Japanese have been described in the most fantastic series of ‘...but also's’ ever used for any nation of the world. When a serious observer is writing about peoples other than the Japanese and says they are unprecedentedly polite, he is not likely to add, ‘But also insolent and overbearing.’ When he says people of some nation are incomparably rigid in their behaviour, he does not add, 'But they also adapt themselves readily to extreme innovations'. When he says a people are submissive, he does not explain too that they are not easily amenable to control from above... When he says they act mostly out of concern for others' opinions, he does not then go on to tell that they have a truly terrifying conscience...

When he writes a book on a nation with a popular cult of aestheticism which gives high honor to actors and to artists and lavishes art upon the cultivation of chrysanthemums, that book does not ordinarily have to be supplemented by another which is devoted to the cult of the sword and the top prestige of the warrior... All these contradictions, however, are the warp and woof of books on Japan. They are true. Both the sword and the chrysanthemum are a part of the picture. The Japanese are to the highest degree, 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.
  


People say she made this worse, but you can't claim that she didn't know something was up with the Western concepts used. There's an intriguing suggestion that the book is actually a satire (Geertz: "The Chrysanthemum and the Sword is no more a prettied-up science-without-tears policy tract than [Gulliver's Travels] is a children's book."). But she actually was attached to military intelligence at the time and actually interviewed Japanese-American internees, and I find I don't much care either way.


In one sentence: The above long passage with a question mark on it.

The Chrysanthemum and the Sword Patterns of Japanese Culture

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