Urbanities,
Vol. 3
·
No 1
·
May 2013
© 2013
Urbanities
84
Proceeding in history, Japan continued to astonish the world when coming out of a
260-years- long isolation, in which commercial contacts where maintained only with China
and Holland, the country was quick to modernize and gain a world role in politics, after
winning wars with China (1895) and Russia (1905). Japanese culture was a pleasant mystery,
and numerous European intellectuals at the turn of the XX century avidly sought to collect
pieces of Japanese arts and handicrafts, to study Shinto, Bushido, the tea ceremony, Zen
Buddhism, calligraphy, ukiyoe painting and the many other expressions of ‘high culture’ that
Japan had to offer to the world. Then, after two decades of intense and high-speed
modernization in which Japan had industrialized quickly its mainly agrarian economy and
had established modern prototypes of work unions and socialist movements, the reality of
things turned ungraspable again. The Manchurian accidents, followed by the escalations of
violence in South-east Asia and China and by Pearl Harbor, again taught the world how
incomprehensible a country Japan was.
The war period was not only one of devastation and horrendous crimes, it was the
time in which North-American anthropologists started to be actively engaged in
understanding cultural patterns through the culture and personality approach (Gorer 1943).
Japan was on the agenda, and a group of scholars frantically struggled to explain the
explainable, often leaving out the unexplainable. The Second World War produced one of the
most celebrated masterpieces of scholarship and knowledge on ‘Japanese culture’, the book
by Ruth Benedict,
The Chrysanthemum and the Sword
, which was published in the aftermath
of the conflict (Benedict 1946). Benedict’s book is itself half a mystery, similarly to the traits
of Japanese culture it depicted. Ruth Benedict did ethnographic fieldwork outside Japan; she
interviewed mainly war prisoners in North American camps and Japanese people who had
migrated to the US before the war. As she did not speak the language, she was who to a
Malinowskian follower would simply not be a qualified ethnographer. Nonetheless,
Benedict’s book has been celebrated as one of the best-ever anthropological works on Japan.
Her book has enjoyed 15 editions in Japan, selling over 1.5 million copies there; thus making
it the best-selling anthropology book in Japan. The question here is not how Benedict could
write such a book without coming into contact with Japanese culture in Japan, but why her
work was so well received in Japan. The answer may not be, as some analysts have argued
(Hendry 2012) that Japanese people have found in the book a number of social and cultural
features that they are not able to express self-reflectively, or that the book is simply so
convincingly well-written. In a rare joint interview, Ruth Benedict dialogued with Yanagita
