Ruth Benedict's Original Wartime Study of the Japanese

Abstract

Benedict's classic work on Japanese society, The Chrysanthemum and the Sword (1946). is still cited frequently in studies on Japanese society and culture, despite the fact that it is now nearly 50 years since it was published. However, although this book has exerted enormous influence on subsequent generations of scholars, her research into the work on the Japanese that preceded the writing of Chrysanthemum. is virtually non‐existant. This paper first traces the process through which Benedict progressed during her war‐time study of cultures at a distance. It then examines the eventual report she wrote on the Japanese and the significance of this report. Benedict's report, which stresses the importance of “giri to one's name” within the code of Japanese ethics but devotes very little space to the discussion of “shame”. raises questions about the excessive attention devoted to repetitive references concerning her depiction of Japan as a “shame culture” by numerous social scientists. As this paper demonstrates through a consideration of her background research, the importance placed on the concept of “shame culture” by others was not shared by Benedict herself.

Chrysanthemum's Strange Life: Ruth Benedict in Postwar Japan

“…As with other traits of Japanese culture presented in the book, such as hierarchy and obligation, that had first been accepted as negative in the postwar period and then later re-interpreted, shame culture also was later understood as a positive trait of Japanese culture, especially against the historical background of Japan's postwar economic recovery. Pauline Kent suggests that Benedict never intended to portray Japanese culture primarily as shame culture (Kent 1994(Kent , 1999. In my view, whether Benedict truly intended it or not is less of a concern than how it is that the notion of shame culture has become, over fifty years, so important in the Japanese reading of Benedict and in Japanese selfperceptions.…”