The Chrysanthemum and the Sword:
Patterns of Japanese Culture is an influential study of Japan by Ruth Benedict begun in 1944 at the invitation of the Office of War Information in order to understand and predict the behavior of the Japanese in World War II .The book was influential in shaping American ideas about Japanese culture during the Occupation of Japan,and popularized the distinction between guilt cultures and shame cultures.
Although it has received sometimes harsh criticism,the book has continued to be influential.Two anthropologists wrote in 1992 that there is "a sense in which all of us have been writing footnotes to [Chrysanthemum] since it appeared in 1946".
The book also affected Japanese conceptions of themselves when it was translated into Japanese in 1948.In 2005,fifteen years after it was translated into Chinese,the book became a bestseller in the People's Republic of China when relations with Japan soured.
Research circumstances
This book which resulted from Benedict's wartime research,like several other OWI wartime studies of Japan and Germany,[4] is an instance of "anthropology at a distance," that is,study of a culture through its literature,newspaper clippings,films and recordings,and extensive interviews with German-Americans or Japanese-Americans.These techniques were made necessary when anthropologists were unable to visit Nazi Germany or wartime Japan.As one later ethnographer pointed out,however,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." [5] These anthropologists were attempting to understand the cultural patterns that might be driving the aggression of once friendly nations,and hoped to find possible weaknesses or means of persuasion that had been missed.
Americans found themselves unable to comprehend matters in Japanese culture.For instance,Americans considered it quite natural for American prisoners of war to want their families to know they were alive,and to keep quiet when asked for information about troop movements,etc.,while Japanese POWs,apparently,gave information freely and did not try to contact their families.Why was that?
[edit] Criticism
One critic[who?] has written that The Chrysanthemum and the Sword is "long since...discredited since Benedict had no direct experience in Japan" and described it as "considered shallow and overtly racist".
C.Douglas Lummis has written:"After some time 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."[6]
Lummis,who went to the Vassar College archives to review Benedict’s notes,wrote that he found some of her more important points were developed from interviews with Robert Hashima a Japanese-American native of the United States who was taken to Japan as a child,educated there,then returned to the U.S.before World War II began.According to Lummis,who interviewed Hashima,these circumstances helped introduce a certain bias into Benedict's research:"For him,coming to Japan for the first time as a teenager smack in the middle of the militaristic period and having no memory of the country before then,what he was taught in school was not 'an ideology',it was Japan itself." Lummis thinks Benedict relied too much on Hashima,who he said was deeply alienated by his experiences in Japan."[I]t seems that he became a kind of touchstone,the authority against which she would test information from other sources." [6]
簡(jiǎn)單的那就看前三段