The Chrysanthemum and the Sword

The Chrysanthemum and the Sword, was an influential study of the society and culture of Japan by Ruth Benedict and published in 1946 in the United States and later in translation in Japan, China and elsewhere.

The book influential in educating Americans about Japan during the occupation of that country after World War II, and it filled a vacuum in Western studies of Japan, there was no extensive cultural study of Japan before The Chrysanthemum and the Sword, according to Sergei Alexandrovich Arutiunov, head of the Department of Caucasian Studies at the Institute of Ethnology and Anthropology at the Russian Academy of Sciences.

Although it has received criticism (including harsh criticism), the book has continued to be influential among American anthropologists. "[T]here is a sense in which all of us have been writing footnotes to [Chrysanthemum] since it appeared in 1946", two anthropologists wrote in 1992.

The book also affected Japanese conceptions of themselves when it was translated into Japanese in 1948. Even in 2005, the book was influential when it sold well in translation in China.

Research circumstances

Benedict's war work included a major study, largely completed in 1944, aimed at understanding Japanese culture.

This book, incorporating results of Benedict's wartime research, is an instance of anthropology at a distance. Study of a culture through its literature, through newspaper clippings, through films and recordings, etc., was necessary when anthropologists aided the United States and its allies in World War II. Unable to visit Nazi Germany or Japan under Hirohito, anthropologists made use of the cultural materials produced studies at a distance. They were attempting to understand the cultural patterns that might be driving their aggression, 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? Why, too, did Asian peoples neither treat the Japanese as their liberators from Western colonialism, nor accept their own supposedly obviously just place in a hierarchy that had Japanese at the top?

Criticism

One critic 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."

Lummis, who went to the Vassar College archives to review Benedict’s notes, wrote that he found 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 Lammis, 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." Lammis 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."

The Japanese social critic and philosopher Aoki Tamotsu said the translated book "helped invent a new tradition for postwar Japan". The book helped increase the momentum of a growing interest in "ethnic nationalism" in the country, shown in the publication of hundreds of ethnocentric "nihonjinron" (treateses on "Japaneseness") published over the next five decades. Although Benedict was criticized for not discriminating among historical developments in the country in her study, "Japanese cultural critics were especially interested in her attempts to portray the whole or total structure ('zentai kozo') of Japanese Culture", as Hardacre put it. C. Douglas Lammis has said the entire "nihonjinron" literature stems ultimately from Bennett's book.

Her book began a discussion among Japanese scholars about "shame culture" vs. "guilt culture" which spread beyond academia, and the two terms are now established as ordinary expressions in that country.

Soon after the translation was published, Japanese scholars, including Tsurumi Kazuko, Watsuji Tetsuro, and Yanagida Kunio criticized the book as inaccurate and having methodological errors. American scholar C. Douglas Limmis has written that criticisms of Benedict's book "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".

The Japanese ambassador to Pakistan called the book "must reading for many students of Japanese studies".

Other Japanese who have read this work, according to Margaret Mead, found it on the whole accurate but somewhat "moralistic". Sections of the book were mentioned in Takeo Doi's book, The Anatomy of Dependence, where he uses some of her concepts to expand upon his ideas, as well as giving a critique of the concepts covered in the book.

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 in post-World War II Japan that Benedict would not recognize the nation she described in 1946.