Franz Boas, Ruth Benedict's advisor and the patriarch of the Columbia anthropology department, was censured by the American Anthropological Association because of his comments imploring American military involvement in World War I. After this experience, Boas was less openly vitriolic concerning World War II, and, at first, his students expressed a similar reserve. However, as the war escalated, Ruth Benedict, Margaret Mead, Gregory Bateson and others became more involved in the war effort, finally taking jobs with the United States government to provide war time ethnographies and cultural analyses.
As Benedict states in her introduction to the book, The Chrysanthemum and the Sword grew out of war-time research she did for the American State Department and Office of War Information (Fukui 1999:173). Similar to short papers she wrote on other cultures involved in the war (cf. Thai Culture and Behavior), Chrysanthemum began as an internal working paper to distribute among the armed services. Benedict was commissioned to explain the Japanese culture, particularly to render their militarism and patriotism intelligible. In her introductory chapter, "Assignment: Japan," Benedict writes:
"Conventions of war which Western nations had come to accept as facts of human nature obviously did not exist for the Japanese. It made a major problem in the nature of the enemy. We had to understand their behavior in order to cope with it" (Benedict 1946:1).
Although Benedict supported the Malinowskian model for fieldwork (Mead 1974:27), she was unable to complete the requisite trip to her fieldsite. Because of the war, and perhaps furthered by her tendency to avoid fieldwork situations, Benedict was forced to complete her study with materials available in the United States, and, because she spoke no Japanese, with the help of translators. In the three months that she took to complete the original study (Fukui 1999), Benedict read translated novels, watched movies, considered propaganda and spoke with Japanese Americans interred in the "relocation" camps on the American west coast. This white paper, originally entitled "Japanese Behavior Patterns," was expanded after the end of the war to the current text of The Chrysanthemum and the Sword.
Despite the stated intention to understand "the Japanese" on their own cultural terms, Benedict employs the comparative method she first articulated in Patterns of Culture. Indeed, the cultural comparisons come fast and furious, and Japanese cultural patterns are contrasted to those in Prussia, France, England, Samoa, India, Burma, and more. (Like Geertz, I started a list of all the cultures to which she compares Japanese, but became overwhelmed by the sheer number and gave up; Geertz 1988:117). Within this profusion of comparison, "American culture" remains the touchstone to which Benedict returns, describing Japanese beliefs and actions in idioms comprehensible to the American audience she expected. (For example, in describing the elaborate Japanese system of moral debt and obligation, she returns repeatedly to the comparative metaphor of American beliefs in money lending; Benedict 1947:121) As Geertz describes, Benedict's "negative-space writing" thus simultaneously creates an image of the United States and Americans as she describes Japan and the Japanese:
"[M]oving from examples in which "they" sound the odd case to ones in which "we" do, a disconcerting twist appears in the course of this forced march through cultural difference; an unexpected swerve that sets the campaign a bit off course -- Japan comes to look, somehow, less and less erratic and arbitrary while the United States comes to look, somehow, more and more so. [T]he enemy who at the beginning of the book is the most alien we have ever fought is, by the end of it, the most reasonable we have ever conquered" (Geertz 1988:121).
As suggested by the personal pronouns in this citation, Chrysanthemum was written for a popular American audience. However, as soon at it was translated into Japanese it became overwhelmingly popular and remains in print, having sold hundreds of thousands of copies. (When I refer to Chrysanthemum in this paper, I will be referencing the English version.) Thus, a literate and articulate "native" audience existed for Chrysanthemum to a degree different than for Patterns of Culture.
Benedict begins Chrysanthemum with a description of how she received her assignment, and the war-time context in which she worked. Restating her commitment to comparison she first used in Patterns of Culture, Benedict suggests that "[i]t is hard to be conscious of the eyes through which one looks," and that any responsible anthropological analysis of Japan will necessarily help "us" understand "ours" as well (Benedict 1947:14). Chrysanthemum will be, she suggests, a de-mystification of the seeming contradictions of Japanese actions:
"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. They are terribly concerned about what other people will think of their behavior, and they are also overcome by guilt when other people know nothing of their misstep. Their soldiers are disciplined to the hilt but are also insubordinate" (Benedict 1947:3).
As described by Benedict, Japanese culture is shaped primarily by an extreme awareness to social hierarchy, honor, virtue and duty (on and giri), and these social patterns, like the Zuni's Apollonian, play out in every social action, from war to child-rearing. Although Benedict sites a few personal narratives about growing up in Japan, she rarely quotes individual voices when supporting her points. Instead, she quotes anonymously (using single hash marks) and repeatedly mixes literary, historical, mythic and human sources (e.g.: Benedict 1947:168-9). Such rhetorical tools suggest a authoritative command of the culture, but privilege a homogeneous culture, as defined by a nation-state, over social difference.