Ruth Benedict
Legacies of Chrysanthemum

Email Survey on Chrysanthemum

I was first assigned The Chrysanthemum and the Sword as a first-year undergraduate at the University of Chicago in a class called 'Wealth, Power, Virtue.' We read chapters of Chrysanthemum in the 'Virtue' section and it was intended, I imagine, to complicate our eurocentric understandings of virtue, honor, pride and duty. But, because the class was not explicitly about Japan, the book was not contextualized with other examples of Japanese social analysis. Looking over my old notes, I am slightly embarrassed to admit my first reactions to the book: despite having spent time in Japan, I never questioned the totalizing picture Benedict presented, nor considered that what she was describing was shaped by history or social class. My responses seem remarkably similar to what some professors have described as the 'dangers' of teaching Chrysanthemum to undergraduates; without the appropriate context, the text can reproduce images of Nihonjinron and Japanese 'uniqueness.'

Yet, despite these shortcomings, Chrysanthemum cannot be simply written out of the English language canon of social science of Japan. Indeed, its continuing popularity (in both English and Japanese language versions), suggests that it is still being bought, read, and assigned.

In an effort to understand how Chrysanthemum was first approached by current scholars of Japan, I conducted a small email survey. I asked scholars of Japan to share their first experiences with this text: was it assigned to them in a class? What were their impressions? Did it play any role in their interest in Japan? Further, I was interested to see if these same scholars include Chrysanthemum in the classes they teach, and how they contextualize the text if they do.

I sent out about thirty-five requests and have received twenty-one responses so far. Particularly at this busy time of year, I greatly appreciate each respondents taking the time to type up their memories and experiences.

If you would like to contribute to this project, please email me at allison.alexy@yale.edu.

From Dr. Peter Ackermann:

I first came across Ruth Benedict just after I started my studies in Japanology at the University of Zurich in Switzerland, probably in 1970. We were given the book to read (in English). At the time I read the book I was rather fascinated with the method of Benedict's approach. This reflected the fact that European studies on Japan at the time were basically historical and centered around documents. I had never come across cultural studies before that wanted to know how "normal" people acted and thought within their social context. Naturally the political and military background of Benedict's study - as well as of many other cultural studies dealing with Japan from the American perspective - was difficult for us to fathom at the time, as Switzerland had never been involved in understanding any kind of enemy and had enough to do with the German threat. A few years after reading Benedict's book I was given a long Japanese text by Watsuji Tetsuro, in which he sharply criticised Ruth Benedict. As I at the time was not really aware of Watsuji's position in the context of Japanese intellectual thought I reacted rather intuitively. That is, I was startled and in many ways quite convinced by Watsuji's heavy attacks on what he saw as Benedict's lack of understanding Japanese people and her racist, anti-Asian stance. Though today of course I see things in a much broader context, I still emotionally feel deeply influenced by this first experience of "clash of civilizations". Also, I have remained very sensitive since then towards all signs of Japanese rejection of Western discourse and scholarship and always try to fathom the reasons. This has led me to take an extremely critical stance with regard to dangerously racist aspects of German scholarship long before the 1930s, and has led me to worry a lot about equally racist positions in Japanese writing, because they are not unrelated to Western models of thinking.

At present I rarely have my students read Benedict, and if so then always with reference to her methodology as well as the specific context in which her book was written.

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From Dr. Kalman Applbaum:

If I recall correctly, I read it for a seminar in about 1987. It was not the first experience I had with Japan. I have never read past the introduction to the Japanese version. My initial reaction was prefigured by the context in which I read it: in our seminar, the book was assigned as a museum piece. I do not include the book in any classes I teach on Japan, except I do note its historical importance in general, and how Japanese still buy it and read it (64th printing?).

From Dr. Eyal Ben-Ari:

I first read Ruth Benedict's book when I was preparing to go to Japan for my fieldwork. I was in Cambridge, England during my pre-fieldwork year.

I remember it cited in some book I was reading about the country and going out to the book store to purchase it. I thought that it would be a good introduction to Japanese society. At that time I also read and bought Takeo Doi's Amae and Chie Nakane's Japanese Society. I read all three books in English. This was twenty-one years ago.

My initial reactions were that this was an interesting book. I don't remember being totally taken up with it nor rejecting it. It was more of a chance to read one more book towards the trip to Japan for field research.

I first 'encountered' The Chrysanthemum and the Sword when I first went to Japan as a teacher on the JET Programme immediately after completing my first degree (in English Literature) in 1987. I saw it while browsing in the bookshop in Japan and thought to myself, 'I don't think I want to bother reading that, it's probably out of date - I want something that tells me about Japan today.' So I never read it (though I did read Nakane's Japanese Society).

Nor did I ever read it (or have it assigned) either while doing two years of a second BA in Japanese Studies at Oxford in the early 90s, or during my MPhil studies in Anthropology there in 1993-95. The first time, in fact, was as part of my doctoral research, doing a literature review of studies of 'the self' in Japan. At that point, I found it quite interesting (but maybe I had just been brainwashed by my fellow anthropologists!!). Nowadays I mainly regard it as an interesting and useful historical study (all anthropology eventually does become history, I guess - Maitland's revenge). It's also of historical interest for the light it throws on Benedict's thinking and on anthropology of that period.

The points that I still find of enduring value are what Benedict says about the fundamental importance of hierarchy ('keeping one's proper station') and the idea of 'debtor to the ages and the world', where I really do think Benedict showed great insight in capturing some really fundamental aspects of Japanese value orientation. I also think somebody should do a re-study about the significance Japanese people attach (or do not attach) to the concepts of giri and on today. Maybe such a study has been done, but if so, I am not aware of it.

I do teach The Chrysanthemum and the Sword as part of a graduate course looking briefly at various approaches to Japanese society and the methodologies used. The idea is to get the students to think about the methodological issues involved. I also try to set the texts in some kind of intellectual context, so that students don't just dismiss them as out-of-date stuff written by old fogies. The course is not too demanding - the students are not necessarily trained in anthropology or sociology, so I have to make it quite gentle.

I remember picking up Benedict's book at a Maruzen bookstore. It was my first stay in Japan and I had been there about 4 months, my first visit to the store. At that time I just scanned through it. Several months later, I encountered the book (in English) at a Japanese friend's house. He encouraged me to read it, which I did. I have occasionally used it or selections from it in classes.

I have written about my contact with Benedict's The Chrysanthemum and the Sword in my own book 'The Zen Arts' which is just out with Routledge Press. In particular there was a revealing incident when I started fieldwork in Japan when my tea ceremony teacher gave me a copy of Benedict's book to 'find out what was really going on'....All I would add to my comment above is that, yes, I do use the book in class, but as an example of the politicization of anthropology and also of a certain style of writing n.b. the famous passage where she writes that 'the Japanese are ...aggressive and unaggressive etc. This is a case of binary oppositions which ultimately negate each other so that the Japanese become nothing at all!

Sorry -- it's so long ago that I honestly can't remember how I thought about at the time. I read it when I was an English teacher in Yamanashi in about 1984. I'm basically critical of that book nowadays and I don't use it any classes, though I will next year, when I have to teach a course in Nihonjinron, of which it's a prime example.

The truth is that I do not remember how did I first read The Chrysanthemum and the Sword, but it was long ago and it was not in class, as actually I did not attend regular graduate Japanese Studies program. Looking at the English copy I have at home, I think that I recall buying it in NY city in my visit there after my first visit to Japan as a backpacker in 1984. It was at that visit to Japan (2 months) that I decided that Japan will be my theme for research (it was after completing my BA degree in Anthropology). I think I regarded it as one of this basic books on Japan that a 'real' anthropologist should read. As for my initial reactions: sorry, I cannot recall.

If I use it in class: Not regularly. I used to give a course titled: Models of Japanese Society and I remember it was included. In another course I gave which was an Introductory course on Japanese Anthropology I included it in "general reading". I do mention it in class in passing, either as a problematic example of anthropological methodology and/or when discussing nihonjinron, as an interesting Western example of Nihonjinron.

I can remember clearly when I first read Benedict! I went on a predecessor of the JET programme to Japan in 1981 and was for much of the year the only western foreigner (as far as I knew) in Ube City in Yamaguchi Prefecture apart from the occasional Mormon missionary. I took Benedict with me as it had been recommended by a historian of Japan, Louis Allen, who was one of those who had encouraged me to go to Japan in the first place. (The other book he recommended that I read was Nakane's Japanese Society, which I read before my interview for the position in Japan).

I read Benedict very soon after I arrived, sitting in the staff room at the junior high school where I was based. I spent many hours in that staff room as the English teachers in the school argued how (or indeed if) I could be best utilized in their classes and I read about Japan (and studied Japanese) intensively during those first few weeks.

My memories of my first reading are not strong. I think that I thought it was rather old-fashioned and did not relate to contemporary Japan as it started off with the Japanese in the war and had a section on the Meiji Restoration. I remember also though that it made me read Botchan (possibly immediately afterwards) and I remember trying to engage one of the older English teachers in the school about the book (which he professed to have read) and being frustrated by his reluctance to discuss it (he seemed embarrassed about the sections on Japanese attitudes during the war; looking back I realize that he would have been nearly 20 when the war ended and may never have discussed that period with a foreigner?).

What your query has made me do is pull my copy of Benedict off the shelf and look at the markings I made in it from that initial reading, so soon after I arrived in Japan for the first time. This is very interesting to me as I see that I was much taken by sections where she talks: about sleep being seen as an art in Japan; the inability of Japanese teachers to admit they are wrong; a desire in Japan to avoid confrontation; praise for food's looks as much as its flavour; the importance of relaxation through drinking sake in Japan, etc. All of which of course clearly reflected my own early impressions. Looking at the book again now (and of course I have re-read it several times in the intervening years) I see something quite different.

I do include the book in my contemporary course, though students use it quite carefully after attending my lecture series on the construction of Japanese ethnic identity.

I have an appalling memory, and it doesn’t appear to have shown any selective kindness towards Ruth Benedict. I have no idea when I first read that book. Perhaps as late as 1995, when I was writing up my DPhil thesis. One of the first books I read on Japan was Mirror, Sword and Jewel by Kurt Singer, or something similar sounding, which I vaguely recall being delightful and ridiculous all the same. That would have been in 1989. And the person who gave it to me to look at was (the late) Keith Thurley, Head of Industrial Relations, at the London School of Economics, where I was an economics undergraduate. He taught a course based around the theme of Continuities and Transformations between Prewar and Postwar Culture and Society. Some of the reading was faintly Oriental, but the teaching style was open. In addition to which we had a few visiting Sociology professors from Kyoto in the seminar, with leftfield backgrounds , so there was no set theoretical angle. I was very engaged by the course, and spent days burrowed in the nearby SOAS library where I discovered arcane diagrams and incredible theories about Japan. Beyond the initial delight in learning how some things were done differently, leaving the shoes in the genkan etc., these never made much impression on me on the Japan side of things, but they were interesting material for learning about aesthetics and the dichotomies of modern, colonial metaphysics (femininity versus masculinity, object=subject, relationality and being etc. ), which was all fascinating to me right then. Its possible that I read Benedict at this time too, and probably took her in the same vein.

So, no, I don't have Benedict on any reading lists, and I never have. I don't teach Anthropological methods, and if I want to put some samples of Oriental concepts on undergraduate courses, I tend to use explicitly romantic work, like Lafcadio Hearn, that gives more of a sense of the beauty and pleasure of Orientalism for the reader.

I first read it in Japanese when I was an undergraduate student. My major was not anthropology, and I read just a few chapters for pleasure. My reaction was neither positive nor negative. I thought I should read it because I had heard that it was a classic. I do not remember when I read the book through in English. Maybe soon before I went to UCLA in 1982. The Japanese translation is written in old Japanese, and I thought that Benedict's words were far more eloquent than the translation.

In the first few years after my return to Japan in 1993, I had students read The Chrysanthemum in my seminar. Generally, they enjoyed it, and the book is still an eye opener for many Japanese, but it is not clear if the students truly appreciated it. My impression is that for young Japanese people today, The Chrysanthemum is about a country that is not Japan, but infinitely close to it. At least, this is how I describe it when non-Japanese people ask about it. Two major reasons for that are the changes over time and Benedict's style of representation.

I hardly remember my initiation to Benedict's book but I do know it was far from being a remarkable experience. It must have been in the first or second year of my undergraduate years when I attended a introductory lecture class to Japanese society. Here Benedict's work was introduced to me in a row with numerous other descriptive or self-descriptive concepts of Japan such as the i.e. society, vertical society, interpersonalism, moratorium man and others I nowadays tend to associate with the famed Japan discourse aka nihon bunka ron.

I can't recall how my reaction was in particular but I am sure I was not impressed very much. It is quite likely that I reacted rather negatively because I could not figure out how such a simple conceptualization should be sufficient enough to explain the choice of behavior of many million individual subjects. At the beginning of my studies, I had no particular predefined interest in Japan as such. I somehow was sure that Japanese society is better explained by using sociological standard ideas of modernization; aberrations should be in explanatory range of theory or due to historical particularities (path dependence).

Although I am generally over-conspicuous of any totalizing concept, I guess that the background of that particular lecture was partly responsible for my critical attitude. My cautious stance even prevented me from reading the entire book. I never read the book in this class and even though I was once expected to read either it or any other out of a list of four, five books in a course on the history of Japanese Studies, I went for a sociological study (probably by Fukutake Tadashi) instead.

I do remember re-reading parts of the book when I came across Clifford Geertz's Works and Lives: The anthropologist as author. This certainly opened my eyes, and at the same time it confirmed some of my previous assumptions about the limited usefulness of Benedict's concept. I am still reluctant to deal with it to a greater extent. I don't use it in classroom teaching though I certainly would in case of particular teaching assignments.

I first read The Chrysanthemum and the Sword in 1980, a few months after my arrival in Japan to teach at an "alternative" English school. My Japanese colleague was a former hippie and radical, and I quickly became immersed in his circle of craftspeople, musicians, and societal dropouts of various sorts. Thus, when I read Chrysanthemum, my reaction was, "This has nothing to do with Japan today! This is outmoded..." -- a reaction very much shaped by the people around me. The next time I read The Chrysanthemum and the Sword was in 1985, at a graduate seminar I was auditing at UC Santa Cruz. This time, the book's arguments made more sense to me, but I also had doubts: "Does this book now make more sense to me because I understand Japan more fully, or because I am being socialized into thinking like an American anthropology graduate student?" The third time I read it was as a graduate student at Cornell in 1989 (but not, I might add, for a course: it was not assigned in the courses on Japan that I took). I began to appreciate it more fully for its subtly of exposition, but still remained skeptical: "Anthropologists seem always to want to emphasize cultural difference, but in fact Japanese and Americans, as inhabitants of large capitalist countries, are 90 percent alike, aren't they?" That view informed my dissertation, and my later writings on ikigai; I was trying to emphasize how two American and Japanese grandmothers, or small businessmen in their forties, or rock musicians, might in crucial respects resemble one another more than they do most of their fellow citizens, and how institutional structures and social pressures, as much as "culture" per se, shape how Japanese, and all people, perceive and act within their social worlds. All that has been, at least indirectly, an ongoing reaction against Benedict: one based not on a political reading of Benedict, but more simply, on a lack of fit with what I saw in empirical reality. A couple of years ago, I picked up Chrysanthemum again in passing, and marveled at its subtlety--but again, all my skepticism welled up. Personally speaking, Benedict's Chrysanthemum (as well as Patterns of Culture) makes me believe all the more that culture is an anthropological construct with a real but finally only a limited validity in its application to messy reality. Benedict created the widespread American belief in culture, it's said, but today after reading Benedict, who can believe in culture? With all due respect to Benedict's undoubted genius...

I first read Benedict as an undergraduate. It was assigned as a class text in Cultural Anthropology. Because of my Japanese-American background, it was not my first experience with Japan. The version I read was in English. My initial reaction was that Benedict got a lot of mileage for one who never spoke the language or even went to Japan for fieldwork! I have used the book from time to time either in my Japanese Culture class or my Japanese film class. Just the other day in my film class we saw Kitano Takeshi's "Hana-bi" and I commented to my students that Kitano must have read Benedict before he made the film because the aesthetic side and the violent side are definitely represented.

I'm embarrassed to say that I don't remember that much about my "first experience" with the book but I will do my best to help out

Did you read it in a class? Yes - I read it as an undergraduate at Harvard. But I don't remember if it was assigned for the cultural and personality section of Anthro 110 (intro to soc anthro) or was it part of the Modern Japanese Society class I took. I took the intro class in the spring of 1983 (gosh, almost 20 years ago!) and the ethnographic subject the following fall, so it's hard to remember which class was which.

Did you read the English version? Yes

Do you remember your initial reactions? Not really! I think because it was one of so many books I had to read, it was a part of an overall impression of the study of Japan, and also of the study of anthropology - the culture and personality school, part of the flow from Boas to Benedict and Mead.

Do you include the book in classes you currently teach? I did in the past (early - mid nineties) but I don't anymore. Why. . . it is very hard these days to get undergraduates to read a whole book. Students like to read journal articles and chapters from edited volumes reproduced in photocopied readers. Also the style is a bit formal and old-fashioned. Secondly, and more importantly, students with little experience with Japan look at this book as not an analysis but a moral judgment of Japan and are sometimes eager to leap to conclusions (e.g. "aha, this is the way Japanese people ARE!" and it's not necessarily a productive exercise ). Even though I don't disagree with everything Benedict wrote, I often end up disagreeing with the way undergraduates digest her writing. It's too problematic to teach as only one small part of a survey course on Japan. If I had more time, it might work better but I don't have that much time to spend on one book when my semester is only 12 weeks long.

Did you read it in a class? I can't actually remember if I read it in a class or not. I might have. I think I may have read it first as a high school student (or freshman in college?) because "it was there."

Was it the first experience you had with Japan? No. I had already had previous Japan experience.

Did you read the English version? Yes.

Do you remember your initial reactions? My initial reactions were that Benedict must have never been to Japan (this was prior to knowing anything about her or even know her as an 'anthropologist'). The Japan she described and the Japan I knew were basically polar opposites.

Do you include the book in classes you currently teach? No, not in any that I currently teach.

Since you already "appreciate" the various aspects of Benedict's text, I suppose my answers are not so helpful. I will merely end by noting that my family has had a long history with "Asia" (both South East Asia and East Asia); so I grew up with that part of the world as an active part of my "imaginary". Europe was not a part of my "imaginary" as a child/adolescent. So, books about Asia -- fiction, autobiographical, non-fiction, etc. -- were easily found on our bookshelves. This undoubtedly "pushed me" in particular directions -- or "limited" my choices if you will -- but I was never forced to read the Benedict book under question.

I first read The Chrysanthemum and the Sword as a high school senior in a Japan Seminar class I took at the American School in Japan. At the time, I don't think I understood the content in any depth, but was impressed by the way Benedict characterized Japanese culture without ever being in Japan.

The work came to my attention again as an undergraduate in a Japanese Self and Society class, I think my junior year. I remember being amazed at her characterization of cultural traits such as on and giri, but felt she was dead wrong about others. I read the book again in grad school as a part of my anthropology program at Illinois with David Plath. I think this was when I purchased my first Japanese version.

During fieldwork I met many Japanese scholars and civilians who knew of and had read the book, and I found it to be a good conversation charger. I have talked with many Japanese in their fifties and sixties for whom the book was required reading as part of their undergraduate curriculum.

Today I keep a copy of the book both in my study at home and here in Gordy Hall. I just included it in a proposal I wrote for a new course entitled, Japan: A Sociocultural Interpretation. Personally, I think the book is historically significant, interesting and useful. I like to use it both for its insights into Japanese culture and as a reminder of how history and political circumstances are so closely tied to our interpretation of things.

I'm not entirely sure about when I first read The Chrysanthemum and the Sword. I know that I read it in graduate school, but it was never assigned to a class I took. I read it on my own, having purchased it in a used book store (later to find out that I had bought a first edition, something I didn't notice at the time). I think I bought early in my graduate studies, but I really don't remember exactly when.

Reading The Chrysanthemum and the Sword was not the first experience I had with Japan. I had been to Japan and I grew up seeing the many slides of Japan my father took when he visited there in the 1950's in the US Army. Actually, my very first experience with Japan was Godzilla films shown on the Creature Double Feature on Channel 56 in Boston when I was growing up, in addition to my father's slides.

I don't remember my initial reactions very well.

I do not assign the entire book in any classes that I currently teach. However, I sometimes assign a couple of chapters from it in a course on Perspectives on Japanese Culture that I teach.

I read the book, in English, as an undergraduate. It was not my initial "encounter" with scholarship on Japan, but it did come early in my college education. I got a lot of it-- as I would today, were I to reread it.

Did you read it in a class? No. I first read the book when I was in my third year reading anthropology in the University of Amsterdam. It was in 1967. I had become interested in Japan, and started to look for what anthropological studies I could find. I bought books by Benedict, Dore, Embree, Smith, Beardsley, and others. I wrote a brief paper about John Embree's Suye Mura for a course (obtaining a paperback copy the book thru a friend in America). I bought Benedict's book in November 1967 in an academic bookshop in Amsterdam. It was the first British edition by Routledge & Kegan Paul of 1967. In these years I pretty much cruised on 'teachers at a distance', meaning the authors I read. Japanese anthropology was not taught in the Netherlands and no one knew much about it. To learn Japanese and study Japanology I enrolled in the Japanese department in Leiden University in 1968.

When I graduated in 1971 my Dutch teachers urged me to apply for a Harkness Fellowship to go and study Japanese anthropology in America. Fortunately, I received a fellowship, and was accepted by the university of my choice.

Was it the first experience you had with Japan? No. I read Japanese literature in translations, saw Japanese films, followed news about Japan. At this time I met my first Japanese and began to know them better. All this was in Amsterdam and Europe. I did not set foot on Japanese soil until September 1973.

Did you read the English version? Yes, literally. Translations. Of course you know of the early Japanese translation. A French translation of the American edition was not published until 1987, Editions Picquier, Paris. I don't know in what other languages the book might have been translated.

Do you remember your initial reactions? I had read a good deal of American anthropology by then, including Benedict's earlier works. I read The Chrysanthemum and the Sword in the light of the earlier work that I knew. I knew too little about Japan to be able to judge the Japanese ethnography. That came much later. It took ten years and more before I knew what Japanese ethnography was and entailed. Still, I always felt very sympathetic to her work, those in her anthropological circle, and to her as a person. What she wrote about Japan was insightful and detailed. Much later I read a much briefer report that she wrote in preparation for the Allied Occupation and Administration of occupied Holland. Again: insightful and mostly right.

Do you include the book in classes you currently teach? In introductory classes, classes on the American anthropology of Japan, classes on wartime anthropology, that sort of thing. Students may use it for a paper or essay. I do not include the book in everything, or even the majority of what I teach. But it is a book that students of the anthropology of Japan should have read.

I talk about the book in some lectures and contexts. About the book itself, the reaction of the Japanese scholarly world - criticism and praise - since it appeared, and since the Japanese translation. In Japan the book is not out of favour at all. The Japanese translation still is a best-seller. Recently in anthropological circles, Tamotsu AOKI has highly praised Benedict and her book (chapter 2) in a book that he published in 1991 book on a number of postwar theories about Japanese culture.