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Ruth Benedict: Cultures
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[J]ust as Benedict was wrong about Japanese culture, she was wrong about what the Occupation could and did achieve. In breaking the totalitarian power that the government had over the people, the Occupation did not “break up” the pattern of Japanese culture itself. The process was far more complicated than that. Japanese culture, like all complex cultures, contained many conflicting traditions and ideals. Long-standing aspirations for peace and democracy, which had been virtually silenced by the wartime regime, recovered and thrived under the post-war Constitution. But this story would be the subject for another work.
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By far the most critical, indeed dismissive, reader of Benedict among the Minzokugaku kenkyu contributors is Watsuji Tetsuro. An important thinker of prewar Japan, whose philosophical investigation of Japanese culture, Fudo: Ningengakuteki kosatsu (Climate: Humanistic Investigations), first published in 1935, is in fact similar to Chrysanthemum in its quest for fundamental Japaneseness, Watsuji seems almost displeased to have had to read Chrysanthemum in order to make a contribution to the journal.[4] He bursts out in complaint, stating that the book “has no academic value whatsoever” (1950: 23). His essay took the form of a letter to Ishida Eiichiro, anthropologist and the editor of Minzokugaku kenkyu.
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The Pimas represented a way of life that Benedict at first called “Dionysian” after hearing the stories, narratives, songs, and oratory collected from various tellers during her three-month stay. The oral literature concerns the creation of the world and its transformations over time, the creation of the O’odham people, and other cultural traditions. Featuring a pair of man-gods, a female monster born of woman, and a conquest of Pimas by Pimas, they serve to mark the O’odham as a people distinct from their neighbors near and far.
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Benedict's war work included a major study, largely completed in 1944, aimed at understanding Japanese culture. 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?
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In contradistinction to the above, Benedict can ... be seen as a “culture giver” to postwar Japan. When she refers to American freedom, American informality and openness and therefore, genuine human relationships, and American informal democracy, she effectively places these traits, intentionally or not and despite her relativist principles, one step above those of Japan. They become something that Japanese, even with their peculiar ethics, can hope to aspire to, no matter bow much she insists that her American readers be patient, tolerant, and understanding of Japan’s peculiarities. After all, Chrysanthemum was part of wartime “enemy morals studies” and was produced by the victorious nation about a defeated nation. In this sense, it is understandable that it became a verdict for Japanese -- no doubt a kind verdict -- as to why Japan had to be defeated by the U.S. and how it could make itself more like the U.S. in order to salvage itself and its culture.
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Benedict hoped that the Japanese would "naturally" change, but as a government researcher she could not leave it at that. In the passage quoted earlier, Benedict made clear that the victorious U.S. government should not shirk from its task of using "that amount of hardness, no more and no less, which will break up old and dangerous patterns . . ."(37) There is something chilling about an obituary written by a person calling for an execution. It calls to mind the image of a priest who, when his beautiful funeral ceremony is disrupted by the deceased struggling to sit up in the coffin, smacks him over the head with the shovel and then returns to his speech on how we should honor the life he had lived. It is in this context that Benedict's "respect" for Japanese culture should be understood.
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