Overlooked aspects of the chrysanthemum and the sword

Dialectical Anthropology

Volumn 24, Issue 2, 1999, Pages 217-232

  Suzuki, Peter T ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF NEBRASKA AT OMAHA   (United States)

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EID: 33847327887     PISSN: 03044092     EISSN: 15730786     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1023/A:1007091132480     Document Type: Article

References (50)

1. Ruth Benedict, The Chrysanthemum and the Sword: Patterns of Japanese Culture (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1946), pp. 168-170 (original italics).
2. Peter Suzuki, "Suicide Prevention in the Pacific War: WWII," Suicide and Life-Threatening Behavior vol. 21 (1991), pp. 291-298.
3. Office of War Information, Area III, Overseas Branch, FM AD September 15, 1945, "Restricted." National Archives, Record Group 208, Entry 370, Box 444.
4. As one source that Benedict used stated, "contemporary Japanese are all heir to the Samurai" and "The Samurai was trained to think of death in exactly the same way he thinks of life. How best to die constituted the highest part of Samurai training as much as how best to live." She then continues: "How best to die" has, quite understandably, little or nothing to do with the state of one's feelings and the famous Japanese pattern of suicide brings this out very clearly. In the Occident suicides are regarded as acts of despair, loneliness, frustration or some other state of the soul. In Japan "one does not kill oneself to be rid of an unhappy life," but to have a "useful" death. "Useful," "noble" deaths are distinguished from (physically) "weak" deaths by the occasion which is chosen, the means-whether drowning, which is "weak," or cutting the body, which is "strong"-by the status of the person concerned, the date that is selected for the deed, and the like. The most elaborate complex of rules and restrictions, of course, concerned seppuku (harakin), the Samurai's privilege, but all causes of suicide were judged on this scale of properly accomplishing a purpose by this act. It could be an honored and final statement of responsibility, of innocence, of protest, of apology, of remonstrance. To rank as "noble," it had been weighed in the balance with other alternatives and actively preferred. Except when trapped by an opponent in civil war or condemned by a court of justice, all kinds of suicide in Japan were only one possible way of meeting the crucial situation. However honored suicide was, there were other honored courses. Instead of committing suicide at the New Year, an insolvent debtor could honorably, though with loss of status, sell all he had and endeavor to pay his debts by hard work. A soldier defeated in civil war could flee and renew his efforts for final success; only if he were trapped by the enemy and helpless, he robbed them of of their spoil by killing himself before capture. A man might honorably commit suicide to protest a humiliation he had undergone, but the far more usual course was to retaliate; violent Japanese reactions of vengeance to what they regard as insults make up a large part of their favorite stories and dramas. Suicides entered into as a means of apologizing for errors-failure of a mission, injury to a friend-are honored in Japan just because they represent an extreme choice made by an individual, and the same is even more true of love suicides, or of vengeance to what they regard as insults make up a large part of their favorite stories and dramas. Suicides entered into as a means of apologizing for errors-failure of a mission, injury to a friend-are honored in Japan just because they represent an extreme choice made by an individual, and the same is even more true of love suicides, or of those who died to protest a national humiliation like the Exclusion Act or the naval parity treaties. Death by one's own hand in Japan, therefore, was not a final personal capitulation to an overmastering hostile universe but a carefully calculated act of individual initiative directed toward approved goals. As Komakichi Nohara puts it, suicide is the supreme Japanese "argument." Contrary to the impression of many Westerners, suicide was not extravagantly common. Their rate of suicide has been exceeded by several Occidental countries, notably by pre-Nazi Germany. The honor the Japanese bestow upon it was in proportion to their view of it as an act not of submission and self-abusement but as the deed of a person who took affairs into his own hands, chose among alternatives and achieved a desired outcome by the most drastic possible means." (Original underlinings; references omitted), Chrysanthemum, pp. 9-10.
5. Yoshitomo Takahashi, "Culture and Suicide: From a Japanese Psychiatrist's Perspective," Suicide & Life-Threatening Behavior, vol. 27 (1997): pp. 137145.
6. See also his Suicide in Japan (Tokyo: Tokyo Institute of Psychiatry, 1993); His affirmation of the importance of Benedict's book regarding Japanese suicide is contained in an e-mail letter to me of 8/7/97.
7. In my article on Benedict's study of Japanese suicide, I note nine publications (from 1972-1989) on Japanese suicide by four Japanese sucidologists, including Takahashi, which cite the importance of Benedict's work. Peter Suzuki, "Suicide Prevention in the Pacific War," pp. 297-298 (several of the authors are North Americans but originally were from Japan).
8. Benedict, Chrysanthemum, pp. 7-8.
9. Office of Strategic Services, Bureau of Overseas Intelligence, National Archives, Report No. 1307, Record Group 208, Entry 370, Box 403. For an analysis of this document, see Peter Suzuki, "Analyses of Japanese films [by Geoffrey Gorer et al] in Wartime Washington," Asian Profile, vol. 23 (1985), pp. 371-380.
10. L. Anderson and Donald Richie, The Japanese Film: An and Industry (New York: Grove Press, 1959);
11. see also, Donald Richie, Japanese Cinema: Film Style and National Character (New York: Doubleday & Co., 1971). This book was an extensively revised, expanded, and updated version of his Japanese Movies, first published in 1961 by Japan Travel Bureau, Tokyo.
12. Noel Burch, To the Distant Observer: Form and Meaning in the Japanese Cinema (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979), pp. 263-264.
13. Gregory Barrett, Archetypes in Japanese Films: The Sociopolitical and Religious Significance of the Principal Heroes and Heroines (Susquehanna, PA: Susquehanna University Press, 1987), p. 147; Kyoko Hirano, Mr. Smith
14. This observation is made based partially as well on my personal acquaintance, years ago, with Richie. He and I were undergraduates at Columbia in the late 40's and early '50s and were in several classes together. In the 1949-50 fallspring semester we attended Professor Hugh Borton's "Modem History of Japan" class. (In the summer of 1950, both of us were also in Professor Horace Miner's "American History, 1830 -1900." Richie, a veteran who had been in the Occupation Army in Japan and who had been the movie critic for Far Eastern Stars and Stripes, was specializing in Japanese studies in preparation for return to Japan after his degree. As I recall, on one occasion, after Borton's discussion of Benedict's book, Richie, his friend Al Brown, who was also a veteran who had been in the Occupation Army and was specializing in Japanese studies, and I spent some time at their apartment, near 116th Street and Broadway, discussing Benedict's book. Richie carried on most of the conversation and spoke enthusiastically about its significance, including its understanding of Japanese film (several years later, while working part-time at Columbia's library, he was producing short experimental films in pursuit of one of his hobbies).
15. Meilen, The Waves at Genji's Door, p. xii. (Italics added.)
16. For the very powerful influence by the anthropologist Geoffrey Gorer on some aspects of the analyses of Japanese films on some of the earlier studies, including the OSS study and the book by Anderson and Richie, The Japanese Film;
17. see also, Suzuki, "Analyses of Japanese films [by Geoffrey Gorer ei o/J in Wartime Washington."
18. Margaret Mead, An Anthropologist at Work: Writings of Ruth Benedict (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1959), She also writes in the same sentence that Benedict did not mention Geoffrey Gorer's paper on the Japanese "... which was the precursor of her own work on national character in general and on Japan in particular." M'ead has a point because Benedict cites his 1942 document in several places in her 1945 classified report, "Japanese Behavior Patterns" (pp. 2, 38,. 50, 53). On page 2 of the Benedict report the reader will find the following: "The basic problem of how Japanese children are reared to be the carrier of the culture is omitted because the subject has already been discussed by Geoffrey Gorer in a well-known study."
19. In the spring of 1996 an anthropologist in a graduate program on the East Coast, who was teaching The Chrysanthemum and the Sword as part of his course, e-mailed me to ask whether Benedict had conducted interviews in the internment camps, because his students had raised this question, and they thought it would have been unethical for her to have done so. I replied that those whom she had interviewed were living in or near Washington, D.C., and some had been in the camps and had moved out under the "relocation program," and that she certainly had not gone to any of the camps for interview purposes. This illustrates what kind of misunderstanding still exists regarding her research methods even amorg those teaching about Benedict and her book and why there is still criticism of Benedict concerning her job at the Office of War Information.
20. "FMAD Staff Meeting," March 8, 1945, National Archives, Record Group 208, Entry 370, Box 443.
21. Peter Suzuki, "Ruth Benedict, Robert Hashima and The Chrysanthemum and the Sword," in Interdisciplinary Anthropology, vol. 3 (1985), p. 60;
22. Barrett, Archetypes in Japanese Films, pp. 129-30, interprets the plot as a kind of "noble sacrifice."
23. . Suzuki , "Ruth Benedict, Robert Hashima and The Chrysanthemum and the Sword," pp. 59-60.
24. For a discussion of the water incident in The Chrysanthemum and the Sword, see pp. 107-08.
25. Suzuki, , "Ruth Benedict, Robert Hashima and The Chrysanthemum and the Sword."
26. Robert Hashima, Rusu Benedekuto Joshi no Tsuioku in Minzokugaku Kenkyu ("Reiminiiscences about Professor Ruth Benedict"), vol. 14: (1949), pp. 6669.
27. Earlier, he was the co-author, with the anthropologist Morris Opler (who also worked in FMAD), of this publication: "The Rice Goddess and the Fox in Japanese Religion and Folk Practice," American Anthropologist, vol. 48 (1946), pp. 43-453.
28. See John W. Bennett & Michio Nagai, "The Japanese Critique of the Methodology of Benedict's Chrysanthemum and the Sword," American Anthropologist, vol. 55 (1953), pp. 404-141, for a summary of the articles that appeared in the symposium in Japanese.
29. "I believe that Dr. Benedict wrote me the letter on V-J day because we had discussed on many occasions the role the Emperor could play in ending the war and bring about a peaceful occupation of Japan by the U.S. Forces. In fact, when I first met her in January 1945 in Washington, D.C, Dr. Benedict told me that her assignment was on Japan, and that she had to make some kind of recommendation to the U.S. government as to how the Emperor should be treated in the event of U.S. occupation of Japan. When she asked for my opinion, I gave her my reasons why I would recommend that the Emperor be saved if we were to have a peaceful and successful occupation of Japan. I honestly believe that if it were not for Dr. Benedict, the Emperor may have been treated more severely and tried as a war criminal at the international tribunal. After her study on Japan was submitted [Report No. 25, "Japanese Behavior Patterns"], Dr. Benedict told me that the State Department, former Ambassador to Japan Joseph Grew, General MacArthur in Australia, and others concerned all agreed to her recommendation to save the Emperor. She appeared very happy and satisfied over the results. When I left Washington in September 1945. . ., Dr. Benedict informed me that she had obtained permission to write a book based on her study of Japan and had asked me to read her draft upon my return. Since I did not return to the U.S. as scheduled, Dr. Benedict sent me a copy of her book through Clyde Kluckkhohn when he visited Japan shortly after it was published. At the same time, she had given me a set of questionnaires she had prepared and asked me to conduct a random survey of how the status of women in Japan had changed with the end of war. During one of our discussions, Dr. Benedict had remarked that she thought Japanese women were much happier and/or satisfied than American women from the standpoint of sexual life even though the status of Japanese women was regarded much lower than that of U.S. women. She had already anticipated at that time that there would be some changes for Japanese women with the end of war. In fact, after the war, almost everybody in Japan used to joke mat the only thing among the postwar products that got tougher was 'women and socks' (Onna to kutsushita)." Robert Seido Hashima, letter to Peter Suzuki, August 15, 1986.
30. One directive from the U.S. government to its white workers in the camps read as follows: "The work areas . . . should be referred to as 'relocation centers' or 'relocation project,' not as 'internment centers' or 'concentration camp.' Even the use of the word 'camp' should be avoided since it carries some implication of internment and close military surveillance." War Relocation Authority, "Information, Objectives and Principles of the War Relocation Authority," Washington, D.C. ("Confidential") n.d. (1942?), pp. 4-5; National Archives, Record Group 210;
31. See Peter Suzuki, "Anthropologists in the Wartime Camps for Japanese Americans: A Documentary Study," Dialectical Anthropology, vol. 6 (1981), p. 42.
32. "Camp Harmony," Puyallup, WA, May 1942-August 1942; Minidoka Relocation Camp, Hunt, ID, September 1942-September 1944.
33. In an unpublished manuscript (ca. 1947) on postwar race prejudice she also notes with sympathy the wartime treatment of Japanese Americans. See Margaret Mead, An Anihropologist at Work, p. 361.
34. See Peter Suzuki, "A Retrospective Analysis of a Wartime 'National Character' Study [by Weston LaBarre]," Dialectical Anthropology, vol. 5 (1980) pp. 33-46; 1981; On p. 45 of "Anthropologists in the Wartime Camps for Japanese Americans," I note the few anthropologists who showed even a glimmer of sympathy for the incarcerated);
35. "The University of California Japanese Evacuation and Resettlement Sudy: A Proglegomenon, " Dialectical Anthropology, vol. 10: (1986), pp. 189-213
36. (reprinted in Jeffrey Chan et al. eds., The Big Aiieeeee! An Anthology of Chinese American and Japanese American Literature, (New York: Meridian, 1991), pp. 370-413;
37. "When Black was White: Misapplied Anthropology in Wartime America," Man and Life, vol. 12 (1986), pp. 1-12;
38. "For the Sake of Inter-University Comity: The Attempted Suppression by the University of California of Morton Grodzins' Americans Betrayed," in Y. Ichioka éd., Views from Within: The Japanese American Evacuation and Resettlement Study, (Los Angeles: UCLA Asian American Studies Center, 1989) pp. 95-123. In my 1980 article cited above, on p. 45 I wrote: "Compare [Weston] LaBarre with the compassionate and sympathetic statements about the Japanese made by another anthropologist, Ruth Benedict, who had also done a national character study of the Japanese during World War II, in her 1945 letter to a former inmate at Manzanar Relocation Camp [it turned out that he was in Poston, AZ, rather than in Manznar] who later worked alongside Benedict . . .
39. Robert Hashima, Rusu Benedekuto Joshi No Tsuioku, in Minzokugaku Kenkyu, vol. 14 (1949), p. 69." LaBarre's study was racist; unfortunately, he was not the only racist anthropologist who worked in the camps.
40. In all honesty, my graduate work in anthropology at Columbia (M.A. in anthropology, 1952) had very little to do with my interest in Benedict. Indeed, in the courses that I took that should have dealt with The Chrysanthemum and the Sword, hardly any mention of it was made. The courses I have in mind: Professor A. L. Kroeber's "Value Systems and National Character," spring 1951;
41. Visiting Professor Douglas Haring's courses "Cultural Aspects of Individual Character," and "Cultural Patterns in Japan," Anthropology, summer 1951; Dr. Margaret Mead's section on culture and personality in the team-taught course "General Anthropology,", fall-spring 1951-52, Interestingly, more on Benedict's book was discussed by Hugh Borton in the history course on modern Japan that I took as an undergraduate in Columbia College than in any of the Columbia graduate anthropology courses (see Note 14, above). Borton had been an advisor to the Military Government in occupied Japan and discussed Benedict's insights Benedict in both her Report No. 25, "Japanese Behavior Patterns" and her book). More striking is the fact that in J. P. B. de Josselin de Jong's Saturday seminars in the mid-1950s, at Leiden University (where I received my M.Phil. [Doctoraal] and my Ph.D. [Doctoraat] in anthropology), several sessions were devoted to Benedict's book; yet Leiden was supposedly the hotbed of structuralism. Actually, J. P. B. de Josselin de Jong was very much in tune with American anthropology (for example, one semester was devoted to discussions of articles in the A. L. Kroeber-edited Anthropology Today [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1953],
42. Kluckhohn's Mirror for Man [New York: McGraw Hill, 1949]
43. and Linton's Cultural Background of Personality [New York: Appleton, Century, Crofts, 1945]) as he himself had publications in archaeology and linguistics as well as in cultural anthropology. As to why Benedict was "neglected" by the Columbia Department of Anthropology after she died,
44. see Sidney W. Mintz, "Ruth Benedict," in Sydel Silverman ed., Totems and Teachers: Perspectives on History of Anthropology (New York: Columbia University Press, 1981), pp. 141-166,
45. and Robert F. Murphy, "Anthropology at Columbia: A Reminiscence," Dialectical Anthropology, vol. 16 (1991), pp. 65-84.
46. For an observation made by Benedict hi her book that I have used as a starting point for an analysis of an aspect of the Japanese, see Suzuki, Le jeu du shogi, révélateur de la pratique des affaires, de la diplomatie et du caractère national Japonais ("Japanese Chess, Japanese Corporate Practices and International Diplomacy, and an Adumbration of National Character"), Cahiers de Sociologie Economique et Culturelle (formerly Ethnospychologie), vol'. 1 (1984), pp. 56-81.
47. Also on shame vs. guilt cultures as first having been publicly discussed, see Suzuki, "Talcott Parsons' Unpublished Wartime Study on the Japanese National Character," Asian Profile, vol. 17 (1989), pp. 227-234.
48. Rob van Ginkel, "Ruth Benedict over Nederlanders," Etnofoor, vol. 3, no. 2 (1990) pp. 5-16;
49. "Typically Dutch -Ruth Benedict on the National Character of Netherlanders," Netherlands Journal of Social Sciences, vol. 28 (1992), pp. 50-71;
50. Notifies over Nederlanders: Antropologische reflecties, (Amsterdam/Meppel: Boom, 1997), pp. 73-122.