Japan and National Anthropology: A Critique (Routledgecurzon Asian Studies Association of Australia East Asia Series, 6)

Japan and National Anthropology

Japan and National Anthropology is an empirically rich and theoretically sophisticated study which challenges the conventional view of Japanese studies in general and Anglophone anthropological writings on Japan in particular. Sonia Ryang explores the process by which the post-war anthropology of Japan has come to be dominated by certain conceptual and methodological approaches and exposes the extent to which this process has occluded our view of Japan. In an attempt to move away from theoretical trends which identify Japanese cultural boundaries with Japan’s nation-state boundaries, consequentially portraying the country as racially homogeneous and culturally unique, Ryang examines: • • • • •

how wartime enemy studies shaped the direction of post-war anthropology the historical effects and significance of Chrysanthemum and the Sword key texts from the anthropology enquiry that started within the US military occupation of Japan (1945–1952) Japanese kinship and its relationship to the study of Japan as a nation the origins and development of the studies of the Japanese self.

This book will be welcomed by all students of Japanese anthropology and Japanese history. Its historical breadth and criticism of existing approaches provide a fresh and reasoned insight into the development and future of anthropology of Japan. Sonia Ryang is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Johns Hopkins University, USA. She is also the author of North Koreans in Japan.

RoutledgeCurzon/Asian Studies Association of Australia (ASAA) East Asia Series Edited by Tessa Morris-Suzuki and Morris Low Editorial Board: Dr Gemerie Barmé (Australian National University), Professor Colin Mackerras (Griffith University), Professor Vera Mackie (Curtin University), and Associate Professor Sonia Ryang (Johns Hopkins University).

This series represents a showcase for the latest cutting-edge research in the field of East Asian studies, from both established scholars and rising academics. It will include studies from every part of the East Asian region (including China, Japan, North and South Korea, and Taiwan) as well as comparative studies dealing with more than one country. Topics covered may be contemporary or historical, and relate to any of the humanities or social sciences. The series is an invaluable source of information and challenging perspectives for advanced students and researchers alike. RoutledgeCurzon is pleased to invite proposals for new books in the series. In the first instance, any interested authors should contact: Professor Tessa Morris-Suzuki Division of Pacific and Asian History Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies Australian National University Canberra, ACT0200 Australia Dr Morris Low Department of Asian Language and Studies University of Queensland Brisbane, Queensland 4072 Australia

RoutledgeCurzon/Asian Studies Association of Australia (ASAA) East Asia Series

1. Gender in Japan Power and public policy Vera Mackie 2. The Chaebol and Labour in Korea The development of management strategy in Hyundai Seung Ho Kwon and Michael O’Donnell 3. Rethinking Identity in Modern Japan Nationalism as aesthetics Yumiko Iida 4. The Manchurian Crisis and Japan Society, 1931–33 Sandra Wilson 5. Korea’s Development Under Park Chung Hee Rapid Industrialization, 1961–1979 Seymour Hyung-A Kim 6. Japan and National Anthropology A critique Sonia Ryang 7. Homoerotic Sensibilities in Late Imperial Japan Wu Cuncun

Japan and National Anthropology A critique

Sonia Ryang

First published 2004 by RoutledgeCurzon 11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by RoutledgeCurzon 29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001 This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2004. RoutledgeCurzon is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group © 2004 Sonia Ryang All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data A catalog record for this book has been requested ISBN 0-203-79981-X Master e-book ISBN

ISBN 0-203-68183-5 (Adobe eReader Format) ISBN 0–415–70032–9 (pbk)

For Samantha and Thomas

Contents

Acknowledgments Notes for the reader Introduction

1

2

3

xi xv 1

Anthropology and Japan Japan before to anthropology What this book is about Chapter-by-chapter outline

1 5 8 11

Anthropology and the war

15

Compulsive, anally eroticized Japanese Suye Mura, an ethnography The master narrative Embree’s dilemma Debating national character

15 23 28 35 40

Benedictian myth

47

Chrysanthemum’s strange life Postwar reactions Chrysanthemum as a political intervention On shame culture

47 51 58 67

Occupation anthropology

73

Formative years of the Japan field “New ethnographies” Oyabun-kobun as the antinomy of democracy Family-like factories Beyond Occupation anthropology

73 81 87 91 95

x 4

5

6

Contents Locating Japanese kinship

101

Kinship as a key site Prewar kinship studies – Ariga Kizaemon Postwar kinship studies Regional diversity Kinship nomenclature D™zoku: neither lineage nor descent

101 103 114 122 126 131

The emergence of national anthropology

139

Chie Nakane and ie society All-pervasive ie In search of the cultural core National anthropology

139 148 155 160

The Japanese self

166

From medicine to society Amae, the universal derived from the cultural particular Words and ontology Construction and deconstruction

166 174 180 186

Afterword

193

Notes Bibliography Index

205 223 253

Acknowledgments

This book derives from years of having been a student of anthropology that taught me to think carefully about human societies and culture and to read critically the existing studies thereof. I am indebted to my past teachers and present mentors as well as colleagues at the University of Cambridge, the Australian National University, and Johns Hopkins University. In all these places, I met remarkable thinkers and admirable individuals and benefited from their wisdom and influence. Among them, I wish especially to acknowledge Professors Alan Macfarlane, Marilyn Strathern, James Fox, Gavan McCormack, Tessa Morris-Suzuki, Sidney Mintz, and the late Ernest Gellner. Interactions with them gave me ideas for this book and the mental strength to pursue them. My immediate and most profound thanks go to Professors Mark Selden, Alan Macfarlane, Ezra Vogel, William Kelly, David Plath, Richard Minear, and Dr. Wendy Walker, all of whom read and commented extensively on earlier or advanced drafts of this book and gave me valuable insights, suggestions, and criticisms. In particular, Mark Selden, my closest mentor, read and commented on numerous versions of an earlier draft. Wendy Walker, a dear friend, carefully read and improved the pre-submission version. I am indebted to Mark and Wendy. Professor Minear, whom I have yet to meet, closely read, edited, and commented on crucial chapters, for which I am most grateful. I have been very fortunate in terms of friendship and support, surrounded by friends, colleagues, and mentors, including Hussein Agrama, Linda Angst, Sara Berry, KyeongHee Choi, Michael Dutton, Gillian FeeleyHarnik, Norma Field, David Howell, Edgar Krebs, Soo Hee Lee, John Lie, Marlene Mayo, Vera McKie, Karen Nakamura, Ben Orlove, Maria Philips, Jennifer Robertson, William Rowe, Erica Schoenberger, Miriam Silverberg, and S. Hoon Song, among others. Interactions and discussions with them on formal and informal occasions, more or less frequent, sometimes at conferences and sometimes over the phone, helped me sustain my interest in the project. It is, indeed, impossible to name all the friends and colleagues who one way or another contributed to the formation of this book, enduring my preoccupations and sudden outbursts of thinking aloud.

xii Acknowledgments My thanks are also due to the Yale University Council for East Asian Studies, who invited me to a stimulating seminar where I presented part of the ideas contained in this book to a thought-provoking audience. In particular, Professor William Kelly gave me important suggestions and comments on that occasion, as on many other such occasions where Bill has taught me and helped me. I am particularly indebted to Dr. Gordon Mathews and Dr. Tan CheeBeng, editors for the journal Asian Anthropology. My article “Chrysanthemum’s Strange Life: Ruth Benedict in Postwar Japan” was published in the inaugural issue of Asian Anthropology (vol. 1 (2002): 87–116) and that article became a large part of Chapter 2. I wish to thank the editors for granting me permission to publish overlapping parts from the article. Comments by anonymous readers for the journal were very helpful. Professor Sidney Mintz gave me encouragement and directions throughout the process of research and writing, with particular insight on Ruth Benedict’s thoughts, as her former student. Dr. Wilton Dillon, Senior Researcher at the Smithsonian Institution and a former student of Margaret Mead, gave me valuable insights and personal memories on having served in the Occupation of Japan, which helped me to put parts of this book into perspective. Numerous funds from the Zanvyl Krieger School of Arts and Sciences, Johns Hopkins University, helped me complete this book. I wish to thank the offices of former Dean Richard McCarty and Dean Gary Ostrander, who kindly provided me with research grants and budget. I would also like to thank the office of Dean Steven David and Kenan Fund Trustees, who awarded me the teaching grant that facilitated a course on Ruth Benedict, her life and work, that became a venue for a stimulating exchange of ideas between my students and myself. Students who took that course engaged in exciting discussion, which was a source of inspiration for me, and Hussein Agrama, my teaching assistant for the course, gave me many valuable insights in wonderfully thoughtful ways. Professor Sidney Mintz and Dr. Wilton Dillon, guest lecturers for the course, delivered very interesting lectures, which also became an inspiration for the book. This book owes its ideas to three other courses that I offered at Johns Hopkins: “Japan as the Other,” “The Other Japan,” and “Self and Freedom in Japanese Society.” My students in these courses gave me an eye-opening experience in the classroom that indirectly helped me to form many of the thoughts that are contained in this book. Indeed, each class was an unfailing session of forcing me to think afresh. My teaching assistants for “Self and Freedom in Japanese Society,” Young-gyung Paik and Donald Selby, were fabulous interlocutors. The original idea for this book goes back to my stay at the Department of Cultural Anthropology, University of Tokyo, in the early 1990s. I am

Acknowledgments

xiii

grateful to the professors and colleagues of that department, Professor Abito Ito in particular. For research for parts of Chapters 3 and 4, I am indebted to the Center for Historical Studies, University of Maryland, College Park, which granted me the twentieth-century Japan research award for the year 2001–2. This award allowed me to consult the Prange Collection and other resources of the McKeldin Library, which contains the postwar publications in Japan during the US Occupation. A special acknowledgment is in order for my two colleagues in the Department of Anthropology at Johns Hopkins, Professors Donald Carter and Niloofar Haeri, both of whom have been generous supporters of mine, both morally and intellectually. My other colleagues in the department of anthropology, Veena Das, Jane Guyer, Gyan Pandey, Deborah Poole, and Pamela Reynolds, gave me valuable comments and insightful suggestions, for which I am very grateful. Professor Emeritus Sidney Mintz at Johns Hopkins inspired my ideas with great wisdom and gave me consistent support. My former colleague and the then chair, Professor Michel-Rolph Trouillot, who made my initial years at Hopkins great fun, was an inspiration through and through. Likewise, my former colleague Professor Gillian Feeley-Harnik gave me sustained support and encouragement. I miss the endless corridor conversations we had on kinship systems. My assistants in various stages of research, HanNa Kim, Julia Kim, Rita Setpaul, and Matthew Kroot, eased my burden immensely. I am grateful for their patience and the care with which they undertook their work. I would also like to acknowledge with great admiration the staff librarians in the Interlibrary Service Department of the Milton S. Eisenhower Library at Johns Hopkins, who coped competently with my extraordinary demands for Japanese-language books and articles. I wish especially to thank Professor Tessa Morris-Suzuki and Dr. Morris Low, the editors of the RoutledgeCurzon/Asian Studies Association of Australia (ASAA) East Asia series, who took great interest in my project right from the beginning and accepted my manuscript into their series. Considering how much I enjoyed my years in Australia as Research Fellow at the Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies, Australian National University, and how rewarding those years were for me intellectually, this is a very appropriate place for this book to be published. The publication of this book would have been impossible had there not been the support and commitment of Ms. Stephanie Rogers, the Asian Studies editor at Taylor and Francis, whose continuing encouragement, professional competence, and highly focused work ethic were indeed a great help to me as an author. The two reviewers for RoutledgeCurzon were superb in their constructive and critical assessment and suggestions for the earlier version of the manuscript. Their fair judgment and close reading were the utmost gift for me as an author. The copy-editor, Lisa Williams,

xiv

Acknowledgments

improved this manuscript enormously, with judicious and careful reading, for which I am most grateful. The Japan National Tourist Organization has granted me permission to use a map of Japan from its website. I wish to acknowledge its generosity with gratitude. The process of writing this book was an education for me, in that I learned how marginalized Japan anthropology is in the US and how little of it is understood: I took it as a challenge to maintain my intellectual integrity in this atmosphere. I am most grateful to Dean Daniel Weiss of Krieger School of Arts and Sciences, Johns Hopkins University, and Dean Adam Falk, Vice-Dean for the school, for their commitment to uphold intellectual freedom on campus, including mine. I wish to acknowledge in particular Theodore Bestor, William Kelly, Jennifer Robertson, Richard Fox, Katherine Verdery, Gillian Feeley-Harnik, Richard Grinker, Marlene Mayo, Linda Angst, William Rowe, Mark Selden, Sidney Mintz, and Jacqueline Mintz for their ongoing support and encouragement in times of difficulty. I realize also that I was helped because my parents taught me to persevere under pressure. I learned from my mother to do so with determination, and from my father, with humor. Finally, but not least, I wish to thank Bradley G. Kaldahl, who shared my agonies and joy over the course of writing this book. During my research and writing I gave birth to my two children. My daughter Samantha and my son Thomas have been, and continue to be, the source of my strength. To my children I dedicate this book.

Notes for the reader

Romanization of well-known Japanese names such as Tokyo is omitted. Korean authors’ names are in principle transliterated in Korean, even when their work is published in Japanese. Japanese and Korean names follow the East Asian convention of listing the family name first, except for the cases where the author published in English and listed his/her name following the western convention. All translations from Japanese or Korean text to English are mine, unless otherwise noted.

Source: By permission of the Japan National Travel Organization.

Figure 1: Map of Japanese prefectures

Introduction

Anthropology and Japan Anthropology – the study of man – is a peculiar discipline, as it inherently implies not simply the study of man, but the study of man by man. In other words, it is eternally confined in the self-study, the exploration of one’s own kind. Nevertheless, and sadly but perhaps inevitably, humans manage to create a division between those who study other humans and those who are studied by other humans. Of course, humans have always thought about themselves ever since they first possessed writing, if not earlier. But this nineteenth-century invention was different: whereas philosophers thought about why we are the way we are, anthropologists started with the question why they are the way they are. The rise of this discipline, like that of many other modern academic disciplines, coincided with the colonial expansion of the west on a global scale. Since its birth in the nineteenth century, anthropology has gone through many transformations. It moved from what was an armchair reflection on remote, exotic tribes, to fieldwork-oriented hard science by the early decades of the twentieth century. By the mid-century, with the independence of former European colonies in Asia and Africa, anthropology faced a keen need to redefine its mission. In the face of stern criticism from within and outside the discipline, western metropolitan centers of anthropology came to terms with their own history as cultural sentries of imperialism. In the period following World War II and the 1960s independence of African nations, anthropology saw an interesting turn initiated within the western tenet. The hitherto dominant British structural-functionalism began to lose its paradigmatic status: structural functionalism assumed the static equilibrium in the primitive tribal society and was ill equipped with theoretical tools to account for a new vision offered by the independence of African nations now aspiring to modernization and industrialization (e.g. Asad 1973). In France, unlike Britain, the influence of structuralism promoted by Claude Lévi-Strauss had been strong in anthropology (e.g. Lévi-Strauss 1963–76). Following the rise of post-structuralism in Parisian philosophical circles, in which new versions of Marxism, known variably as structural

2

Introduction

Marxism or neo-Marxism, led by Louis Althusser (1971, 1984, 1990) became influential, anthropologists experimented with new approaches to traditional societies and re-examined the existing wisdom of the discipline by using a Marxist framework (Terray 1972; Meillassoux 1981; Godelier 1977; 1986; Diamond 1979; see also Bloch 1983). This dealt a further blow to the structural functionalist cast across the English Channel, where scholars responded to the impact of structuralism and neo-Marxism in varying ways (Douglas 1966; Leach 1974; Goody 1976). An onslaught of critique and polemic by feminist anthropologists both in Britain and the US turned the male-centered table of anthropology radically around; feminists contributed to the deconstruction of the heretofore takenfor-granted paradigms of anthropology by confronting the discipline’s occlusion of women on the one hand and by critically assessing each other’s work on the other (e.g. Rosaldo and Lamphere 1974; A. B. Weiner 1976; MacCormack and Strathern 1980; Rosaldo 1980; Ortner and Whitehead 1981; Strathern 1981; see also Atkinson 1982 for a review). In the 1980s anthropology faced vigorous, multi-directional shake-ups: the intervention of postmodernism, reflexivity, and the return of the subject – including the native subject – to the center of research shifted the location of scholarly gaze of the discipline from the colonized, exotic, and different other to the inter-subjective engagement between the other and the west, remote field and the metropolis, and informants and ethnographer, while feminist and native critiques of the male/west-dominated tradition of the discipline continued to highlight the heretofore invisible participation of diverse scholars in the discipline. Notable was the feminist critique of science and medicine, including reproductive medicine (Martin 1987; Ginsburg and Tsing 1990, for example). At the same time, ethnography, the standard form of anthropological text, came under close scrutiny, as it embodied unequal relations of power between the ethnographer and informants, embedded in the mechanism of anthropological representation.1 In the 1990s the eruption of ethnic violence and religious conflict, massive exodus of refugees, transnationalism on a global scale, and reinforced critique of medicine, science, and the nation-state captured the attention and passion of anthropologists (e.g. Schiller et al. 1992; Malkki 1995; Rabinow 1996; Ong 1999; Rapp 1999; Schmidt and Schröder 2001). Today anthropology looks very different to when it began: people from cultures that used to be studied are members of the academy, and a few are indeed trendsetters. Women’s voices have a greater weight, while textual forms of ethnography have expanded, incorporating experimental and experiential styles that would probably have been dismissed outright thirty years ago. Totalized discourse is out; localized yarn is in. Distanced neutrality raises eyebrows; political intervention inspires students and colleagues. The field of anthropology has expanded to encompass research labs, clinics, nursing homes, homelessness in the street, law firms, government agencies, non-government organizations, diasporic communities, refugee

Introduction 3 camps, and war zones. But the picture is not entirely positive. For one thing, ethnographic others largely remain others, while metropolitan centers continue to be centers. This dilemma has been emphasized but not dealt with. Age-old methodology lingers on in regional discourses due to the contradictions and methodological tensions inherent to fieldwork – after all, the ethnographer writes, natives are written about. Sometimes, ethnocentric or even reactionary interest prevailing in a particular cultural field is overcompensated in the western representation in the name of the native’s point of view or in the guise of cultural relativism, largely ignoring the question “which native?” The order of the relevance of sub-fields bears witness to the apparition of colonial geography – thereby preserving the old trajectory connecting theories and places that, in Arjun Appadurai’s words, “all capture internal realities in terms that serve the discursive needs of general theory in the metropolis” (1986: 46). At the same time, over-reflexivity has turned some quarters of the discipline into self-aggrandizing exercises of narcissistic selfflattering by anthropologists (Behar 1996; see Ryang 2000a for a critique). Although totalization has been badly criticized, the region-specific or local discourse as an alternative still requires a propositional model, as a simple replacement of “the society” with “the locality” can do little more than scale down the same grand view – be it nationalism or positivism, holism or economic determinism (see Strathern 1990). Similarly, whereas the west remains the originating point of theoretical innovations, the rest offers cases, examples, and exceptions, although some become “exportable” paradigms as in African descent systems or Trobriand Kula exchange (Strathern 1988). Anthropology, and especially that of the more academic kind, in some very ironic ways has become an oasis to replenish the west’s energy and self-recognition. The lack of reciprocity or mutual engagement between the theory-producing center and field data-gathering peripheries continues to vex the discipline. In this process, conceptual topics that are married to certain areas continue to be preserved, arresting the disciplinary diversity of anthropology. Some time ago, Appadurai had the following to suggest: Let me start with an observation with which few will quarrel. Though all anthropologists traffic in “otherness,” we may note that it has always been true that some others are more other than others. From the start, the ethos of anthropology has been driven by the appeal of the small, the simple, the elementary, the face-to-face. In a general way, this drive has had two implications for anthropological theory. The first is that certain forms of sociality (such as kinship), certain forms of exchange (such as gift), certain forms of polity (such as the segmentary state) have been privileged objects of anthropological attention and have constituted the prestige zones of anthropological theory. The second result has been that the anthropology of complex non-Western societies has, till recently, been a second-class citizen in anthropological discourse. (Appadurai 1988: 357)

4

Introduction

Appadurai adds that studies of complex civilizations by anthropologists do exist, “but in a peculiar form” (1988: 357). This book is a study of one such “peculiar” case – Japan. We shall see in the pages to follow that as a complex non-western society, in Appadurai’s classification, Japan occupies a second-class status among anthropological objects of study and, accordingly, topics and themes that have developed in the anthropological studies of Japan are outside “the prestige zones of anthropology.” This does not mean that kinship studies did not exist in Japan or gift exchange in Japan did not previously attract the western anthropologist’s eye: they did and continue to do so. Rather, as I hope to demonstrate in this book, Japanese kinship was studied in such a way as to confirm and conform to the existing kinship theories of western anthropology – the theories that are built in the west on the basis of the field data collected from non-western natives. But what is really peculiar about the western anthropology of Japan, which was born in earnest from within the character studies of enemy nations during World War II, is that it has been predicated upon the conditions presented by a culture that proclaims its boundaries to be overlapping with those of the nation-state. Practitioners of Japan anthropology have not, so far, fully articulated this as a problem, more often than not accepting Japanese culture to be Japan’s national culture and its cultural identity to be identical to its national(ist) identity. As the title of the book implies, I deal with this case as one that faces a predicament and requires a critique due to its presupposition of overlapping boundaries between nation and culture. In other words, while Japanese culture is studied as a national culture, this approach is not clearly understood by the practitioners themselves: this is my contention. The peculiarity and predicament of anthropological studies of Japan do not simply arise in the division of labor following the distribution of power among “places” in western anthropology as suggested by Appadurai, but are the result of a two-way communication, albeit an unequal and asymmetrical communication, between western and Japanese researchers who have come to share a similar disciplinary background and represent similar socio-economic class and political dispositions.2 And, of course, the way we study Japan has a lot to do with the fact that Japan was never colonized by the west, thereby never presenting itself as an originary point of field data that provided the foundation for western anthropology. A propos Appadurai’s classification, a further segmentation is necessary, notably a distinction between those non-primitive cultural entities that were colonized by the west, as in the case of India, and those that were not colonized by the west, as in the case of Japan. This doubly marginalizes Japan in the anthropological inventory of “others.” In other words, for a long time Japanese were not even included in those other humans whom anthropologists studied in order to find out why they are the way they are.

Introduction 5

Japan before anthropology Japan, of course, is not new in the western literary scene. Its Tycoon was known, its local lords observed, its supernatural stories recorded, its customs documented, its maps drawn, and its architecture and aesthetics loved. Some key observations came in opposites: its people were admired and ridiculed, its civilization praised and lamented, its modernization believed and doubted, and its technology welcomed and feared. In a word, a strange, unfamiliar Japan, with quite a few irresistible enticements and entertainments despite enigma and distrust, had always existed prior to the anthropology of Japan (Alcock 1863; Clark 1878; Bird 1973 [1880]; Hearn 1904; Chamberlain 1905; Satow 1921; Hearn 1927; Taut 1936, for example). Unlike the western perception of the “Orient” that according to Edward Said occupied a special place in western European experience – that is, the colonial encounter (Said 1978) – Japan was not included in Europe’s overall colonial ambitions. Unlike Islam, Japan was not feared in terms of unfamiliar religious potency; its unfamiliarity was of a secular sort and generated endearment, ridicule, tantalization, and sometimes sympathy rather than fear. According to Richard Minear, who succinctly portrays this difference: Unlike that Orient [in Said], Japan is the remotest segment of the “Far East” and was unknown to the West until Marco Polo’s time (Said opens his discussion of “the Orient” with the Iliad and Aeschylus’s The Persians); another two hundred and fifty years would elapse before Japan saw its first Westerners. Intensive political contact, suspended at Japan’s insistence in the seventeenth century, resumed only in the nineteenth century. Japan did succumb to Western use of force in the nineteenth century and, briefly, in the middle of the twentieth; but Japan did not become a colony. Matthew Perry’s Narrative of the Expedition (1856) may bear superficial resemblance to Napoleon’s Description de l’Égypte (1809–1828); but we look in vain for a colonial overlord like Britain’s Lord Cromer. (Minear 1980a: 514)3 Of course, this all changed once Japan became a genuine threat to the west, especially after World War I. Until then, compared to other cultures that the west colonized and hence directly dealt with, Japan remained relatively insignificant, politically meaningless, economically harmless, and, above all, inscrutable. It is only during the interwar years and World War II that the west had to deal with Japan, its people and culture, first as an outcaste from the Anglo-American-dominated international community and then as a most unfamiliar and formidable enemy, the monstrous source of yellow peril. Earlier accounts perceived Japan to be strange and anti-scientific, and at times comical and almost hilarious. Here are some examples. At the turn of

6

Introduction

the century Basil Chamberlain, a British traveler and a long-term resident in Japan, wrote of its kinship as follows: It is strange, but true, that you may often go into a Japanese family and find half-a-dozen persons calling each other parent and child, brother and sister, uncle and nephew, and yet being really either no blood-relations at all, or else relations in quite different degrees from those conventionally assumed … though genealogies are carefully kept, they mean nothing, at least from a scientific point of view, – so universal is the practice of adoption, from the top of society to the bottom. (Chamberlain 1905: 17) Warren Clark, an American missionary teacher, wrote on Japanese contrariness: In a Japanese house the roof is always built first, and the other parts afterwards! With a kind of celestial instinct, they always commence at the highest point and work downwards. In all the lesser occupations of daily labor, such as digging, sawing, planning, cutting lumber, boring holes, or turning screws, the Japanese do just exactly the reverse of what people do on the other hemisphere. (Clark 1878: 57) Isabella Bird, an English traveler, on Japanese people: So lean, so yellow, so ugly, yet so pleasant-looking, so wanting in colour and effectiveness; the women so very small and tottering in their walk; the children so formal-looking and such dignified burlesques on the adults, I feel as if I had seen them all before, so like are they to their pictures on trays, fans, and tea-pots. (Bird 1973 [1880]: 12) Bruno Taut, a German architect, on the Japanese and rats: The fact that the Japanese consider the rats as more or less domestic animals was confirmed by nearly every one. … When the children go to bed at night, they like hearing the rats rummaging above the thin ceiling. They say: “Listen to Mr. Rat at his games.” (Taut 1936: 27) Then Lafcadio Hearn, arguably one of the best-informed western connoisseurs and commentators of Japan of the day, wrote on the impact of Japan’s modern higher education on the emotion of its people:

Introduction 7 [I]t is … undeniable that, the more highly he is cultivated, according to Western methods, the farther is the Japanese psychologically removed from us. Under the new education, his character seems to crystallize into something of singular hardness, and to Western observation, at least, of singular opacity. Emotionally, the Japanese child appears incomparably closer to us than the Japanese mathematician, the peasant than the statesman. (Hearn 1927: 308) After this lament Hearn reminisces about olden times, stating that “[a]mong the Japanese of the old regime one encounters a courtesy, an unselfishness, a grace of pure goodness, impossible to overpraise. Among the modernized of the new generation these have almost disappeared” (Hearn 1927: 310). Endearment to people who do things differently to us, enchantment with the land that is full of miniatures and childlike creatures, nostalgia for the old, pure Japan prior to its contact with pragmatism that spoiled the Japanese heart as much as it saved Japanese technology – these are usually not the starting points of classical anthropology. Colonial government, territorial expansion, mercantile advancement, and missionary evangelism (except for those in the sixteenth century) did not precede these literary accounts of Japan. Japan was, in short, funny and strange, not profitable or useful. It is no coincidence that Japan is the only real country that Gulliver, not the anthropologist, traveled to. An epistemological break occurs during World War II. Before, Japan captured the west’s imagination and filled its leisurely time; now, it loomed as an entity the west had to handle full time at a cost of losing the cannons and airplanes, and above all the lives of its soldiers, as Japan turned from an enigmatic dwarf that loved cherry blossoms and merry feasts into a yellow devil, the devil from the land of inscrutability where people take honor in suicide, have no emotion and feelings, and eat livers still warm from a human carcass. The desperation of the wartime situation – not so much in terms of military superiority but more in terms of the availability of information about Japanese culture – would color the subsequent study of Japan for a long time thereafter. After the war, western anthropology, because of, not despite of, the lack of its prior knowledge on Japan, became one of the most fertile grounds to cultivate a new image of Japan, which went through a quick transformation from a yellow-skinned evil to a hardworking and efficient ally of the US in the Cold War. The process of this transformation is subtle, yet obvious in part because of the very nature of anthropology as an academic discipline, that is, the study of “other” humans, and in part because of Japan’s self-presentation to the outside world and the world’s perception of it, that is, Japanese cultural uniqueness; in this, as we shall see, Ruth Benedict’s Chrysanthemum and the Sword (1946) played a decisive role.

8

Introduction

For many decades after the war – long after Japan was reinstated as a member of industrial (and “free” as opposed to Sovietized) nations – ethnographic studies of Japan focused on strange, unfamiliar aspects of Japanese society, fundamentally different from those of the west. This was matched by Japan’s self-promotion as culturally unique, with its postwar prosperity being attributed to its racial homogeneity as well as the west’s acceptance of the Japanese miracle, with its management style studied and emulated. This book tells a story of the emergence of this new Japan from within the western anthropological discourses.

What this book is about In this book I discuss anthropological texts that have been influential in forming the Japan sub-field. A few texts that I discuss are not written by anthropologists. But they are included because of their lasting impression in the field of the anthropology of Japan. Some key texts that appear in this book have been dealt with by existing critiques of nihonjinron. Nihonjinron refers to the body of discourse that emphasizes Japan’s cultural uniqueness. Although such discourse existed before and after World War II, it gained special attention in the 1970s and 1980s when Japan’s economy ascended to the unquestionable position of leadership in the world. By now nihonjinron has been, so to say, thoroughly castrated. Critics approached it from all angles: methodologically by revealing the flaw in research; empirically by demonstrating that the information was simply incorrect; epistemologically by showing that what authors claimed to be uniquely Japanese has always existed elsewhere and, hence, its foundation is false; and politically by revealing its ideological (i.e. nationalistic) overtone (see Dale 1986; Mouer and Sugimoto 1986). Nihonjinron also held sway over the anthropology of Japan. Indeed, several writers of what came to be the bible of nihonjinron were anthropologists, including Chie Nakane (see Chapter 5). Although some anthropologists, such as Harumi Befu, were critics of nihonjinron (Befu 1990, 1993, 2001), overall the cultural uniqueness of Japan and the Japanese was a welcome factor for the anthropology of Japan. After all, what could be a better justification for studying Japan anthropologically? Thus a specific critique from within anthropological discourse has not hitherto been clearly addressed. The purpose of this book is to revisit key texts specific to Japan anthropology, assessing their contribution to the postwar emergence of Japan as an anthropological field. As such, I follow the development of this sub-field and because of this the reader will note that not all my texts are well known or widely read. Paradigmatic works, including The Chrysanthemum and the Sword (Benedict 1946), are recycled and fed back into texts that exist on the peripheries of Japan anthropology, and together they form an organic process of constituting the boundaries of the Japan field by giving it a unique shape and making it into what I call

Introduction 9 national anthropology. For this reason I analyze texts, some of which may seem insignificant or unknown to the reader, yet which embody the dominant trend in very illustrative ways. From this, it should be clear to the reader that this book is not a survey: there already exist a number of excellent survey articles on the Japan field (see Sofue 1959, 1960, 1969, 1992; Smith 1989; Tamanoi 1990; Kelly 1991; Robertson 1998a). This book is not a book on a general American image of Japan either (see Raz and Raz 1996; S. Johnson 1988; N. Glazer 1975). Rather, my aim is to trace tendencies that reveal themselves to be gatekeeping elements of anthropological studies of Japan. Often, the hegemonic effects of these tendencies go unnoticed by the practitioners of Japan anthropology, who take it for granted that we start our study of Japan from a set of given key notions such as “group model,” “harmonious society,” “household society,” “vertical society,” “non-assertive self,” “interdependent self,” “sociocentric self,” and so on. I wish to take a moment to rethink what these gate-keepers do to our approaches to Japan and what kind of effects are produced by using these concepts as given. An historical review tells us that some time after the initial postwar anthropology, and amidst rising interest in Japanese cultural uniqueness in the 1970s, the Japan field was nationalized. I mean by this the establishment of Japan as a nation-state as an a priori boundary of anthropological studies of Japan. Its national culture became the primary site of investigation – be it “vertical society” or “Japanese self.” Ironically, this is wholly logical, since anthropological studies of Japan in the US started as part of the study of national character or, more precisely, the wartime enemy studies during World War II. In other words, an inquiry into the entity called Japan was, from the beginning, set on a national footing. The postwar US military occupation of Japan consolidated what is peculiar in retrospect – the integration of Japan as a national field, paradoxically, by way of international collaboration between Japanese anthropologists and western researchers that eventually updated the national character studies of the mid-twentieth century, entrenched in the culture and personality school, into national culture studies of the late twentieth century. Such a collaboration in the immediate years after the war was made possible in part because Japanese anthropologists had to turn their attention to Japan proper, now that they had lost their colonies to do ethnographic fieldwork in. However, by the mid-1960s, with the reemergence of Japan as an economic power in Asia and the world, Japanese anthropologists were no longer interested in Japan and, instead, they made their field trips to Southeast Asian countries, the Pacific islands, and the African continent, leaving Japan to western ethnographers. Helped by the poor linguistic proficiency with the Japanese language enjoyed by western anthropologists of the day, the ethnic division of labor in Japan anthropology between native researchers studying non-Japanese fields and western researchers studying Japan created an epistemological gap between, on the

10

Introduction

one hand, the anthropological studies of Japan during the 1950s and early 1960s that abundantly documented Japan as a regionally diverse and richly complex historical entity and, on the other, studies of Japan from the 1970s onwards that emphasized Japan as a national unit with cultural and racial homogeneity. The reason why in the early 1970s a very limited number of books by native scholars translated into English, such as Chie Nakane’s Japanese Society (1970) and Takeo Doi’s The Anatomy of Dependence (1973), became so dominant in Japan field reflects this gap. The approach to Japan as a national field continues today, producing texts that are oriented in search of a “Japanese” cultural core, a “Japanese” sense of self, a “Japanese” way of life, and the bounded pristine group of individuals called “the Japanese” who are supposed to have embodied quintessential Japaneseness; all the while, their fieldwork may have taken place in a remote enclave, thick in local custom and heavy in regional identity. This is not, however, a mere return to the wartime national character studies, although it is true that there is a similarity between the latter and today’s anthropology of Japan. The difference is that today’s anthropology of Japan reflects a high level of sophistication and a wealth of field data in representing Japan as a national-cultural entity, unlike the crude wartime enemy studies that simply labeled Japan and the Japanese by the use of very limited data. This makes it all the more appropriate for us to consider how it is that the Japan field has become so much more dependent, covertly and overtly, on the condition and presupposition of national boundaries. One other reason for reflecting critically on Japan anthropology now is related to a more recent and powerful trend of representing Japan from a multi-ethnic, multicultural, and pluralistic angle, including ever-increasing research on ethnic and other minorities; foreign guest workers, Japan’s untouchables, eccentric individuals, marginalized existences, and so on. It is all very well to celebrate this trend, but at the same time we must ask why it took five decades to open up a discursive field that deals with these marginalized groups and individuals. The delay is not coincidental with the demography of those minorities: ever since the prewar period Chinese and Korean minorities have existed in Japan, while it is no secret that Okinawans and the Ainu were culturally segregated and at the same time were forcefully assimilated into the Japanese mainstream. The wartime enemy studies were totally blind to this, but the post-1970s Japan field was aware, yet did not take up the task of exploring the peripheries of Japan as the major task, either. Rather, it effectively concurred with the mainstream and governmentsponsored image of Japan as a nation of business-suited men with a ticket for lifetime employment and as the land of hard-working little capitalists with group-oriented selves that regard company as family. This book is a critical reflection on the kind of intellectual history that made Japan into the anthropological field we know today.

Introduction 11

Chapter-by-chapter outline Chapter 1, “Anthropology and the war,” discusses the origin of anthropological interest, mainly in the US, in close relation to World War II. Reflecting the lack of familiarity with the Japanese and triggered off by Japan’s unconventional offensives such as Pearl Harbor, the Office of War Information (OWI) and other government offices involved many anthropologists (Japan specialists and non-specialists alike) in research into the character of this most unfamiliar and formidable enemy, the Japanese. Anthropological studies of Japan specifically started within the framework of the culture and personality school and national character studies. It was in this process that Ruth Benedict’s now classic Chrysanthemum and the Sword (1946) was conceived. Chrysanthemum is a pivotal text in understanding the subsequent postwar development of anthropological studies of Japan: it initiated two dominant trends – studies of Japan as a cultural whole and studies of the Japanese self in stark contrast to the western self. In light of Chrysanthemum’s importance, Chapter 2 explores the controversial reception it received, notably tracing the process by which what Benedict suggested as an internal cultural logic of Japan, leading to the destructive war, subsequently came to be understood as the positive traits of the Japanese, reflecting Japan’s re-ascent into the world’s foremost economic power. I start with the postwar reaction to Chrysanthemum, which shows a complex reading offered by a number of Japanese scholars. I then examine how the initial postwar reading shifted from descriptive knowledge to an explanatory tool for Japanese cultural traits in the 1980s. I make a specific critique from the position of the former colonized people under the Japanese Empire, since Chrysanthemum completely omits this aspect. It is no coincidence that Chrysanthemum became one of the longest-selling books in Japan, whose government has, just like Chrysanthemum, consistently ignored the legacy of its colonialism. Chapter 3 returns chronologically to the postwar period, focusing on what I call Occupation anthropology. During the US military occupation (1945–52) many texts with an anthropological orientation were written by both anthropologists and non-anthropologists either working directly for the Occupation or in close relation to it. I focus on key texts that were produced in the immediate years after the war, although their publication may have been postponed until the 1960s; some of them I call “new ethnographies,” as opposed to John Embree’s Suye Mura (1939), the only English-language ethnographic study of Japan that existed in prewar time. We can see in these texts that Japan was first seen as a follower of the US, the territory that the US needed to guide into modernization and democratization, eradicating its feudal remnants. Then, by the early 1960s, it became increasingly clear that Japan was the US’s most important ally in Asia in the Cold War. More importantly, Japan from the 1960s demonstrated to the west that its economy was growing strongly, while its culture remained “Japanese,” not westernized. This enigma set up the new mold for the Japan

12

Introduction

anthropology of the 1970s onwards – the enigma that Chapter 5 will take up more fully. Chapter 4 deals with postwar anthropological studies of Japanese kinship. The attention to kinship gives us a useful window to learn how anthropological scholarship on Japan developed during the postwar years. From prewar years, Japanese sociologists and ethnologists documented and analyzed a striking variety in pattern of kinship and household organizations in the Japanese archipelago. One of the most renowned in this area is the corpus of study by Ariga Kizaemon, a sociologist of family, who I shall introduce in Chapter 4. Ariga’s study is important, because with the Occupation’s family law reform scholars reopened a lively debate over what the Japanese household was about and should be about, and Ariga’s study provides a foundation for this debate. In postwar kinship studies during the 1950s it was clearly recognized that Japanese kinship was regionally diverse, complex, and transformed historically. Such diversity and complexity, however, were eventually obscured, and by the late 1960s Japanese and western scholars collaboratively suggested that the Japanese kinship system was unlike any other systems documented in anthropology and was nationally more or less unified. With such a turn, the assumption about Japan’s cultural uniqueness and national homogeneity became the norm in the Japan field. Chapter 5 takes up this issue further. It highlights the texts that are responsible for actively disseminating the practice of Japan anthropology as a nationalized anthropology, reinforcing the assumption of Japan’s cultural uniqueness and ethnic homogeneity. The rise of this approach to Japan as a national whole is related to the flourishing literary and scholarly genre emphasizing Japan’s cultural uniqueness, or nihonjinron, as mentioned above. The Japanese enigma, or what Ezra Vogel called the Japanese miracle, that emerged in the form of Japan’s re-modernization, unaccompanied by the westernization of its culture, was explained (away) by a stroke of holistic brushwork of “vertical society” or “ie (household) society” (Nakane 1970). I argue in this chapter that such a trend, which was a long-term by-product of the way Benedict’s Chrysanthemum was consumed in the Japan field, reinforced the marginalization of non-mainstream populations, while rendering Japan a land of homogeneous people called “the Japanese.” The unit of study is often, in a facile manner, taken to be Japan as a whole, or the “nation,” as opposed to the very localized fieldwork that ethnographers actually conduct. The Japan that emerged from within these texts is not simply an anthropological field, but a national anthropological field. In addition to studying Japan and the Japanese from a holistic point of view, Benedict’s Chrysanthemum opened a new territory – the study of the Japanese self. Chapter 6 reviews the process by which the now flourishing studies of Japanese self were formed. We briefly go back to the postwar years when Japanese psychiatry and psychoanalysis were reorganized under US influence instead of the hitherto dominant German influence;

Introduction 13 the origins of studies of the Japanese self are closely connected to the culture and personality school, on the one hand, and native Japanese psychiatry’s reaction to western psychiatry, on the other. The celebrated notion of amae, or passive love, indulgence, or dependency, was promoted in this process by Japanese psychiatrist Takeo Doi, and kindled the enthusiasm of numerous western anthropologists, who proffered this notion as the key to the Japanese personality; it continues to be a fundamental category for scholars who are interested in grasping Japanese culture and the typical personality or self, albeit in the guise of a more fashionable wording. Although inquiry into the Japanese self is an important and fascinating area of Japan anthropology, which can also be potentially subversive, its practice today comes with drawbacks not unlike those of the approach that takes Japan as a national anthropological field, and I show this by analyzing the selected texts. Three holisms are involved in the process of the emergence of national anthropology, each aiming at depicting Japan as a national cultural totality, as a household-like society, and in the form of a Japanese self with an implicit gaze of national self. The first holism, cultural totality, is best captured in Ruth Benedict’s Chrysanthemum and the Sword, which will be discussed in part of Chapter 1 and more fully in Chapter 2. The second holism, Japan as a household-like entity, derives from history and transformation of kinship studies in the anthropology of Japan. This will be the focus of part of Chapter 3 and Chapters 4 and 5. Chapter 5 also deals with other forms of essentialism that emphasize Japan’s cultural uniqueness and its superiority, thereby erasing regional, local, and class differences. The third holism, the emphasis on the Japanese (national) self, will be taken up in Chapter 6, by way of looking at studies that argued for Japan’s unique national psyche. The critique will be carried on in the Afterword, as this genre of research is very much a contemporary trend. Holism, needless to say, is not unique to Japan anthropology. The intellectual premise of anthropology is indeed holism (Goody 1995: 8). But while, say, African anthropology took the so-called small-scale society or face-to-face society as a community to be depicted as a whole, Japan as a nation became the object of such inquiry in Japan anthropology, as I shall argue in the pages to follow. A book like this cannot have a conclusion, as my aim of writing it is not to close but to open the paths for discussion. In the Afterword, though not exhaustive, I summarize the existing trends and attempts to show possibilities of de-nationalizing Japan anthropology and incorporating more diverse and heterogeneous elements into future studies of Japan. As such, the purpose of this book is not to diagnose the current health of the anthropology of Japan, let alone make a prognosis of it. As I emphasize in the Afterword, new directions of research are emerging in the anthropology of Japan – in fact, new directions of research are always emerging, yet it remains to be seen which directions are most effective in changing the

14

Introduction

current state of Japan anthropology. And my contention is not that the anthropology of Japan “gets better” linearly along historical time – an older text can be more critical of the nationalizing trend of Japan anthropology, while some recent texts may easily yield to becoming prey to nationalizing Japan, oblivious of such an effect. In other words, my project is synchronic, not diachronic, paradigm-oriented, not oriented on developmental stages. In this sense, the chronological schema of this book is largely heuristic, as we take into account extra-textual factors such as political economy and history as we read key texts in the Japan field. The reader will also find that not all the authors I discuss are known as anthropologists. This is because I am not following the professional identity of the authors; I am, rather, following the identity and social life of texts in terms of the way they influence the course of debate and research in the discipline of anthropology and the wider anthropological debate on Japanese culture and society. My critique and analysis in this book derive from an insider’s point of view – not only having been born and having grown up in Japan, but also as an insider to the professional community of anthropologists of Japan.4 Obviously, the book only does partial justice to the enormously rich documentation of the postwar anthropological studies of Japan in the west.5 Nevertheless, it proposes to show the unseen and to say the unsaid that we carry, consciously or unconsciously, with or without pain, as our historical baggage in Japan anthropology. I hope the following pages will contribute to making it obvious how we have studied Japan and how we can proceed in the future in order to further enrich our knowledge of Japan and its culture and to make studies of Japan more relevant to anthropology as an academic discipline. This task is all the more relevant because of the way Japan and the anthropology of Japan are given only secondary significance in western anthropology. This is a consequence, I think, of the way we have studied Japan as anthropologists. I offer this book, therefore, in the spirit of constructive and critical self-reflection on the Japan field. As such, I invite the reader, especially the reader who is in the Japan field, to join me in this endeavor for the remainder of this book.

1

Anthropology and the war

Compulsive, anally eroticized Japanese On January 6, 1942, a month after the Japanese surprise attack on Pearl Harbor, Franklin Roosevelt concluded his State of the Union address with the following passages: We are fighting today for security, for progress and for peace, not only for ourselves, but for all men, not only for one generation but for all generations. We are fighting to cleanse the world of ancient evils, ancient ills. Our enemies are guided by brutal cynicism, by unholy contempt for the human race. We are inspired by a faith which goes back through all the years to the first chapter of the Book of Genesis: “God created man in His own image.” We on our side are striving to be true to that divine heritage. We are fighting as our fathers have fought, to uphold the doctrine that all men are equal in the sight of God. Those on the other side are striving to destroy this deep belief and to create a world in their own image – a world of tyranny and cruelty and serfdom. (Israel 1966: 2,867) Among the “ancient evils, ancient ills” that were trying to “create a world in their own image – a world of tyranny and cruelty and serfdom” was Japan. With the outbreak of the Pacific War it now became an urgent task to know, in order to defeat, the world of their own image. The Pacific War produced unexpected, yet in retrospect wholly logical, collaborations, the one between anthropologists and military intelligence being one of the most important and perhaps one of the least studied historically.1 The by-product of this collaboration was to provide a major opportunity to promote the studies of Japanese culture and society in US anthropology. Whether the content of these studies was close to the truth or not is a separate matter. The shock of Pearl Harbor and the subsequent display of extreme wartime behavior on the part of Japanese soldiers in the

16

Anthropology and the war

eyes of the Americans, such as the unthinkable kamikaze suicide bombers, stirred up a great enthusiasm among the Americans to know this formidable alien enemy. Studies of Japanese national character, or “character structure” as the practitioners often put it, were dominated by scholars of the culture and personality school, a school of thought developed under the leadership of Franz Boas, or, more precisely, by “a new generation of Boasians” (Kuper 1988: 150): by the time the culture and personality school emerged, it was Boas’s students such as Alfred Kroeber, Ruth Benedict, and Margaret Mead who played a major role, while “Papa Franz” lent wisdom and authority where necessary. Although they were based at Columbia University, the discourses in this field were produced by scholars with diverse academic and institutional affiliations. Due to the limited intellectual and anthropological resources on Japan at that time, their works heavily influenced each other, which may have also been a reflection of the wartime need to come up with a relatively unified and clear picture of Japanese culture. Unlike evolutionism, the basis on which classical anthropology was formed, the culture and personality school stood firmly on the premise of cultural relativism. In this school of thought, each culture functions according to its own internal logic and individuals in that culture are immersed from childhood in this cultural logic. Therefore, according to the culture and personality scholars, by looking carefully at cultural logic one can understand the personality type and national character that a particular culture tends to produce (Sargent and Smith 1949). In turn, cultures are “explained” in terms of psychological characterization and the personality type associated with it (Lindesmith and Strauss 1950: 587). What was seen as important was the earliest stage of the process of personality formation, childhood. In the words of Eric Wolf, it was assumed that “a common repertoire of child training would produce a single national character” (1999: 11). Compared to a more biologically deterministic approach, the culture and personality school was open to the possibility of historical change: if a certain personality and character were produced through cultural logic and a social environment including childhood, it would be perfectly possible for such a personality to change in accordance with the changing culture and society over time. Rather than condemning or labeling certain cultures biologically backward, the culture and personality school maintained that there was no superior or inferior culture and pertinent personality (see Barnouw 1963). Although it contained a strong potential to account positively for cultural diversity in human societies, the culture and personality school came with its own shortcomings. Its practitioners often took “culture” as a closed system and gave unwarranted classifications such as Dionysian and Apollonian, for example, which were themselves derived from conceptions of culture types familiar to the western tradition (Benedict 1934a). In other words, the rela-

Anthropology and the war 17 tivity was conceived ethnocentrically within the western intellectual terrain, and not beyond. Indeed, often cross-cultural comparison or classification of non-western cultures is done with the west as a covert and overt point of reference. This way, it ended up pigeonholing various cultures in the service of western self-understanding. Although the school had a premise that all cultures are equally open to change, in the actual research a mere classification of cultures seems to have been attained and how to account for changes was left unattended to. Unless one can account for the transformational aspect of culture, a mere cultural relativism of giving different names to different people would not go a step beyond a typology. Wartime investigators of Japanese culture were no exception. Having said this, there really were not many Japan experts when the Pacific War broke out. There had been only one ethnographic study of Japan published in the US at that time, Suye Mura (1939) by John Embree. Embree was trained in Chicago under A. R. Radcliffe-Brown, one of the founding fathers of the structural-functionalism of British Social Anthropology. Embree’s Suye Mura, despite its being a conscientious and first-hand ethnographic study, somehow did not provide a starting point for wartime studies of the Japanese national character. Embree himself later criticized the wartime tendency that effectively neglected his Suye Mura for being a method to acquire “knowledge by definition” not “knowledge by observation” (Embree 1950a; and see p. 39 here), suggesting that many socalled Japan experts were armchair anthropologists who never had the experience of fieldwork in Japan and that their accounts were based on no concrete investigation of (say) real Japan, but on assumptions and preconceptions (see pp. 35–9 here). What became disproportionately influential at that time, instead of Embree’s ethnography, were two articles, one by Geoffrey Gorer and the other by Weston La Barre, neither an expert on Japan. What made their articles influential was their content, which is fascinating yet clear in statement, completely acceptable to the wartime American frame of mind in assessing the Japanese character. There was an elective affinity in Weberian terms between what these studies produced and what the US military and general readership wanted to hear. It is important to start from these articles because they represent initial attempts to figure out Japanese character structure from within its culture. They also stand as antecedents in continuity with (and one of them at least is evidently a source of) The Chrysanthemum and the Sword by Ruth Benedict (1946), by far the most definitive and most influential text on Japan produced by US anthropology of the day, and which even today stirs up heated arguments among Japanologists – if not anthropologists as such – within and outside of Japan (see Chapter 2 in this volume). Gorer and La Barre, along with Benedict, were what Richard Minear calls “the nouveau japonistes,” as opposed to “the old Japanists,” among whom Minear includes Embree (Minear 1980b). Gorer based his study on

18

Anthropology and the war

questionnaires, surveys, and interviews among Japanese Americans, and La Barre observed daily life for about a month or so among Japanese American inmates in the wartime relocation camp in Utah.2 Independently of each other, the two reached a set of similar conclusions about the Japanese national character and the mechanism that produced such a character. Gorer’s study “Japanese Character Structure and Propaganda” (1942) was issued jointly by the Committee for National Morale and the Institute for Intercultural Studies, founded by a group of social scientists during the war, including Margaret Mead, a close associate of Benedict, and published from the Institute of Human Relations, Yale University (see Mead 1961). It was also published in a condensed form in Transactions of the New York Academy of Sciences under the title “Themes in Japanese Culture” (Gorer 1943). Gorer is not a Japan hand per se: he later published on English and American national characters (e.g. Gorer 1948, 1967) and he did not read or speak Japanese. In the study, Gorer emphasizes that Japan would seem to be “the most paradoxical culture of which we have any record” (1943: 106). How can, he asks, a nation with such a calm and elegant ritual as the tea ceremony indulge in the “almost unbelievable savagery, lust and destruction of the rape of Nanking?” (1943: 106).3 Gorer puts forward his study as motivated by the desire to explain such a paradox. Embarking on his discussion of Japanese character structure, he outlines his basic postulates, divided into twelve points, which I reproduce here in shortened form: 1 Human behavior is understandable. 2 Human behavior is learned. 3 Individuals of similar age, sex, and status in a given society show a relative uniformity in behavior. 4 All societies have an ideal adult character. 5 Habits are established as behavior by reward and punishment. 6 The experiences of early childhood form subsequent adult character. 7 Learning in early childhood consists of modifications of the innate drives of hunger, optimum-temperature seeking, pain-avoidance, sex and excretion, and the drives of fear and anger (anxiety and aggression). 8 The child’s attitude to his parents will become the prototype of his attitudes to other people. 9 Adult behavior is motivated by learned drives. 10 Adult desires are unverbalized, since they have been structured as the unconscious during childhood. 11 When adult desires are shared by the majority of the population, some social institutions will evolve to gratify them. 12 In a homogeneous culture the patterns of superordination and subordination, of defense and arrogance, will show a certain consistency in all spheres from family to religious and political organizations.

Anthropology and the war 19 On the basis of these points, Gorer created detailed questionnaires on childhood training to be circulated among his informants, the precise number of whom he does not clarify. His informants included missionaries, “women whose children had been raised by Japanese servants,” second-generation Japanese Americans, psychiatrists, anthropologists, and writers with experiences of having visited Japan (1942: 2). From this we may note that we cannot tell how many of his informants were actually qualified to be called “Japanese,” and in what sense. Despite the diverse selection of informants, Gorer proceeds to generalize the character structure of the “moderately well-off [Japanese] male of the common people living in a city,” who in his view constitutes the average Japanese. Women are not included, since according to him Japanese women are severely subordinate to men and hence Japan has a “male culture.” Also, since the soldiers are male, the character of this group is “desirable to understand in the present situation” (1942: 4). The generalization Gorer drew on the basis of this material can be summarized into the following sentence: “It is the thesis of this memorandum that early and severe toilet training is the most important single influence in the formation of the adult Japanese character” (1942: 9). Gorer thus connects the aggression and brutality the Japanese soldiers displayed with the toilet training that they had received as children. The influence of the culture and personality school is evident here, with an additional blend of psychoanalysis. What Gorer means by toilet training is a practice in which, according to him, Japanese parents hold the infant of four months or older out over the balcony or road at frequent intervals. If the child fails to indicate the need in advance, he is punished by mother’s angry scolding. According to all of Gorer’s informants, states Gorer, this training is extremely efficient and almost all babies achieve the goal (1942: 9). This training has physiological and psychological ramifications that Japanese carry through to their maturity, according to Gorer. For example, the Japanese eat very quickly, because eating is directly associated with its end-result, defecation. The very idea of it is already repulsive for Japanese and hence minimum time is spent on eating, the instigator of it. Also, excreta-like substances, such as mud, are universally hated in Japan. Gorer emphasizes that, in contrast to the Japanese obsession with excretion, sex is not their passion. In fact, according to Gorer, the toilet is more erotic than sex, or, more precisely, sex cannot be thought of in isolation from the toilet (1942: 6). It is obvious that Gorer is concluding that in the language of psychoanalysis Japanese personality remains in the anal stage of inner drive and has not yet reached or is not interested in the genital stage. According to Erich Fromm, in anal eroticism, which follows oral eroticism, the bodily discharge is associated with pleasure and further development of this stage would be a) cleanliness and stinginess, and b) love for possessions (Fromm 1970: 171).

20

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These largely correspond with what Gorer draws on to the Japanese character under the label “compulsive.” Gorer states: In contemporary psychology an individual preoccupied with ritual, with tidiness and order, is technically known as a “compulsive neurotic”; these characters with us are statistically unusual and it is consequently justifiable to speak of them as neurotics. The Japanese character described in these last pages is statistically common, and therefore it would be unjustifiable to speak of the Japanese character as neurotic, unless one were appealing to some unformulated and absolute ideal; they do show however in the mass most of the character traits which in individuals would be called “compulsive.” (Gorer 1942: 13) The difficulty in following this, beside the fact that Gorer’s data never attain clear qualification or quantification, is that in Freudian psychoanalysis it is the infant’s sexual trauma, not anal eroticism, that often plays an important role in neuroses (e.g. Freud 1963). Gorer has no data about Japanese infant sexuality. He does not appear to know how masturbation is dealt with or how the taboo subject of incest is institutionalized, for example (see Freud 1950). This is not to say that had he covered all this he would have obtained a correct picture of the Japanese national character. This is, however, to point out that, despite his scientific language, he does not appear to have a clear idea as to what it is that he is dealing with. Let us go back to his twelve postulates. One can, from the list, infer that his questions stood on the toilet training or its comparable equivalent as a hidden premise. Postulates 5, 7, 8, 10, and 11 allude to such a possibility. In those, the assumptions are that childhood training determines the adult character and, conversely, that society’s ideal adult character dictates each family’s child training. These assumptions are themselves tautologous, and they are also ahistorical, as if a given society has a well-defined ideal adult type that never changes. The seemingly cause-and-effect connection conceived by Gorer between toilet training and Japanese culture is in fact not a causal explanation but a circular argument: the totality called Japanese culture includes the instruction of toilet training (if any) in the first place. Empirically, his point about severe toilet training among the Japanese was refuted only five years after his publication by Mildred Sikkema, a social worker working among Japanese Americans in Hawaii, who reported that what westerners saw as toilet training did not exist as a concept among Japanese families and only those who were westernized strictly trained children in this area (Sikkema 1947). Nonetheless, five years and the extraordinary conditions of war were enough to have elevated Gorer’s view to a canon, setting the pace of similar studies to follow. As late as 1944 a paper entitled “An Analysis of Japanese Character Structure” by Arnold Meadow was distributed by the Institute for

Anthropology and the war 21 Intercultural Studies, an institute founded and run by anthropologists including Gregory Bateson and Margaret Mead (Lapsley 1999: 286). The paper was firmly based on Gorer’s assumption – now called “data” – on “anal aggression,” among other assertions, combined with film analysis and individual Thematic Apperception Tests, consisting of psychological reaction checks tested on Japanese Americans (Meadow 1944). Meadow’s study only confirms that Gorer’s coinage was incrementally reinforced by other research. Indeed, Gorer’s psychoanalytical, psychologistic, and pathologizing approach to the Japanese nation persists in many different incarnations in anthropological studies of Japan after the war, as we shall see in subsequent chapters. Another point worthy of mention in Gorer is his emphasis on a boy’s excessive aggressiveness being tolerated by the family, especially the mother. And when he was not indulged, he would angrily punish her – contradicting his earlier statement on strict toilet training in which the mother figures prominently as a stern figure. Gorer parallels this boy’s character to the Japanese view of male/Japanese traits, and his mother’s concession or begging for mercy to the Japanese view of female/western traits. Gorer states: On December 7th 1941, this theory [of dividing Japan and the west as male and female equivalents] was put to the test; and the democracies still held their feminine role. Most convincing of all, they [citizens of Manila] asked for mercy (declaring Manila an open city): and just as the angry boy on such a plea will destroy his mother’s hair-do and break her precious pins, so in response did the Japanese destroy Manila with special attention to buildings of religious or symbolic importance. (Gorer 1942: 18)4 Gorer, at the beginning of his memorandum, gives the caveat that in “so short an essay it is inevitable that more stress has been laid on the contrasts between Japan and America (the ‘peculiarly Japanese’ aspects of Japanese character) than on the shared similarities” (1942: 2). This is precisely the point where Weston La Barre starts, since in his view “the clash of incommensurable ways of life is a major, if wholly irrational, motivation of wars” (1945: 319), the Pacific War being one of them. By postulating this assumption as his starting point, La Barre echoes Roosevelt, suggesting that World War II was all about different ways of life. Upon closer examination it becomes clear that in La Barre’s view these different ways were not moral equals – it was a clash between good and evil. When comparing Japanese and Americans, La Barre uses a concept of “psychological nationality” (1945: 321), although nowhere in his study does he define this concept, and he uses it interchangeably with “ethos” and “group pattern,” for example. According to La Barre, Americans are “compulsive”: “The hurrying, busy, perfectionistic, upward-striving, conscientious people of

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America might even be described by a visiting mandarin, and with some justice, as compulsive” (1945: 324). He is at times critical of American culture as he imagines it is seen by others – a strategy Benedict later adopts: “To the more disciplined British, for example, Americans appear overly boisterous or ‘vulgar’ in the public display of what they think on occasion are more properly private feelings” (1945: 325). But, according to him, the Japanese character structure is the most compulsive of all “in the world ethnological museum” (1945: 326). Its traits include: [S]ecretiveness, hiding of emotions and attitudes; perseveration and persistency; conscientiousness; self-righteousness; a tendency to project attitudes; fanaticism; arrogance; “touchiness”; precision and perfectionism; neatness and ritualistic cleanliness; ceremoniousness; conformity to rule; sadomasochistic behavior; hypochondriasis; suspiciousness; jealousy and enviousness; pedantry; sentimentality; love of scatological obscenity and anal sexuality. (La Barre 1945: 326–7) He then spends the rest of the article further expanding on each trait. The list, though seemingly absurd, is by no means totally dismissed by later researchers. For example, hypochondria is taken up by Emiko OhnukiTierney (1984) as a distinctly Japanese trait. It is not hard to imagine that the list gave to the contemporary reader a somewhat satisfactory explanation about the extremely fanatic behavior of Japanese soldiers at war, including their treatment of the western prisoners of war (POWs). If individual sexuality was just one of several things that Gorer’s psychoanalytic study of the Japanese national character did not have data on, La Barre’s is a psychoanalysis of a nation. La Barre does not stop there: he selfrighteously (just like the Japanese?) concludes that “Americans owe it to the Japanese to modify the Japanese social system with great drasticness, sureness of purpose and thoroughness” (1945: 342). This conclusion is not totally far-fetched if it is measured against what happened after the war under the US Occupation of Japan, in which the US imposed their way of life in toto on the war-defeated Japanese (see Chapter 3). Such was contemporary opinion in the US. Indeed, already in 1944 Fortune magazine published a special issue on Japan, in which we find that “we have not only to defeat Japan in war but to keep her at peace. For a long time Japan will be at close range” (Fortune 1944: 121). Minear calls the wartime researchers of the Japanese national character “poor historians” and notes: “What is more, most of them came to see their analyses of Japanese national character as an explanation of Japanese history, an answer to such questions as why Japan invaded China and why Japan attacked the United States” (1980b: 37; original emphasis). In other words, the personality that was supposed to be typical of the Japanese was

Anthropology and the war 23 anachronistically and teleologically used to explain why the Japanese went to war in the first place: the clock is used backwards. What is national character after all? Does such a thing exist? I shall explore these questions later in this chapter. But, before that, let us turn to one important exception in the diatribe of compulsive, neurotic, and anally eroticized Japan – John Embree’s Suye Mura.

Suye Mura, an ethnography John Embree was the only anthropologist in the US who conducted fieldwork in Japan before 1945. Many, including travelers and missionaries, went to live in Japan and wrote about it, but Embree is the only one who went to Japan as an anthropologist with ethnographic fieldwork as his primary purpose. According to Minear, he was 31 when he published Suye Mura, A Japanese Village (Embree 1939), the first ethnography of modern Japan, and only 42 when he and his daughter were killed in a car accident.5 At the time of his death he was the director of the Southeast Asian Studies program at Yale (Minear 1980b: 49; see Pelzel 1952). Suye Mura was an exception in the prewar and wartime studies of Japan. But, as we shall see, in the atmosphere created by wartime needs Embree’s works did not succeed in offering a concrete alternative to national character studies derived from the culture and personality school. Suye Mura’s approach is firmly rooted in another tradition, British Social Anthropology and its structural-functionalism. Although it is not clear to me whether Embree personally received significant influence from A. R. Radcliffe-Brown, who was at Chicago when Embree studied there, RadcliffeBrown wrote the Introduction for Suye Mura, in which he emphasized that Embree’s major concern was “social structure,” not character structure (1939: xi). According to Radcliffe-Brown, who was at the time one of the pioneers of the new generation of British Social Anthropology, which was based on fieldwork, social structure is “meant to refer specifically to the network of direct and indirect social relations linking together individual human beings”; “field anthropology” in contradistinction to the armchair anthropology of the older generation is “to investigate the social structure in the concrete observable behavior of individuals, and this necessitates a close study of a community of limited size” (1939: xi). Structural-functionalism was born from within the British Empire, as Perry Anderson wrote: The British bourgeoisie had learnt to fear the meaning of “general ideas” during the French Revolution: after Burke, it rarely forgot the lesson. Hegemony at home required a substantial moratorium on them. By the end of the nineteenth century, however, this class was master of a third of the world. English anthropology was born of this disjuncture. British imperial society exported its totalizations onto its subject

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Anthropology and the war peoples. There, and there only, it could afford scientific study of the social whole. “Primitive” societies became the surrogate object of the theory proscribed at home. British anthropology developed unabashedly in the wake of British imperialism. Colonial administration had an inherent need of cogent, objective information about the peoples over which it ruled. (P. Anderson: 1992: 93)6

While totalization was an overall effect of structural-functionalism, on a more concrete level structural-functionalism assumed an equilibrium in relations of power among individuals in a given community and, from this, its description tended to be ahistorical and static. This is a pseudo-theory that developed in close relation to studies of the kinship system in primitive societies, since in the latter it was thought that kin relations simultaneously functioned to regulate law and politics, economics, and an individual’s life course. Just like the culture and personality school, structural-functionalism was one step more progressive than evolutionism: whereas evolutionism regarded primitive societies as the past of civilized societies, structuralfunctionalism conferred analytical value to each primitive society, although the emphasis on cultural relativity was not as outspoken as it was in the culture and personality school. Structural-functionalism studies a society as a whole – in Anderson’s words, “totalizations” – while the culture and personality school pays more attention to personality formation in a particular society. Lucy Mair’s 1965 textbook has a passage comparing the two: [I]n America one school of anthropologists has pursued a line of study that brings people into the picture, the study of culture and personality. Very roughly, this implies the assumption that a culture both reflects and creates a typical personality in the people who share it. It has not found many adherents in Britain. When British anthropologists say they are interested in social rather than in cultural facts, they mean that they are interested in the interactions of people living in society, and not in the personal characteristics of individuals, even when these are thought of as the product of their culture. We [British] are still apt to say that a field study is concerned with a society. (Mair 1965: 10) In spite of Mair’s contrast, in retrospect both schools share a set of similar assumptions, including the proclivity to see “culture” or “society” in closure and a lack of critical attention to historical transformations in human society. It would be stretching the truth, as it were, to apply the term “theory” to either of those assertions, since neither produced a clear set of universal suppositions that can be used to analyze any culture or society.

Anthropology and the war 25 Neither, in the most serious sense, had a conceptual integrity that can explain a society fully and fundamentally. Rather, these two schools can actually be better identified as a cluster of methodological practices and a broadly defined typology that were employed to depict culture and society. For example, from within the culture and personality school developed a body of literature on life history, which is still a valid method of study within socio-cultural anthropology: often in the field, data are taken by tracing personal histories as understood and depicted by the informants themselves. Structural-functionalism, on the other hand, left the discipline of anthropology with the fieldwork method that came to be known as participant observation, which likewise continues to be an ongoing theme of discussion among anthropologists today.7 With this in mind, let us now turn to Suye Mura. Suye mura, or Suye village, is located in southwestern Japan. Embree chose this village because of its manageable size and the average features it presented in terms of wealth, for example. Embree and his wife Ella, who spoke fluent Japanese, lived in Suye for a year and a half from August 1935 to December 1936, getting to know people, participating in village events, and observing festivities and rituals – participant observation. Although the text is a general description of the village as a whole, Embree’s emphasis is on socio-political organization and socio-economic co-operation. In Embree’s view, Suye village is governed more by neighborhood ties between unrelated families and a web of social obligations than by the extended web of kinship. Embree records the almanac of religious and seasonal commemorations throughout the year in Suye, as well as the generic process of an individual’s passage of life from infancy to maturity, and then to retirement. In conclusion, Embree suggests possible directions of change, including those caused by the transformation of the means of production, including the mechanization and transformation of the relations of production that would follow it.8 As a study that methodologically belongs to structural-functionalism, Suye Mura is exceptional in its choice of field, Japan, a nation that had achieved modernization and industrialization at a remarkable speed, a nation that had defeated two giants, one Asian (China) in 1895 and one western (Russia) in 1905, a nation that had not been colonized by the west but had colonized other Asian nations, and a nation that audaciously withdrew from the League of Nations as a result of the disagreement over its aggressive advancement in northeastern China in the early 1930s. It was a society that may have been seen as different, suspicious, exotic, and perhaps even primitive, but not primitive in the same way as African societies were seen, and one that had not been subjected to the gaze of the western fieldworker at very close range. The years 1935 to 1936, during which John Embree and Ella Embree conducted fieldwork, were just one year away from Japan’s all-out military aggression in China, the notorious Rape of Nanjing being a significant part

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of it. Domestically, the mobilization of citizens in preparation for the upcoming war was slowly yet steadily taking place, while in Japan’s colonies, such as Korea, labor force recruitment for the home front would begin from around 1939, as part of a tighter integration of the colonies in accordance with the enlarging ambition of the Empire. Concern over the military had a weight in Embree’s consideration when choosing the field. He states that “Suye is far from any military zone, and thus our work did not come under undue suspicion by the military” (1939: xviii). From this, it should be justified to assume that Embree had an awareness of the international and national political situation contemporary to his fieldwork. As was typical of structural-functionalism, however, Suye Mura is oblivious to the international political economy of Japan, of which the village was an organic part. It depicts village life as largely static, with well-bound socio-economic classes and a hierarchical order, which is in slight contradiction to Embree’s own conclusion, where he indicates the change in the village owing to the new configuration in wealth difference and the transformation of the means of production. But, above all, Embree overlooks the change in village organization in the militarist era, reflecting the advent of Japan’s intensified militarization, as seen, for example, in the presence of military-inspired organizations such as the Patriotic Women’s Association and the annual military inspection of the villagers that reshaped the traditional form of co-operation among Suye and other Japanese villages.9 The government-encouraged emigration that sent hundreds and thousands of peasants (especially of the lower strata) of Japan to Manchuria and the presence of Chinese and Koreans in Suye’s vicinity, the mirror of colonialism, are also touched upon only in fragments (Embree 1939: 170, 174, 187). In a way, Embree seems to be trying to avoid investigating intervention by state apparatuses and the changes that it brought to the village and, at the same time, trying to isolate more traditional, “natural,” and “pure” elements, as if the former are things that do not belong to original village life. It is precisely those factors that hybridize and transform the community relations that need to be attended to if one is to capture ethnographically the everyday life of social individuals that existed amidst the historic change of the national state. Embree’s study misses them, as its mission was to account for a social structure, which remains by definition unchanging in structural-functionalism. Interestingly, he does not pay too much attention to the kinship system either, unlike other structural-functionalists. For example, Embree describes interesting cases of “bastard adoption,” where a fatherless child is adopted or absorbed into the mother’s marriage. He also reports cases of the adoption of the son-in-law. From these, Embree makes a very important statement: “The family system is patrilineal in pattern but, through the customs of adoption, often matrilineal in practice” (1939: 85). He does not, however, proceed to investigate the actual working mechanism of this arrangement – this discrepancy between lineage and practice later becomes a

Anthropology and the war 27 focal point in postwar studies of Japanese kinship (see Chapter 4). He does not present genealogies of the village families; neither is he interested in kinship terminology beyond introductory translations. More importantly – and here he is not an exception among structuralfunctionalists – he does not deal with the relations of power that are expressed through kinship relations. For example, he does not address questions of seniority-based hierarchy and gender relations in terms of power and authority in the household organization. These relations often cannot be identified by looking at the married couple in isolation from larger factors such as the socio-economic standing of the families involved, the entire organization of social relations inside the village, and legal institutions that families are subjected to, including matrimony and inheritance. Attention to such factors would have, in turn, opened up a complex analytical terrain to help understand the exercise of power within and between domestic groups. But in many senses Embree’s treatment of kinship as an institution devoid of power relations was a precursor to what happened later in the Japan field. Indeed, as we shall see in Chapter 4, kinship studies become central in understanding Japan’s postwar rural communities, which will have implications for the way Japanese society is understood to be homogeneous and egalitarian. The way the domestic unit was documented patrilineally was related to the post-Meiji reform of household registration, which was carried out in close connection with the conscription and taxation system, as part of Japan’s modern capitalist nation-building (see Fukushima 1967). The discrepancy between concept and practice that Embree noted would have opened up a new dimension of analysis regarding the state surveillance of individuals with family as the basic unit. As such, it would have highlighted the inadequacy of the existing kinship theory, which was not compatible with the need to account for kinship in close relation to state intervention. Unfortunately, Embree merely documents kin relations; he does not analyze them.10 This is closely related to the way kinship figured in structuralfunctionalism. As stated earlier, structural-functionalism developed from within societies in which kin relations overlapped with socio-political organizations. In Suye Embree discovered that this was not the case, and yet he did not pursue an alternative use of kinship theories in a society such as Japan or carefully delineate how, then, kinship complemented other institutions: structural-functionalism was not equipped with the means to improvise kinship in a broader investigation of social relations. This is not to say that in the 1930s Japanese kinship functioned fundamentally differently from the way it did in so-called primitive societies: as long as it was a basic unit of politico-economic control, Japan’s household played a similar role to the kinship institution in “primitive” societies. What was different was that in Japan after the Meiji Restoration the kinship idiom, as well as institution, was consciously deployed by the government to politically integrate the

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diverse population into one nation, as in the phrase kazokukokka, or the family state (Gluck 1985). A similar point can also be made in connection to Embree’s chapter on religion (1939: ch. 7). Although this is a richly informative chapter with a detailed calendar of religious festivities in the village throughout the year, the crux of the description is missing – that is, the fact that people are relaxed about worshiping either belief system, Shinto or Buddhism, without committing themselves exclusively to one or the other. The reality of hybrid or unprincipled worship needs to be explained in connection with the government’s effort to convert, as it were, the Japanese to emperorworshipers on the basis of the Shinto myth, while locally established Buddhism was kept largely unchanged. The role of Shinto was more pronounced in day-to-day terms as a political practice in the guise of religion in the Japanese state’s overall effort to socially control and ideologically mobilize its nationals for the nationalist cause. In fact, similar to the deployment of the kinship idiom, Shinto was actively reinstated and reorganized by the Meiji government as an instrument to implement emperor-worship. But Embree does not attend to such aspects and disregards the role played by the state and its influences on the local level. Again, his use of religion is only to illustrate the village almanac in isolation from interventions by the state and the military. If in a way the national character studies of Gorer and La Barre oversimplified the local diversities and everyday life of individuals, Embree’s structural-functionalist ethnography oversimplified the national state. Neither analyzed the state, the dominant ideology, and the relations of power within the society. Such was also the weakness of The Chrysanthemum and the Sword by Ruth Benedict, to which we now turn.

The master narrative Ruth Benedict’s Chrysanthemum and the Sword: Patterns of Japanese Culture, first published in 1946, was the product of her involvement with the OWI during the war. She was by then a senior anthropologist at Columbia, even if the recognition came much later than it should have. Her earlier scholarly work, Patterns of Culture (1934a), was making a long-lasting impression on the academy and beyond by that time. When one reads Gorer and La Barre carefully, one can see that they were influenced by Patterns of Culture, both in their labeling and classifying of Japanese culture and personality under certain type names, and in their pursuit of hidden cultural patterns, although neither is clear about what kind of things can be legitimately regarded as pattern. On the other hand, when one reads Chrysanthemum it is obvious that the book is heavily reliant on Gorer’s data (as acknowledged by Benedict) and echoes La Barre’s approach, in particular in citing striking contrasts between the Japanese character and the American way of life. Nevertheless,

Anthropology and the war 29 it is Chrysanthemum, not Gorer’s or La Barre’s article, that became the master narrative and paradigm in the postwar study of Japanese culture and society. Indeed, it virtually formed the postwar definition of Japanese culture by the Japanese themselves (see Chapter 2 in this volume). Its bestselling record still continues: one recent calculation has it that a total of 2.3 million copies of the Japanese version have been sold since the publication of the translated text in 1948 (Fukui 1999: 173). In terms of natural age, Ruth Benedict belonged to an older generation of scholars compared to John Embree, although they were professional contemporaries, as she entered the discipline of anthropology later than others.11 It was Geoffrey Gorer who was responsible for involving Benedict in the work of the OWI: when Gorer, a British citizen, who was working in the OWI, moved to the British Embassy, he suggested Benedict as his replacement.12 Just like Embree, who worked for the War Relocation Authorities, who were in charge of uprooting Japanese Americans from their homes, Benedict also came to be involved in wartime strategic research on Japan, the enemy nation. In the OWI Benedict wrote a short piece analyzing Japanese films (Benedict 1944) and another short study entitled “Japanese Behavior Patterns” (1945). It would be fair to assume that both provided the basis for Chrysanthemum. The methodological genesis of Chrysanthemum, however, begins much further back. Clifford Geertz points out that Chrysanthemum’s strategy, notably endless juxtaposition, “a look-unto-ourselves-as-we-would-lookunto-others manner” (1988: 107), is the strategy Benedict had used from early on in her writing on cannibalism (Benedict 1959a [1925]) and, of course, Patterns of Culture (Benedict 1934a). According to Margaret Mead, Benedict enjoyed working on others’ field notes and her own fieldwork experience was scarce, compared to Mead’s very extensive fieldwork experience (Mead 1974: 34). This can be witnessed in her use of Reo Fortun’s data on Dobu in Patterns of Culture. Similarly, Ruth Benedict wrote Chrysanthemum based on literature, historical studies, films, autobiographical writings, conversations with Japanese Americans, and anthropological studies preceding hers, mainly Gorer’s, and not on her own fieldwork. Just like Gorer and Embree, she did not speak, read, or write Japanese.13 She wrote Chrysanthemum after the war while on leave in California in 1946 after her service in the OWI, before she returned to Columbia for teaching (Lapsley 1999: 293–4). The Chrysanthemum and the Sword is a broad work containing history, social psychology, and the analysis of literary texts and movies and the childhood of the Japanese. Many pages are devoted to interpreting Japanese behavior in wartime from a psychological point of view. The reason why the Japanese behaved so obscurely and extraordinarily in American eyes would become clear and ordinary once we understood the Japanese way of life and thinking – this belief underlies Benedict’s work page after page. So, regardless of what she discussed – be it the Meiji reform or how a Japanese boy

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grew up into adult manhood – the main focus remained on the internal logic of the Japanese national psychology or mentality as manifested culturally, i.e. how the Japanese mind works, rather than on the factual cause-andeffect explanation, such as the fact that Japanese soldiers were not informed of the Geneva Convention regarding the treatment of POWs. Benedict thus was a committed relativist, but not a good empiricist. Resonating La Barre, but more explicitly and without pejorative assumption, time and again Benedict oscillates between how strange, peculiar, and outrageous Japanese culture might appear and how justifiable it is when it is shown that it functions perfectly well in the Japanese context. She insists that Japan be understood from the natives’ point of view and carefully monitors the western reader’s preconceptions. Unlike other wartime propaganda against the Japanese, Benedict’s text is scholarly and well balanced, which deserves more credit considering that, as John Dower states, during the war “the enemy perceived to be most atrocious by Americans was not the Germans but the Japanese,” and that “the racial issues that provoked greatest emotion among Americans were associated with the war in Asia” (1993: 258; see also Dower 1986). Above all, Benedict’s text is a masterpiece in its literary accomplishment, abundantly manifesting her gift as a poet, Anne Singleton, a pseudonym under which Benedict published. Given the enormous significance of Chrysanthemum even in today’s Japan (see Chapter 2), it would be worth our while to pay due attention to this text here. First of all, Chrysanthemum tells us of the hierarchy that is embedded in Japanese society. The model she abstracts from Japanese social hierarchy is oriented on a type of tight-knit group such as family or the army. What creates and maintains rigid hierarchy within such a group is the relationship individuals have with the group, notably the principle of occupying “one’s proper station” in rank (Benedict 1946: ch. 3). Every individual is supposed to know where she stands in a given group. Rankings, however, do not always function oppressively: in the family, children are loved by parents and at the same time must obey them. In this way, the hierarchy internal to Japanese groups is at once one of protection and submission. The emotion that governs this hierarchy is the sense of the debt that individuals supposedly owe to their parents, ancestors, community, and society at large (Benedict 1946: ch. 4). Everyone, therefore, is under the obligation to repay the debt of their very existence. This can be done by being loyal to the emperor, one’s grandparents, and parents, by being courteous to village elders, being true to friends, or applying oneself to self-discipline and selfimprovement. The debt-cum-obligation is often verbally expressed as on. On is supposedly given top down, not bottom up. It could be delivered from peer to peer, but that would be an uncomfortable situation. The notion of on is something that sustains hierarchy, by making those in the lower ranks feel constantly obliged to their superiors. Another notion that fascinated Benedict is giri (1946: ch. 8). According to her, giri is distinguishable in two ways: one is giri to one’s name; the other,

Anthropology and the war 31 giri to the society. The former is a kind of self-respect, but deeply embedded in the notion of hierarchy. It does not necessarily mean the act of pursuing the possible highest achievement in terms of one’s social success. Rather, just like on, it is more closely related to the notion of “taking one’s proper place” within a circle that is already set up in a hierarchical order. The latter is a public duty that one has to pay. Loyalty to the feudal lord may result in leaving one’s father or opposing him. But it is a public giri that ultimately justifies such a deed. In a way, paired with on, giri works as a remedy for solving contradictions arising in the course of one’s life, legitimizing the priorities given to certain duties over others in such a way as not to damage one’s dignity. On this note, Benedict has an interesting passage about the self-respect of the Japanese, which also shows her relativistic position: “True dignity,” in this day of objective study of cultures, is recognized as something which different peoples can define differently, just as they always define for themselves what is humiliating. Americans who cry out today that Japan cannot be given self-respect until we enforce our egalitarianism are guilty of ethnocentrism. If what these Americans want is, as they say, a self-respecting Japan they will have to recognize her bases for self-respect. … Japan will have to rebuild her self-respect today on her own basis, not on ours. And she will have to purify it in her own way. (Benedict 1946: 150) By far the most important notion that Benedict constructed about Japan, which became heavily influential in both academic and popular discourses on Japan, is the notion of shame culture (1946: ch. 10; see Chapter 2 in this volume). Benedict sees Japan as having a culture of shame, which is distinguishable from a culture of guilt. According to her: Shame is a reaction to other people’s criticism. A man is shamed either by being openly ridiculed and rejected or by fantasying to himself that he has been made ridiculous. In either case it is a potent sanction. But it requires an audience or at least a man’s fantasy of an audience. Guilt does not. In a nation where honor means living up to one’s own picture of oneself, a man may suffer from guilt though no man knows of his misdeed and a man’s feeling of guilt may actually be relieved by confessing his sin. (Benedict 1946: 223) In other words, shame-based behavior is a type of performativity, fulfillment on the surface, and a satisfaction of external requirements. For this, no inner principle is quite necessary. Rule-boundness and meeting the socially set standard are all to be desired. By way of contrast, guilt culture is more based on the integrity of the person himself or herself. The inner

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self-consciousness and conscience form the most important sanction for the sense of guilt. No external gaze, even that of one’s parents, teachers, or peers, matters here. Benedict is not judging one against the other. Moreover, she does not deny the virtue of shame culture. On the contrary, she identifies great potential in this culture. For example, because of the shame mechanism postwar Japan found it easy to shed the dream of the Greater Eastern Asian Coprosperity sphere and switch to a different set of performance parameters – that is, a peaceful coexistence within the community of (certain) nations (in the Cold War). This type of easy change Benedict calls “situational ethics.” Her accounts of how a child grows up in Japan follow those above. In Chapters 11 and 12 (of Benedict 1946), especially in Chapter 12, she describes to the reader the process by which a child is trained into a proper practitioner of Japanese social life. How an indulgent childhood, full of close contacts with parents and siblings, is drastically changed into the stern self-control of adulthood, wedged in circles of on and giri, becomes clear in her description. She calls it “the discontinuity of upbringing,” which is more conspicuously recognized among Japanese men than among women. The discontinuity potentially maintains an internal dualism: somewhere in their mind, Japanese adult men crave early childhood, when they acted spontaneously and unself-consciously – this, of course, resonates with Gorer. This is contrasted to disciplined adult behavior, which expects men not to show their emotions and to act within the socially stipulated codes of conduct. Such an interpretation had already been offered by Gorer, but by combining it with native concepts such as on and giri Benedict distances herself from deductive psychoanalytical assumption and grounds the growing-up process of the Japanese in indigenous terms, and not necessarily and one-sidedly in terms of western science. She manages to do so despite the lack of fieldwork, except for interviews with Japanese Americans, by extensively utilizing literary sources such as the story of the forty-seven samurai who remained loyal to their deceased master and repaid their on by taking revenge in exchange for their own lives, and autobiographical accounts such as A Daughter of the Samurai by Etsu Inagaki Sugimoto (1928), and by analyzing many propaganda films.14 Although enormously successful in reviews, with Alfred Kroeber praising it for being “a book that makes one proud” to be an anthropologist (1947: 169; also Bowles 1947; Morris 1947a, 1947b), when looked at in detail Benedict’s methodology seems to be replete with problems. As a relativist, she takes great pains to treat Japan the same as she would treat other cultures whether they are societies with or without literacy, with or without a complex state structure, with or without industrial capitalism. Can one do this? Is it legitimate to treat as many cultures as we possibly know as standing on exactly the same footing? Does not so doing in fact reify the notion of culture itself, as if we can comfortably draw its unchanging, fixed structure and nature, its secure boundaries, and its inherent essence? In the

Anthropology and the war 33 twentieth century, through various contacts and conquests, colonial domination being one of them, cultures are no longer isolated from one another, but transnationally and transcontinentally interactive and, if this is so, how do we account for international (or global, in 1990s language) factors? There is no way of accounting for these in Benedict’s text. Furthermore, as with other culture and personality scholars such as Mead – but maybe not so much with Sapir, who saw culture as being influenced by individuals’ agency as well – Benedict saw culture with too close a correspondence with personality types, with the latter determined by the former. In this way, culture becomes a closed system that houses finite personalities (see Handler 1986). It is a sort of cultural determinism, the contention that runs counter to Benedict’s overall scheme of presenting Japanese culture as it exists. This predicament is illustrated by a methodological flaw in the culture and personality school itself: the formation of modal personality is seen as the one-way product of this colossal force called culture, while culture itself is left unproblematized as if it is some kind of a black box. More importantly in the context of postwar Japan, Benedict emerges as the figure of a “culture giver.” When she refers to American freedom, American informal and open, and therefore genuine, human relationships, and American moral democracy, she effectively places them, intentionally or unintentionally and despite her relativist principle, one step above those same aspects in Japan, as something that the Japanese, though with their peculiar ethics, can hope to aspire to, no matter how much she insists that her American readers should be patient, tolerant, and understanding of Japan and its peculiarity. After all, Chrysanthemum was part of a wartime enemy morals study and was produced by a member of the victorious nation as a study of the defeated nation, and in this sense it is understandable that it became a verdict on the Japanese, albeit a kind one, that tells them why Japan had to be defeated by the US and how they could salvage their culture by making themselves more like the Americans (see Chapter 2). Also, her use of linguistic data is not supported by sociological and historical data. She arbitrarily picks up some words such as on and giri, presumably from Japanese-American informants as well as the literature she read, without logically supporting the grounds as to why these particular words, and not others, should be keywords, and without paying sufficient attention to the socio-historical contexts in which these words were uttered and to the effects these utterances produced. In tracing the usage of these concepts, she freely leaps, without principle, between centuries to justify how these words are used in the same way by the Japanese over and over again, as if the Japanese mentality, represented in words such as on and giri, never changes. Indeed, in her text what was valid under the feudal Tokugawa system is also valid in the age of capitalism. Similarly, she fails to pay due attention to the politico-economic transformations that Japan went through, especially in the late nineteenth/early

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twentieth centuries; that is, modernization – a process that brings about not only societal transformation but also individuation and atomization of people, who now emerge as critical self-reflexive subjects, albeit with relative cultural differences depending on which society and which sections of that society they come from. Rather, what matters to her, again, is “culture,” which, in her view, stands above history, society, and economy. As a result, her attempt at explaining such a complex entity as Japanese society by using fragmentary sources such as some words, isolated ideas, quaint literature, and partial observations based on second-hand information is without connection to history and political economy. The result is inevitably to identify an unchanging Japanese cultural essence. The consequent reductionism marks the book from cover to cover. We must also pay attention to how Benedict collected her data. Apart from the research that had already been done by others such as La Barre and Embree, Benedict interviewed Japanese Americans. If La Barre’s observation was superficial, Benedict’s interviews were thorough, according to Ezra Vogel: I recall some of these informants telling me what it felt like to talk with Benedict over lunch, day after day. They admired the thoroughness of her questioning, but they lived in dread of her excruciating effort to delve into every little aspect of their feelings and experience. It seemed to them as if she wanted to hear every detail they could possibly remember, over and over again. They recalled the exhaustion and relief they felt as they were allowed to leave when the meal ended. (Vogel 1989: x) This indicates both how methodical Benedict was and the vulnerable position in which her interviewees were placed. It is by now a well-known fact how unjustifiable it was for American citizens of Japanese heritage to be detained in camps during the war under crude living conditions and with tight surveillance. Being Japanese American during the war was no simple matter; this ethnic group was placed on the threshold of life and death, as the Japanese heritage was seen as anti-patriotic and as compromising national security. Her Japanese-American interviewees were in a sense more or less forced to co-operate with Benedict: they had no choice. Considering that power asymmetry between the interviewer and the interviewee even today is an ongoing theme in anthropological debate on the politics of representation, Benedict’s interviews with Japanese Americans were an acute case of the interviewer’s political authority being exercised in full, whether intentionally or not. What is more characteristic of Chrysanthemum is not details such as the notion of shame culture or the use of terms such as on and giri, but its method of naming, labeling, classifying, and pursuing the Japanese cultural core, the nucleus that can at once explain Japanese culture in an

Anthropology and the war 35 all-encompassing manner. This may not, in Chrysanthemum, appear in a single term. Indeed, Benedict suggests more than one conceptual core that makes up the Japanese national character: hierarchy, especially (fictive) kinship-based hierarchy attributed to the relation between the emperor and his people; shame culture; circle of obligation; discontinuity between indulgent childhood and disciplined adulthood; and so on. Nevertheless, Benedict’s was the first modern account of Japan from a holistic point of view and this holism was to dominate postwar anthropological studies of Japan for quite some time.15 Later anthropologists of Japan will each come up with their own formulation of the content of a Japanese cultural core – be it the vertical principle or ie society, wrapping culture, or amae, dependence or passive love, as we shall see subsequently. Despite the book’s many shortcomings, following the war, by the end of which Americans came to regard Japan as a subhuman monster, the significance of Benedict’s work was immense: she salvaged Japanese humanity, by trying to render its “monstrosity” comprehensible and logical. Her book explained the fanatic loyalty of the Japanese to the emperor as a cultural logic, not as madness; it explained the extreme militarism of the Japanese, which was outside the range of western military training, as in line with indigenous cultural rationality, not as irrational, disorganized frenzy; it explained the national-scale belief in victory in the war, which they were already badly losing, in terms of the national character that could be understood in its own right, not as a pathological illusion or sheer lack of reflexivity.

Embree’s dilemma John Embree also wrote wartime studies of Japanese society. Embree’s first, shorter study, The Japanese (1943), published in the Smithsonian War Background Study Series, is a concise version of Suye Mura supplemented by new research on urban life and industrial economy. This forty-two-page study was widely used by the US Army and Navy, according to the dust jacket of the first edition of his later study The Japanese Nation (1945a). What appears interesting in The Japanese is that Embree now expands his perspective from the social structure of a village to “National Social Structure,” by which he refers to the structure of the government and the symbolic role of the emperor (1943: 11–13). There seems to be an incompatibility between what Radcliffe-Brown had suggested social structure to be – “the network of direct and indirect social relations linking together individual human beings” (1939: xi) – and the political and administrative structure of a nation-state. In particular, considering that Radcliffe-Brown was clear about the possibility of structural-functionalist anthropology as a study of “any convenient locality of suitable size” (1952: 193) and “a close study of a community of limited size” (1939: xi), Japan as a nation does not appear to belong to its repertoire of fieldwork-able size.

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Although in many senses Japan was seen as culturally primitive in wartime enemy studies, it nevertheless was not the same as the primitive societies that Radcliffe-Brown and other structural-functionalists studied. Embree’s study does not fill the theoretical gap between the studies of primitive societies and the studies of industrialized, literate societies such as Japan. In this sense, the term “national social structure” only shows this internal logical contradiction. Embree certainly fulfilled one important condition of structuralfunctionalism – fieldwork. But, precisely because his fieldwork was entrenched in the village, he could not handle Japan as a nation as the object of analysis. However, in the height of wartime enemy studies, it was inevitable that Embree would have produced studies of the Japanese nation as a whole: the war was waged against the whole nation of Japan, and not against one Japanese village. Embree resisted succumbing to the silent pressure to reduce Japanese society into a convenient shorthand such as toilet training. Indeed John Pelzel, in his obituary of Embree, emphasizes that Embree found the postwar military occupation of Japan “distasteful” and often disagreed with his colleagues (Pelzel 1952: 221). But it is also true that he was not successful in producing an effective counterdiscourse against the national character discourse originated by Gorer and La Barre and popularized by Benedict. The term “national social structure” is a manifestation of this dilemma. More importantly, although at times he was critical of the culture and personality school, his structural-functionalist approach was equally plagued with an ahistorical representation of Japan. For example, for Embree Japan had not changed since the Tokugawa period and its restoration of the rule of the emperor of Meiji (1868) was just another fad that preserved the changeless Japanese orientation of loyalty and hierarchy (1945a: 225). He also documents the existence of the Korean minority and their inferior position imposed by Japanese society (1945a: 123). But, as in Suye Mura, such knowledge is not connected to the reality of colonialism or ethnic discrimination and racism. Rather, again, it is seen as a mere extension of the Japanese proclivity for hierarchy in creating lower layers, due to its inherent social structure. Notable is the increasingly recognizable influence of national character studies on Embree’s 1945 book. One sees, for example, passages that could be closely compared to Gorer and La Barre, such as: It is an ignorance of these customs and the motivations behind them that causes so many casual visitors to the Orient to misinterpret actions and get themselves into frustrating impasses which they tend to blame on native stupidity or cussedness. The same overt action in two societies may mean two quite different things, just as two similar sounding words in two different languages may have different meanings. In English “go” is a verb, in Japanese it is the name of a game; in Western culture one waves to a person to bid farewell, while in Japanese a wave of the hand

Anthropology and the war 37 means “come here.” These are simple examples which rarely cause confusion, but there are others, more complex, which are less well comprehended, such as the use of a go-between, or the Japanese smile. (Embree 1945a: 221) Although Embree’s is a much more empathetic account, the juxtaposition of incongruity between east and west is a tactic highlighted by La Barre, used by Gorer, and later refined by Benedict. Compared to Suye Mura, Embree’s Japanese Nation is a patchwork of inconsistent data, which he himself does not appear to handle well. Embree was certainly critical of the culture and personality school. The following passage from his Japanese Nation is a virtual critique of Benedict’s method, for example: This brief summary of Japanese behavior traits, while of some value in predicting how particular Japanese may behave under certain circumstances, does not provide a magic explanation for Japanese aggressive warfare any more than a similar summary of national behavior traits would explain why the United States once attacked Mexico, the British took on an Empire, or the French swept over Europe under Napoleon. The Japanese under the Tokugawa maintained internal and external peace for over two centuries, while such aspects of her culture as child training, group responsibility, and the family system have been more or less constant during both the peaceful and aggressive phases of her history. It is necessary to look to various socio-economic causes, such as industrialization and European colonization in Asia, to explain the complex phenomena of modern wars. Behavior patterns help to predict how individuals of a given culture behave in a particular social context; they neither cause, nor can they “explain” why, nations go to war or remain at peace. (Embree 1945a: 235–6) The above passage, at the same time, contains considerable ambiguity about the culture and personality school. Although Embree suggests that one needs to look at more than behavior patterns and personality traits, he nevertheless endorses the timeless aspects of child training, the key point disseminated by national character studies. In other words, it seems that Embree himself did not come up with the original formula to convert his Suye data into a satisfactory explanation of enemy behavior; he therefore had to lean, possibly unintentionally, toward the culture and personality school in many ways during the war. His more eager critique of the culture and personality school had to wait until the end of the war. When Chrysanthemum was first published Embree gave it a mixed review. Embree commends Benedict, saying that she has “done a cultural analysis of Japan” that is “more extensive” than Patterns of Culture, and that

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Chrysanthemum is “an illuminating study” which would help the US Occupation officers already stationed in Japan. But he qualifies his praise with a couple of quibbles. For example, he points out “the repetition of certain remarks made by Geoffrey Gorer” on child training and disputes the assumption that Japanese houses are dangerous for children. He also, rightly in my view, asserts that Japan has diverse regional customs as opposed to a singular set of national traits and criticizes the simplistic generalization that Chrysanthemum tends to present. This point, in retrospect, is very important considering that the post-Chrysanthemum anthropology of Japan moved headlong toward national holism by erasing regional diversity (see Chapters 4 and 5 in this volume). He then suggests that the only way to rectify this is to collect more empirical data through field studies in different areas of Japan in the future (Embree 1947: 246). Embree postponed a more fundamental critique until two years after Benedict’s death in 1948 – that is, the year of his death, 1950. In a short article under the title “Standardized Error and Japanese Character” (1950a), Embree extensively quotes from both Gorer and Benedict regarding the dangers of Japanese houses for children. Gorer talks about paper walls and open charcoal burners being dangerous to children and at the same time about how children can damage those due to the fragile construction of the house, emphasizing that “it is believed that even the weight of a baby may be too heavy for the raised joints which support the house” (Gorer 1943: 110). Benedict’s text resonates with this, by stressing that “[i]t is seriously felt that the whole house can be thrown out of shape even by a child’s step upon the threshold”; also, where the tatami floor mats join, “the samurai of old times used to thrust their swords up from below the house and pierce the occupants of the room” and therefore children are trained not to sit on the joints of mats (Benedict 1946: 260). Gorer does not clarify who believes this when he states “it is believed” and Benedict does not tell us who seriously feels this when she states that “it is seriously felt.” Embree denies these claims on the basis of his own empirical study and states: The ordinary Japanese home is a place of familiarity, a place of safety, and a place where one is protected and fed. In it also are to be found supernatural protectors; the ancestral spirits by the Butsudan, regional spirits by the Kamidana, various spirits of good fortune such as Ebisu and Daikoku in the kitchen. The house, even when empty of adults, is still a familiar and relatively safe place because of these spiritual presences. This is not to say that a Japanese mother would leave an infant alone. There are hazards such as falling off the front step or into the fire pit. But it is safe enough for the children, and even babies may be left in the care of ten- or twelve-year-olds in the home. (Embree 1950a: 441)

Anthropology and the war 39 For the wartime public mind, at once afraid of the Japanese, the most unknown enemy, and full of a triumphant postwar desire to learn about the defeated enemy, whose country the now victorious nation was occupying, Gorer’s and Benedict’s insights were exotic, fascinating, and unique, while Embree’s were mundane and ordinary. This may be why Embree’s voice was not heard as much as Gorer’s and Benedict’s. At any rate, the fact that these seemingly absurd details, i.e. houses not being able to withstand the weight of babies etc., could provide serious points of debate among the leading scholars does tell us about the way in which Japan was perceived and studied – that is, on the basis of imagination and hearsay, rather than empirical research – and this was Embree’s more important critique. As I mentioned earlier, Embree named the existing approach to characterizing Japan “knowledge by definition.” By relying on Vilhjalmur Stefansson’s The Standardization of Error (1927), in which Stefansson shows that the erroneous knowledge and judgment that fill social needs become standardized – the observation as to how socially dominant discourse is created through the intimate relation between the producer of discourse and the expectation of the print market – Embree suggests that Gorer and Benedict offered the wartime and postwar readers of Japanese culture the knowledge that filled their expectations. Embree, then, ahead of many anthropologists, vehemently criticizes the ethnocentrism of the culture and personality school, which ultimately catered for a western readership: In much of the character structure writing about the Japanese there is an ethnocentrism which fitted in well with the social needs of the war period during which the “scientific” conclusions as to their character were made. Racist interpretations were socially as well as scientifically unacceptable at this time but “character structure” interpretations were all right and served just as well in the literate world to “explain” the international and domestic behavior of Japan. Margaret Mead, for example, refers to Japanese culture as one that functions but is “not pleasant.” … In regard to Dr. Mead’s reference to Japanese culture as unpleasant the question immediately arises as to unpleasant from whose point of view? (Embree 1950a: 442) Embree also explicitly criticizes Mead, who called the Japanese “pathological” and “adolescent,” in his 1950 letter to the editor of American Anthropologist. He laments the fact that anthropology had lost its objectivity and fallen into the trap of ethnocentric judgment since anthropologists’ close involvement with wartime enemy studies (Embree 1950b: 430, 431).16 Embree’s early death denied him a chance to build his own school of Japanese studies on the basis of these criticisms. Had he lived longer and continued to pursue his line of research, it would not be going too far to say that we would have had a different anthropology of Japan today.

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Debating national character The end of the war brought about a certain revision among practitioners of Japanese national character studies. For example, Douglas Haring, whom Richard Minear classified as “the old Japanist” along with John Embree, went through an interesting change from 1943 to 1953. Haring was a missionary-turned-anthropologist and his Blood on the Rising Sun (1943) was listed in Benedict’s references. This book is more like propaganda, full of judgmental declaratives about what to do with the Japanese during and after the war. Its appendix even goes into detail about from where and along which route the US fleet should proceed to Asia. The book is about the Japanese national character, but his is more idiosyncratic: based on the firsthand experience of having lived there and probably due to his interest in religion, he explains the Japanese character in terms of spirit domination, suggesting that the decade from 1929 to 1939 could be “viewed in terms of the resurgence and final dominance of the rough spirit” (1943: 126). In 1946 Haring published an article commenting on the wartime studies of character structure. First he validates studies of the national character by saying that Superficial appraisals dismiss the study of “character structure” as a passing anthropological fad. Perhaps the term “character structure” and the allied jargon may go the way of fads to merited oblivion. But meticulous observation and analysis of the development of patterns of individual character in conformance with local cultural norms offers more than an academic amusement. Such investigation hews close to scientific explanation of the durable problem of ethos – “the soul of a people,” “racial genius,” or “national character.” (Haring 1946: 14) Reflecting the US military occupation of Japan, Haring then combines this stance with the building of Japanese democracy, suggesting that “[o]nly by changing the patterns of social experience in infancy can a society undergo permanent reform, either toward democracy or toward autocracy” (1946: 16). Resonating with La Barre and Gorer, Haring comments on the Japanese male’s sexual behavior as “tinged with sadistic violence” and goes on to state that “the fierce obscenity of Japanese schoolboys, homosexuality, contempt for wives, and sexual mutilation of helpless enemies all stem perhaps from these unresolved conflicts” (1946: 18). He does not provide any data to substantiate these assertions. His conclusion, again very similar to Gorer’s and La Barre’s, was that “[t]he wartime studies of the Japanese personality indicate that large numbers of Japanese behave in ways regarded by Euro-Americans as neurotic” (1946: 21). Interestingly, however, despite these strongly worded assumptions Haring warns that current knowledge is inadequate because of its overgeneralization and lack of details. He even suggests that the study of Japan would

Anthropology and the war 41 require fieldwork, and this fieldwork should be longer than six months or a year (1946: 22). Thus, although deeply entrenched in the culture and personality school, Haring now takes a new task of fieldwork to be necessary.17 Seven years later, in his 1953 “Japanese National Character: Cultural Anthropology, Psychoanalysis, and History,” published in Yale Review, Haring historicizes wartime studies of national character. Though commending Chrysanthemum as outstanding, Haring insists that it is necessary to “verify” findings of wartime studies “on the spot” and suggests that “[t]he Japanese mode of living has changed too profoundly. The present situation could be studied; it would be feasible to discover much about prewar Japan while correcting our knowledge of contemporary Japanese character” (Haring 1953: 377). Here, national character is seen not as timeless and unchanging, but as transformative, historically changing, and non-inherent, although it continues to be seen as a totality. Haring then emphasizes the importance of history in producing a national character: “All the features of the alleged ‘compulsive personality’ of the Japanese are logical fruits of the police state. An explanation centered in diapers is suspect if it neglects three centuries of fear-inspired discipline” (1953: 386). Although Haring does not abandon the existence of national character and does not invalidate hypotheses pertaining to Japanese character structure – and we are left with no explanation of which “fear-inspired discipline” he is talking about – he now demands empirical confirmation of these and historical analyses of the interrelation between state political structure and the everyday lives of individuals. What is interesting to note here is that the pretension of anthropology being a science was quietly withdrawn: the secret of Japanese toilet training was seen first as data, then hypothesis, and now as something that needs to be empirically verified, since now it is suspect.18 Since the postwar period, anthropologists, it seems, have shied away from using the term “national character.” Although studies of national characters are by all means dead, as in the case of social psychology, the culture and personality school redefined itself in multiple ways, including the sub-field of psychological anthropology (Barnouw 1963; Hsu 1961, 1972). Margaret Mead, the leading figure in the culture and personality school and close collaborator of Ruth Benedict, defined studies of national character as “the attempt to delineate the regularities in character among the members of a national group attributable to the factors of shared nationality and the accompanying institutional correlates” (1953: 646). This definition is incorrect in today’s perspective. For example, where do we place refugees and expatriates, transnationals and diasporas, people with multiple nationalities and stateless people? Since the spate of studies on nationalism in the 1980s, followed by the rising interest in colonialism and postcolonialism in the 1990s, anthropologists are no longer open to the idea that “nations have essence” (e.g. Gellner 1983; B. Anderson 1983; Bhabha 1990; Dirks 1992; Chatterjee 1993). Mead’s assumption stands on the

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premise that nations emerge naturally, have existed always in the same way, and will not change in essence. The twentieth century witnessed the opposite: the newly independent nations emerged, in some cases preserving pre-colonial tribal boundaries and in other cases disrupting such boundaries. Nationality is a product contingent on historical transformation of political conditions and hence cannot be taken as a starting point for studying a group of people. But, Mead perceives nationality as something that exists naturally and will not change.19 Because of the undefinable “national” boundaries of culture, Mead’s formulation faces the problem of sampling, which was already pointed out in 1953 by David Mandelbaum (1953). A Chinese-American Harvard graduate, Mead says, “is equally as perfect a sample of American national character as is a tenth-generation Boston-born deaf mute of United Kingdom stock” (Mead 1953: 648). If so, Ruth Benedict’s Chrysanthemum becomes a book not about Japan and the Japanese but about American national character with data pertaining to Japanese Americans. After all, nationalizing cultural boundaries is problematic, given that culture does not coincide with the boundaries of nation. Moreover, culture does not just grow into humans; it is embodied in art products, merchandise, books, and thoughts, for example. As such, it travels, regardless of immigration control, and such a process of “traveling,” its patterns and directions, is not free of international relations of power, which in turn are subjected to changing historical conditions. In other words, culture is often imposed on people – that is, a stronger and more dominant form of life is often exported into the weaker regions as more desirable, better, and normal. If one sees how the legacy of colonial oppression often takes cultural forms – cricket games in India, Japanese food in Korea, for example – and if one sees the transnational cultural flows we have witnessed in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries it becomes obvious that nationalizing cultural boundaries is impossible. Neither Gorer nor Benedict questioned the legitimacy of regarding those who were seen as Japanese as belonging to Japanese culture, although many of the interviewees and the people observed were US citizens and in this sense they were in disagreement with Mead’s national boundaries. We have no way of telling whether those who were interviewed by Gorer and Benedict regarded themselves as Japanese or US citizens. Either way, it was the abstract impersonal personality that was studied, not the personhood or the subjecthood. In this way, the Japanese cultural peculiarity possessed by all Japanese was already assumed prior to the investigation, which dictated classification and interpretation of the survey data. As Federico Neiburg and Marcio Goldman emphasize, national character studies created and enhanced cultural essentialism and disproportionately emphasized cultural homogeneity in a society (1998: 65). Problematically, culture is explained in terms of a set of behavioral traits (which are themselves survey results, not empirical information) and

Anthropology and the war 43 researchers adopted the scientific pretension to present such an explanation. This can be observed in the psychoanalytic and psychological vocabulary anthropologists employed in describing the Japanese character. This comes as no surprise, considering that in those days anthropology and psychology in the west had closer relations, complementing each other. Benedict’s excerpts from Chrysanthemum were carried in Science Digest under the title “The Puzzling Moral Code of the Japs [sic]” (1947), La Barre’s article was published in the journal Psychiatry (1945), and Benedict’s 1934 article “Anthropology and the Abnormal” was published in the Journal of General Psychology, confirming the disciplinary intimacy between cultural anthropology, psychiatry, psychology, and psychoanalysis.20 In many ways national character studies inherit a Hegelian perspective on history and the world. Culture was perceived as an embodiment of unchanging, but historically repeating, essence – “the march of the Objective Spirit,” “the World Spirit” (Berlin 1996: 94, 96), or a world-soul, an anima mundi (see Hegel 1971: 28–55). Just as Hegel was divided from Marx in that the latter saw the key to change the world in political economy and the development of contradictions in economic relations, national character studies failed to locate the fundamental contradiction in society. Its sense of history was thus false, as it perceived history to be something that the essential national character and the corresponding personality would present identically and repeatedly. It was also tautologous, since national character was thought to “characterize” the nation. The assumption of the existence of essential nation-ness, however, gave rise to the subsequent anthropological studies of Japan. What was the Japan that anthropologists studied as an assignment of the OWI and the Office of Strategic Services in the 1940s? Japan was the enemy of the US. Although the US eventually defeated Japan, due to the lack of knowledge about Japanese cultural values, which meant that the behavior of Japanese soldiers on the battlefield was unpredictable, for a time Japan proved to be a most incomprehensible and hence formidable enemy. The enigma of the Japanese was multiplied in their seemingly contradictory, paradoxical characters, stretching to the extreme opposites of the poles – emotional/unemotional, aesthetic/brutal, obedient/insolent, and so on. Swept along by sensational accounts of the Japanese national character, researchers were often oblivious of Japan’s role in Asia as a colonial ruler and aggressor, and studies of Japanese national character neglected Koreans and other colonial subjects in Japan. In other words, it was Japan as the enemy of the US that anthropologists studied and not Japan as the colonizer of other Asians; the latter did not even count.21 Despite the existence of excellent studies such as E. Herbert Norman’s Japan’s Emergence as a Modern State (1940), the Japanese Empire was never seriously dealt with by anthropologists. It was always the internal cultural logic that was supposed to hold the magic key to explaining Japan and Japanese behavior within the

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confines of the Japanese nation, not the historical consequences of Japan’s colonial empire-building, which involved peoples other than the Japanese. On the basis of the foregoing, the specific flaws in the wartime studies of Japanese national character can be summarized as follows. First was a teleological deduction of wartime aggression. Aggression was already concluded to underlie the Japanese character and provided a point from which scholars looked back towards the early life experiences of soldiers. Second, character was explained tautologously within the boundaries of “character.” In other words, what was offered as an explanation of a Japanese characteristic such as compulsiveness was also offered as resulting from that characteristic, making the argument circular. The third was sexist bias, erasing females from consideration, as can be seen first in Gorer’s and then in Benedict’s emphasis of how boys grow up into manhood. Fourth, as I have emphasized, wartime studies of the Japanese national character were blind to history. Fifth, ethnocentrism underpinned them throughout: for example, a concept such as toilet training is a western construct that was ethnocentrically imposed on the Japanese. Sixth, a finite number of linguistic data were equated with psychology, rendering the existence of certain words synonymous with the existence of such traits and emotions among people who spoke that language. What people said they were was equated with what they really were without further theoretical ado. Seventh, as a consequence of the foregoing, the complex Japanese culture and society were reduced to a homogeneous entity. One important question remains: does national character exist? There is no easy answer to this question. Despite recurrent and some vehement criticisms of the culture and personality school in general and national character studies more specifically, no one completely denies the existence of national character, be it a product of ideological engineering or environmental effect (see, for example, Shweder 1979a, 1979b). During the Vietnam War, US intelligence used the concept of national character in order to understand the enemy (Feuchtwang 1973: 75). Whenever new armed or political conflict is created or a tension arises in foreign relations, analysis of the enemy’s character becomes an issue (see Platt 1961), just as in criminology, where offenders are analyzed and given a psychological profile on the basis of the socio-economic and racial group in which they were brought up. Remembering what Perry Anderson remarked regarding the British Empire and the complicity of structural-functionalism as an imposition of “totality” on the colonized peoples, we see here the export of psychological profiling to other (especially non-western and non-free-world) nations as a “totality” in US practice. Furthermore, as Arjun Appadurai puts it, the Cold War-related projects in area studies and university funding sustained “a topography of national cultural differences” (1996: 16). Indeed, the rise of area studies as an academic discipline is closely related to the Cold War concern with national security and international tension. Far from disappearing, national bound-

Anthropology and the war 45 aries and national character are assumed as givens in the studies of cultures in connection to strategically envisioned US global policies.22 Anthropological studies of Japan, as we shall see in subsequent chapters, are not an exception. In a way, the persistence of discourse indeed preserves national character as a real substance, no matter how ideological such a substance may be. Discourse, as it were, both reflects and constitutes the reality. Just as no nation is free from nationalism, national myth, and self-righteous raison d’être, the discourse of national character is inevitably fed back to the everyday life of individuals in a given nation. In this sense, we must treat national character as an ideological discursive formation – real it may be, but perhaps not entirely true. Therefore the process of its formation is a more important object of analysis than the true-or-false verification of its content; a mere listing of content that is not accompanied with the analysis of its gestational process would simply add another myth to the existing list of national traits. From Neiburg and Goldman: What must be done is to map out, in its various foci of production and propagation, the mechanisms of constitution and diffusion of the categories related to this notion [national character], showing how apparently self-evident concepts and facts, as well as the most commonplace of words and things, come to acquire, throughout history and in social usage, the density that is attributed to them as if it were a second nature. (Neiburg and Goldman 1998: 71) As long as we attribute a reality to ideology – ideology not as false consciousness but as a real system of thought – and insofar as there is a broad milieu of production, reception, and exchange of ideas and discourses about “who we are and what makes us people of such and such nationality,” national character, understood as an ideological discursive field in which scholars and lay people alike widely participate – that is, an historical product of the national-state system – does exist. This can best be seen in the way in which Ruth Benedict’s Chrysanthemum and the Sword reigned over the postwar reconstruction of Japanese culture: after fifty years, there remains a salient discourse of the culture of shame and the image of hierarchical but homogeneous Japanese society continues to be accepted, as will be shown below. The Japanese national character discourse, more commonly known as nihonjinron (discourses on Japanese cultural uniqueness), developed hand in hand with anthropological studies of Japan in the west (see Chapter 5). It was sustained by a two-way process of feedback between western researchers and Japanese commentators. The postwar Japanese national character discourse, it would not be going too far to say, started with the adoption of Benedict’s Chrysanthemum as

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self-knowledge by the Japanese. By writing about Japanese national character, anthropologists – Benedict most of all – contributed to redefining and recreating Japanese national character. Indeed, Benedict’s reception in Japan is so peculiarly ideological in nature that it succinctly shows a feedback mechanism of the dominant discourse constituting a reality where it consolidates itself into hegemony, although the interpretation of her text varied historically depending on Japan’s domestic and international relations of power, conditioned by various occurrences such as war, economic growth or recession, and political turmoil. This process deserves a separate treatment, to which I devote the following chapter.

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Chrysanthemum’s strange life Politically, by rendering Japanese culture rational and comprehensible The Chrysanthemum and the Sword assured its US readers that the Occupation of Japan that had started in August 1945 and was to last until 1952 did not have to rely on violence or oppressive measures; it endorsed the idea that Japan had its own civilized, albeit unfamiliar, lifestyle, only that it had a different cultural logic behind it. Of course, this did not guarantee that the Occupation authorities regarded Japan and the Japanese as standing on equal footing to the US and Americans – the Occupation’s main aim was to bring Japan out of its backwardness and place it on the path of modernization. In Japan itself Chrysanthemum received a strong reaction, the direction of which was not unanimous. On the whole it gave Japanese the chance to redeem their self-worth in the postwar international community led by the US, by assuring to them that the west understood them. Benedict’s reasoning of Japan’s defeat and Japan’s possible path to recovery gave Japan and the Japanese a face-saving alibi, an explanation of their miserable loss in the war, and the moral ground for rebuilding the nation. More importantly, Chrysanthemum was a text that gave the Japanese a sense of how westerners tended to see Japan, and hence supplied them with an appropriate discursive tool and conceptual constructs to explain themselves to westerners. In other words, those who learned the most about Japan by reading Benedict were the Japanese themselves. The Japanese learned how to represent themselves to the west, how to be accountable to the west, by satisfying western preconceptions which they learned by way of reading Benedict. Furthermore, the Japanese learned in retrospect how to be reflexive and sensitive about their cultural uniqueness. As the Japanese cultural critic Aoki Tamotsu suggests, the Benedictian approach, including the concepts and notions she suggested in Chrysanthemum, appears and reappears with some modifications throughout postwar Japanology; indeed, Benedictian notions became the core of nihonjinron sor Japanese cultural studies (Aoki 1990: passim). In his reading of postwar

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nihonjinron (or nihonbunkaron in his usage, meaning discourses on Japanese culture), Aoki traces Benedict’s method (holism) and conceptual frameworks such as shame culture in the writings of a broad spectrum of authors across different disciplines. He divides postwar Japanology into roughly four phases: negative uniqueness (1945–55), historical relativity (1956–63), positive uniqueness (1964–83), and universalism (1984 on); he points out that by the positive uniqueness phase of 1964–83 elements that had previously been understood as Japan’s negative cultural uniqueness were turned around as elements that demonstrated its positive cultural uniqueness against the background of its economic achievement. A parallel inversion has happened with regard to the Japanese reading of Chrysanthemum, as we shall see in this chapter. Benedict’s text played a crucial role in the postwar social scientific discourse on Japan – written both by Japanese and non-Japanese. Aoki attributes the use of holistic method to grasp Japan and Japanese society as a whole – widely seen among nihonjinron authors – to Benedict’s book (Aoki 1990: 42). As recently as 1992, the “big two” of the postwar American anthropology of Japan, David Plath and Robert Smith, emphatically placed Chrysanthemum and the Sword as one of the most (if not the single most) influential books. Smith goes as far as to suggest that “there is a sense in which all of us have been writing footnotes to [The Chrysanthemum and the Sword] ever since it appeared in 1946” (Plath and Smith 1992: 206). He has also said that all Americans who study Japan are “Benedict’s children” (see Smith 1989). From a very different – almost opposite – angle, Jennifer Robertson points to the ramifying consequences of Chrysanthemum’s influence upon Japanese studies, an influence that is not wholly positive, but nevertheless pervasive: It seems that cultural portraits contrary to the tenaciously normative template constructed by Benedict and subsequently reproduced can only always be “alternative” or “other” as opposed to unacknowledged facets of the complex, composite, and integrated whole of “Japanese culture.” (Robertson 1998a: 311) We can provisionally conclude that Benedict shaped the postwar cultural discourse of Japan’s self-representation and the west’s perception of it; in this sense, Chrysanthemum became paradigmatic. Compared to wartime enemy studies, the advantage of Chrysanthemum was that although it used data collected during the war its publication actually postdated two atomic bombings, VJ day, and Japan’s complete surrender. The American public was in a position to see Japan from the vantage point of the victor and was ready to see it differently, especially with its Occupation, which was becoming increasingly important for US hegemony in the rising Cold War confrontation in East Asia. The changing

Benedictian myth 49 political climate transformed Benedict’s text from wartime enemy studies into a postwar manual for understanding and governing Japan. Of all the books written about Japan in modern times, Chrysanthemum has perhaps had the strangest life. One of the inexplicable things about Chrysanthemum is that despite the existence of harsh criticism from early on in Japan to this day it is still read and admired and continues to create a debate about the interpretation and reinterpretation of Ruth Benedict. By 1984 the sale of the Japanese translation of Chrysanthemum, first published in 1948, was said to have reached 1.2 million copies (Nishi 1983: 12). As I have already pointed out, in a more recent calculation a total of 2.3 million copies of the Japanese version of Chrysanthemum were sold in Japan (Fukui 1999: 173). One random survey has it that 33 per cent of 944 adult Japanese respondents in an urban area have heard of Chrysanthemum (Befu and Manabe 1987: 98). The first pocketsize edition was published in 1967 and it had its 101st imprint by July 1995 (Kent 1996: 35). This shows a higher statistical interest than in the US, where it had been estimated that 23,000 copies of Chrysanthemum were sold from 1946 to 1971, although Clifford Geertz in the late 1980s estimated that a total of 350,000 copies were sold (S. Johnson 1988: 14; Geertz 1988: 116). Whereas in the US the interest and readership have been confined to business and academe, except perhaps for the initial postwar years, in Japan Chrysanthemum was quoted even in high school textbooks (Lummis 1982: 2). Every decade saw important articles or books published with Chrysanthemum as the theme, mostly in conjunction with the Japanese cultural uniqueness thesis, or nihonjinron (see, e.g., M. Suzuki 1967; Nishi 1983; Soeda 1993; see also Lie 2001a). With the recent release of the Ruth Fulton Benedict papers at Vassar College, her alma mater, debates on Benedict’s life in close relation to the production of Chrysanthemum have been revived in Japan among Japanologists and other scholars. The way in which Chrysanthemum has been read in Japan is indicative of a perception of Japanese culture by Japanese intellectuals as well as the general public, which has then interactively fed back into the western discourse of Japan (see Hendry 1996). According to Clifford Geertz, Chrysanthemum embodies the accomplishment of Benedict’s literary (if not ethnographic) strategy: It rests on Benedict’s use, over and over again, from the beginning of her career to its end, and virtually to the exclusion of any other, of the rhetorical strategy upon which that mode of critique centrally depends: the juxtaposition of the all-too-familiar and the wildly exotic in such a way that they change places. … The habit of contrasting an “as-we-know” us with an “imagine-that” them is here carried to climax; as though American Indians and Melanesians had been but warm-ups for the really different. (Geertz 1988: 106, 117; original emphasis)

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He goes on, telling the reader that he had thought to count the occurrences of contrasting “in America/in Japan” tropes, but soon gave up, as they were too numerous (Geertz 1988: 117). Geertz then suggests that, after being immersed in the us/them juxtaposition, in the end the reader comes out of the book with a feeling that there is nothing wrong about Japan, while simultaneously wondering if in fact it is “us” that is wrong if the Japanese are not wrong after all (1988: 121). I suggest that Geertz’s reading is distinctly American. In Japan readers did not read Chrysanthemum as the book, as it were, that compared Japan and the US. It was and still is read as the book about Japan – and nothing else. It is in this connection that I feel a new (and long overdue) intervention needs to be made – a critique that can be obtained only by assuming the critical position of a former colonial subject of the Japanese Empire. Sufficient, if not enough, is said about Benedict’s humanitarian courage in delivering the image of Japan as seen from the time the book was published – that is, the time when the Americans saw Japan in close overlap with Pearl Harbor, the Bataan Death March, Guadalcanal, kamikaze bombers, the Nanjing massacre, and so on. But nowhere is a critique of Chrysanthemum to be found from the position of the former colonial subject. Let us ask: who is missing from the picture? Is the war’s end all about only Americans and Japanese and nobody else? Is it simply about how Japanese think and behave, or what makes the Japanese Japanese? What is missing here is a vision of the (former) Empire where not only the Japanese but also their colonies are involved. The war’s end is not merely about the victor and the vanquished, yet, as is indicated by the way the US Occupation of Japan and postwar Japanese society systematically ignored Chinese, Koreans, and other peoples from the peripheries of the Empire (although they were the ones first to be persecuted in case of any trouble), Japanese (and American, for that matter) readers of Chrysanthemum have been completely oblivious of the Empire. Salvaging Japan from the racially prejudiced American eye without paying attention to those who had been racially denigrated by the Japanese themselves is ultimately to cater to the logic of the powerful, the inflictors, the usurpers, the imperialists. Postwar discourse on Japan pioneered by Chrysanthemum was no exception. This chapter is to fill the existing gap in critical readings of Chrysanthemum by re-reading it from a distinctly defined position of the former colonial subjects of Japan. Such a reading cannot simply be seen as historical; it is not a done deal, considering that the problems of postcolonial reparation between Japan and its former colonies have never reached a satisfactory solution, as represented in rising numbers of questions about Japanese history textbooks in schools, the unresolved “comfort women” issue, and the general amnesia in Japan about what the Empire did before and during the war in Asia. By revisiting some of the readings of Chrysanthemum in postwar Japan, I illuminate angles by which we can see a connection between particular ways of interpreting and appropriating

Benedictian myth 51 Chrysanthemum and the pending postwar reparation by the Japanese state – that is, particular ways Chrysanthemum is connected to today’s unequal relations in memories of the war-related past between the Japanese and Asians colonized by Japan. To think about Chrysanthemum in this way takes an apt critical approach to today’s Japan anthropology, in which, as Benedict’s book and Geertz’s reading of it allude to, the former colonies and colonial subjects who continue to exist in the heart of Japan, in its modern history and ethnographic present, are quietly forgotten – at least until very recently. If this is so, it would be worth our while to take a moment to explore the historical controversies over this book among scholars in and on Japan.

Postwar reactions Before the Japanese translation of Chrysanthemum was published, Tsurumi Kazuko’s critique of the English original attracted the Japanese reader’s attention to this book. Tsurumi had been educated in the US and repatriated during the tension of the Pacific War. In a brief but critical review Tsurumi first credits Benedict’s skill at isolating Japanese patterns of behavior in contrast to American patterns of behavior. After she has summarized the Benedictian conception of Japanese character based on on (obligation) and the contrast between the culture of guilt and the culture of shame, the latter being Japanese culture, as we have seen in the previous chapter, Tsurumi charges Benedict with superficial observation and methodological flaws in tracing national culture back to child training without paying attention to the socio-historical processes that the nation has gone through from feudalism to capitalism (1947: 222–4). Tsurumi also criticizes Benedict for her selective use of examples: examples that fit the hypotheses are preserved, while counter-examples are simply dismissed. Tsurumi states: Even in the analysis of primitive societies by Boas or Malinowski the formation of social relations – be it the relation of production or the conditions that produce ideology [in the society] – are analyzed in detail. In contrast, in Benedict’s method [of studying] patterns of culture, as long as one can see in her study of Japanese culture, the changes in the means of production and the conditions arising thereby are totally left unconsidered. (K. Tsurumi 1947: 224) Tsurumi points out, further, that the official discourse engineered by the state in order to disseminate emperor-worship – such as the Imperial Rescript for Soldiers, for example, or “the ideology of the ruling class” – is taken to be a representative view held by the Japanese at large (K. Tsurumi 1947: 224). Following the publication of the Japanese translation of Chrysanthemum in 1948 (Benedict 1948), social scientists in Japan paid tribute in a cluster of

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articles entitled “What is offered in Ruth Benedict’s The Chrysanthemum and the Sword” published in the special issue of Minzokugaku kenkyù (ethnological study), the most widely circulated academic journal of ethnology in Japan. A total of five scholars presented views about Chrysanthemum that were starkly divided into those of supporters and denouncers (see Bennett and Nagai 1953). Kawashima Takeyoshi, a Tokyo University professor of law, who is known for the study of family systems and family law (Kawashima 1950a; see Chapter 4 in this volume), praises Chrysanthemum as follows: Perhaps to those of us Japanese who were taught to blindly accept our own tradition and our own viewpoints and to judge others on the basis of our [own standards] … this book would be immensely shocking. This book was originally written for the wartime purpose of conquering and governing Japan, but for us, it is a book of lesson through and through. We must understand from this book the difference between the nation that distorted facts … and simply mocked other nations in a childish manner on the one hand and the nation that steadily carried out subtle and scientific analysis of the enemy state on the other. (Kawashima 1950b: 1) Unlike Tsurumi, Kawashima credits Benedict with having abundant data pertaining to Japanese culture and commends her for her analytic capacity which is displayed in her method of connecting various phenomena that may at first appear to be contingent and mutually unrelated, but which make sense when carefully connected, presenting a picture that captures Japanese culture in its totality, which Kawashima calls a “structural understanding of Japanese behavior and ways of thinking” (1950b: 2). In the detail, however, Kawashima notes inconsistencies. For example, the hierarchy that Benedict discusses in Chrysanthemum is not unique to Japanese society. Kawashima also suggests that feudal patriarchy was supported by the totalitarian Meiji government and forcefully imposed on the population, while people had their own form of family relations away from the state-imposed norm. In other words, Benedict’s understanding of Japanese hierarchy is buying into the official propaganda of the state, which is simplistic and ahistorical in perspective. On this point, Kawashima is in agreement with Tsurumi, who has no praise to give to Benedict. More importantly, Kawashima is reading Chrysanthemum as a critique of the Japanese feudal legacy and looking toward Benedict as a provider of the ideas to lead Japan into democracy by eradicating feudalism. Nowhere in Chrysanthemum do we find such a stance, but to Kawashima’s postwar frame of mind, aspiring to Japan’s reconstruction – economic but, above all, cultural – Chrysanthemum becomes a manual of enlightenment.1

Benedictian myth 53 Another contributor who reacted positively to Chrysanthemum in Minzokugaku kenkyù was the sociologist Ariga Kizaemon, who is also highly acclaimed for his studies of family, household, and kin groups in Japan (e.g. Ariga 1943; see Chapter 4 in this volume). Ariga endorses Benedict’s approach to Japan as anthropologically valid and compatible with existing studies of primitive societies. Like Kawashima, Ariga is impressed by Benedict’s attention to the Japanese hierarchy. But unlike Kawashima, who regards the hierarchical aspects of Japanese culture as the legacy of feudalism, Ariga interprets Benedict as suggesting that Japanese hierarchy is an inherent part of the everyday life of the Japanese across different historical periods (Ariga 1950: 16). In other words, for Ariga Benedict’s originality lies in her synchronic approach and discovery of a Japanese cultural essence, that is, hierarchy. Ariga emphasizes that Japanese hierarchy is distinct in the sense that its structural base is kinship organization: even Japanese capitalism developed from the kin-based hierarchy. Ariga concludes his essay by suggesting that “in order for democracy to grow [in Japan] the conditions [that create hierarchy] must be overcome and individual-oriented life needs to be established” (1950: 22). However, he does not clarify how the deeply embedded kin-based hierarchy could possibly be replaced with such an individual-based norm. The following three contributors read Benedict in a negative light. The social psychologist Minami Hiroshi’s critique revolves around the details of Benedict’s interview technique. He questions the appropriateness of samples that were supposedly taken from Japanese Americans who were born in Japan during the Meiji period and who, having emigrated to the US, had preserved their old customs, while the reality in Japan itself had moved away from such old norms. Similarly, for Minami the Japanese films Benedict studied were biased from the outset, given that they were made for specific propaganda purposes and designed to be exported to the west. After raising doubt about Benedict’s data, Minami draws on Benedict’s contention that the reason why the Japanese have a dual personality – one shown to others and the other kept to themselves, the psychological base of shame culture – is derived from an abrupt discontinuity between indulgent childhood and strict adulthood (Benedict 1946: ch. 12). Pointing to the fact that this contention was first conceived of by Benedict in her 1938 article “Continuities and Discontinuities in Cultural Conditioning,” Minami suggests that Benedict first teleologically applied this conclusion to “the abstract type called Japanese” and then tried to avoid examples that did not suit her interpretation. What underpins Minami’s critique is that he basically sees shame culture as a negative trait and resists accepting it as an inherent principle of Japanese culture. In conclusion, Minami sarcastically states that Benedict’s contribution is to remind us that “social anthropology alone is not sufficient to analyze humans in modern society” (1950: 12). The folklorist Yanagita Kunio takes a similar line, although Yanagita is more detailed in counter-examples that are drawn from linguistic data. For

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example, Yanagita points out that the term on that plays a central part in Benedict’s understanding of hierarchical human relations in Japan is in fact not part of daily language in today’s Japan. Moreover, the term originated in China. Yanagita suggests that Benedict misunderstood the on used in the state-engineered propaganda as a term that is used by ordinary people, a point also made by Tsurumi (1947) and Kawashima (1950b: 33). He attributes Benedict’s misunderstanding to the false self-representation that the Japanese state disseminated to the world in prewar and wartime propaganda. By far the most critical or indeed dismissive reader of Benedict among the Minzokugaku kenkyù contributors is Watsuji Tetsur™. This important thinker of prewar Japan, whose philosophical investigation of Japanese culture, Fùdo: Ningengakuteki k™satsu (Climate: a study of human science, 1979), first published in 1935, is in fact very similar to Chrysanthemum in its quest for fundamental Japaneseness, was fiercely displeased to have had to read Chrysanthemum in order to make a contribution to the journal.2 His essay took the form of a letter to Ishida Eiichir™, an anthropologist and the editor of Minzokugaku kenkyù. Watsuji’s complaints burst out; he states that the book “has no academic value whatsoever” (1950: 23). Watsuji’s first point of criticism is on the principle of generalization – or the lack thereof. Resonating with Tsurumi, Kawashima, and Yanagita, he asserts that Benedict unmethodically generalized the ideas that the military fanatically manifested to the world as those of the Japanese as a whole. Considering that even the media were under strict state control, Watsuji suggests, it would be impossible to determine what the Japanese were really like behind the representation given by the military and the jingoist state (1950: 24–5). Taking, for example, Benedict’s statement on the Japanese wartime belief in willpower being able to overcome material scarcity and even death (Benedict 1946: 25) in a manner tantamount to dismissing the materiality of technology, which corresponded strikingly with the behavior displayed by kamikaze suicide bombers, Watsuji refutes the idea that such a tone existed in Japan prior to the Manchurian incident of 1932 and suggests that it was only after the military took over state affairs that the Japanese media came to be imbued with such extreme views (Watsuji 1950: 25). As such, these views were the product of the military operation, “patterns of military ideas,” not the patterns of Japanese culture (1950: 25). Another example Watsuji takes on is hakk™ichiu, a wartime phrase meaning that all Japanese form one happy family, the old phrase originally used in Nihonshoki, an ancient book describing the Japanese origin myth (Watsuji 1950: 25). In prewar Japan hakk™ichiu meant that the emperor’s benevolence reached every corner of Japan, unifying all Japanese under his guidance. In Watsuji’s view, this phrase, when applied beyond Japan, cannot automatically mean aggression and invasion, although Watsuji does not clarify an alternative meaning. But, according to him, Benedict misrepresents this in the following passage from Chrysanthemum:

Benedictian myth 55 Japan, having attained unification and peace in her homeland, having put down banditry and built up roads and electric power and steel industries, having, according to her official figures, educated 99.5 per cent of her rising generation in her public schools, should, according to Japanese premises of hierarchy, raise her backward younger brother China. Being of the same race as Greater East Asia, she should eliminate the United States, and after her Britain and Russia, from that part of the world and “take her proper place.” (Benedict 1946: 21) In other words, the formation of one happy family was twisted around by Benedict to mean the hierarchy of family members within Japan, a family state, and, beyond Japan, the world of family nations with Japan dominating the peak. Such an interpretation is, Watsuji states, “extraordinarily judgmental” (1950: 25). Watsuji then suggests that Japanese people do not express their thoughts in direct action and just let things happen. Because of this tendency, it was possible for a handful of fanatics to control the nation’s behavior during the war; people knew all along that it was not their idea, but they simply followed. Watsuji connects this to the “multiple layers of Japanese culture,” where not only feudalism but also primitivism are found side by side with modern culture (1950: 26). Watsuji concludes his letter by asking Ishida to teach him where in the book Ishida, as an anthropologist, finds academic value. Early critiques of Chrysanthemum offer some interesting perspectives that will be useful for further understanding of postwar Japanese intellectuals’ perception of their own culture and the critique of it. What is interesting in the foregoing is that positive reaction and negative reaction rest more or less on the same points, yet are portrayed from completely opposite positions. Benedict is majestic in analyzing Japanese hierarchy as a feudal legacy; Benedict is missing the unique nature of Japanese culture, where feudalism always existed with other modes, including capitalist economy and modern culture. Benedict is unfortunately ahistorical in her approach to Japanese culture; it is her strength that she explores Japanese culture from a presentday point of view. Benedict is precise in understanding Japanese culture as a whole and this is all the more admirable considering that she never undertook fieldwork; since Benedict never undertook fieldwork, her empirical data cannot be trusted and her use of military wartime propaganda as true data pertaining to the Japanese is not acceptable. There seems to be a certain emotional charge commonly found in these shared points between opponents and supporters of Benedict, either welcoming the fact that an American anthropologist wrote a study of Japanese culture that has quite a few things to teach the Japanese about their own culture, or indignant about the same fact. The positive reading endorsed Benedict, and the US for that matter, as the mentor of Japan’s

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postwar democratization, be it an eradication of feudal remnants or the abolition of kinship-based hierarchy and the creation of the civil society.3 The negative voice was raised over Benedict’s and the US’s failure to distinguish between the establishment (the ruling class, the military, official discourse, the oppressor, the state, etc.) and the people, be it the linguistic discrepancy between the written, classical, and formal Japanese of Chinese origin and the spoken, informal, and everyday Japanese (Yanagita), or the Japanese behavior of group adhesion without really believing in the official state policy and militaristic slogans (Watsuji, Minami), the conspiracy of the ruling class while assuming the innocence of the people (Tsurumi), or the difference between state-imposed norms and the people’s lifestyle at grassroot level (Kawashima). Interestingly, in the logic of postwar critics, people – whoever this might mean – had been forced by the state and military either to join the war or to exercise a dual behavior pattern (which Benedict did not see) between a façade loyal to the government and their true selves, which did not believe in and co-operate with the military. This certainly is an interesting mutual misunderstanding between Benedict and her opponents. If we remember Benedict’s notion of shame culture, in which individuals are governed not by internally autonomous moral principle, but by externally imposed sanction, the complaints that her critics make of her – that she missed the dual behavioral principle of the Japanese distinguishing their formal façade from their inner “true” thoughts or feelings – does not apply: this duality is indeed the basis of shame culture. Benedict does not presuppose the existence of an inner principle behind the behavior that adheres to a social sanction, but neither does she dismiss such a possibility. Her notion of “situational ethics” captures the ambiguity pertaining to interpreting Japanese behavior, admonishing a hasty conclusion on the basis of external presentation. In this sense, the critics and Benedict are in complete agreement. What appears more interesting to me in the early Japanese critiques of Chrysanthemum lies elsewhere. If, as the critics emphasize, Japanese people did not play a part in the state-engineered military aggression, who is responsible for Japan’s Asian invasion? If, as they suggest, there was indeed such a clear-cut, sober distinction between the official and the unofficial during the war, how is it that extraordinary sacrifices such as kamikaze suicide bombings were possible? Were they all simply presentational performances on the surface? It may be possible to argue such, considering the logic of shame culture that presupposes the distinction between the external presentation and the internal self, although sacrifice involving the actual death of the actors would bring any such distinction to a practical closure. More importantly, one must not forget the effects of indoctrination that had been rubbed into individuals so insidiously that self-sacrifice for the sake of the emperor was no longer a sacrifice, but became a privilege for the actors. Hence, such an extraordinary action as kamikaze suicide bombing was achieved in the name of honor and patriotism. And, if this is so, excusing

Benedictian myth 57 the Japanese “people” by using the logic of shame culture is nothing but eschewing responsibility. But, as has been shown above, in the readings of the critics Japanese “people” were exempt from responsibility for the war and atrocities, and for postwar reparation and the payment of compensation; it is “the establishment” that needed to go through self-criticism. One might, of course, wonder where these intellectuals placed themselves – on the side of the “working class” (in the words of Tsurumi) or the “people” (in the words of Yanagita and Watsuji and to some extent Kawashima), for example? One must not forget that “people” were soldiers too; except for those who had been jailed for treason, almost all Japanese individuals – including men, women, children, and the elderly, educated and uneducated, rich and poor, old and young – participated one way or the other in war efforts. I do not intend to open a blame session on the responsibility of ordinary Japanese with regard to the war – such is far too complex an issue to be dealt with within the scope of this chapter. Nevertheless, to (conveniently) separate people and the military after the war ex post facto is nothing but an act of avoiding personal moral responsibility in the name of the collective, that is, the external, sanction – precisely the traits that Benedict attributes to shame culture. All the early reactions to Chrysanthemum were closely connected to the postwar political situation following Japan’s defeat and the US Occupation. The ambivalence toward foreign-induced democratization and the social pressure for intellectuals to oppose in public the wartime and prewar policy of the military government underpin the critique – both pro and con – of Chrysanthemum. While Benedict wrote Chrysanthemum in order to provide a better understanding of Japan in the future, including the understanding required to better occupy Japan, the early Japanese readers read it in close connection to the past – to the war, that is. Criticized or welcomed, there is no doubt that Chrysanthemum was read not simply as a study of culture but as a political intervention. This is not to say that Chrysanthemum has no academic value, as Watsuji emotionally declared. But it is to say that it was a project in applied anthropology that served the specific need of state policy-making at the time of the war and, more importantly, in the aftermath of the war. Although the bulk of research results Benedict used had been collected during the war, she actually wrote the book after the war. Hence there was a different ethos in her writing compared to Gorer’s or La Barre’s studies of Japanese culture. By the time Benedict published Chrysanthemum, as stated earlier, two atomic bombs had been dropped on Japan, wiping hundreds and thousands of lives off the horizon, reducing hundreds of cities to ashes and devastating the livelihoods of millions: Japan’s defeat was complete. In other words, sympathy for Japan and Japanese culture was a real possibility. Benedict herself listened with tears to the news of the Japanese emperor’s radio broadcast announcing the defeat, and wrote to Robert Hashima, her research assistant:

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Chrysanthemum provided an explanation for the defeat on the one hand and saved Japanese face in starting over on the other. Laying the blame on the military, the state, or the feudal legacy, the ruling class or the Japanese trait of dual behavior in group situations – this was all part of the whole process of rebuilding Japanese culture, exactly as Benedict showed in the name of shame culture or situational ethics.

Chrysanthemum as a political intervention Since the initial swathe of critiques immediately following publication of the Japanese translation, there have been a number of debates over Chrysanthemum to this day, including some controversy over whether Benedict visited Japan or not, despite the clear statement by Benedict herself that she did not (Fukui and Ueda 1995; Sargent and Smith 1949: 139). With the publication of recent biographies, the life of Ruth Benedict is attracting increasing attention in both Japan and the west.4 Of the many controversies and debates over Ruth Benedict and Chrysanthemum, Douglas Lummis’s critical reading and the reactions to his reading offer an appropriate point of departure in considering how Chrysanthemum and Benedict have been approached in Japan from the 1980s onwards. The 1980s was a time when Japan’s long-lasting economic boom triggered by the Korean War (1950–3) was consolidated and the material life of ordinary Japanese became remarkably affluent compared to the devastation of the postwar period. For example, from 1964 to 1973 Japan’s economy grew yearly by an average 10.2 per cent, compared with the US’s 4 per cent, Britain’s 3.1 per cent, France’s 5.6 per cent, and West Germany’s 4.7 per cent (Masamura 1988: 234). Its thriving cities and businesses gave rise to globally appreciated terms such as “Japanese-style management.” From the 1970s on, the body of discourse on Japanese cultural uniqueness had been pervasive in the Japanese print market, offering native readers an opportunity to indulge in cultural superiority over those in the world’s stagnant economies and experiencing social and political chaos. It was a time, predictably, when the cultural traits Benedict offered in Chrysanthemum as Japanese uniqueness – that is, the uniqueness that led Japan to defeat in the war – were now re-endorsed as positive factors that caused this remarkable rise of the national economy from the ashes. Douglas Lummis is an American professor in Tsuda Woman’s College, Tokyo, founded by Tsuda Umeko, a late-nineteenth-century Bryn Mawr

Benedictian myth 59 alumna and one of the first few Japanese women to have studied abroad. Lummis published a full Japanese version of his critique (1981) and its shorter English version (1982). Lummis’s major points are that Ruth Benedict wrote Chrysanthemum as an obituary for the dead Japanese culture and as literature of political education (which in my view is a valid reading). His first point stems from the interpretation of Benedict’s other life as a poet (with the pseudonym Ann Singleton) whose main theme was death, the sorrow of death, and the beauty of death. Benedict lost her father early in childhood and since then the ritualistic commemoration of his death was forced on her by her mother, who expressed her sorrow in hysterical crying whenever the bereaved family paid homage to the dead. This commemoration became a point where the young Ruth Fulton distinguished the world of death as calm and beautiful from the world of the living as disturbed and ugly (Benedict 1959b [1935]). Based on Ann Singleton’s poems, which were by and large extremely cryptic but often alluded to the serenity and beauty of death, Lummis sees Benedict as being similarly fascinated with dying cultures such as those of native Americans in the Southwest and the war-torn Japanese. This is how Chrysanthemum was written, according to Lummis: the secret of its success lies in the fact that Benedict wrote it as the dead heritage of the Japanese, who now faced the task of wiping away this past and building a brand-new culture – American-style democracy, that is. This reading does not contradict the way Kawashima and Ariga received Chrysanthemum. Both scholars regarded the Japan depicted in Chrysanthemum as something that the Japanese had to do away with: Ariga with reservation and a realistic estimation that, despite the ideal of the individual-based democratic society, kin-based hierarchy would persist; Kawashima with an optimism that the disappearance of the oppressive prewar culture was an historic necessity that no force could stop, especially with the aid of the American Occupation. Lummis’s point is slightly different from these two. For him, to declare the death of prewar Japanese culture is morally wrong, as it indicates a conquest by the alternative, that is, American, culture, and, by implication, the superiority of American culture. Lummis sees Chrysanthemum as a book written entirely on the basis of the victor’s logic of cultural domination, superimposition of values, and neocolonial remolding. Lummis emphatically states: The element in The Chrysanthemum and the Sword which has overpowered its critics is not its “scientific” conclusions but its brilliant and unforgettable imagery, and the indispensable role which that imagery has played in the ideology of the post-war Japan–U.S. political relationship. … This is the importance of defeat: defeat means being shamed in the eyes of the world, and that is something the Japanese can understand. Therefore only defeat can teach the Japanese to change their ways for

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Benedictian myth the better. And “change for the better” of course means change to more closely resemble the U.S. (Lummis1982: 3–4)

In similar vein, elsewhere we find the following: The critics simply had not understood that to Benedict the cup of Japanese culture had been smashed, and that it was time to write a respectful account of what it had been, and then to consider how the Japanese should arrange their society in the future. American anthropology, born out of the study of Indian cultures, had always been the science of a conquering people. It is no accident that the first anthropological study of a large nation-state was of one which the U.S. had just defeated in war. (Lummis 1982: 55–6) In the above, Lummis is referring to the critics who took Chrysanthemum to be a positive account of Japanese culture. He emphasizes that what Ruth Benedict thought to be Japanese culture was in fact state ideology, resonating with early critics of Chrysanthemum. But they are fundamentally different; whereas early postwar critics blamed the state and military as falsely representing Japan and thought that Benedict’s flaw was her overgeneralization of Japanese culture on the basis of ruling-class ideology, Lummis understands clearly that what might have been originally a state ideology was embodied and internalized by ordinary Japanese, including Benedict’s informants. Unlike early critics, who regarded the dominant ideology as something that was separate from the “real” Japanese culture, Lummis grasps the mechanism by which ruling-class ideology becomes dominant in a given society and understands that the so-called ordinary Japanese were well versed in it and played a good part in the state-promoted culture of militarism. For him, Benedict’s responsibility as a social scientist would have been to isolate the ideological component of the native understanding of Japanese culture, revealing the mechanism by which the dominant ideology reflects the interest of only a section of society and yet is successfully internalized by individuals and generalized as a national culture. But Benedict fails to deliver such an understanding. Lummis’s more pointed critique is that Benedict was not scientific enough, or not scientific at all, in her account of Japanese culture. Therefore, for him, it is odd that Chrysanthemum is read as an accurate account of Japanese culture, since it is ultimately political propaganda endorsing the American way of life and placing the US in a superior position to the Japanese. This does not mean that Lummis thinks Benedict was racist. On the contrary, he denies that. But what complicates his view is not what Benedict directly believed, which was in fact very explicitly anti-racist (see, e.g., Benedict and Weltfish 1943; Benedict 1942a, 1942b, 1942c, 1940),

Benedictian myth 61 but the effect her work had, that Chrysanthemum “taught a new and subtle form of racism” to the Americans against the Japanese (Lummis 1982: 7). I differ from Lummis in the fundamental sense that I do not think Chrysanthemum presented Japanese culture as dead. Contrary to what Lummis believes, as I have proposed, Chrysanthemum gave birth – or rebirth, to be more precise – to Japan’s national culture. Also contrary to Lummis, I do not believe that Chrysanthemum created a new form of racism implying American superiority – if it did, it eventually created a Japanese superiority over other cultures in the mind of Japanese readers and critics of the book. But Benedict cannot be held directly responsible for this, since such an effect is a product of a particular reading of Chrysanthemum by Japanese consumers that occurred in an historically structured field overdetermined by the domestic and international power relations encompassing the market (including the print market) and shaping material life on the mass level, which in its turn would determine the value systems to be shared widely by each different stratum of the society. The problem lies elsewhere. It is true, to some extent, that by effectively impressing a US way of life on the Japanese as a better form Chrysanthemum played a certain role, intended or not, in promoting US hegemony and the ethos that we might often label with the umbrella term “westernization” or, better still, “Americanization.” More importantly, by homogenizing Japanese culture and seeking an historical explanation within a bundle of characteristic behaviors of the Japanese Chrysanthemum occludes the issues pertaining to colonial responsibilities and postcolonial settlements that the Japanese government should have faced at the end of the war. Chrysanthemum postulates the problem of Japanese imperialism as existing internally in a Japanese cultural essence, as if to say that all the Japanese need to do to revise it is to re-study their national character. Where in Chrysanthemum can one find any suggestion about Japan’s postcolonial settlements with former colonial subjects? And yet was not Japan in 1945 the product of the preceding decades not only of wars but also of imperial and colonial expansion? Did not Japan face, in 1945, not just its own identity crisis or its due to pay the Allied Forces, but also the task of providing due remedies and compensations to its former colonial subjects in Asia? By drawing the readers’ attention only to Japan’s internal cultural logic, Chrysanthemum effectively hides these questions. In this sense, the book in my view played an enormously important political role in redefining Japan’s position in postwar Asia, but not in the sense Lummis suggests. Another point I disagree with Lummis on is his method of directly connecting Benedict’s biographical history with Chrysanthemum. Ruth Benedict was the author of Chrysanthemum, but also of Race: Science and Politics (1940) and The Races of Mankind (Benedict and Weltfish 1943), texts that outraged white supremacists in the South, earned her an FBI investigation, and prevented her from obtaining top-level security clearance at the OWI (Lapsley 1999: 290–1). All texts, once produced, have

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their own lives in the process of public reading, as emphasized by Umberto Eco (1992), among others. In addition, as Michel Foucault suggested, the author “does not refer purely and simply to a real individual, since [the text] can give rise simultaneously to several selves, to several subjects – positions that can be occupied by different classes of individuals” (1984: 113). Furthermore, as Roland Barthes (1977) emphatically wrote, we need to consider the position of the reader and his or her role in deciding the fate of a book. All this leads us to consider Chrysanthemum not in a simple and unproblematic connection to Benedict’s private life, personal character, and proclivity, but as a text that is a product of historically conditioned social relations, and as a text that was and is read, read by Americans, but above all by the Japanese. If this is so, using the biographical data of the author in evaluating the historical role of the book requires caution. The question concerns the interrelation between the author and the text. In fact, what seems to me to be more interesting with regard to Chrysanthemum is that, regardless of what Benedict intended or might have intended, it has been read in certain ways in Japan – some very different over time, and sometimes contradictory. This can be seen in Lummis’s own experience of re-reading it when he notes: “My own understanding of The Chrysanthemum and the Sword has gone through several stages” (1982: 7). My third point about Lummis is related to his understanding of anthropology. It seems that Lummis understands anthropology to be a scientific – objective – account of culture and opposes science with politics by classifying Chrysanthemum as political literature and hence not “real” anthropology. This interpretation is out of date seen from today’s understanding of anthropology; few socio-cultural anthropologists would call anthropology an objective science. The majority of them would positively acknowledge that anthropology, and especially the writing of ethnography, are, in large part, political interventions. When Chrysanthemum was written, anthropology may have occupied a position in scientific disciplines, but today ethnography is read not so much as science but as an interpretive text crafted by anthropologists within the given socio-historical conditions of textual production. In the process of textual production the relations of power between writer and informants in the shifting political economy of representation are of great concern to the critical reader. It would be committing an act of naiveté to regard ethnographic text as an objective or scientific representation of the given field (see, e.g., Clifford 1988; Clifford and Marcus 1986). Chrysanthemum itself is now read as an interpretive text, not as a scientific account of Japan, and the unresolved tension between the literary endowment of Benedict and her claim to be scientifically objective – and, perhaps, politically neutral – has been pointed out (Geertz 1988). This said, Lummis no doubt offers valuable insights into the Japanese reception of Chrysanthemum. In conclusion, he states:

Benedictian myth 63 There is no use in asking who should have won the Pacific War. It was not a war between different “ways of thinking” but between two imperialist powers whose purposes were quite the same: the control of the markets and resources of Asia: and in such a war there is little to choose. The greatest benefit to all would have been if the war had never been fought, and the second greatest if both sides had been defeated. (Lummis 1982: 77) He clarifies that the political background to Chrysanthemum’s publication must not be forgotten. But maybe this is why it is all the more curious that Lummis tries to explain the political nature of Chrysanthemum from within Ruth Benedict’s personal life. Lummis’s reading was enthusiastically accepted by many as agreeable and endorsed as a critique of the American understanding of Japanese stereotypes (Sait™ 1981; Mut™ 1981; Nishikawa 1994). But it was also received with strong criticisms, two of which I introduce here. In his historical overview of Chrysanthemum and its critiques, Nishi Yoshiyuki denies Lummis’s statement that Chrysanthemum “tends to make many Japanese uncomfortable or angry” (Lummis 1982: 5) and states instead that “it seems that there is hardly any Japanese who is displeased or made angry by The Chrysanthemum and the Sword ” (Nishi 1983: 15) and that most Japanese readers are impressed with the book in multiple ways, while they might be grinning at Benedict’s minor misunderstandings (1983: 16). The Japanese readers of Chrysanthemum, by the time Nishi published his work, were no longer members of a defeated nation, but were flexing the muscles of a nation which had risen from the ashes of war and entered the ranks of the world’s most advanced industrialized nations by another economic miracle reminiscent of prewar Japan. In Nishi’s view, therefore, those readers might generously and knowingly grin at an American anthropologist who did not quite understand the fine details of Japanese life thirty-five years earlier. On the other hand, Lummis’s reading reflects nothing other than Lummis’s own personal and political prejudices according to Nishi: I think Mr. Lummis belongs to the generation whose hopes for their homeland were destroyed by the Vietnam War. These people were disillusioned by the fact that their ideal of “the American sacred war” and “American democracy” had been betrayed and turned against their own homeland by accusing it. This does not mean they became communists. They are in a halfway house, so to say. And when those people arm themselves theoretically with Marxism, their disease of US denunciation becomes more serious. For them, the US looks arrogant and not likable. They smell from Benedict, who was cultural relativist, the arrogant stance of prioritizing the US. Their sense of smell is far from admirable – it gives a pathological air.

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Benedictian myth But again, this does not mean that they’ve become friends of Japan by becoming critics of the US. They do not like the Japanese government either, because of its cooperation with the US in international politics. (Nishi 1983: 131–2)

Furthermore, Nishi dismisses Lummis’s conclusion, which I have already quoted (p. 63), stating that such an opinion – deeming World War II to be a war between imperialists – is obsolete and laughable, and he wonders if Lummis is a Marxist – as if that is an important point on which to judge him as good or bad (Nishi 1983: 155). In Nishi’s view, Lummis’s critique of Chrysanthemum is pathological and political – more political than Chrysanthemum itself – mainly because he is still talking about imperialism (which, of course, the Japanese government has long forgotten). At first glance, Nishi’s critique appears to rest on the overly politicized nature of Lummis’s critique of Chrysanthemum and instead Nishi suggests that we read Chrysanthemum in its historical context, when postwar Japanese readers were moved by its method of showing the Japanese themselves what they really were like seen from an American point of view. It may also deserve some attention here that in Nishi’s view politicalness is a stigma: Lummis’s criticism of Chrysanthemum was about its deceptive nature, hiding its political agenda behind science, and not its politicalness itself; Nishi’s criticism of Lummis rests on the latter’s being political, as if Nishi himself is free from politics. Upon closer examination, Nishi’s stance is itself highly political. For example, why is it a laughable act to understand World War II as imperialist warfare when indeed it was? Koreans did not fight Americans as Koreans, but as soldiers of the Imperial Japanese Army, Japan’s imperial subjects, and the emperor’s children. Yet how many Koreans were executed as war criminals, and how many Japanese top leaders were saved by the Americans? Okinawans did not sacrifice their lives as free citizens, but as imperial subjects and for the protection of the sacred emperor. Yet how is it that Okinawa was offered to the American military after the war as part of the settlement between the imperialists, while the mainland flourished? What was the Pacific War other than an imperialist war? It is “laughable,” one might say borrowing from Nishi’s words, that a Japanese intellectual such as Nishi had failed to acquire a proper historical consciousness nearly forty years after the end of the war. An attitude like Nishi’s is symptomatic of the Japanese government’s dismissal of colonial compensation, which is indeed “pathological” in its amnesia. Perhaps Nishi needs to think again why he himself was impressed by Chrysanthemum when reading it in the postwar years. Was it not because he found a great deal of hope in a book that said that, after all, the Japanese had their own internal cultural logic that could be used for cultural reconstruction, a book that said nothing about Japan’s colonialism, its annexation

Benedictian myth 65 of Taiwan and Korea, the Manchurian Incident, the Nanjing massacre, the fifteen-year war with China, the invasion of Southeast Asia, forced labor mobilization of men and women from the colonies, including the army “comfort women,” to cite only a few things? Nishi’s critique of Lummis is echoed perhaps in stronger terms by Pauline Kent, a Japan-based Australian scholar. From the outset Kent is highly critical of Lummis, stating that “[i]n Japan, commentary on Benedict, fuelled by Lummis’ arguments, includes some outrageous suppositions, and repetition of these is not unusual. Consequently, Benedict has tended to have been encompassed by a thick fog of hearsay and myth” (Kent 1996: 34). Kent tries to disentangle Lummis’s erroneous (in her view) expectation of Benedict, by stating that Benedict did not intend to deliver a general introductory book on Japan that covers all the fields, but was “attempting to give a description of the Japanese ethics system which she considered to be at the core of Japanese behaviour” (1996: 47). What is interesting in Kent’s critique is that she stresses Benedict’s motivation, as if to speak on her behalf. But, as we have seen, Lummis’s critique does not rest on the point that the book was not comprehensive enough; his point is not that Benedict did not do it all, but rather that Benedict did not get it right. What is Chrysanthemum for Kent? Written for the American general public, according to Kent, the book rescued the Japanese from their demonic image and delivered the image of a different, but understandable culture. She further states: Benedict had, during her time at OWI, learnt the value of shunning propaganda for objective data and thus was also able to shun the “politically correct” image of the day of the imbecile and inhuman Japanese. And yet, Lummis would have us believe that “what she creates … is America’s natural enemy” (Lummis 1982: 64) because she arranges the facts to fit her purpose to finally produce a simplistic but “neat and orderly pattern of values.” (Kent 1996: 56). No doubt Chrysanthemum did rescue Japan from US racist propaganda and fanatic demonization. But Chrysanthemum did other things, too – occluding Japan’s wartime and colonial responsibilities over its Asian subordinates and failing to explain Japan’s historical position with reference to international political economy, as mentioned earlier. Seen historically, these are important omissions, given that the Japanese government even to this day has not properly compensated its former colonial subjects, including the wartime military “comfort women” (see, e.g., McCormack 1996). Indeed, after half a century new forms of discourses that justify the evasion of postwar responsibilities – different from simple amnesia – are emerging, for example the late-1990s conservative trend that is loosely clustered around organizations such as Jiyùshugi shikan kenkyùkai and Atarashii rekishi

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ky™kasho o tsukuru kai (roughly translated as “the study group for historical liberalism” and “the association for making new history textbooks,” respectively). These organizations are participated in by the so-called bunkajin, or cultural personnel, of varying degrees of visibility in Japan’s public milieu. All in all, they stand on the premise that the dispute over war responsibilities is a done deal, that Japan also suffered – “Look at Hiroshima and Nagasaki” – and that the demand for reparation by the former military “comfort women,” for example, is motivated by material greed, and so on (see Suh 1997: 274ff.). Needless to say, the above trends need to be separated from conscientious historians such as the late Ienaga Sabur™, who fought against distortion of the history of Japan’s war crimes by the Ministry of Education’s systematic engineering of school textbooks. More succinctly, those “new right” groups are different from the more outright right-wingers who call for the revival of militarism, recovery of the Empire (including Sakhalin and the northern territory that Japan lost to the Soviet Union after the war), and return to the primordial Japan; their attempts to rewrite history come in the guise of progressivism, forward-looking discourse, and user-friendly presentation with the public support of TV celebrities and comic writers, for instance. Obviously they aim at broad mass appeal, unlike sectarian ultra-nationalism, and here lies a more serious danger in Japan’s rightist turn. Benedict’s failure to expand the discussion more consciously toward historical processes of empire-building, rather than probing into the inherent and internal Japanese national character, has a certain bearing on today’s reality. I am not blaming Benedict as an author; it is her text, its historical positionality and popularity, and, more importantly, its reception, that matter here. Nevertheless, it is significant that Benedict, an American anthropologist writing from the vantage point of the victorious nation, completely overlooked Japan’s need for adjustment towards its former colonies and the people Japan had forced to serve its Empire and then left with miniscule or no reparation. It is even more significant considering that Japan became a US ally in the Cold War in Asia, a setting in which Japan’s cooperation with the US became more important than Japan’s reparation to former colonies. The US fought two important wars in Asia, using Japan as its base: Korea and Vietnam, which in return brought to Japan economic boom and stability. Although all these happened after her death (in 1948), it cannot be denied that Chrysanthemum heralded the age of US–Japan security treaties. What is common to Nishi’s and Kent’s criticism is that they blame Lummis for misleading the readers of Chrysanthemum, the basis of which is nothing other than Lummis’s misreading. According to Nishi, Lummis is waging his own anti-American ideological struggle using Benedict as a scapegoat, while Kent criticizes Lummis for not crediting Benedict for having humanized the Japanese within the context of World War II. Nishi, as I have already stated (p. 64), appears to wage his own political struggle by

Benedictian myth 67 dismissing Lummis as pathological, and Kent seems to be oblivious of the fact that Chrysanthemum was not published during World War II, but after the war, after the Japanese devastation was complete and America was in the vantage position of shaping Japan into its Cold War ally. It may be that Benedict rescued Japan from exaggerated demonization and one-sided propaganda. Simultaneously, it must not be forgotten that the Japanese military committed a great many crimes against humanity, and many things Japan’s emperor and government allowed to happen or facilitated remain to this day inexcusable. One must not, in other words, exaggerate the image of Japan as victimized by western propaganda. At any rate, rather than critically analyzing or intellectually appraising Chrysanthemum, Nishi and Kent take it for granted that Benedict did a good thing, as if to say that their mission is to defend Benedict’s name. This approach by Nishi and Kent is itself a form of ideological consumption of Chrysanthemum. Salvaging Japan from demonization, I state again, is fundamentally a logic of the fellow imperialist: patting the shoulders of the defeated enemy, who at any rate had a ticket to enter the war. Outside this picture are the people who were mobilized to serve the colonial “motherland.” Chrysanthemum is blind to this exclusion. Why? Because it was written from within the logical terrain that belonged to the imperialists themselves.

On shame culture A similar approach to salvaging Benedict is also found in one of the other controversies over Chrysanthemum that I introduce here, a debate over the notion of shame culture, although the controversy here is perhaps less heated in tone than the debate Lummis created. This debate shows how a text can have its own life and how important the role of reader as actor is in determining the interpretation of the text, as it shifts over the course of history. It also reminds us of the fact that national character discourse reflects reality as much as it makes the national character into a reality. In 1989 Ezra Vogel wrote in the new preface for Chrysanthemum: Perhaps nothing in The Chrysanthemum and the Sword attracted more interest than Benedict’s discussion of shame and guilt. She was intrigued by the fact that the Japanese were extremely sensitive to others’ opinions and less concerned with internalized, standardized rules about right and wrong. Dozens of scholarly articles, stimulated by her questions, defined and redefined the relationship between Japanese guilt and shame. (Vogel 1989: xi) But for anyone who read Chrysanthemum it is obvious that Benedict dwelt on the contrast between shame and guilt, placing Japan in shame culture,

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only for a small portion of the entire book. Why is it that Chrysanthemum came to be seen as coining this name for Japan? It is closely related to the way Japanese readers accepted the book, differently over time, yet with consistent attention to the notion of shame. It was in the 1960s that the sociologist Sakuta Keiichi published a view emphatically highlighting shame culture as Japan’s national character or national personality, minzokuteki kosei (Sakuta 1967: 9).5 This does not mean that Sakuta was in agreement with Benedict. In his view, whereas Benedict presents only the negative side of shame culture there are diverse dimensions to it. Expanding on the notion of shame, Sakuta proposes that Japanese society gives middle-level groups such as cities and local polities only weak autonomy: immature in the formation of civil society consisting of autonomous middle-level political units such as the city, Japanese society is formed by the vast population who identify strongly and directly with the central polity and society at large (1967: 20). Although Sakuta’s study is often referred to as one of the first important misreadings of Benedict (Shimada 1994: 52), upon close examination Sakuta is presenting his own formulation of the notion of shame as the core of Japanese culture and does not necessarily rely on Benedict other than for the initial inspiration that he receives from her work. Even if it was a “misreading,” it nevertheless is worth investigating why this particular notion among the other notions Benedict suggested captured the Japanese imagination so strongly and fascinated commentators year after year. Furthermore, if, as Shimada Hiromi states, “later commentators who quoted from The Chrysanthemum and the Sword began relying on it in order to criticize today’s Japanese for having forgotten shame” (1994: 52), such a phenomenon itself affords an interesting site for sociological inquiry. As far as such studies are concerned, the “true” intention of Benedict is irrelevant, since by this point of inquiry a Japanese national character based on shame culture is no longer Benedict’s product, but is made by the Japanese themselves (Shimada 1994: 53). Bearing this point in mind, let us trace how the notion of shame culture captured Japanese intellectuals. In 1977 Hamaguchi Eshun attempted to revise the notion of shame culture as being regulated by the sanction of other people: Hamaguchi explored the possibilities where “shameful” individuals control themselves according to their own moral standard (1977: 88–9). Unlike Sakuta, who proposed his own formulation inspired by Benedict, Hamaguchi’s view is an explicitly revisionistic reading of Benedict’s notion, inverting the notion’s negative import, turning it into a positive attribute of the Japanese. Hamaguchi suggests that Benedict’s opposition between guilt culture and shame culture cannot be taken too rigidly, and that they may not be so different after all and may stand in conceptual continuity, depending on how one sees them. In his pursuit of “Japaneseness,” nihonrashisa, Hamaguchi concludes that, although Benedict very aptly understood the mechanism of Japanese situational ethics, this

Benedictian myth 69 itself cannot explain how individuals control themselves on the micro level and shame cannot be born simply from external sanction, for individuals conscious of shame control themselves just as much as individuals in guilt culture might (1977: 248–50). Writing in the early 1980s, in tandem with Lummis’s view which was published at around the same time, Saeki Sh™ichi emphasizes that Benedict’s classification of Japanese culture as shame culture is a verdict handed down by a superior culture to the inferior culture, that of shame, and he wonders why this unequal background of the verdict was not understood by later Japanese readers (Saeki 1984: 108–9). Such a view had been entertained by some, including Takeuchi Yoshitomo, who wrote thus: By defining Japanese culture as shame culture as opposed to western culture as guilt culture, [Benedict] was highly conscious of western cultural superiority and looked down on the Japanese. But because Japanese at that time had lost confidence by the war’s defeat, [Benedict’s view] deeply impressed them. (Mainichi shinbun May 29, 1971, quoted in Hamaguchi 1982: 68) This revised reading corresponds to Lummis’s reading, although, expressed by the Japanese, it represents a different ethos; whereas Lummis is basically warning against the American superiority that was hidden in the text, the revised Japanese reading reflects a changing ranking of Japan in an international community of industrialized nations. In the 1990s Chrysanthemum continued to be read and the notion of shame culture continued to bother Japanese readers. Re-evaluating Sakuta’s reading, Soeda Yoshiya suggests that Sakuta’s understanding of Japanese society as “a community of shame” needs to be revised, since such an image pertains to prewar Japan and today’s Japan is full of people who are conceited, with a desire to exhibit themselves, that is, people who have forgotten shame (Soeda 1993: 428–9).6 Among western scholars of Japan also, the notion of shame culture has been discussed. For example, Millie Creighton, arguing against scholars including Takie Lebra – who suggested that she could not “endorse Benedict’s view of Japan as a ‘shame culture,’ for there is much guilt as well” (Lebra 1976: 79) – defends Benedict, emphasizing that her discussion of shame culture and guilt culture was more nuanced and Benedict’s view was generally supported by native scholars such as Sakuta and Hamaguchi. Pace Creighton, to read Sakuta and Hamaguchi as supporting Benedict is odd, since if Benedict’s proposition is nuanced, Sakuta’s and Hamaguchi’s are even more nuanced, ambiguous, and ambivalent and neither supports Benedict. Also, immediately following the sentence that Creighton quotes from Lebra, Lebra cautiously adds: “However, I do agree with Benedict that the Japanese are sensitive to shame, primarily, I believe, because of their status orientation” (Lebra 1976: 79). This makes Creighton’s portrayal of

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Lebra’s points one-sided. Furthermore, Creighton’s position is tantamount to taking the notion of shame culture as an established one, which precisely goes against her earlier suggestion that Benedict’s opposition was not of a stark sort, but nuanced (Creighton 1990). In a brief but masterful review and critique of the historical consequences of Chrysanthemum and the Sword, Jennifer Robertson points out that Benedict “collapsed past and present, and fused shreds and patches of data in formulating a unique and timeless janusian core … that was ‘the Japanese’ cultural personality” (1998a: 304). According to Robertson, “Benedict made getting to know Japan look too easy, and the Japan she profiled seemed all too knowable: once inscrutable, the Japanese were suddenly crystal clear” (1998a: 302). Robertson suggests that the western anthropological approach to this “knowable” Japan took the method, first, of focusing on internal contradictions, paradoxes, and conceptual opposites found in Japanese culture, and, second – resonating with Geertz’s point already mentioned (p. 69) – of drawing a contrast with the US: “The evergrowing anthropological literature on ‘the Japanese self,’ for example, works both to locate ‘indigenous’ constructions of selfhood and to distinguish the Japanese from the American (or Western) self ” (Robertson 1998a: 304; see Chapter 6 in this volume for more on the Japanese self). The notion of shame culture, deployed by both Japanese and western scholars, is one of the most representative concepts to place Japanese personality in antinomy to the western counterpart. This and other conceptual properties Benedict proposed as the key to Japanese culture, including on and giri, became the primary site for anthropologists and scholars to work and rework in interpreting Japan (e.g. Lebra 1969; Kawashima 1951). In this process, the key concepts that Benedict offered as descriptive tools are converted into explanatory tools of Japanese culture, with the notion of shame culture being the central one. Recently, scholars have gained access to Benedict’s hitherto classified papers stored in Vassar College. By using Benedict’s OWI Report #25 “Japanese Behavior Patterns,” which according to the investigation by Fukui Nanako provided a basis for Chrysanthemum (Fukui 1999), Pauline Kent suggests that Benedict never intended to portray Japanese culture primarily as shame culture (Kent 1994, 1999). In my view, whether Benedict truly intended so or not is of less concern than how it is that the notion of shame culture has become, over nearly sixty years, so important in the Japanese reading of Benedict and their perception of themselves. The fact that the notion of shame continued to provide a reference point for Japanese self-perception, mainly proposed by intellectuals, and the fact that this notion takes up a different value – negative or positive, obsolete or contemporary – are indicative of an historical transformation in what is deemed to be national character. Behind the identical signifier, the signified never remains the same. In the dialectical process of production of meaning, the notion shame has been appropriated by Japanese interpreters in multiple

Benedictian myth 71 ways. As such, it is a good reminder that anthropology is as much an analysis as it is a constitutive part of the culture it studies. What needs to be emphasized here is that the way shame culture is understood by scholars and critics has taken a distinctly “national” approach, i.e. nationally characterizing Japanese. So far as that approach is concerned, the Benedictian paradigm is firmly preserved. The rise and fall of shame culture as a name for Japanese national culture shows an interesting life of Chrysanthemum. In the postwar period it was a text that gave the Japanese a sense of relief; it explained Japan’s defeat in the war and salvaged Japan and its cultural essence as something that did not have to be totally denied and discarded. After several decades Chrysanthemum came to be interpreted with more ambivalence, underpinned by a growing sense of economic achievement and the visible affluence of Japanese society. The way the notion of shame was inverted over time from negative to positive reflects this: if Japan can achieve modernization without fundamentally having to go through cultural transformation, i.e. westernization, then there must be something good about Japanese culture. Such was the core argument of nihonjinron in the 1970s and 1980s. No matter how the notion shame is conceptualized or valued, sometimes negatively, sometimes positively, it has always been framed as characteristic of the Japanese nation, as can be seen from the way Japanese culture has been considered in close connection to the national predicament of defeat in war and economic devastation and, then, to the national achievement of economic reconstruction and recovery of international status. Chrysanthemum has thus been read and re-read as a sutra of Japan’s postwar national history, a treatise of Japan’s national culture. The reading of Chrysanthemum as a text that occluded Japan’s wartime and colonial responsibilities by trying to explain Japanese culture purely from within its internal logic in a time when Japan faced not only reconstruction but also compensation for and settlements with former colonies and other Asian nations has not occurred to the readers of Chrysanthemum, Japanese and non-Japanese alike. To this day, Chrysanthemum serves predominantly as a tool of cultural self-reflection for the Japanese, inward looking and obsessed with their own national character. It cannot be denied that literature such as Chrysanthemum played certain roles in justifying this obsession, which necessarily comes with neglect of colonial responsibilities and postcolonial injustices. A Korean critic in Japan, Suh Kyung Sik, notes that new forms of racism justifying the war are recognized among Japanese young people today, who are influenced by the New Right and raise the suspicion of greed on the part of war victims, marked by the paranoia that (poor) Asians are jealous of Japan’s economic achievement (Suh 1997: 182–92). Suh adds, appropriately in my view, that “Japanese who do not belong to the wartime generation may not possess the guilt consciousness, but at least they must take the

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responsibility to go beyond ‘shame’ ” (1997: 192). Indeed, it is another paradox of Japanese society that the conventional understanding that the Japanese are shame-oriented is blatantly defied by the Japanese state’s ongoing refusal to grant citizenship and/or voting rights to former colonial subjects who continue to live in Japan, the maintenance of systemic discrimination against foreign guest workers, and the marginalization of individuals who cannot be classified as the average national “type.” Whether Benedict intended this reality or not is irrelevant and, if pressed, I am inclined to believe that she never did. In any case, as I have already emphasized (p. 62), such is beyond an intention of one author – it is a result of historically conditioned power relations between the US and Japan, where the postwar military occupation connived in the amnesia regarding Japan’s former colonial oppression and aggression in Asia, while imposing the American logic of Cold War power games. The production of such a book as Chrysanthemum is part of this process. What needs to be emphasized in relation to the postwar anthropological studies of Japan here is that Chrysanthemum set the basis for two major approaches to Japan: Japan as a socio-cultural totality and an inquiry into Japanese personality that later became studies of the Japanese self. These two approaches form part of three holisms I suggested in the Introduction, the remaining one being an approach to Japan as a household society. The emergence of these dominant approaches owes much to Chrysanthemum and its paradigmatic framework. But this process was not simple or smooth – it is, rather, marked with disagreements across the Pacific, controversies within anthropology, and intervention from or collaborations with other disciplines, as I shall argue in the following chapters.

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Occupation anthropology

Formative years of the Japan field Approximately three million Japanese died in World War II. The Allied bombing destroyed one-quarter of the country’s wealth. Rural living standards fell to 65 per cent of prewar levels, and urban standards to about 35 per cent. Sixty-six major cities, including Hiroshima and Nagasaki, were bombed, destroying 65 per cent of residences in Tokyo, 57 per cent in Osaka, and 89 per cent in Nagoya (Dower 1999: 37, 45–6). The victorious Americans marched into a land where the natives welcomed them with seemingly unambiguous enthusiasm, an unthinkable scene considering that Japan and the US were intolerable foes just a few weeks before, a scene that was to be remembered as another Japanese paradox. With the Occupation of Japan (1945–52) and the rising tensions of the Cold War, it became increasingly clear that Japan would now be an important ally for the US in East Asia. Accordingly, its image as reflected in anthropology and other academic disciplines shifted. In this chapter I consider the formative years of the Japan field in western anthropology, during which Japan became a “field” where anthropologists could actually do fieldwork. This process was not smooth or one-dimensional. Rather, as we shall see, it was marked by contingencies and complexities. There were contesting interpretations and understandings. Eventually certain versions of understanding became dominant and hegemonic, this process being consistently influenced by changing international relations of power and, in that sense, not unlike what happened to The Chrysanthemum and the Sword as presented in the previous chapter. One of the academic disciplines that clearly reflects such a changing understanding of Japan is history. Commenting on US studies of Japanese history, John Dower refers to the “convergence” trend that was widely recognized among Japan historians in the US: whereas in prewar and wartime scholarship, Japan’s cultural exceptionalism, the “divergence” from the western model, was emphasized, in the Cold War power reconfiguration the new argument emerged, identifying Japan at first as a delayed follower of the west and then as a partner of the west under the rubric of modernization

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theory; though immature yet, Japan would catch up to the west one day and probably soon (Dower 1998; see Samuels 1992). By the late 1970s and early 1980s, reflecting Japan’s ascending economic power worldwide, another revisionism became influential, notably back to “divergence.” Dower cautions us in stating that it was not just a mere reverting back to the pre–1950 vision: rather than labeling Japan as a failure and the different and inferior partner of the west (in contradistinction to the same but inferior partner of the 1950s/1960s), the “third-stage” scholars on the whole took a more positive view of Japan’s economic success.1 Japan is modernized and yet remains non-western and traditional – that is, uniquely Japanese. The formative years of Japan anthropology that I explore in this chapter largely overlap with Dower’s second stage and capture the initial shift toward the third stage. Unlike Dower’s subject matter, history (although he includes a wider disciplinary selection), with my focus being anthropology I shall steer my discussion within the parameters of a limited number of works. This does not mean that I shall deal only with the writings of anthropologists or that I shall deal with all the anthropological writings of the period concerned. Rather, I am tracing the footsteps of those texts whose influence on the anthropology of Japan became unmistakable. There were concrete changes in the conditions for studying Japan anthropologically after World War II. First of all, fieldwork in Japan became a real possibility, which was initially guaranteed by peace under the Occupation, accompanied by the economic and political superiority of westerners, and particularly Americans, who were stationed in Japan. Unlike today’s western fieldworker in Japan, who would have to struggle to economize on research expenses due to the high living cost in Japan, in those days Japan had just come out of a devastating war resulting in disastrous defeat accompanied by inflation, which destroyed the national economy and spirit: the US dollar was worth many times more than the yen, while things western (including western scholarship) were worth hundreds of times more than things Japanese. Although western researchers faced minor political and economic restrictions, reflecting the fact that Japan was under military occupation, the western fieldworker was placed in a distinctly superior position vis-à-vis the natives and was able to mobilize, inexpensively, material resources and human assistance with little linguistic and cultural competence on his/her part – a situation which resembled the typical power relation in classical anthropology between the anthropologist from the colonizing nation and the natives who were colonized. Like history, the anthropology of Japan went through many turns. First, it was assumed that with the intervention of the Occupation Japan’s “westernization” and modernization would happen in the near future. But without noticeable and rapid proof of westernization anthropologists remained skeptical, duly “othering” Japan. Or, rather, unlike history, where Japanese-style modernization was sufficient to bring Japan back to the

Occupation anthropology 75 convergence model, anthropology basically left Japan as the west’s other because of (not despite) its modernization. A modern non-western culture posed a challenge to western anthropology, which had been familiar only with the non-west, which was by default backward in economy and technology. Japan’s modernization without westernization became intriguing to western anthropologists, which in turn resulted in an ongoing exoticization of Japan. In this process, in a manner similar to the way Ruth Benedict’s Chrysanthemum and the Sword was inverted from negative to positive and from descriptive device to explanatory tool of Japanese culture, what was seen as the cause of Japan’s aggression and eventual defeat in war came to be reinterpreted as a set of positive attributes that enabled Japan to shake off its postwar disaster and enter the ranks of industrialized nations, while preserving all its cultural uniqueness. Some uniqueness, as we shall see, came to be exaggerated. For Americans in the US and Japan, the Occupation was clearly an attempt to modernize Japan, although how to do so – or, as Sheila Johnson has put it, “the choice of ideas to be introduced and the methods to be employed in imposing them on Japanese” – were not always agreed between Washington and the Supreme Command for Allied Powers (SCAP) in Tokyo or even within each of these (S. Johnson 1988: 64). The aim of modernizing Japan was recognized widely in various circles and areas, including by experts on education, policing, law enforcement, labor organization, and women’s status, for example, although each came with its own problems and not always with consensus (e.g. Mayo 1982; Aldous and Leishman 1997; Koikari 1999). The US Occupation of Japan was, of course, an immensely complex process and no simple judgment would do justice to it, although, as Gavan McCormack and Yoshio Sugimoto contend, it was distinctly a process formed by mutual US–Japan perceptions: Immediately after World War Two, Japan was depicted as a society where almost everything was unmodern, the government autocratic, social relations hierarchical and unequal, and the national mentality (in the words of General Douglas MacArthur) that of a ‘twelve-years [sic] old’. The Western approach was essentially anthropological: Japan was analyzed as a compact, homogeneous and exotic unit, qualitatively different from and fundamentally inferior to Euro-American industrial societies. (McCormack and Sugimoto 1988: 2) “Essentially anthropological,” this is a profoundly clairvoyant prophecy in retrospect, for what was to happen in Japanese studies as a whole. Indeed, this ethos of “anthropologizing” Japan allowed the anthropology of Japan itself to preserve, with little qualms, the vision of “compact,” “homogeneous,” and “exotic” Japan for years and decades to come.

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According to Dower, the Occupation was also a process that offers lessons in “the fragility of ideology” promoted by the state and followed by the people, on the one hand, and some reasoning for preoccupation with one’s own misery and subsequent amnesia regarding pain inflicted on others, as can be seen in the Japanese neglect of postcolonial settlement (1999: 29–30). It was an historic time and space in which the ruling Americans and the ruled Japanese all participated, with the result being varying degrees of reconfiguration of power encompassing the broad spectrum of society (see Mayo forthcoming). The years of Occupation were indeed equally, if not more so, a time of new opportunities, but these were also the years that created the culture of the defeated among the Japanese, which was accompanied by self-negation, denial of responsibility, a victim mentality, forgetting of their own deeds of genocide and ethnocide elsewhere, a certain revolutionary idealism, shame, boredom, decadence, and, most definitely, poverty – a mixture of all sorts of contradictory ideas and confusing realities. No longer was a simple logic of severe toilet training during infancy sufficient to grasp the new situation where the former aggressor was made powerless and suddenly became an enthusiastic follower of western leadership. In the middle of the Occupation, in 1950, Edwin O. Reischauer published a book entitled United States and Japan. The dust jacket of the book captures the ethos of the time: To the American people, who since 1945 have spent half a billion dollars a year to keep a former enemy from going under, and whose international prestige and security depend upon Japan’s conversion into a safe and cooperative member of international society, what happens in Japan is of immediate, critical importance. Yet Japan is half a world away, and Japanese society and psychology are incomprehensible to most westerners. Mr. Reischauer opens a closed door. He gives us in this book all the facts that responsible citizens need to know about Japan’s relations in the past with the Western world, her geographical setting, and her economy. He tells how the Japanese people feel, think, and act in terms of their history and culture: his original and vivid interpretation of Japanese psychology makes fascinating reading. (Reischauer 1950: dust jacket blurb) Actually, Reischauer’s probing into Japanese national psychology is far from original, almost precisely following Benedict’s Chrysanthemum, including on hierarchy, shame, and situational ethics. Just as in Chrysanthemum, generalized descriptions on the basis of very limited data are offered as explanations of Japanese character (Reischauer 1950: 142ff.). Despite the similar content, what divides Reischauer from Benedict is his writing position. Now for Americans, knowing Japan was no longer a condition for fighting and defeating her, but part of the concern for governing her.

Occupation anthropology 77 Benedict caught a glimpse of the beginning of such a change, but since her research was carried out during the war Chrysanthemum stood on the threshold between the need to understand the enemy culture and the clairvoyance of the brand-new victor as a governing power. Reischauer’s book contained no such ambiguity: it was a book by the victorious nation for the victorious citizens, now with a civil duty and international mission to govern and guide the defeated. Similarly, Japanese studies rapidly shifted from wartime enemy studies to peacetime strategic studies under the tension of détente. Studying Japan became a crucial key for establishing the international leadership role of the US on the global political stage divided by the iron curtain. Chrysanthemum was published at the moment when sympathy for Japan had just become possible; only four years later, in 1950, knowing Japan, its cultural and psychological idiosyncrasy, became a national imperative for the Americans. Reflecting the initial positive ethos of the Occupation, which was best understood in terms of the aim of the “demilitarization and democratization” of Japan, early reports based on field observation reflected a sense of eagerness to record Japan’s economic rehabilitation and social progress (e.g. Raper et al. 1950). Initial projects were either carried out by individuals who were themselves members of the Occupation or conceived in close collaboration with them. Understandably, the Occupation brought with it hopes for reconstructing Japan as well as a set of biases about her. John Bennett and Iwao Ishino, who were researchers in the SCAP, capture this vividly: The Americans in the Japan Occupation looked at Japan and the Japanese from several perspectives. From one point of view, which we may call the “GI-vulgar,” the Japanese were considered “gooks” – that is, uncivilized, uninteresting, contemptible creatures. From another (the “GHQ image”) the Japanese were seen as highly intelligent but amoral humans, not to be trusted and in need of stern authoritative guidance. From a third (the “progressive Occupationaire” view) the Japanese were seen as intelligent human beings, fellow-moderns, who had been misled by a cadre of reactionaries, and who would welcome aid in getting on the right track. From a fourth (or “gone-native”) the Japanese were regarded as representatives of an old, exotic, mysterious, and intriguing Oriental culture, with everything to teach the crude Americans. (Bennett and Ishino 1963: 25) On the whole, there was a strong belief, shared by sections of Japanese social scientists and the Occupation personnel, that “feudalism” in Japan would wither away due to Occupation-introduced democratization, although what exactly “feudalism” or “democratization” meant was far from clearly defined or agreed. It is true that the Occupation introduced radical measures, including land reform, abolition of exploitative serfdom and tenant farming, and distribution of land among cultivators; the Occupation

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established the new Constitution for Japan, with universal suffrage, including that of women; it introduced education reform with an emphasis on the concepts of civil liberty and individualism; it disbanded the Japanese military (only in theory – Japanese military capacity was reincorporated into the Self-Defense Force); most importantly, it dethroned the emperor from the position of the living god and made him a mere figurehead, separating emperor-worship from secular politics. But it was also an extension of the military government now put in place by the Americans. The difference in status between the ruling Americans and the ruled Japanese was unmistakable. Douglas MacArthur, according to Dower, thrived on veneration, believed that “the Oriental mind” was predisposed “to adulate a winner,” and assumed that democracy would take root only if people believed him when he said it should. And, indeed, the response of huge numbers of Japanese was that the supreme commander was great, and so was democracy. (Dower 1999: 205) The media was placed under the direct control of the SCAP. Censorship was installed and all publications had to be inspected by the SCAP. The area of Tokyo that was spared from the Allied bombing was reserved for the Americans in the style of racial segregation as practiced in the US. The quick training given to Occupation personnel was not sufficient to cultivate sensitivity to cultural difference, while simplistic and somewhat derogatory propaganda films were used as an orientation for the Occupation forces (Embree 1949; see also Hornstein 1996). Enormous power and authority were bestowed on personnel who neither spoke Japanese nor had much expertise in the areas they were assigned to, yet who issued orders to more experienced natives (see, e.g., Embree 1949: 211–12). The GI store was inundated with food in excessive volumes right in front of the eyes of starving Japanese, who continued to live in shantytowns and on the streets. Occupation personnel usually retained considerable racial disdain toward Japanese, while they enjoyed cheap domestic labor, first-class theater and other entertainments reserved exclusively for them, and an unchallenged position of wealth, authority, and power (Dower 1999: ch. 6). The ethos created by the interrelation between the totally dominant Americans and the utterly humbled and powerless Japanese underpinned changes in every sector of the society, in mediated and complex ways, including scholarship. The way Japanese scholars understood the west (the US) and the way American scholars saw Japan were all part of this process of rehabilitating Japan. In this sense it is interesting to find that as early as September 9, 1945, John Embree had predicted that it would not be possible to achieve true democracy as long as a military government was in charge (1945b: 51).

Occupation anthropology 79 I start my investigation of the Occupation anthropology of Japan from what I call “new ethnographies.” In distinction to John Embree’s Suye Mura, which holds the position of the classic ethnography of Japan, new ethnographies represent the ethos of the Occupation, which was replete with the conviction that Japan would be modernized and westernized following the US model. We shall see in these writings that ethnography as a genre ultimately contradicted the Occupation’s distinctly evolutionist way of looking at Japanese society in terms of progress. I take up two texts, Takashima by Edward Norbeck (1954) and Village Japan by Richard Beardsley, John Hall, and Robert Ward (1959). Both are among the earliest texts produced on the basis of fieldwork in rural communities under the Occupation. Following “new ethnographies,” I move on to a study of ritual kinship relationship found in labor organizations by Bennett and Ishino (1963), which offers an insight into the way Japanese society was perceived in the image of the household. This perception itself was seen as peculiarly Japanese by the Occupation authorities. The expansive notion of household as applied beyond the actual household to society at large holds a key to understanding later anthropological studies of Japan, which will become clearer in Chapters 4 and 5. I then examine the study of Japanese factories by James Abegglen (1958), whose work came to form the basis of subsequent studies of workplace relations, which were to become one of the major research sites for Japan anthropology. Finally, I look at two texts, by Ezra Vogel (1963) and David Plath (1964), on urban life in a changing Japan after the Occupation. These texts symbolize the end of Occupation anthropology and the beginning of a new era in the anthropology of Japan. In the background of the new ethnographies was a collaborative effort between Japanese researchers and western fieldworkers. Begun in the late nineteenth century, hand in hand with Japan’s colonial expansion, and subsequently having provided a crucial role in intelligence during the war, anthropology, or more precisely ethnology, in Japan was itself going through a period of readjustment, while anthropology, especially cultural anthropology, unlike physical or biological anthropology in Japan, was not well established as a disciplinary field in higher education in both teaching and research (see E. Ishida 1965: 303). Because Japan lost its colonies, anthropologists lost their fields of research in Korea, China, Taiwan, the Pacific Islands, Southeast Asia, Central Asia, the Sakhalin Islands, and so on, while Okinawa, one of the most important field sites in traditional ethnology, was placed under direct occupation of the US military. Reflecting this, many ethnologists in Japan turned their attention to Japan’s main islands (Japanese Society for Ethnology 1968). This resulted in the short-lived popularity of studying ethnic minorities in Japan, including Koreans – a trend that was soon to go out of fashion as Japanese ethnologists started to explore newly opened overseas fields, as the power of the yen permeated Asia, Africa, and Latin and South America (e.g. Izumi et al. 1951; Kohama et al. 1959).

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During the Occupation many Japanese anthropologists worked as assistants to the Occupation offices and western researchers. Given that anthropology in Japan historically had been susceptible to the reception of theories and methods that were originally developed in Europe and the US and hardly any original theory of its own existed (E. Ishida 1959), through these collaborations native self-knowledge was reformulated, especially in terms of methodology, while western researchers acknowledged the wealth of ethnological research in Japan and absorbed the anthropological selfunderstanding of Japanese scholars (e.g. Pelzel 1948).2 If the Occupation engraved the US victory as an unmovable fact of history, it also marked the Japanese as unconditionally defeated. In this stark binary contrast, many other aspects of the reality of the time were forgotten. According to Dower: One of the most pernicious aspects of the occupation was that the Asian peoples who had suffered most from imperial Japan’s depredations – the Chinese, Koreans, Indonesians, and Filipinos – had no serious role, no influential presence at all in the defeated land. They became invisible. Asian contributions to defeating the emperor’s soldiers and sailors were displaced by an all-consuming focus on the American victory in the “Pacific War.” By this same process of vaporization, the crimes that had been committed against Asian peoples through colonization as well as war were all the more easily put out of mind. (Dower 1999: 27) This ethos was undoubtedly reflected in the early postwar ethnographies of Japan. Mirroring the two-party play of the victorious and the vanquished, the comparative poles were set between Japan and the west (the US). Instead of studying decolonization, ethnic conflict, political purge, economic division, and social stratification, for example, anthropologists studied Japanese villages and factories against western counterparts, ultimately homogenizing Japan as the west’s other. As I pointed out in Chapter 2, Ruth Benedict’s Chrysanthemum and the Sword was the first such exercise within this twoparty vision. It is no accident that Chrysanthemum was not only widely read among lay people, but also firmly relied upon by Occupation personnel as a reference source for understanding Japanese society.3 In the long run, the process of locating postwar Japan within the existing anthropological framework produced omissions. For example, “villages” that anthropologists studied were presumed to be the communities where anthropologists could identify kinship relations and co-operative organization, autonomous or semi-autonomous self-government, and collective decision-making, while it was forgotten that from these communities men and women left for Korea, Taiwan, Manchuria, and Inner Mongolia as colonialist settlers, and that, later, men left for the Pacific, New Guinea, Southeast Asia, and Okinawa as imperial soldiers. What the war – and the

Occupation anthropology 81 aggression and atrocities committed by the Japanese in that war, not just the atomic bombs and defeat in the war – brought to the villages, cities, and society never became the subject of serious anthropological inquiry except for fragmentary observations. Similarly, Koreans, Okinawans, Taiwanese, Burakumin, the Ainu, and other minorities in Japan proper were conveniently forgotten. Indeed, until much later in the twentieth century Japan’s minorities were left unattended to by anthropologists – what better way is there to concur with the Japanese state’s “official” amnesia of wartime and postcolonial reparation? We see in this chapter that the Hegelian search for national character in correspondence with Japanese culture persisted; that the idea of the exoticness and uniqueness of the Japanese was hard to eliminate; that the image (and the reality) of Japan as a colonizer in Asia – the point that Benedict missed – continued to be omitted by anthropologists; and that Japanese kinship, communities, business management, and personality continued to be explained, tautologously, within the confines of being “Japanese.”

“New ethnographies” During the Occupation, avid collection of field data – be it quantitative survey or qualitative analysis – was carried out by western researchers in Japan. One way or the other, ethnographic accounts of this period reflected and were influenced by the “modernization” zeal of the Occupation; they tried to capture the spirit of changing Japan, the new Japan. As stated earlier, I shall call these studies “new ethnographies,” in distinction to John Embree’s classic Suye Mura (1939). Many of the earlier field studies of rural Japan were carried out under the auspices of the University of Michigan Center for Japanese Studies. The center had a field station in Okayama prefecture in western Japan. Consequently, many researches were based on Okayama and its vicinity, covering the Inland Sea area between Honshu and Shikoku Islands.4 Under the conditions of military occupation it was necessary for American researchers to comply with the rules and rely on the institutionally controlled field setting. As will be seen, this created a distinct flavor of Japan as a field from the beginning – notably, accounts on rural communities in the southwest dominated, somewhat marginalizing other areas and distorting an understating of the regional diversity of rural communities in Japan. Interestingly, whereas the southwest was designated as the site for village studies, the northeast became the site for kinship studies, although not many western anthropologists conducted fieldwork there during the Occupation (see Norbeck 1961). (Japanese kinship was predominantly understood in terms of the northeastern variety, which itself poses a problem, as will be shown in Chapter 4.) One of the leading fieldworkers in Japan at the time, Edward Norbeck, studied the island community of Takashima, located off Okayama prefecture.

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Norbeck’s fieldwork lasted from June 1950 to April 1951; the study of Takashima itself began in August 1950. Since ruling foreigners were not permitted to rely on the Japanese economy for subsistence, a community within a commutable distance from Okayama City was chosen, so that Norbeck and his wife could secure supplies from the military government. Norbeck and his wife lived in Takashima only part of the time throughout their fieldwork. Norbeck had “a modest competence” in conversational Japanese (1954: ix–x). As was typical of Occupation ethnographers, Norbeck’s interest was to identify aspects of westernization in this remote fishing community (1954: ix). In his other article Norbeck recounts “westernization” as follows: Clothing has become predominantly Western particularly for the young. Permanent waves are the rule for young single and married women. Fishing is almost exclusively by motorized craft. Housing and diet are relatively little affected, but household equipment shows a fairly marked influence. Entertainment for the young is Western, movies, baseball, pingpong, social dancing. … Sexual freedom is, for the most part, a thing of the past; present day sex mores are circumspect, and at least suggest the influence of the West. (Norbeck 1951: 38)5 Norbeck first qualifies Takashima, his field site, as “thought to be to a considerable extent representative … of rural Japan as a whole” (1954: x), although it is not always clear how this is so. As is typical of early ethnographies of postwar Japan, Norbeck gives a detailed account of the ecological and geographical setting of Takashima. Moving on to the household and family life (1954: ch. 3), Norbeck maintains the anonymous description of villagers from a distance. With a highly report-like tone, he moves from the household head and his authority, through the head’s wife, the bride and her lowly position, divorce, adoption, and terms of address inside the family, to the dwelling itself, diet, dress, health, and recreation. In all these descriptions, not one Takashima individual or family is depicted in depth or on a personal level, while Norbeck’s observation is predominantly based on the behavioral level – in some ways more similar to Malinowski’s work on the Trobriand Islands (e.g. Malinowski 1926) than to Embree’s ethnography. About halfway through the book, and only briefly, the reader learns that this small village is stratified in many intersecting ways: it is dominated by the Matsui household, or more precisely a coalition of Matsui households, the rest of the non-Matsui households being looked down upon even when a non-Matsui is wealthier than the Matsuis. Interestingly – though this is not totally clear from Norbeck’s depiction – the Matsuis appear to intermarry with each other, yet a fraction of outcasts on the coast, sokobiki fishermen, apparently the lowest stratum of the village hierarchy, are disdained in part due to the rumors of incestuous marriage among them. Norbeck confirms

Occupation anthropology 83 that these are unfounded, although we are not told how this segregated group does recruit brides (1954: 113–15). There is no genealogical study of the Matsui household, or any other households in the village. Also curious is that, although Takashima is a fishing island, fishing is less honored than farming; having a farmer for an ancestor procures better status than having a fisherman, although, again, Norbeck leaves it at that without further analysis as to how it has become so (1954: 113). The book is informative, but not clear in its focus. The bulk of description – be it religion or life-cycle – demonstrates that the old practices are maintained: the custom of pollution and taboo regarding childbirth is strictly observed; celebrations take place in a manner more or less the same as before the war. Yet Norbeck presents his study as an attempt to find out about the degree of westernization. In his concluding chapter (1954: 195–201), he lists, for example, household utensils that are of western origin, including items such as batteries and lightbulbs, bicycles, cosmetics, Gregorian calendars, aluminum kitchenware, magazines, newspapers, comic books, ink, sewing machines, glasses, wristwatches, can openers, and so on (1954: 198–9). It does not take a Japan specialist to see that the list is inconsistent and of little use: those things that Norbeck lists all existed prior to World War II and the Allied Occupation. Furthermore, what could possibly be the logic of finding a newspaper or magazine in the household and calling it “westernization”? Are all the technological innovations “western,” including electricity and the use of glass windows? Or is “origin” the only way to categorize things as western or non-western? If so, there are many things on the list that east and west can equally claim the credit for. The social mode of the use of those items embedded in everyday lives of islanders would be a better clue to analysis. More fundamentally, how does one evaluate the degree of westernization when the whole country is under American military occupation, supply of goods is channeled by its authorities, and lifestyle is to a large extent defined by this condition? In addition to the regrettably superficial account of the island, Norbeck’s simplistic westernization thesis effectively obscures what life is really like on the island. Since it was the first of this sort of rural ethnography by a western researcher after Embree’s Suye Mura, Takashima attracted certain attention from Japanese readers. But, in a rather dismissive review, one reader states: If I may present my conclusion first, compared to the Japanese firstclass researchers, this book does not deserve to be selected [for a review]. I simply wonder what exactly it is that this book offers us in answer to the unresolved question regarding Japan’s progress: it just presents a mundane description. … Is Takashima … worth studying for such a long period at the expense of large research funding? I wonder if there was not a better choice of a fishing village than this one. (T. Kitami 1954: 124–5)

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Seen as a standard ethnography, Takashima is not different from any other. It has an ethos similar to The Nuer (Evans-Pritchard 1940) or The Sexual Life of Savages (Malinowski 1926) with its anonymity, measured distance from the people in the field, collection of hearsay and interviews, behavioral observation, and anecdotal revelation of feuds and alliances inside the village. In fact, considering conditions under the Occupation and Norbeck’s only “modest competence” in Japanese, the fieldwork is well done. It is, however, a misplaced thesis of westernization, combined with the state of ethnography of Japan in western anthropology, that culminated in the bitter disappointment of the Japanese reviewer. No substantial consultation is made of existing Japanese materials that may have been useful. Having said this, the frustration of the aforementioned reviewer of Takashima results from his expectation that the book will answer “the unresolved question regarding Japan’s progress.” This is interesting, since it reveals that this Japanese reviewer also saw Japan under the Occupation as having been placed on an irreversible track of progress and modernization – not unlike Kawashima Takeyoshi, as shown in the previous chapter. As far as this point is concerned, the reviewer is in agreement with Norbeck. The only problem is that, in the eyes of this reviewer, Norbeck’s book did not have any good insights to offer. The irony is that, compared to Benedict’s Chrysanthemum, which was written without fieldwork, Takashima is less insightful and mundane despite its fieldwork-supported data. What creates tension throughout the book is that the westernization thesis and the progress that is assumed to accompany it are not compatible with the static ethnography Norbeck maintains. Norbeck did not come up with a solution to the discrepancy between the internal structure of the structural-functionalist ethnography, which necessarily renders the description equilibrium-based, and the premise of the postwar Occupation that insisted on progress and change. This discrepancy had already existed in Suye Mura, as argued in Chapter 1. Another Okayama project was published in 1959 under the title Village Japan (Beardsley et al. 1959). This 500-page study is a product of a total of seven years of research (1950–7) in a small but relatively affluent farming village in Okayama, Niiike. Substantially larger in volume than Takashima, the overall structure of the book is very similar: it includes ecology, lifecycle, village life, and production activities. But in its content Village Japan is far richer than Takashima. There are individuals with faces, names, and personalities. The effect of the Occupation is relatively better documented than in Takashima in some areas of village life, including land tenure and education (see Takemae 2002: chapters 7–8 for reforms). Interestingly, according to the authors land ownership in Niiike hardly changed even after land reform under the Occupation, because there had been no great landlords and few landless tenants prior to the war. This is a case that conforms with the southwestern type of village organization, in contradistinction to the rigidly hierarchical northeastern type (Beardsley et al. 1959: 142; for more on this, see Chapter 4 in this volume).

Occupation anthropology 85 Indeed, Village Japan is well informed on native scholarship compared with Takashima. The village of Niiike is dominated by two families, Iwasa and Hiramatsu. The authors are well aware that the type of relationship in these families is different from the northeastern type. Referring to Ariga Kizaemon’s data on Sait™ d™ zoku (household; see Chapter 4 in this volume), the authors state: “whereas Niiike co-operates on a basis of equality, these people of the north work together within the frame of enduring and pervasive hierarchy” and “Niiike and its neighbors on the coastal plain have no d™zoku with the rigid, particularized vertical structure seen in Ishigami [the village of the Sait™s]” (1959: 272). One Hiramatsu elder is called sensei, teacher or master, and is widely respected by the villagers, but he is not the head of the main household. It would be, authors note, unthinkable for this man to rise to this position of influence had he lived in the northeast (1959: 274). In light of the authors’ awareness of Japan’s regional difference, then, it is curious to see their insistence on Niiike’s national representativeness, when, for example, they state that “much of Niiike’s way of life is also customary and normal in a great many other Japanese communities” (1959: 1). They base this claim on the grounds that about half of the Japanese population live in the countryside; this statistic would be larger, since many urban dwellers have only recently moved there from rural areas; ambiguously, they state that “the villages may, to a limited but significant degree, be held to represent the traditional cultural foundations of all of modern Japan” (1959: viii; my emphasis). “Limited but significant” – how this might be the case, however, does not emerge from the massive number of pages of the book. Although there is no simple assumption that westernization is happening in the village as in Takashima, it nevertheless does not fulfill its mission beyond describing the village in its local specificity; yet why this insistence on its national representativeness? Unlike Chrysanthemum, which was not meant to be an ethnography, Takashima and Village Japan aim to be ethnographies – that is, a record of the community in totality. But totality here obviously does not coincide with national boundary – these are studies of two small villages. Interestingly, however, just as the Nuer, the Dinka, or the Tiv are all seen as selfcontained, integrated communities, so are the Japanese. Hence, village studies here are presented as equivalent to “Japan studies,” so to say, and accordingly the authors insist on the national representativeness of their villages. Metonymically, a portion of Japan is seen as representing Japan as a nation (Sofue 1959; 1960: 312). Behind such representativeness, important questions went unasked. Where are the more urgent issues such as farmers’ views of the Occupation and the emperor? Why is there no mention of the atomic bomb, considering that Okayama is right next to Hiroshima? Is not the fieldwork in these places more political in nature than the authors wished to portray, considering the overpowering presence of the Americans? Yet the neutral tone of a scientific report on a total community from a remote corner of the world is present throughout these ethnographies. Even

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though Village Japan tries to engage more intimately with the villagers, the following quotation provides an appropriate illustration: In their physical appearance the people of Niiike are typical of the population of the region. Adults are short in stature. Several men are nearly as diminutive as Iwasa Genshir™, about 4 feet 10 inches tall, whereas Hiramatsu Tokujir™, at 5 feet 9 inches, seems strikingly tall. The average male height is about 5 feet 4 inches; women average about two inches shorter. As is true of many of the world’s short peoples, both men and women are proportioned with trunks of moderate length but short legs, so that their appearance is one of long-waistedness. Body build is more spare than is immediately apparent to the casual eye. Faces are often quite broad across the cheekbones and suggest a wellfilled body below. Loose-cut clothing also contributes to the impression of a sturdy figure. But most people are lean or even thin by American standards. Few hard-working farm men or women get fat, even though their normal diet is abundantly starchy. … Despite habits of working bent far over from the hips, the standing posture is more or less erect, though shoulders carried well back are seldom seen among mature and older adults. Men somewhat more than women carry the head thrust forward, their shoulders bowing slightly forward in sympathy. Certain elderly men and women, apparently afflicted with osteoarthritis, lose all ability to raise themselves erect and are bent forward from the lower back so that walking is almost impossible without a cane or other support. This particular posture of the age, seen commonly enough in other communities as well, afflicts four persons in Niiike to a moderate or extreme degree. (Beardsley et al. 1959: 59) This kind of description is scarcely found among today’s anthropological accounts of the Japanese – or any other peoples for that matter: it shows an objective (pseudo-)scientific eye that the authors tried to maintain in studying Niiike people, just like scientists would try to sharpen their trained eyes and ears in facing a hitherto undiscovered species. This kind of posture toward field people was still very much valid in the not-too-distant past of anthropology and Village Japan attempted to locate Japan within that paradigm. The authors’ insistence on their field being “nationally representative” can also be understood in connection to the predicament of classical ethnography. They did not have a model of an ethnographic study of a non-western nation-state and therefore tried to extend the mostly structuralfunctionalist model of small-scale societies to Japan as a whole – just like Embree did during the war. The reality is, however, that their fieldwork covers only one specific corner of an extremely diverse culture in a highly volatile time in Japan’s historic transformation. Hence the tension between

Occupation anthropology 87 their insistence on having the national representative and the actual ethnographic content, on the one hand, and between ethnographic equilibrium and the assumption of progress, on the other. In this sense, new ethnographies of rural Japan did not succeed in breaking through the existing methodology; there is a gap between old methods and rapidly changing field communities. More importantly, new ethnographies are the first sign of “nationalizing” the local field. Unlike Embree’s Suye Mura, which was self-professedly a village study, the Occupation anthropology tried to grasp Japan as a national whole through microscopic observation. This is no coincidence: with the historical condition of the Occupation, where the task was for the US to grasp Japan as a whole, efficiently and quickly, to manage it first, and then to change it, ethnographic studies inevitably bore the mission of presenting as nationally typical a picture as possible.

Oyabun–kobun as the antinomy of democracy The Occupation’s zeal for modernization, and by the same token the concern for Japan’s backwardness, was manifested in the management of other areas as well – notably urban and city dwellers and industrial communities. John Bennett and Iwao Ishino, major writers in this area, worked in the Public Opinion and Social Research Division in the Civil Information and Education Section of the General Headquarters of SCAP during the Occupation. One of the Division’s interests lay in the oyabun–kobun (parent role–child role) relationship in the workplace, which Bennett and Ishino were assigned to study.6 Occupation agencies and Japanese police were concerned about large criminal syndicates that controlled black markets. The Labor Division was trying to “eliminate these so-called ‘feudalistic’ and ‘undemocratic’ forms of labor organization” (Ishino 1953: 609). These syndicates were organized into hierarchical ritual kinship relationships called oyabun–kobun, or parent role–child role (Bennett and Ishino 1963: 13; see Takemae 2002: 307–33 for labor law and other reforms). Bennett and Ishino clearly distinguish ritual kinship found in labor organizations from “biological” kinship (see Ishino 1953; Bennett 1958). This distinction, however, comes with its own problems. As Ernest Gellner (1987) notes, “true” kinship is often fully marked with rituals, while there are “truly ritual” kinship relations such as eboshi oya and eboshi ko or oyakata-kokata relations in Japanese rural communities (see pp. 123–4), which work only in terms of inter-household or community-level affairs involving ritual and exchange of protection and deference. Beyond rural communities and on a different level, workplace oyabun–kobun relations are shared among a wide variety of traditional guilds – criminal or not – while the Occupation’s concern over policing had the researchers concentrate only on criminal elements, thereby making this kind of ritual kin relationship appear to belong only to illegal organizations. In reality, criminal or not, both urban

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and rural communities of Japan were full of diverse ritual kin relations (see pp. 122–6). Bearing these caveats in mind, Bennett and Ishino’s insight into labor organization and labor boss systems gives us an interesting bridge between kinship studies and studies of wider aspects of Japanese society represented in kinship terms, research that was to become central from the 1970s onwards. Ishino’s ethnography of a construction company in the northern city of Honshu deserves attention here. The company’s upper echelon consists of the boss and his “brothers” (both biological and ritual), who assume the role of the oya (parent) generation, while the lower echelon is made of the ko (children) generation, recruited from rural areas as apprentices by way of some kind of intra-“family” (i.e. mostly ritual family) connections. The authority of oyabun vis-à-vis kobun is absolute, while oyabun’s relation with his “brothers” rests on trust on an egalitarian basis. In the case of this company, three out of four of the “brothers” of oyabun are his kin and another is not related but is seen by the boss as reliable and rich in experience. The boss’s first kobun is not his kin, but the man the boss thought was best qualified in terms of skill and leadership (Ishino 1953: 700–3; Bennett and Ishino 1963: 60–5). Companies based on the oyabun–kobun relationship can recruit their labor force by way of oyabun-to-oyabun connections. Labor recruitment in this sense resembles indentured labor, where individual workers have no choice but to obey the boss’s assignment and serve the boss’s “brother family.” At the same time, the labor relation is organized similarly to kin relations in terms of idiom as well as blurred boundaries between economic and extra-economic domains of social relation. The concept of contract is non-existent; extra-economic obligations in return for protection are the norm. Recruitment and initiation to the oyabun–kobun relationship – not all the employees are chosen to be the kobun – is marked by rituals that enact the entry into child status vis-à-vis oyabun. It needs also to be emphasized that entry into the family is not arbitrary, but always rests on connections, which may well extend to the rural communities where the recruits originally come from. In this sense, the workplace oyabun–kobun relationship stands in continuum with the rural ritual kinship relation, but there are also fundamental divides between them. Unlike a household, a company is profit oriented. Therefore the position of workers is more vulnerable than that of minor members of the farming household, especially in times of difficulty. Also, a worker can face conflicting loyalty to the company and to his own family (Bennett and Ishino 1963: 72). There are elements of coercion, and the use of violence is not uncommon when lower-ranking workers are not fulfilling their role. Unlike children in a farming family, who will contribute to the household economy by growing into an additional workforce and bringing in more people to the workforce through marriage and procreation, workers in the company under the oyabun–kobun relationship basically have only their own

Occupation anthropology 89 labor service to offer. One can, of course, interpret the hierarchical household system as exploitative of the younger generation’s productive and reproductive capacity. But the exploitation in the oyabun–kobun relationship, as perceived by Bennett and Ishino, is more direct: The frequent charge that the labor boss system is “undemocratic” deserves a brief discussion. From the point of view of the bosscontrolled workers, certain characteristics of the system have prevented the legitimate exercise of their now legal, or generally recognized, civil rights. The system has enabled the boss to extract a percentage (commonly between 10 and 30 per cent) of the workers’ pay; it has tended to prevent workers from either quitting their jobs or changing them at will; it has made workers dependent upon the personal good will of the “boss”; and it has prevented collective bargaining for the improvement of working conditions and the increase of wages. (Bennett and Ishino 1963: 46) In rural ritual kinship relations such as eboshi oya–eboshi ko relations of some inner prefectures in Japan, a teenage child (eboshi ko) is taken to a locally influential man who becomes his eboshi oya and looks out for him in exchange for his loyalty and “filial” dedication. In this case, the “profit” the eboshi oya gains is very little in material terms, but largely symbolic: by being an eboshi oya to a child of another family he gains confirmation of his authority, public trust, and an influential position. His funeral will be prepared and attended by the eboshi ko, but this, too, mainly comes in a non-material form after his death (see Chapter 4). The workplace oyabun– kobun relation is, though thick with ritualistic conventions, one step closer to proto-capitalism in its operative mode, in that it is the kobun’s duty to earn his keep and deliver profit to the oyabun. The selection and recruitment of kobun is combined with the merit-based principle, rather than simply based on birthright, as can be seen in the case of the northern construction company mentioned earlier. The attention given to the kinship idiom within the labor organization is closely related to the assumptions and expectations held by the Occupation toward the “new democratic Japan.” According to Bennett and Ishino, between March 1948 and July 1950 the Japanese government reportedly eliminated 42,000 labor bosses and “freed” 1,113,000 workers from the control of oyabun, although Occupation officials remained skeptical about these statistics (1963: 47). Bennett and Ishino continue: It was evident that in spite of explicit legal prohibition, widespread propaganda, and regular inspections, labor suppliers continued to exert their influence upon the employment system of local exchange offices, and employers continued to use the services of the bosses. Many “labor bosses” short-circuited the official employment exchange offices and

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This phenomenon was thus seen as “undemocratic” and “feudal,” and therefore needed to be eradicated under the Occupation’s leadership. But is it really “undemocratic,” and is democracy completely free of this type of social relations? Ritual kinship is widely found in the world, including in religious, political, and vocational organizations in both west and non-west: for example Muslim brotherhood, Christian godparents, Freemasonry, and the Ku Klux Klan. The American underworld, also tightly knit by family-like obligatory relationships, was still very active in the 1950s and 1960s, controlling large commercial and gambling sectors. Even in the “legal” world, nepotism, kin connections, and fraternal “old-boy” networks are clearly evident, as can be seen in the recruitment of politicians even in cases where candidates are democratically elected. (I am writing this book in the fourth year of the second-generation presidency of the Bush household.) Just as in Japan, or indeed anywhere else for that matter, the proprietorship of American firms is inherited within the family line. More recently, in American colleges and universities spousal appointments frequently occur, sometimes with clear recognition of the merit of each person in the couple, sometimes with favoritism obvious in the appointment of a spouse who clearly lacks qualifications. (Spousal appointments are extremely rare and in most cases unthinkable in Japanese universities, and would be seen as embarrassing.) Merit and genealogical connection do not stand in opposition, and nepotism, spousal or kin appointments, pseudokinship connections, and other “feudal” relations can certainly co-exist in a society that may be seen as democratic. The perception of the workplace oyabun–kobun relationship as feudalistic can also be attributed to lack of understanding on the part of Occupation officialdom of the Japanese kinship system, which had already taken Basil Chamberlain by surprise in the late nineteenth century – notably the widespread adoption of non-kin individuals (see Introduction). Seen from this point of view, the workplace oyabun–kobun relation was not necessarily the legacy of the feudal past, but an ongoing part of Japanese genealogical practice. Nevertheless, American officialdom in the Occupation saw it as a serious obstacle to Japan’s democratization and modernization. Why? The answer seems to lie in their perception of US society rather than their perception of Japanese society. For them, US society – the model for Japan – stood on the principle of equal opportunity for all and contractual relations that indi-

Occupation anthropology 91 vidual workers entered and left according to their free will: whether they saw this as ideal or real is not certain, but they seem to have forgotten that such conditions existed only for a section – a certain class, gender, and race – of their society, certainly not for all and sundry. It is simply an irony that side by side with this type of “democratization” Occupation personnel lived in staggeringly better material circumstances than those of the natives, and benefited from Japanese maids and servants in a world that was racially segregated – nothing progressive or democratic about that. It needs to be emphasized that it is no accident that the oyabun–kobun relationship was seen as undemocratic; it predicts how Japan is to be perceived from the 1970s on as an industrialized modern capitalism with a non-modern work ethic. In this sense, the shock the Japanese economic recovery delivered in the 1970s had more to do with the US perception of Japan’s “backwardness” starting from the Occupation years than with an actual transformation in Japanese society. The attention given to “feudal” relations such as oyabun–kobun ultimately reflected the US’s image of Japan’s backwardness as much as it contributed to creating an exaggerated sense of division between the US and Japan in workplace relations; in reality this divide was probably smaller than it was perceived to be.

Family-like factories The co-existence of “modern” and “undemocratic” (or “feudal”) cultures was to intrigue Japan specialists for decades following the Occupation, since elements of the oyabun–kobun relationship not only persisted but also seemed to prosper in the capitalist economy. With Japan’s notable economic prosperity – just like what happened to Benedict’s Chrysanthemum – what used to be seen as undemocratic and backward institutions such as the oyabun–kobun bond are now seen in a new light, notably as positive factors that enabled Japan to leave the postwar devastation behind. Let us turn to one of the earliest studies that determined the mutual penetration of kin relations and labor relations as positive and uniquely Japanese. James Abegglen’s The Japanese Factory: Aspects of Its Social Organization (1958) is based on his more than a year’s stay in Japan, during which he visited nineteen large factories with 2,000–8,000 employees and thirty-four small factories employing up to 200 persons, and for the most part eight to twenty persons, spread over Honshu, Shikoku, and Hokkaido. Abegglen’s study starts from the acknowledgment that Japan offers a third option to the two alternatives that dominated the world’s industrialization of the day: western and Soviet types. Abegglen denies the validity of both – the former on the basis of colonial exploitation and wasteful private enterprises and the latter on the basis of cost-efficient state intervention at the expense of personal freedom (Abegglen 1958: 1–2). He further criticizes the assumption (mainly held during the Occupation) that industrialization would make Japan look like the west (1958: 7). He then adds one other

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objective to his study – methodology. This is very sensibly put, considering the research was done during the 1950s when the study of national character was still strong and explicit: A further objective of the study reported here was to add to the understanding of modern Japan through the detailed examination of a limited problem. Leaving aside descriptions of Japan by self-exiled romantics and the results of war-fevered attention, a very considerable part of the studies of Japan move on a quite general level … in speaking of modern Japan there is a distressing frequency of sentences beginning, “The Japanese are …,” which treat the nation and its people as a compact and homogeneous unit with little or no note of the diversity and complexity of this modern nation. Most general is the view of Japan as a nation of fishing villages and farming hamlets, isolated communities, and ancient festivals. Although these elements are present in modern Japan, to understand the nation they must be seen in focus with Japan’s sprawling, ugly cities, jammed with people, interlaced by high-speed transportation, smoky and noisy, and filled with the clamor and tension of commerce and industry. (Abegglen 1958: 5) This is a strikingly different and fresh angle. Clearly Abegglen was critical of overmuch focus being given to the rural communities, as in Takashima and Village Japan, since Japanese society was by then rapidly moving towards industrialized capitalism and therefore there was a gap between what anthropologists depicted as a “representative” community of Japan and the reality of Japan. In a way, to confine the Japan field to rural, agricultural, and fishing communities was itself a reflection of the western presupposition of Japan as the backward other, resulting in simplification and homogenization of what was a very complex and fluid population. Would Abegglen overcome this presupposition? Let us follow his study closely. Abegglen first argues that there is a critical difference in the commitment of workers to the firm in the US and Japan. Whereas in the US it is common practice for a worker to leave one job for another better one, in Japan a worker commits his lifetime to the company: “He is a member of the company in a way resembling that in which persons are members of families, fraternal organizations, and other intimate and personal groups in the United States” (Abegglen 1958: 11). In a company that employs about 4,350 persons, only five or six are fired each year, Abegglen reports. For the five-year period 1949–53, 83 out of 3,337 men and 109 of a total of 1,014 women departed from their job; of the men, two-fifths retired and the rest left for health and family reasons; almost all the departures of women were because of marriage (1958: 12). This is a remarkably slim attrition rate. In sum, Japanese factories operate just like a family:

Occupation anthropology 93 It is family-like. When a man enters the large Japanese company it is for his entire life. Entrance is a function of personal qualities, background, and character. Membership is revocable only in extraordinary circumstances and with extraordinary difficulty. As in a family, the incompetent or inefficient member of the group is cared for, a place is found for him, and he is not expelled from the group because he is adjudged inadequate. Again, family-like, the most intimate kinds of behaviors are the proper province of concern and attention from the other members of the group. Fidelity and tenure bring the highest rewards, and, should the group encounter financial difficulty, it is expected that all members will suffer these difficulties together. Rewards of money and of material are secondary to the total success of the entire group. And, family-like, there is little recourse for the member of the group who has erred in his choice of group or who is mistreated by other members of the group. (Abegglen 1958: 99) Abegglen connects this operation mode with the ongoing tie to “a nonurban, prewar, traditional Japanese experience and outlook” held by the industrial leadership (1958: 100). He sees it as an historical phenomenon that is subject to transformation, as the constitution of leadership changes depending on generation shift. Already, he notices that, side by side with the aforementioned family-like traits, Japanese factories are proving to be unstable in their internal relations and quickly shifting in terms of their system (1958: 99). Nevertheless, at the point of Abegglen’s research a strong continuity between the prewar and the post-Occupation work ethic was clearly observed on the managerial level. Abegglen states: It would seem from this study, then, that the very success of the Japanese experience with industrialization may well have been a function of the fact that, far from undergoing a total revolution in social structure or social relationship, the hard core of Japan’s system of social relationships remained intact, allowing an orderly transition to industrialization continuous with her earlier social forms. (Abegglen 1958: 134–5) In conclusion, interestingly, he connects Japan’s industrial success with traditional kinship relations on three points. First, on an ideological level, the widely spread practice of adoption enabled Japanese individuals to remain conscious of social mobility and flexibility even within the traditional society and made it relatively easy to transfer to the mode of industrial recruitment. Second, on a practical level, household organization and its mechanism of symbiosis between a main house and branch houses (see Chapter 4) protected the workforce from being directly hit by the effects of industrialization by providing them with certain guarantees during hard

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times. Finally, again on the ideological level, just as family loyalty and cohesion had been successfully incorporated into militarization in the prewar and wartime years, the transition to industrialization was supported by this type of loyalty (Abegglen 1958: 136–7). Despite his earlier warning against the homogenization of Japanese culture and society, here his use of Japanese kinship reference neglects regional diversity and historical complexity. For example, the southwestern kinship type would not fit into his perception of the household symbiosis, whereas in the northeast the severity of the industrialization of economy did not spare the farming population that was supposed to be protected by the main family. During the 1950s and 1960s the difficulty in farming forced farmers out of northeast and central Japan to industrialized areas of the Pacific coast as underpaid seasonal workers, leaving the farming to the wife and elderly parents (Norbeck 1965: 11). Young people from peripheral areas left their village in scores as soon as the minimum compulsory education was over (age 15) to work as unskilled labor in urban factories – this is called shùdanshùshoku, or group recruitment. None of these was protected by the traditional kinship relations. The exodus of workers from the villages violently transformed the internal structure of Japanese kinship. Abegglen’s assumption is, however, the opposite: traditional kinship enabled the transition to industrialization to happen in a relatively pain-free way. This assumption is simplistic: rule-bound factory routines, competition in the workplace, alienation from the home environment, and, for many, low wages were all things that did not exist in the farming environment or existed in a different form. Furthermore, it is contradictory to assume that, on the one hand, traditional kinship relations helped Japanese workers to adapt to industrialization and, on the other, traditional kinship relations protected them from the shock of industrialization. Again, one needs to bear in mind the regional diversity and the different pace at which the Japanese countryside was exposed to the cash economy and wage labor. As will be shown in the next chapter, in the southwest the relatively early introduction of a cash economy helped minimize the creation of the very lowest stratum of landless peasants in the village; by contrast, in the northeast the household functioned as a hierarchical governing body with the effect of firmly binding individual members to the rankings within it. In northernmost Hokkaido, one of Abegglen’s sites, things stood on a very different footing, in that residents there were, in general, relatively new immigrants who had cut off ties with their original families on the main islands. Moreover, historically, industrialization was not new to Japan in the 1950s. Japan had already gone through major industrialization under state initiatives and state protection and kindling of zaibatsu big businesses in the late nineteenth/early twentieth centuries. From early on in its industrialization, Japan has had a long and well-functioning (in terms of efficiency but not of equal distribution) tradition of a dual economy, where big businesses are surrounded by subcontracting and sub-subcontracting small-scale and

Occupation anthropology 95 manual sweatshops which operated in a room set aside for the purpose in family homes. Abegglen’s accounts show little historical sensitivity to this effect and obliterate Japan’s prewar industrialization. Rather than assuming that the workforce retained and transferred traditional kinship ideology to the industrial setting, it would make more sense to assume that the Japanese workforce already had a long and painful historical experience of having been uprooted from farms and used as cheap labor in urban factories while maintaining strong, ongoing ties with the countryside.7 One other interesting point about Abegglen (and Vogel below and many others to follow in the area of Japanese management studies) is that he completely omits the other tradition of the Japanese working class – the history of class action and industrial struggle. This was acutely observed, especially in the early years of the Occupation, in the rapid unionization of the labor force. Dower notes: The base line for such rapid unionization had actually been established during the war years when workers were organized at company, industry, and national levels as part of the mobilization for “total” war. Once the wartime raison d’être for patriotic service had been destroyed, these existing unions and national federations proved easily mobilized by the political left. (Dower 1999: 257) As recently as 1946, even under military occupation, the Japanese labor movement demonstrated a highly organized capacity to take control of production, rather than being company men or women, and to make this demand even at the cost of police persecution and violence – as seen in the May Day demonstration, where 1.25 million participated in rallies, and on Food May Day one week later, when 250,000 gathered in front of the imperial palace (Dower 1999: 257). Between 1946 and 1950, 6,432 disputes involving over nineteen million workers were documented (1999: 257). Abegglen conveniently sets aside this tradition and focuses on “primordial” kinship relations in rural Japan and family-like factories as the extension of such kinship relations, consequently delivering an image of labor and capital working together in family-like harmony. This one-sidedness was to become the standard representation of the Japanese labor for decades to come. Abegglen’s study was one of the first of many to attempt to solve the puzzle of Japan’s modernization without westernization by focusing on the ongoing co-existence of and mutual reinforcement between an industrialized economy and kin-like work relations.

Beyond Occupation anthropology In the early 1960s two interesting books were published on urban life: Ezra Vogel’s Japan’s New Middle Class (1963) and David Plath’s The After Hours:

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Modern Japan and the Search for Enjoyment (1964).8 These two texts symbolized the departure of western anthropologists of Japan from an Occupation-oriented choice of research topics and fieldwork. In terms of style, Plath’s work in particular takes a unique form, unlike any of the ethnographies that had been written before. Vogel and his wife lived in a small suburban bedroom town near Tokyo, which Vogel names Mamachi. From here, salaried company employees, or “salary men,” commuted to Tokyo every day. Vogel sets his focus on the community of salary men, although his fieldwork takes place in their home environment and family, rather than their work environment. His method is explicitly qualitative, dealing in depth mainly with six families. This is a new “field” in Japan anthropology in that Vogel does not locate his study in one village or on one island: that his field is locally in Mamachi is not a crucial point; rather, he is dealing with a community of individuals and families that are connected by belonging to the corporation and by the values and lifestyles that are conditioned by this belonging. Salary men’s families are divided into “separate communities of husbands, wives, and children” (Vogel 1963: 102). The husbands and their company “gang” retain loyalty towards the firm; wives and children develop solidarity inside the home, although they each have their own friends. The salary man’s family often has very little or a weak tie to his rural origin and more closely resembles the average western suburban nuclear family than the traditional Japanese family. Vogel contends that the old-style ie (household) has disappeared and, instead, “a new familial order” has emerged, an order that is based not on the structural coercion of the hierarchical household relation, but on “sentiment and a sharp division of labor and authority” (1963: 180). As will be shown in Chapter 4, this type of family relation comes close to the one that Kawashima Takeyoshi proposes as an ideal type of modern Japanese family (see Chapter 4). Vogel captures the transitional process by which the ie authority is weakened and in its stead the husband’s firm provides increasing support for the family, substituting for the protection the main family traditionally extended to the branch families in rural Japan (see more on this in Chapter 4 below). According to Vogel, the foundation of the family is now made of feelings and role allocation, rather than authority and prescribed position that one is born to occupy. Vogel’s contention is a clear precursor to what was to become dominant in Japan anthropology, the idea of the company as ie – but this ie being no longer authoritarian but, rather, egalitarian, harmonious, democratic, and homogeneous. Like Abegglen, Vogel finds the secret of Japanese success in the transition from a farming economy to industrialization in the traditional practice of branching out of families. But, unlike Abegglen, who found the basic value of Japanese traditional kinship relations in a parallel manner in Japanese factories, Vogel attributes the emergence of a salaried class to the way younger sons left the farm, effectively implying that the deterioration of

Occupation anthropology 97 traditional kinship relations, not the continuity of kin relations, is responsible for the emergence of salary men and their new family order. According to him: The sons who moved to the city knew that they would not receive any inheritance from their parents, and that they would be accepted back into the rural areas only temporarily in time of emergency. The young sons going to the urban areas therefore were fully committed to finding long-term work. They were willing to undergo long apprenticeships and to acquire skills useful at a later stage of life. Again this is in contrast to the migration in many countries where the migrating sons hoped to acquire money quickly and then return to their original home. Even if such migrants remained in the city indefinitely, they seldom had the perseverance to acquire the skills that would compare with the young Japanese migrant. (Vogel 1963: 257) What seems to be a discrepancy here is that the “sons” Vogel depicted most likely worked in blue-collar jobs – going through “long apprenticeship” to acquire the appropriate skills in factory labor, while the white-collar workforce Vogel called “new middle class” was typically made up of college graduates.9 Blue-collar workers and white-collar workers experienced different historical patterns of urban migration. Blue-collar workers retained an ongoing tie with their rural homes – female factory workers in prewar Japan would return home to get married after having worked many years to earn their dowry and help support the family. College-graduate white-collar workers who originated in the rural areas would most likely stay permanently in the cities. By the time Vogel visited Japan – that is, in the 1960s – Japanese rural families no longer existed in isolation from the urban economy or lifestyle. Mediation between rural communities and urban industries took a complex form, including seasonal (winter) labor by married sons, whose wives and children stayed back in the countryside with the elderly parents-inlaw/grandparents; younger, single male or female workers no longer migrated seasonally to the cities, but moved permanently, often severing ties with their home village. It is more than likely that second- or third-generation former rural immigrants existed in urban and suburban areas. In other words, it is not that the Japanese pattern of labor migration is “in contrast to the migration in many countries,” i.e. uniquely Japanese, but that the stage of temporary migration was long gone even in the prewar years, yet somehow Vogel misses this historical picture. At the same time, many rural areas were themselves being converted into suburbs by expanding construction enterprises and residential developments. Vogel’s depiction understates the fluid dynamic of the ever-changing landscape of Japan at the start of the long-lasting economic boom and presents only a partial explanation.

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This leads us to consider a conceptual difficulty that underpins Vogel’s study: who exactly are counted as the “middle class”? Does this category include blue-collar wage workers, too? For example, in US public discourse “middle class” represents a much broader category than it does in Britain, where “upper middle class” is clearly separated from “lower middle class” and “working class.” How is this perceived in Japan? How did people see themselves in terms of class stratification? These points are far from clear in Vogel’s study. According to Sugi Masataka, in the five-year period 1950–5 the number of white-collar workers increased by 35 per cent (Sugi 1959: 248). He quotes a survey sampling of a total of 5,378 men aged between 20 and 69, taken between 1952 and 1957, that shows that, whereas in terms of kais™, or stratum, 49 per cent felt they belonged to the middle stratum, in terms of kaikyù, or class, 76 per cent admitted to belonging to the working class. Sugi attributes this to the still struggling living standard of the Japanese in general in the late 1950s, which made them hesitate to label themselves middle class (1959: 251). The above data demonstrate the difficulty of classing various managerial and desk workers simply as a “white-collar” or “middle-class” population. It does not emerge from Vogel’s study how complex the “middle class” can be in its internal constitution; by not clarifying the stratification internal to the “new middle class” and by limiting his sample to a very small number of informants situated in a similar setting, Vogel’s study ultimately contributes to laying down a pattern of homogeneous salary men divorced from class differentiation, eternally espoused with the company as family, a form of classlessness and a conflict-free safe haven.10 The very concept of homogeneity is strategically deployed by David Plath, who depicted multiple sites of life in a central Japanese city, including the salary man, the farmer, and the merchant, in his After Hours. Different lifestyles and immediate concerns are represented by these three ideal types, which are to be unified under the Japanese personality and moral values, which Plath takes from Benedict’s method of looking at a culture through configuration – “the way the features are accented and orchestrated that becomes Japanese” (Plath 1964: 71). He lists the key concepts that would enable the reader to understand Japan better, including the frame of human relations, the repressed self in preference to group solidarity, emotions such as sympathy, and how the Japanese work and how they take leisure time. In his Chapter 5, entitled “The after hours,” Plath shows how the Japanese historically divided work and leisure: “I have not argued for a radical change in the amount of after hours available to the ordinary active adult. But I have tried to show that over the past century these hours have taken on a different configuration” (1964: 121; original emphasis). Plath gives a very sensible account of work and leisure, carefully knitting two threads together – historical and contemporary – showing discontinuity and continuity from the Tokugawa period to modern-day Japan. However,

Occupation anthropology 99 Plath’s depiction is strangely oblivious to the power relations behind work and leisure. Leisure, let alone work, does not spring out of a vacuum; its distribution is not even, either. Who has more enjoyment in a given society shows more than just how they enjoy leisure in culturally specific ways such as cherry blossom watching or hot spa visits. His depiction of the historical evolution of the interrelation of leisure and work in Japan omits different forms of state intervention, regulating and disciplining the time management of the citizens through the imposition of law and order, on the one hand, and media and fashion, on the other, in addition to class differentiation and other relations of power produced by the configuration and reconfiguration of forces in the society at a given historical time. In this sense also, the book resembles Chrysanthemum: both work effectively to naturalize the mechanism of power inequality that ordinary Japanese are subjected to, by overemphasizing an internal cultural logic, oblivious of concrete disciplinary and ideological apparatuses, and by disregarding the political-economic milieu that enables a particular cultural logic to emerge as dominant. Plath’s book, nonetheless, offers an exceptionally perceptive insight – the perception of Japan vis-à-vis the west and the modern. He writes: Wartime defeat and the subsequent Occupation brought Japan a multiple American revolution. It brought a wave of GIs and their dependants who provided a free home demonstration of American material culture and social institutions. … The Japanese did not lack moments of democratic fervor and experimentation in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. But even the sweeping changes of the Meiji period are generally regarded as a “restoration.” … The Japanese have not lost all of the “faith in hierarchy” that so impressed Ruth Benedict; there is no need to overstate the case. But the postwar generation, now beginning to take up leadership positions, is convinced that whatever mass democracy may come to be it can never come to be a renewal of the vertical society. (Plath 1964: 181) Plath captures the ethos of the age, seen from a suburban city in central Japan that is not necessarily peripheral but is definitely not central, and conveys the vivid energy he observed in the society. His text neither is precisely a community study, as in “new ethnographies” of rural Japan, nor aims at presenting an occupational group and its community. It aims to capture Japanese society and culture as seen from the location he chose to do his fieldwork. It is the style that was to become widespread in Japan anthropology from the 1970s onwards, namely an approach that sees Japan as a social whole and cultural totality. This is also a revival of the Benedictian paradigm in the sense that his text tries to depict Japan’s internal cultural logic prevailing over its human relations and social structure.

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Whereas in Takashima and Village Japan there is an insistence that the particular village in which fieldwork took place should be typical or representative of Japan through evocation of quantification of the farming population, for example, Plath does not try to establish the empirical connection between his data and the Japanese national average. Rather, he connects them through interpretation of shared cultural logic – a method inspired by Benedict. In other words, for Plath what makes Japan the land of the Japanese does not exist in the average or the majority in a statistical sense; it exists in patterns that one finds everywhere regardless of occupation or social setting. Although this is an approach that is different from those of new ethnographies, since there is no insistence on national representativeness, nevertheless, Plath’s approach is geared toward extracting the national culture out of diverse locations, and in this sense it contributes to the consolidation of the anthropology of Japan into a nationally territorialized, nationally patterned, and nationally homogenized anthropology. In what is a very Chrysanthemum-esque passage, Plath suggests that the Japanese are capable of combining the traditional ethic with a modern work schedule and admonishes the bias of the western eye: We cannot begin to understand such a Japan or surmise its trends until we discard cherished images of the Japanese as poor and underdeveloped and still subject to Western tutelage. Japanese–Western differences in personal income or public welfare or military might are unmistakable. The point is that despite these differences the human problems which modernity has imposed upon the Japanese are overwhelmingly like those it has imposed upon Americans and Europeans. As an opposing self, Japan mirrors us in naked detail. (Plath 1964: 193) Plath consciously departs from the assumptions that Occupation brought in: in his view Japan’s modernization may take a different path from the western one, but it still will bring about modernity and in this sense Japan does not have to follow the western model. This alternative path, ironically and contrary to Plath’s belief, will prove that the Japanese can indeed be convinced that mass democracy can be “a renewal of the vertical society,” as will be shown in subsequent chapters of this book. From Plath’s pages culturally integrated Japanese types emerge, types that are nonetheless consistent with the self that makes the Japanese Japanese. Unlike the days of Chrysanthemum, this “Japanese” is a member of an economically thriving nation with pride in a unique cultural tradition. Furthermore, this “Japanese” has forgotten Japan’s imperial past and colonial history. Thus we are left with a national community and a national landscape, which facilitate the emergence of a national anthropology that can grow strong in the decades to come.

4

Locating Japanese kinship

Kinship as a key site At the end of the 1970s Sylvia Yanagisako pointed out that anthropology had tended to neglect “stratification in the analysis of domestic organizations” and she attributed this to “the basic homogeneity of the communities we have studied” (1979: 175). Curiously, although Japan as a whole was (and to a great extent still is) studied as a homogeneous society, the Japanese household was always understood to be first and foremost hierarchical and stratified. In fact, the assumption of hierarchy and stratification was in this case precisely the factor that prompted and sustained the notion of the homogeneity of Japanese culture and society. And kinship studies in the Japan field became the major sub-field to have enabled such a framework to emerge, the framework that was to play a decisive role in the formation of the anthropology of Japan as national anthropology. It created the foundation for a uniquely hierarchical society, ie (household) society that presupposes internal (read racial) homogeneity, which will be my focus in this chapter. To focus on kinship studies gives us a few advantages. There is a wealth of information and documentation in this area by Japanese anthropologists. This area provided an arena in which active interaction between Japanese and western researchers and the participation of interdisciplinary scholarships in Japan continued. Given the important position that studies of kinship occupied in classical western anthropology, to look at its Japanese counterpart gives us a better overview about where Japan gets woven into the tapestry of western anthropology. In this chapter we will see that the diverse variety internal to Japan’s kinship system has eventually been homogenized as “Japanese” kinship in such a way as to emphasize its national unity. In the next section I take up prewar kinship study with a focus on the sociologist of the family Ariga Kizaemon’s seminal work. Following this, in the subsequent section I discuss contesting studies of kinship system and ideology that emerged in the postwar debate by using the works of Kawashima Takeyoshi, professor of law, and the sociologist Fukutake

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Tadashi. I re-invoke some of the trends of Occupation anthropology, and therefore readers are reminded that chronologically this part predates and overlaps with part of the previous chapter. Many postwar debates over Japanese kinship inherit Ariga’s notion of d™ zoku (household; see pp. 106–7). For this reason, it is important to introduce his prewar study despite the space it takes. A close look at studies in this area shows that the regional diversity and historical complexity found in the Japanese kinship system that had captured the attention of Japanese researchers from prewar time was by the 1960s turned into a somewhat reduced form in the name of the nationally singular “Japanese,” i.e. national kinship. The academic attention that the kinship system received after the war from both western and Japanese researchers was related to the assumption that, since the traditional Japanese kinship system embodied feudalism, in the form of suppressing individuals as the basic unit of human rights and oppressing them in the name of the household or ie, which was understood to be hierarchical a priori, with the Occupation’s reforms it should be replaced by the new order based on egalitarianism and the notion of the free individual as a basic unit of political and civil life. We saw this assumption in the previous chapter in connection to the Occupation’s approach to the oyabun–kobun relationship. We will see in this chapter that this assumption reveals a set of contesting views about Japanese kinship, rather than a unified interpretation of it. It is notable that the Japanese scholars of kinship in Japan were always aware that in Japan non-blood kin persons easily enter the household as kin by adoption, tenancy, settlement of immigrants, or the hereditary position of service held vis-à-vis the lord. The border between blood kin and non-blood kin is often blurred: for example, a servant may be adopted into a family and given a branch household (normally referred to as bunke) with land, dwelling, and the family name of the landlord, while the second or third son may be given a branch household under a different family name from the main house (normally referred to as honke) in a different village, depending on the regional and family tradition (see the examples on pp. 107–11). Beyond this, there is a diverse range of regional and historical differences found within Japan, as I show on pp. 122–6 by using the anthropologist Gam™ Masao’s work. Prior to 1945, western studies on the Japanese kinship system hardly existed and only fragmentary commentaries on Japanese kinship terminology were found. Projects during the 1950s and 1960s in this area inevitably took the form more of translation initially than of invention, discovery, or interpretation, but western anthropology quickly absorbed existing Japanese ethnological knowledge and selectively incorporated some key terms into its corpus – some of which were to become particularly important for Japan anthropology from the 1970s onwards. For this reason, I consider Japanese kinship nomenclature in the penultimate section.

Locating Japanese kinship 103 Western anthropologists of Japan, rather than using the Japanese case as a reference point to critically reflect upon the existing set of assumptions held in western anthropological studies of kinship, confined Japanese examples and arrangements as “Japanese,” rendering them unique and relevant only as exceptions, and, by disregarding their regional diversity and complexity, actively participated in the process of nationalizing Japanese kinship. This involved quite an interesting transformation of Japanese kinship as understood by anthropologists. I discuss this by focusing on Harumi Befu’s works in the final section of this chapter. I choose Befu’s work not only because he is prolific and the author of important articles on the topic of kinship, but also because his texts display an interesting hybridity in the gaze of an anthropologist who was immersed in both Japanese and American forms of life. Nationalizing kinship became an important part of the foundation for the age of “Japanese cultural uniqueness” that predominates in the Japan field from the 1970s onwards, where kinship is no longer studied as a real concrete kinship institution, but as a social and cultural metaphor with which the Japanese construct their reality (see Chapter 5). For this reason also, a look at kinship studies in postwar Japan anthropology provides a key to better understand the later period.

Prewar kinship studies – Ariga Kizaemon By far the most acclaimed study of the Japanese household system prior to the end of World War II is Ariga Kizaemon’s Nihon kazoku seido to kosaku seido (Family system and kosaku system in Japan; Ariga 1943). The term kosaku is not easily translated into English. Diverse regional variety and many different types of kosaku defy its clear-cut classification either as serf or tenant. A type of kosaku called nago (mainly in the northeast) was, for example, able in some cases to leave kosaku status by purchasing the land (called nago nuke), rendering himself incompatible with the semi-slave status of the serf. Some nago were families of the younger sons of the landlord, whose land was given, not rented out, although until the land registry law was established during the Meiji period (1868–1912) the landlord (i.e. the head of the main house), who might well be the nago’s father, was ultimately responsible for tax payments on these lands, rendering the ownership unclear. In these cases, the term nago denotes both tenant and kin in the sense of a member of the household. Although rent-in-kind and corvée labor were required, since kosaku normally overlapped with branch houses, the concept of “rent” was made ambiguous. Creating branch houses is by definition understood as a distribution of wealth (including land) to make the holder of it a member of the larger household. Kosaku in this sense may be understood as half-serf, half-tenant, full or lesser member of the larger household, and, in many cases, true or fictive kin. In light of this complexity, I shall preserve the term kosaku in its original.1

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Locating Japanese kinship

Incorporating broad historical materials and diverse local and household data from various parts of Japan, combined with his own field data in the northeast, Ariga demonstrates that Japanese families are extremely diverse – in size, form, residential pattern, social relations, including relations between genders and generations, organizational mechanism, strategy for succession, inheritance, ritual matters, to list only a few. According to him, the oftassumed patrilineal primogeniture of the Japanese household is not incorrect, by and large, especially in northeastern farming families, but there seem to be various ways of upholding this principle. Moreover, as will be shown, there are many forms of non-patrilineal, non-primogeniture families in Japan. Before we look at the exegesis of Ariga’s work, a brief preliminary account of forms of Japanese kinship is in order. By the 1940s the diversity in Japanese kinship and marriage was no longer news to Japanese researchers. The size of the household differed enormously – from a twogeneration nuclear family consisting of a total of four or five individuals including the married couple and their children, to a large, multi-generational extended family combining a number of bilateral couples and their children. Until just before the Meiji period (1868–1912), in a number of remote mountainous villages in Gifu prefecture, including Shirakawa village, marriage of younger (non-heir) sons was based customarily on a commuting liaison with a local woman; children born to such a marriage stayed with the mother, who in turn lived with her birth family; only the oldest son lived with his wife and households were typically multi-generational. Although prior to marriage men practiced yobai, or night crawling, that is, nightly visits to the woman’s house, and had often entered into a sexual relationship with multiple partners, once a child was conceived a monogamous relationship was established (Ema 1942, 1943; Ariga 1943: 290ff.; see Befu 1968a, 1968b; see also pp. 135–6 here). In Toshima, in the Izu Islands off the Pacific coast not far from Tokyo, a married couple worked for the husband’s family during the day and returned to the wife’s parents’ house after supper. Parents thus lived with their daughter, son-in-law, and their children. After the retirement of the husband’s parents the couple moved to the husband’s house together with their children (ïmachi 1963).2 Accordingly, ancestor-worship in Toshima corresponded to its residential pattern, married-out women and adopted sons-in-law each worshiping their own parents’ memorial tablet separately. This meant that in the following generation a total of four ancestors (i.e. bilateral grandparents) were worshiped, unlike the oft-assumed principle of patrilineage (Ushijima 1966). In cases of the recruitment method of servants and the creation of branch families the complexity is striking. In some regions the household may contain individuals adopted from a remote (blood) relative as a child servant who would eventually receive the status of a branch family on reaching adulthood; in some other regions a child may be more or less

Locating Japanese kinship 105 bought to work for the family in the name of adoption, effectively becoming a semi-serf worker; in other regions still, as stated above, natural sons may be given different family names when they are made into branch families. The way main house and branch houses relate to each other varies enormously. In some regions the main house directs almost every aspect of the branch houses’ conduct, with a greater discrepancy in wealth between them and a greater degree of domination and subjugation. In some other regions the difference in status and material well-being between the main house and branch houses is not great, resulting in relatively egalitarian arrangements. In some villages a single powerful family prevails as the economic, political, and ritual leader of all the households in the village, with its family ancestral god worshiped as the village guardian god. In some other villages a coalition of equally powerful families oversees decision-making. In some villages less wealthy and powerful families customarily enter into a oyakata–kokata (parent role–child role) relationship with the powerful family, asking the latter to be responsible for authorizing children’s marriage, for example, while such a thing is unheard of in other regions (Kitano 1939). It has also been an accepted generalization, as was mentioned in the previous chapter, that in northeastern Japan the hierarchical household coalition with rigid subjugation between the main house and branch houses is traditionally found and a single powerful house tends to dominate a village, while in southwestern Japan household coalition is more egalitarian and villages tend to consist of more than one co-existing d™zoku (household) and, especially in the coastal regions, the age-set and generational groups are more important than household groups.3 In a word, the organization of kinship, the structure of household, and village composition were indissolubly connected, while the way they were connected presented incredible diversity; this is captured well in Ariga’s monumental study, to which I now turn.4 Ariga contends that an understanding of the Japanese household system can be achieved by closely attending to the historical process by which the kosaku system developed. Kosaku of the large landlord in Japan historically consisted of lesser families – that is, branch households that were made of non-heir children and servants. Occasionally, farmers who lost land became subjugated as a branch family to the landlord’s household (Ariga 1943: 329ff.), while immigrant settlers from other localities tended to establish a main–branch household relationship with the locally powerful landlord by becoming the latter’s kosaku.5 Ariga cautions against the possibility of hastily assuming behind the kosaku system the cold-blooded exploitative relations found in landlord–tenant relations; he recognizes this as a feudal system, but criticizes the use of this term as implying “emotional cruelty” and “coercive attitude” (1943: 278–9). He suggests that we understand “feudalism” in Japan as a political system of the samurai class, which became the operative model for all the household systems in Japan throughout different

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socio-economic strata. In this system, the combination of top-down protection and bottom-up loyalty supports the mutual symbiosis between the main house and branch houses, which in union form one large household or household coalition. Anthropologists have proposed the term “patron–client relations” to explain this system, where the patron, though having the ultimate power over the life of the client, does not simply exploit the client but protects him to some extent; the client has to pay service, at times free of charge in the form of corvée labor, to the patron, but may also expect certain benefits from him (Gellner and Waterbury 1977). If in a patron–client relationship the basic unit which enters the tie is an individual, in the kosaku system the unit is a household. Often the client is made to feel proud of being a close associate of the socio-economically powerful patron. Ariga reports a case where branch houses got together to assist a declining main house in order to preserve the lineage. Such is of course a reflection of the ideology that derives from the pre-capitalist mode of production, where the use of extraeconomic exploitation obscures the clear-cut identification of oppressor and oppressed but as far as the actors are concerned it is the reality. If we were to see only the exploitative relation between main house and branch house, as if their relationship consists purely of economic matters, we will misunderstand the nature of Japanese household systems, according to Ariga: there is a great deal of extra-economic symbiosis between them, although such a symbiosis is not based on equal co-dependence. The household coalition organized by a single main house and multiple branch families studied by Ariga is normally referred to as d™zoku – literally, the same folk. Oikawa Hiroshi and Kitano Seiichi each separately coined this name for incorporating main house and branch households in their 1939 articles (Oikawa 1939; Kitano 1939), which Ariga accepted, although differences between Ariga and Oikawa and Ariga and Kitano remained unresolved even in the postwar period (see Emori 1966).6 D™zoku is not a clan, as it does not always assume the same family name, single genealogical origin, or blood relations. It is not a unilineal descent group whose individual members descended from a common ancestor (Keesing 1975: 31). In this sense, neither is it a “family” as we conventionally understand one, as blood relations; nor is it a descent system, since the individual descendant per se is not a member of the lineage: it is the household, ie, that is the member unit of d™zoku genealogy (Nakane 1967a; see p. 126 here). It would be, therefore, more accurate to think of d™zoku as a lineage of households, a household corporation, or corporate-household group. Furthermore, it needs to be emphasized that the function of d™zoku is secured by the fact that all member households live in the same village. If a person who is kin leaves the village and sets up his own family elsewhere, the membership of this household to its d™zoku would be lost; this household will start anew its own d™zoku. In the Kokashiwa d™zoku of Ibaraki prefecture, originally established by a samurai lord, only those foot soldiers who

Locating Japanese kinship 107 accompanied the lord in the initial settlement and their descendants were allowed to remain in the village as branch houses. They were called keho. The rest, including the lord’s own sons (excluding the heir), had to leave the village. The lord’s sons took different family names and established their own d™zoku in other villages (Ariga 1943: 69ff.).7 On the other hand, when a non-kin servant is given a branch household, this household becomes a member of d™zoku of the main house. As a locally limited corporate-household group, its raison d’être is in matters of day-today transaction between the member households, or, more precisely, between the main house and its branch houses. It is in this sense a pragmatic and secular organization, although at times a powerful main house may also act as a ritual leader in the village, as its ancestral shrine is elevated to the position of village shrine. Although the term d™zoku is favored by both western and Japanese researchers, local people rarely use it; each locality has different terms for each corporate-household group with different functions and operating mechanisms. The reason Ariga bases his research on the kosaku system as the key to understanding the Japanese kinship system is because of the hierarchical nature of d™zoku. Although Ariga is careful not to assume class-based confrontational relations inside d™zoku, he painstakingly describes the unequal distribution of economic and symbolic power between main house and branch houses. No d™zoku for Ariga is organized in an egalitarian way: throughout his book, time and again he emphasizes that the creation of a branch house is not intended to give it autonomy and independence; rather, the aim is permanent subjugation to the main house (1943: 107, 274). Nevertheless, according to Ariga, d™zoku is not created merely because of the selfish intentions of the main house; it is created in an effort to increase the power of the household as a whole, including both main house and branch houses. Here, whether the branch houses included non-kin or kin was not important: d™zoku for Ariga is a unit of production and reproduction, and whether the reproduction (both biological and genealogical) of the household was carried out through consanguinity or not is not important in the Japanese context. In this sense, the Japanese household does not base its raison d’être on blood relations, but on the unequal symbiosis of households that are hierarchically related to each other, and the relations of power are fluid and historically indeterminable, though with diverse regional patterns. It is this extra-economic mutual engagement between main house and branch houses that is the key to understanding the Japanese kinship system – “kinship” here does not exclusively assume consanguinity – and it is this unequal, yet mutual, engagement that brings the overlap between the Japanese kinship system and the kosaku system. Ariga devotes the first 100 pages of his massive 700-page book to the citation of diverse practices of branch-house secession found all around Japan across a broad historical timeframe. These are all unique and no two d™zoku are identical. Nosa d™zoku of Aomori prefecture (Ariga 1943: 92ff.)

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is a case where branch houses were made entirely of blood kin. The main house, the Nosa family, the original settler, is called jid™. As of 1940, the family included the household head and his wife, the heir, his wife, and their six children, the second son and his wife, the third son, the fourth son and his wife, a daughter who was adopted from a relative, her husband, that is, an adopted son-in-law, and their six children, a male servant (a relative), and a female servant (a relative). It is Nosa family’s tradition to recruit servants and adoptees from blood relatives. In fact, until quite recently the entire village consisted of Nosa kin.8 The Nosa household owns an enormous area of land. The main family lives in a grand manor. Given, however, that the climate and environmental conditions in the area (i.e. the northeastern tip of Honshu island) are not easy to tame, agricultural production is far from efficient compared to more productive areas of Japan. The conditions are not suited to rice paddy cultivation and production predominantly relies on dry fields. Therefore a large number of farm hands are required to work together on limited arable land. This is one of the conditions that make corvée labor persist in the extreme northeast. As of 1940, the adopted daughter was studying at a woman’s college elsewhere, the third son was in the army, and the second son was a government employee and lived elsewhere with his wife. The heir (i.e. the first-born son) and the household head were assigned to public service in the village. Thus the actual farm work was overseen by the fourth son, the adopted son-inlaw, and the male servant. The main house relied on a total of twenty-five men of corvée a year; this is called jid™yaku. All Nosa non-heir sons are married on reaching adulthood, but they are not given an independent branch house until they reach the age of 41. Prior to that they are given separate sleeping quarters inside the main house. Since the main house requires more than its own sons to provide farm labor, adoption and recruitment of servants from relatives is widely practiced. Interestingly, Ariga does not mention on what grounds one relative was adopted as a daughter and two relatives were adopted as servants; one is raised as a child and sent to college, while the other two work as servants. Ariga, however, emphasizes that in the old days before Meiji legislation both servants and adopted children were in the same system; both were adoptees as well as servants. Working as a servant in the main house was regarded not only as part of growing up but also as an honor. When servants are given a branch house in the Nosa household, according to Ariga, the distribution of wealth is equal to that given to the main house’s own children. Nosa branch houses are called kamado, hearth, deriving from “dividing the hearth,” i.e. part of the same family. Pace Ariga, seen from another perspective they are semi-serf tenant-farmers: although they are given a portion of land and forest, they are not economically independent, and therefore they have to maintain subjugation to the main house in all sorts of ways. However, it would not be appropriate to stop at this under-

Locating Japanese kinship 109 standing: kamado do receive quite numerous benefits from the main house. They borrow tools and household utensils, including clothing and pots and pans. The loan of these is guaranteed to them. In the case of family emergency the main house assists kamado immediately and sufficiently. The Nosa main house institutes household holidays and celebrations, inviting kamado to sumptuous feasts and entertainments. The tenancy of kamado is paid with rent-in-kind, but the land they are given includes a portion of their own land for which no rent is required. Recently, the need for day laborers has increased, for which workers are recruited from outside the Nosa village. Paid in cash, this work is an entirely different arrangement from jid™yaku. Nosa d™zoku is unique in that it consists solely of kinsmen and kinswomen. Many d™zoku combine both kin and non-kin. The Sait™ family is a typical northeastern d™zoku where a large number of blood bunke (branch houses) are combined with a smaller number of non-blood bunke. Originally a samurai family of Nanbu domain in northeastern Japan, this household is Ariga’s main research family (1943: 84ff.). We saw in Chapter 3 that the authors of Village Japan (Beardsley et al. 1959) were aware of Ariga’s research in this family in Ishigami village. Within the village, the Sait™s have seven blood bunke – five in the children’s generation and two in the grandchildren’s generation. The blood bunke is called bekke, literally a separate house. Non-blood bunke are called nago, denoting kosaku. There are twelve nago bunke and seven yashiki nago (see below). When a bekke is created, it is referred to as “kamado o wakeru,” or dividing the hearth; when a non-kin servant is made nago bunke, it is referred to as “ie o motaseru,” or letting him have a house. In the 1930s, two servant households lived within the main house’s premise. They were servants and eventually made nago bunke. The same process goes to second and third sons of the family, who would stay in the main house after marriage before they were given a house and land to establish a bunke. Nago may give their second and third sons bunke, but since there is no land to give them they rent the land and house from the main house. These tenants are called yashiki nago. All nago have corvée labor duty to pay. The main house’s kosaku population is further subdivided. There are bekkekaku nago, meaning that this nago has a status equivalent to bekke (i.e. blood bunke). There are nago bunke, who constitute the most standard branch household created out of the non-kin servants’ pool. Then there are yashiki nago, as stated above. Finally, there are sakugo, whose corvée labor is half of nago’s in exchange for less protection from the main house. In addition to nago’s own land that is originally given to them upon making them a bunke, there is a portion of land that is given to nago called yakuchi. This is the land to cultivate for both the main house and the nago’s own family. A set portion of yield from this land has to be paid to the main house as rent, while the rest feeds the nago’s family.

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Depending on how successful his production is, a nago can become economically independent and leave nago status altogether. This is called nago nuke. There were at least two children of a nago who had made nago nuke at the time of Ariga’s study. A status change can also be seen among bekke. For example, one of them, named sakaya, is financially as well-off as, if not better-off than, the main house. The bekkekaku nago are given the main house’s family name. One of them is a non-kin adoptee who was taken into the family when he was an infant. Ariga notes that in his case the household head loved him particularly and therefore set up a blood-kin equivalent bekke for him. When the Meiji law required all commoners to register their family name, he was given the Sait™ name. The next example, the Sugawara family, is the jid™ of Shiromae village in Iwate (Ariga 1943: 270–1). The family owns a total of forty-three branch houses. Just like Nosa and Sait™, Sugawara creates a branch household when its younger, non-heir sons reach the age of about 40, although they are married as soon as they reach adulthood. When making them a bunke, the Sugawara main house gives them a house building, horses, farming tools, and land; in return, each bunke must pay corvée labor whenever required. Branch houses are called nago, but, unlike the Nosa family, the Sugawara d™zoku nago includes both blood bunke and non-kin kosaku. As with other cases, the nago land is not enough for subsistence and therefore the nago rents a portion of land from the main house, paying rent in kind. Such examples of giving blood bunke only nago status are also known in other parts of Iwate, Nagano, and Gifu. Ariga contends that even though they are called nago the blood bunke nago are usually treated much better than the non-blood nago. After the Meiji reform, the main house bestowed the land on nago (branch houses) as a gift, on the following conditions: • • •

They were not to forget the master–servant relationship. They were not to lose land. The main house reserved the right to take the land away if the nago concerned was seen as unfit to cultivate it. (Ariga 1943: 275–6)

Whether the distribution of land and property to blood bunke should be regarded as inheritance or not is controversial, according to Ariga. During the Tokugawa period (1603–1867), all taxable land needed to be registered under the main house, which was responsible for the payment of taxes. It is only after the Meiji tax reform that the branch house’s land was registered with each household as the owner. In one village, because a nago family did not register its ownership of the land – failing to understand the difference between the existing custom of taking the land as the main house’s property and the new law which the Meiji government consciously adopted from the western legal institution where every ownership had to be formally registered under the individual head of household – they ended up losing the land

Locating Japanese kinship 111 (Ariga 1943: 276). This example shows that the so-called modern (western) law does not conform to the age-old Japanese practice of d™zoku, where typically an individual bunke does not insist on separate land ownership. In contrast to the northeastern d™zoku, which are strictly hierarchical in terms of main–branch house relations, southwestern Japan presents a different picture. In Watase village in Fukuoka prefecture, the two houses of Miyamoto and Tanaka presided over village affairs in their role as the oldest native lineage for a long time (Ariga 1943: 21ff.). But since the Tokugawa period the domination of the two had deteriorated due to their economic decline. The village headship was then sold to a wealthy family at a given time. Not only did blood bunke become less subjugated to the main house, but the way new settlers were accepted into the village was also made more business-like. New settlers, particularly when they settled through the help of a large house in the village, used to be placed in the position of an inferior appendix to that household. Now they settle by simply making some monetary payment. Of those settlers, some became kosaku in the past, but recently their membership is more or less understood to be acquired through business transactions and they do not have to place themselves under the control of a powerful household. In Sawada village in Okayama prefecture, western Japan, one of the village’s oldest families, the Tabuchis, has a servant family named Goyasu (Ariga 1943: 33ff.). The Goyasu family originally settled in the village under the Tabuchis’ protection during the Tokugawa period. Settlers such as Goyasu were called nurewaraji, or wet grass sandals, meaning that while their sandals were still wet from traveling they must secure the protection of a powerful family in the village. Many nago families in the village were originally nurewaraji. When a nurewaraji arrived, the big house gave them a dwelling and farming tools. During village meetings nurewaraji were regarded as minor attachments to the big house. Whenever the protector family required, nurewaraji would pay with free labor. Nurewaraji’s subjugation to the main house was severer than that of regular nago. Especially during the first generation, nurewaraji would work extra hard to serve the main house. Today there are only a very few servant families in the village, Goyasu being one of them. From the above examples, a number of interesting points emerge. The distinction between nago and bunke becomes difficult to make when a blood bunke is named nago. That bunke and nago are not clearly distinguishable is the key to Ariga’s entire thesis. A large household is a hierarchically organized kinship/production unit where branch households are placed in a position akin to that of children – nago’s go takes the character ko, child, and therefore the Japanese kinship system needs to be understood as having an indissoluble connection to the kosaku system, following Ariga’s logic. The line is blurred between blood bunke and non-blood bunke not only in terms of naming but also in their relation to the main house, although it is undeniable that blood bunke tend to receive better treatment – but again, not

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always so, and there are, as we note in the case of the bekkekaku nago of the Sait™s, non-blood bunke who are treated as equivalent to blood bunke. As far as the hierarchy is concerned, it is applied equally to all the bunke vis-àvis the main house. Ariga is clear about this: he suggests that the Japanese kinship system is as hierarchical as the kosaku system, and vice versa, although he emphasizes that the dependency is mutual, if not equal, and symbiosis exists between the main house and branch houses. It is the similarity (or identical nature, in many cases) of bunke and kosaku in relation to the main house that matters here. Fundamentally, this comes down to the point made earlier – that the Japanese household system stands on a vague distinction between kin and non-kin: consanguinity is not very important as far as branch-house subjugation is concerned. There is a crisscrossing notion of kin and non-kin at play in the making of branch houses, kosaku being both kin and serf, servant being non-kin and kin, totally unrelated new settlers being fictive kin, and indebted farmers becoming a child-like client of the main house, the patron. What one needs to note is that the idiom of the main house–branch house relationship took distinctly generational kin terms, notably oya and ko. It is significant that, despite the diversity, the homonym for oya, parent, is widely found among the terms denoting the main house: omoya, ™ya, oyakata, oyabun, etc. And the word ko, child, is again widely recognized in the terms denoting branch houses and subjugated houses: nago (from na, name, and ko, child), kosaku (the character ko here does not denote child, but means small, although they can be seen as homonyms), sakugo (go = ko), kobun, tsukuriko, kokata, etc. (See note 1.) Yanagita Kunio, the founder of Japanese folklore studies, contends that the terms oya and ko were originally used in reference to the division of labor, and, as such, were not kinship terms. Oya, according to him, in old Japanese denoted the overseer of labor organization, while ko meant laborer under him. In some regions, the term oyako denotes inclusively the wide range of relatives, not being limited to parent–child relations. Yanagita contends that it is only in recent centuries that the term oyako came to be used exclusively for parent and child of an elementary family. Yanagita endorses the idea that inside the household/labor unit the difference between oya and ko was minimal, and they shared the dwelling and food and cooperated for production in an egalitarian, communal way (Fukuta 1992: 124–42). Yanagita’s view can be criticized from a number of perspectives. Historical researchers have shown that medieval Japan was a patriarchal slave society (Araki 1959). In this view, to deem “old Japan” to have had an ideal large family where oya and ko were related on egalitarian principles not only falsely homogenizes and hides exploitation and unequal relations of power, but also is empirically incorrect. Oya and ko, in other words, are hierarchical terms denoting unequal distributions of power and privilege. For example, as Fukuta Ajio points out, there was only one ko who could

Locating Japanese kinship 113 become oya – that is, the heir – while the rest of the ko were made subordinate, a practice that empirically disputes the ideal-typical image of Yanagita’s depiction of primordial oyako relations (Fukuta 1992: 143). Similar to Yanagita’s view, Ariga’s study contains elements of an idealtypical household image, though in a more cautious manner. Ariga’s study is riven with the tension between viewing the household as a kin group – here, the non-blood kin are included – and treating it as a labor unit. This tension is never reconciled in Ariga’s study. As can be seen thus far, Ariga’s insistence on the kinship origin of kosaku (or vice versa) does not denote simply the relation of production. Ariga tries to moderate the domination of the main house, emphasizing the protective role it plays vis-à-vis the branch house and denying that the feudal system was “cruel” (Ariga 1943: 278–9; see pp. 105–6 here). By emphasizing the extra-economic symbiotic relations between honke and bunke, Ariga obscures the fundamentally unequal distribution of wealth and privilege between households. It may be true, as Ariga emphasizes throughout his book, that a blood relationship somewhat eases the harshness of economic transaction and at times some bunke may benefit from honke more than the service it pays because of kin relations. But it is also true, as Ariga himself emphasizes, that the existence of blood kinship does not matter in the larger picture of d™zoku and kosaku relations. It is legitimate to observe that for the day-to-day transactions between bunke and honke one cannot simply apply economic logic, and that there are many aspects of ideological, ritual, extra-economic, and non-economic relations in this relationship which cannot be measured or calculated in numerical terms such as monetary payment or labor hours. The unequal, but still mutual, dependence and symbiosis between honke and bunke prevent them from being completely reduced to economic logic. Nevertheless, in this symbiotic relation it is clear that the monopoly over property and land ownership by honke, in particular prior to Meiji legal reform, secured honke’s domination decisively. Yet why insist on kin-based benevolence, especially when consanguinity was not a primary key to the system? Ariga insists that the Japanese household system predates the feudal age and that its nature has survived centuries of historical change, suggesting that it is connected to the Japanese “national character,” minzokuteki seikaku (1943: 279). He attempts to find the origin of the d™zoku system in the ancient clan (shizoku) system and suggests that since the imperial household maintained the most orthodox clan form and since the Japanese state of the early 1940s is organized with the imperial household as a model, it is evident that an understanding of Japanese villages, cities, state, social organization, religion, legal institutions, morality, and even language depends on an understanding of the Japanese household system (1943: 114–16). It is possible that in wartime Japan Ariga had to endorse the imperial household as the legitimate model for the nation. But to rely on the imperial household, which was consciously set up as the “model” household by the

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state, when suggesting the significance of the household system in understanding Japanese society would be to step into the territory of the ideologues. Furthermore, to insist on Japanese “national character” on the basis of extremely diverse household systems would be to defeat his own purpose, as his book itself demonstrates a wealth of diverse forms of kosaku relations. Yet there is a drive in Ariga to reduce historically complex and regionally diverse cases into a unifying base for the Japanese nation. Although at first glance Ariga’s method appears to be inductive, there is a deductive thesis in deeming d™zoku a fundamental principle of Japanese village organization, despite the very different forms each d™zoku takes. This does not contradict the political ideology on which the prewar Japanese state was built – the large household state with the imperial house as the main house and the families of the subjects as branch houses, emphasizing top-down benevolence and bottom-up loyalty. Rather than criticizing the existing social, political, economic, and ideological institution, Ariga’s study, consciously or unconsciously, ultimately replicates imperialist state ideology. In retrospect, there is a curious continuity between Ariga’s study and postwar scholarship, including some that is very influential, in the sense that they both search for a framework that can convey the Japanese national essence, as we shall see in the next chapter.

Postwar kinship studies After the war, as with other parts of society, scholarship on family and household was influenced by changes that were brought about by Occupation and Japan’s newly formed relation with the west in general and the US in particular. It is against this new approach to western social values such as individualism that the vehement critique of the Japanese family system by Kawashima Takeyoshi needs to be read. Along with Ariga Kizaemon, Kawashima was one of the commentators on Ruth Benedict’s Chrysanthemum and the Sword whose work appeared in Minzokugaku kenkyù (see Chapter 2). Of all the commentators Kawashima received Benedict most enthusiastically, because he regarded Benedict’s book as a guiding light for Japan’s anti-feudal modernization. His essays contained in Nihonshakai no kazokuteki k™sei (The familial structure of Japanese society, 1950a), which will be discussed in this section, continued to stand on the assumption that Japan’s anti-feudal modernization was an historical necessity. First published in 1948, Nihonshakai no kazokuteki k™sei was widely read in Japan and also introduced to the US by Michio Nagai and John Bennett, who summarized the book (Nagai and Bennett 1953). Kawashima, a professor of law at Tokyo University, the nation’s top institute, was also a member of the Committee for the Revision of the Civil Code during Occupation, and wrote the essays contained in Nihonshakai no kazokuteki k™sei from a self-consciously reformist perspective (Nagai and

Locating Japanese kinship 115 Bennett 1953: 241). The book consists of seven essays grouped into three parts, all directed one way or another to the critique of the Japanese family/household system.9 I shall introduce his ideas and discussions selectively and without being loyal to the order of his essays. First, and in striking contrast to Ariga’s foregoing study, Kawashima suggests that Japan’s age-old custom of adoption is a form of slavery. He qualifies the practice of adoption as part of Japanese feudalism and its distinctly “Asiatic” nature (Kawashima 1950a: 27ff.). He places the Asiatic mode of production – obviously inspired by Marx – as the most primitive class society, where the division of labor is minimal and the basic relation of production is a familial commune presided over by the head of the family (1950a: 30). In this commune every member is the subject of labor and the object of the family head’s ownership: due to technological backwardness, there is a very minimal distinction between the labor force and the means of production. Such a social relation is supported by extra-economic coercion that does not express itself in the form of direct violence, but in the name of piety, which was closely paired with the household head’s authority, thus presenting its coerciveness in the guise of reciprocity (1950a: 31). This extra-economic, seemingly non-violent coercion is in fact a form of slavery, according to Kawashima. Family members – children and wife in particular – are slaves in Asiatic society, where slaves are made to appear as minors and weaker members of the family (1950a: 33). Because of the familial-communal setting, where infants naturally require adults’ care and the weaker members require the protection of a family head, subjugation is easily (mis)recognized by the actors as benevolence (1950a: 34). Based on this preamble, Kawashima cites a case of adoption-slavery: nankinkoz™ of Yamagata (1950a: 35ff.). Off the coast of Sakata City in Yamagata prefecture (northeastern Japan), facing the Japan Sea, there is a small island called Tobishima. According to the 1946 census, this island village consisted of 186 households. Of these, 174 were fishermen, two were carpenters, and ten others included a schoolteacher and local government office clerks. Needless to say, fishing is the main production on the island. Up until the time of extreme food shortages during the war, there existed on the island male adoptees called nankinkoz™. They were adopted from poor agricultural villages near Sakata at the age of 8 or 9. After adoption, some legally took them into the family by registering them as children, but many simply registered their residence and no fictive kin term was assumed. But, as was shown in Ariga’s study (pp. 110–11 here), prior to the Meiji Restoration (or often even after that, too) the existence of legal documentation did not matter: nankinkoz™ were all de facto adoptees – and slaves. They were released when they reached the age of 21. The story about the nankinkoz™ of Tobishima was well known as a horror story around Sakata. When children would not stop crying, parents would tell them they would be sold to Tobishima if they did not stop, as it was known that nankinkoz™ were made to work at all sorts of household chores,

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including fishing, cleaning, babysitting, cooking, carrying heavy stuff, etc. all day long, all year long. Their food ration was smaller than that of other members of the family and of less nutritious quality. But, worst of all, they were treated with negligence and brutality. Their social isolation and emotional abuse inside the adopted family were accompanied by the general understanding that their entire existence stood on the basis of their being a worker – slaves. Kawashima asserts that the tradition of nankinkoz™ was related to the way branch households were created – or not created – on the island, which was related in its turn to the inhospitable environment. Traditionally, younger sons of Tobishima were not given branch households on the island because of the extreme meagerness of the economy. They customarily left the island for the mainland to survive mostly by working as farmhands for wealthy farming families. This custom maintained the village population at a certain numerical level at all times. According to the village registry, in the village’s living memory the total number of households remained unchanged. Loss of labor from younger sons of the village in turn created a shortage of hands on board fishing boats. Hence, the recruitment of nankinkoz™ became institutionalized. When released at the age of 21, a nankinkoz™ would receive minimum clothing and normally left the island: with his departure, the connection with the adopted family was terminated. The age 21 meant that he would have reached marriageable age and since the adopted household had no intention of paying for his marriage he was sent away instead. Also, 21 became the age of conscription after the Meiji Restoration. During the war and soon after the war, due to inflation the cost of feeding a nankinkoz™ became higher than the yield he brought to the family and therefore this custom disappeared. By “adopting” nankinkoz™ as cheap, disposable, but nevertheless guaranteed labor, while getting rid of the surplus population (younger sons) to the mainland, the island maintained its demography and subsistence. Kawashima then proceeds to argue that in Japan what is normally a nonAsiatic relationship such as the feudal relation assumes an Asiatic form – the most prominent of this being landlord–kosaku relations (1950a: 49). Even the seemingly contractual relations of wage labor assume Asiatic characteristics; in factories, for example, the capitalist is seen as family head – a line of argument that later becomes uniquely Japanese and positive in light of the growing national economy, Abegglen being one of the first advocates of it (see Chapter 3). Kawashima criticizes this as something that needs to be done away with, since for him an understanding such as “company as family” is nothing but an ideological smokescreen for the structure of exploitation (1950a: 50–2). What consistently underlines Kawashima’s argument is the assumption that Japan’s pre-modern or anti-modern, feudal, and Asiatic family system must be and will be dissolved on levels of both practice and ideology. This

Locating Japanese kinship 117 echoes the sway of modernization theory that was influential in the western social scientific milieu, which in turn clearly redirected social science in Japan, under the US Occupation. Also, I should emphasize that evolutionistic thought was not new in Japan, where the influence of Social Darwinism and historical materialism was recognizable among different groups of intellectuals, each of their own politico-scientific inclination. In this sense, Kawashima’s stance did not represent a minority view. As an example of the ideological residue of the Asiatic family system, Kawashima cites an example of a discrepancy between the law and practice of family registry – a corresponding example was also cited by Ariga regarding the land registry. The new postwar family law, which was set by the Occupation and the Japanese law-makers who worked under it, created a discrepancy between the actual residential members in one house and the registered members: registries tend to be much larger compared to the number of actual residents. This is because custom dictates that branch families be included in the main family, making it look on paper as if they all lived together. Since honseki, or the address of origin, does not have to be the actual residential address, in the household registry under honseki all the branch households of younger sons are included under the main family. Kawashima points out that this practice is not based on a misunderstanding: he suggests that the reason branch houses are included in the main house is that they do not regard themselves as completely independent of the main house. Here, his interpretation comes close to Ariga’s, in that both recognize d™zoku to be an ideologically indoctrinated institution. But unlike Ariga, who referred to the discrepancy between western-style land registration and traditional Japanese practice as an indication of the incompatibility between the individual-oriented foundation of western society and the family-oriented foundation of Japanese society, Kawashima’s emphasis on this gap is deployed to denounce a feudal remnant in Japanese society that should disappear with the introduction of legal reforms under the Occupation’s initiative. Kawashima was, perhaps, over-zealous about the Occupation’s reform. It is true that postwar legal reform made it unlawful for parents to forcibly disinherit younger children. But primogeniture continued in the regions where it was traditional, not by way of coercion, but because younger children voluntarily gave up their inheritance. The rationale behind this was that none of the children wanted to see their family land cut into small portions for the sake of equal inheritance. In other words, the legal reform per se was not sufficient to bring about a reform in ideology. Furthermore, in the postwar family law itself the household, not the individual, remained the minimum unit of registry, and it was the household, not the individual, that owned the property, albeit under the household head. So, for example, although a wife did not own the property while her husband was alive, once he was dead she would automatically inherit it, not as an individual beneficiary, but as a new household head. In this sense, the Occupation’s reform

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was not as radical as some hoped it would be and retained the most basic foundation of Japanese family law. In a way, the position taken by commentators such as Kawashima went further than the Occupation’s reform, by insisting on separating individuals from the household in all regards. What divides Kawashima from Ariga is that Kawashima does not allow an interpretation of the household system as a symbiosis of the main house and branch houses in terms of kin relations. Rather, he clearly sees the exploitative relation in pre-modern, household-based societies such as “feudal” or “slave” society. Whereas Ariga emphasized that the term “feudal” could not simply be interpreted as cruel and exploitative, Kawashima sees feudalism as a mechanism that deprives individuals of free subjecthood, and he believes in particular that Japan’s Asiatic mode reduces individuals to an existence that is thoroughly indoctrinated with the idea of repaying parental benevolence – on. It is here that Kawashima upholds Benedict’s Chrysanthemum as a powerful critique of Japanese prewar social morality (see Chapter 2). Just as their reactions to Chrysanthemum were superficially similar but fundamentally different, Kawashima and Ariga differ in their understanding of Japan’s feudal past, Kawashima seeing it as something that is economically exploitative and morally inhumane, and should be on the way to withering away, Ariga seeing it as humane, in part due to its strong overlap with kin relations, and as to some extent mutually beneficial for both main house and branch house, and believing that it would persist no matter what, due to its being Japan’s national cultural heritage. Kawashima’s application of “feudalism” to the Japanese family system, however, is not unqualified. Compared to the pure feudal type found in mediaeval England, where according to Kawashima concepts such as rights and duties were well established on a reciprocal basis in the lord–vassal contract, the Japanese “feudal” family is closer to the Confucian patriarchal family found in China (Kawashima 1950a: 112). But compared to the Chinese Confucian patriarchal family, where women and children are completely subjugated to the patriarch’s authority and ownership, Japanese family relations are based more on the concepts such as on and giri (indebtedness and obligation), which have elements of contractual relations. In ancient China piety or k™ was an absolute virtue and the indisputable duty of children toward their parents (especially the father), without regard to the personal quality of the patriarch – it was structurally determined and there was no room for negotiation. In pre-modern Japan there was some room for rationalization, allowing children to rebel in a case where the parents did not possess appropriate personal qualities and therefore did not deserve the feelings of on (Kawashima 1950a: 118). Thus the traditional Japanese family relation stood somewhere between the pure feudal type and the Confucian patriarchal type (see also Nagai and Bennett 1953: 242–4). Against these old practices, Kawashima looks to the modern family, where mutual affection and love between parents and children are the

Locating Japanese kinship 119 primary factors to ensure familial solidarity – this ideal family was later recognized as the family type of Japan’s “new middle class” by Vogel (see Chapter 3). In this (presumably) conjugal-nuclear family there is no indoctrination of indebtedness, extra-economic coercion in the name of benevolence, or requirement of repayment as a result of the prescribed rules of obligation. According to Kawashima: Modern familial morality is not intended to simply destroy the family itself. It requires instead of the piety conditioned by on, the absolute condition for mutual assistance [between family members]. It requires the making of a mutually cooperative relation on the basis of humane love and voluntary and spontaneous free will. By this means, we will see the birth of a family is based on sincerity rather than coercion. (Kawashima 1950a: 134) What is interesting here is that Kawashima supposes modern family to be free from ideology – the only thing that is left is the genuine love of freewilled individuals. Love, however, is not free from ideology. Whom to love and how to love are far from naturally given or free from coercion, but are conditioned by the dominant values and the form of life in a given society, which is structured upon more or less unequal distribution of power, yet comes in the guise of spontaneity. Given that love is a social product, and given that there is not even a single society where human relations are completely equal, to base the ideal “modern” family on an idea of spontaneous love is utterly false. I do not agree with Nagai and Bennett, who imply that Kawashima saw in the American family a typical modern family, since his discussion is based on ideal types and not an empirical study (Nagai and Bennett 1953: 247). Nevertheless, it is not difficult to infer that under the Occupation, where democratization was seen as making individuals into the decision-making subject of society, Kawashima saw the ideal modern family as an American-imported idea. With all its faults and limitations, Kawashima’s fierce critique of the Japanese family system and his attempt analytically to separate kinship relations and economic exploitation opened the possibility of introducing legal discourse, the notion of power, and the theory of subjection into anthropological studies of Japan. Although his postulates were not always correct and are often riddled with evolutionism and teleology, assuming that now that the war was over Japan would be “modernized” and become closer to a society such as the US, his sharp reinterpretation of adoption as slavery, for example, raised an important aspect to be considered, notably the unequal distribution of economic and political power inside the household behind the kinship idiom. This is not the case in Ariga’s study, which deemed indissoluble the connection between kinship and economic relations. He saw household organization as the basic structure of Japanese society and

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Japanese national character that existed across different historical periods, if not permanently. Whereas Ariga emphasized the symbiosis and mutual benefit of d™zoku households, Kawashima focused on intra-household exploitation. It is curious, then, that the critical discourse of Kawashima and his approach to kinship did not influence postwar anthropological studies of Japanese kinship, as we shall see subsequently. Let us now turn to Fukutake Tadashi, a professor of sociology at Tokyo University, who concerned himself with the problem of interrelations between kinship systems and village society in Japan in Nihonn™son no shakaiteki seikaku (The social constitution of Japanese agricultural villages) (Fukutake 1949). Although his theme is very similar to Ariga’s, his stance is closer to Kawashima’s. Fukutake opens his book with a critique of what he calls kazokushugi, or familialism, most clearly manifested in the honke–bunke subjugation of d™zoku. In this type of society a human is not a human in his own right: his worth depends on the position he fills in the family hierarchy (1949: 8–9). Fukutake’s interpretation resonates with Benedict, but with a strong negative tone. According to him, an ideology such as familialism derives from the reality found in Japanese society, where the ie (household, family) works as the basic unit, not the individual (1949: 20). Elsewhere in his later work Fukutake notes that in Japan familial relations and master–servant relations overlap, and that is the ground for him to regard Japan’s familialism as feudalistic (1954: 24). Fukutake does not define the nature of feudalism as Kawashima does, but the way he deems Japan’s family to be a hierarchical unit based on domination and obedience is the same as Kawashima’s view. In Nihonn™son Fukutake argues that bunke is created not to give economic independence from honke, but to secure the corvée and other services for honke (1949: 21–4). Ariga made a similar statement, but the position taken by Fukutake is, just like Kawashima’s, that of a denunciation, not simply a description. Interestingly, he appears to see Japanese familialism as supra-historical in the sense that it persisted even after the concrete feudal institutions had been eliminated by the Meiji Restoration: familialism, according to him, is deeply rooted in the type of agrarian society that Japan is, where arable land is extremely limited and the population is large (Fukutake 1949: 8). In this view, he is taking a position closer to Ariga’s, who saw the d™zoku institution as Japan’s cultural constant, although Fukutake differs from Ariga in that he finds the concrete base of familialism to be entrenched in Japan’s agricultural economy rather than at the intersection between kinship and kosaku systems. Looking closely at village society, Fukutake contrasts d™zoku and k™kumi: d™zoku is, as we have seen, vertical and hierarchical in organization, whereas k™kumi, or neighborhood association, is horizontal and co-operative. Fukutake suggests that k™kumi and d™zoku exist in conjunction with each other, although, historically, where d™zoku is weakened, k™kumi becomes prominent. K™kumi and d™zoku can overlap, since d™zoku

Locating Japanese kinship 121 are found in the same neighborhood, and in many senses d™zoku and k™kumi stand in both historical and geographical continuity. However, Fukutake contends that, whereas d™zoku is based on the subjugation of bunke to honke, k™kumi contains elements of mutual assistance and egalitarian co-operation, since, within it, honke’s authority over bunke tends to be neutralized due to its neighborhood collective decision-making mechanism. In k™kumi each household participates in its daily running as members who are in principle equal to each other. The d™zoku hierarchy may interfere, but it has to deal with the contesting k™kumi system; its hierarchical nature is often compromised by k™kumi’s co-operative mode of operation. From this, he insists that the predicament of Japanese agrarian society can be solved when d™zoku has been completely eradicated and replaced with k™kumi-type co-operation (Fukutake 1949: 48). Introducing his fieldwork data, Fukutake moves on to discuss the contrasting village types of northeastern Japan and southwestern Japan. In the northeast the intra-household d™zoku hierarchy is strictly established, where the non-heir sons are nothing but cheap labor, bunke are nothing but subjugated labor units, and kosaku are nothing but pre-modern semi-serfs. What is characteristic about Japanese village society is that throughout many layers of its exploitative subjugation the kinship term is consistently employed, as in the case of the landlord in the village Fukutake investigated, who is called oyakata, which may be translated as parent status or the parent role (Fukutake 1949: 69–88). Fukutake emphasizes that the situation in the northeast was rapidly changing after the war. The monopoly over land and authority by honke became impossible, due in part to the land and legal reforms introduced by the Occupation authorities. At the same time, the internal contradiction of the d™zoku system had been being eroding from within (1949: 87–8). In contrast, the southwestern type Fukutake presents seems to have very little servility in the honke–bunke relationship. In the village he investigated, he contends that every individual has a critical consciousness about his own environment (Fukutake 1949: 90). This can also be seen from Ariga’s examples cited on p. 111: southwestern prefectures displayed more radical changes in correlation to productivity and cash economy and, hence, more mobility away from the household hierarchy. We have seen that nurewaraji in southwestern villages were no longer extra-economically subjugated to the village’s powerful family, but settled in the village by way of monetary payment (see above). Southwestern d™zoku tend to be democratic: there is less hierarchy between honke and bunke and the relative autonomy of each is recognizable. In the southwestern village Fukutake investigated, the size of the household was smaller on average than in the northeast and productivity was higher, as all the households engaged in wet rice cultivation – unthinkable in the northeast (1949: 96–7). In recent years the d™zoku hierarchy, in all senses, had rapidly deteriorated, according to Fukutake (1949: 106). He concludes

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that in this village the historical absence of a large-scale landlord was a decisive factor in suppressing the emergence of a powerful d™zoku that would dominate the whole village, a situation that reminds us of Niiike, introduced in Village Japan (Chapter 3). The high agricultural yield and the early penetration of the cash economy in the vicinity also helped the surplus, destitute population to leave the village, rather than being confined inside the village as the lowest, landless stratum (Fukutake 1949: 112). This striking difference between northeastern Japan and southwestern Japan had not gone unnoticed among scholars. Ariga’s examples all conform to this same division. In a way, given the different organization in the southwest and the role played by the cash economy and higher productivity, with the advent of “modernization” and “industrialization” it is understandable that leftist-minded scholars such as Fukutake who were under the influence of the linear evolutionary framework of historical materialism and modernization assumed – or, more precisely, hoped – that Japanese agrarian society would be democratized and that the servile and inhumane d™zoku hierarchy would disappear. What actually happened was, as we shall see subsequently, not quite that: it is true that the rigid hierarchy of d™zoku waned, but research and viewpoints like Fukutake’s also disappeared. In other words, whereas Fukutake wrote about familialism, d™zoku, and ie (household) from the perspective of criticizing them and eventually doing away with them, later researchers validated and used them as tools to explain Japanese society. After all it is true that d™zoku and familialism, contrary to what Fukutake and Kawashima predicted amidst the Occupation zeal, did not disappear so fast.10 Furthermore, as the years went by, this well-established contrast between the northeast and the southwest was forgotten by anthropologists, being subsumed under the unified term “Japaneseness.”

Regional diversity I have already mentioned (p. 79) that, unlike in the prewar period, when anthropologists had a wider terrain for fieldwork across Japan’s Asian colonies and frontier territories of the Empire such as Inner Asia and the Pacific Islands, in the immediate years of the postwar period due to the loss of these field sites a fresh interest was placed on Japan proper and the effort to grasp Japan as a whole became notable. However, unlike in later years (the 1970s on), when Japanese studies focused on the homogeneity of Japanese culture, anthropologists of Japanese kinship during the 1950s and 1960s highlighted the regional diversity found in the Japanese archipelago. Prewar works by sociologists such as Ariga had made it clear that the Japanese d™zoku system differed considerably from province to province and village to village.11 Whereas Ariga, nonetheless, tried to synthesize diverse and complex practices into a “Japanese” system, assuming a unique national character, postwar researchers such as Fukutake were not

Locating Japanese kinship 123 burdened by such a nationalist mission. D™zoku continued to capture the interest of researchers, but it was now placed within the broader comparative spectrum of Japanese society as a whole. The anthropologist Gam™ Masao’s survey study (1960) is useful here, as it describes the regional map of d™zoku, according to which we learn the following diverse picture (Gam™ 1960: 13ff.). Hokkaido villages are relatively new. Households tend to be an independent unit with no substantial link to their main house in Honshu. Interestingly, marriages still take place within the village, which reflects the fact that the intra-village recruitment of spouses has not exhausted the demographic limit, unlike many older villages in Honshu. Household matters depend more on individual decisions than on ie (household) decisions, showing a tendency toward urbanization and industrialization. The Tohoku, or northeast, region largely conforms to the existing data reported by Ariga, Kawashima, and Fukutake; in other words, a large, hierarchical d™zoku is dominant. The Hokuriku region includes Niigata, Toyama, Ishikawa, and Fukui prefectures, all on the Japan Sea coast. Gam™ reports from a village in Ishikawa, where the population is largely divided into oyassan (father) landlords and dependent farmers, just like in the northeastern d™zoku. However, in addition to this system, households enter the fictive oyako (parent–child) relationship by asking a powerful landlord to be an eboshi oya who is responsible to oversee the child, eboshi ko, into his adulthood, as briefly mentioned earlier in connection to the oyabun–kobun relationship discussed by Bennett and Ishino in Chapter 3. In Ishikawa, when a boy reaches 15 years of age his parents ask the head of a powerful household in the village to be his eboshi oya, so as to ensure his successful growing-up. The eboshi relationship is strong; for example, funerals are carried out by relatives, neighbors, and eboshi ko. The Hokuriku region also contains large households similar to those found in Gifu’s Shirakawa village, as mentioned at the beginning of this chapter (see also the final section of this chapter). For example, in a village in Fukui prefecture older residents’ mean household population is 10.6 persons, which is more than double the national average (4.9) and nearly double the average of overall agricultural communities (5.6) (Gam™ 1960: 15, 17, 37). Also idiosyncratic in this region are the strong affinal relations: in Ishikawa the first child is normally delivered in the mother’s family; the newborn’s maternal family has to invite all relatives as well as affines to a sumptuous feast. In Toyama the dowry for daughters is highly demanding and even after the marriage the bride’s family continues to send gifts and goods to the groom’s family. This attests to the relatively weak d™zoku connection and stronger affinal tie. According to Gam™’s data (1960: 42), in the Kanto region, including Tokyo, Tochigi, Gunma, Saitama, Ibaraki, Chiba, and Kanagawa, there are no villages that show a strong d™zoku arrangement. In the inland areas, such

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as in Gunma and Tochigi, patron–client type of fictive relations similar to eboshi can be found, while in the Pacific coastal areas of Chiba and Hachijo and the Miyake Islands no such arrangement is reported. On the Hachijo Island, off Tokyo Bay, a matrilocal or duolocal marriage called ashiirekon, or the putting-one’s-feet-in marriage, is reported: after a brief ceremony, the wife returns to her natal family and works for them for a year or so; the husband commutes to see the wife at night, staying with the wife’s family overnight (Gam™ 1960: 42). The similar example found in Toshima of the Izu Islands has already been mentioned (ïmachi 1963; see p. 104 here). This type of arrangement assumes relative egalitarianism among the villagers, weak patrilineage, and the higher status of women as a workforce. In the hierarchical d™zoku system of the northeastern type such a marriage is unthinkable. The Chubu region of central Japan includes Nagano, Gifu, Yamanashi, Aichi, and Shizuoka. Since this region encompasses a diverse ecology from the inland mountainous areas such as Nagano to Gifu and the coastal areas of Aichi and Shizuoka, generalization is difficult. In the former area, in remote villages of Nagano, Gifu, and Yamanashi, oyakata–kokata relationships have been widely reported, demonstrating that the hierarchy is strong. Oyakata is not necessarily one’s kin; like eboshi, this is a fictive kinship established between households. Interestingly, in Nagano prefecture cases of ultimogeniture and equal distribution of land among sons are reported (Gam™ 1960: 47–8). Here, the active organization of children’s groups (ageset groups) has also been reported (Takeuchi 1957). On the other hand, in the coastal area of Shizuoka age-set groups, in particular youth groups, are prominent; this organization is reported to be most active in the Izu peninsula of Shizuoka. Gam™ asserts that the reason for this is related to the egalitarian relations in fishing villages as opposed to the hierarchical d™zoku of farming villages (Gam™ 1960: 46–7). The Kinki region includes the historical centers of Kyoto, Shiga, Mie, Nara, Wakayama, Hyogo, and Osaka. In a village in Nara prefecture, primogeniture is not strictly practiced – 26 per cent of the oldest sons live outside the village, while second-son inheritance is not rare. Marriage is arranged with nearby villages and 26 per cent of the total marriages in the village are marriages between blood kin (Gam™ 1960: 52–3). Worshiping of ancestors is bilateral, including both paternal and maternal ancestors, and villagers pay homage to both graveyards in the bon memorial service of the summer. Accordingly, the position of daughters-in-law in the household is relatively high and affinal tie is important. The Kinki region is well known for its traditionally small household size and local/neighbor connections are stronger than the d™zoku connection, which is almost non-existent (1960: 54–5). This does not mean that d™zoku is unheard of – in the villages of Mie, Kyoto, and Nara d™zoku-like organizations are referred to as itt™, kabuuchi, or kabu. But all in all the neighborhood association called kaito that functions as k™kumi is far more prominent.

Locating Japanese kinship 125 The Chugoku region stretches from the Japan Sea coast (Tottori and Shimane) to the Pacific coast (Yamaguchi, Hiroshima, and Okayama), covering the western end of Honshu. In Okayama, in conformity to Fukutake’s southwestern type, Gam™ finds that the d™zoku organization is less hierarchical; for example, the third son may not be distinguished from the first-born son in terms of treatment, while the household head does not exercise enormous authority (Gam™ 1960: 59). The k™kumi organization is strong – again conforming to Fukutake’s findings – and village co-operation is well set as tradition. In Yamaguchi also, although the mention of kabuuchi, which works in a similar way to d™zoku, is still heard of, k™kumi’s horizontal ties tend to be stronger. Shikoku’s four prefectures of Kochi, Ehime, Kagawa, and Tokushima in general have stronger local connections than the d™zoku connection. In Kochi prefecture it is said that after ten years or so a bunke will become a honke, denoting that the authority of honke is not permanent, as in the case of the northeastern type. Kyushu has a variety of kinship practices. In Tsushima, an island off the Korean Straits, the ancient custom of a strict hierarchy in the village is still found due to its isolation. The village population is divided into member households and non-member households, hondo and kiryù, respectively, and the two groups do not intermarry. Within the hondo marriages there still is a clear division between the former samurai class and commoners (see also Gam™ 1958). On the main island of Kyushu, the custom of inkyo, or the formal retirement of parents, is widely practiced. In Kagoshima prefecture, a couple of years after the oldest son’s marriage parents retire, handing over the headship to the son. After inkyo, parents live in a separate dwelling, cooking and eating on their own. In Saga, bunke in general is called inkyo, even when a younger son sets up a separate household. Interestingly, in this practice the branching-out of the household is not hierarchical, since in theory everyone becomes inkyo. If the parents make themselves inkyo, accompanied by the unmarried youngest son, on their death the youngest son can inherit the patrimony, rendering it ultimogeniture. In Kagoshima such cases are widely reported (Gam™ 1960: 69).12 This system, called inkyo bunke, is fundamentally different from the northeastern d™zoku system, in the sense that there does not have to be a designated honke that presides over bunke, while honke, i.e. the parents’ house, is just another inkyo. Based on this diverse map of kinship systems, can we still regard d™zoku as a patrilineal and primogenitural stem family, as it is usually assumed to be (Kitano 1959: 108–9; see Kitano 1962; E. Johnson 1964)? When we focus exclusively on the d™zoku of the northeastern type it may seem patrilineal, but even then it is not always and strictly so. Let us recall the example of Nosa d™zoku’s adopted daughter (Ariga’s example on pp. 107–9); she was adopted from the Nosa kin and married to an adopted son-in-law. As far as their children (there were six of them in 1940) are concerned, whose lineage do they inherit? This is not a simple question: which one is the affine –

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father or mother? Is d™zoku a unilineal descent system, and, if so, is it always patrilineal? Ethnographic data illustrate that d™zoku do not exhaustively explain the Japanese kinship system either. In Kikai Island, in the Amami Islands south of Kyushu, the term which refers to the kin group is har™ji, which is a double descent system tracing descent lines back to the father’s father, father’s mother, mother’s father, and mother’s mother; it is both patrilineal and matrilineal (Gam™ 1960: 208). This does not conform to the conventional rules of d™zoku. On the other hand, in the Okinawa Islands further south the patrilineal lineage called monchù operates on the basis of individuals and their consanguines. This, again, differs from d™zoku, in the sense that the lineage here is closer to the orthodox Confucianist patrilineal descent system found in China or Korea: descendants as individuals are ranked in the lineage based on who the father is, while d™zoku is a lineage not of descent but of ie, households. Chie Nakane suggests that har™ji and monchù are fundamentally different from d™zoku: in the latter the household is the unit forming a lineage, while in the former each individual has his or her own place in the lineage (either patrilineal or double descent) and relates to every other person in it according to his or her individual position in relation to consanguines and affines. Nakane asserts that such systems as har™ji and monchù are more common ethnographically in anthropological studies of kinship, since these are descent systems, while the d™zoku system is rare, since here the unit in the lineage is not individuals but households, rendering it different from descent systems (Nakane 1962). These cases from southern islands are not isolated examples: in the aforementioned Nara example we saw that the bon ancestral memorial is paid both matrilineally and patrilineally, and the position of the daughters-in-law in Kinki is different from that of the married-in women of the northeast. In Ishikawa and Toyama, the duties paid to the affines are significant. In this picture, one can appreciate that Japanese kinship cannot be exclusively concluded to be a unilineal descent system based on primogeniture and patrilineage.13

Kinship nomenclature The problem of Japanese kinship arrived in western anthropology when the tradition of kinship studies was being seriously questioned. After World War II western anthropology faced various crises, the most notable being the independence of former colonies, thus forcing the west to lose access to its traditional ethnographic field. This resulted in critical reflection on the practice of anthropology in close connection to the colonial past (see Asad 1973). Debates were opened up on themes and issues that anthropologists had taken for granted for more than half a century; such debate was most clearly seen in the area of kinship studies.

Locating Japanese kinship 127 In anthropology, “primitive” societies that the west had colonized were traditionally seen as kinship-based and kinship-dominated societies. Their socio-political and economic institutions heavily overlapped with the institution of kinship. Without knowing the kinship system, an anthropologist would have missed the working mechanism of the given community in all sorts of ways. Indeed, a kinship chart would have enabled the anthropologist to locate which political office corresponded with which place in the clan, how economic decisions were made according to the blood or non-blood relationship, and what ritual was important because of the role it played in the legitimacy of the authority of ancestors. Consequently, theories of kinship systems, kinship nomenclature, and types of kinship in anthropology were formulated with the kinship system in “primitive” and “traditional” societies as a model. Furthermore, types of societies came to be defined on the basis of kinship systems that anthropologists discovered and codified, as in the segmental society of the Nuer (Evans-Pritchard 1940). Anthropologists analyzed the socio-political structure of recruitment in those societies that again overlapped with kin groups. Thus, among British Africanists in particular, descent theory became most important, as seen in Meyer Fortes’s (1945, 1949) work on the Tallensi. In 1949 George Murdock’s Social Structure and Claude Lévi-Strauss’s Les Structures élementaires de la parenté were published. With this, the attention to kinship terminology was revived. Lévi-Strauss’s study was particularly provocative: rather than placing the focus on descent, it suggested that we see kinship as “alliances” created by way of marriage, i.e. by moving women around. The alliance theory, it seems, did not reach anthropologists of Japan, both Japanese and western, although some regions of Gam™’s map appear to be better understood in terms of alliance (e.g. Ishikawa, Toyama, and Nara). Rather, descent theory was dominant in the studies of Japanese kinship, as can be seen in the focus on the d™zoku model. In the 1950s and 1960s anthropologists began questioning the assumption that “kinship is the basic discipline of the subject” (R. Fox 1967: 10). In a 1956 article, Peter Worsley criticized Fortes’s (1949) privileged treatment of Tallensi patrilineality; in the Tale society there are many factors that influence father–son relations other than kinship, including ecology and landholding, increased influence of wage labor and cash-crop production. David Schneider, on the other hand, criticized the over-intellectualized exercise that anthropologists tended to display regarding kinship terms and questioned whether one could study kinship terminology (in large part created by anthropologists) in isolation from the social relations in which that terminology was supposed to work (Schneider 1965: 52–3). Schneider pointed out the fact that the existing typology of societies on the basis of kinship systems favored by anthropologists, such as segmental society, did not solve the problem; rather, it created more problems by obfuscating socio-economic factors other than kinship. John Beattie went so far as to

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state: “Kinship is the idiom in which certain kinds of political, jural, economic, etc., relations are talked and thought about in certain societies. It is not a further category of social relationships” (1964: 102; original emphasis; see Schneider’s (1964) response). Rodney Needham (1971) also seriously questioned the universality of categories such as marriage, lineage, and other conventional items of kinship studies. The existing categorization of kinship systems was also re-evaluated. Referring to Murdock’s (1957) grouping of New England Yankee, Andaman, and Eskimo kinship systems into an “Eskimo” type, Gertrude Dole wrote: This is an anomaly, since these three peoples represent different levels of cultural development. The Yankees have one of the most complex cultures known, while the Andamanese have one of the simplest. (Dole 1960: 162) Dole’s comment reveals – albeit in evolutionist terms which may look anachronistic from today’s point of view – that kinship studies and classifications reflected very little of the political economy of a given society, as if to say that kinship relations stood outside of history. Except for a brief account by Lewis Henry Morgan (1871) on Japanese kinship terminology and the partial insight found in John Embree’s Suye Mura (1939), there was no substantial work on Japanese kinship in the west, in contrast to the wealth of native scholarship on kinship. In his ethnographic atlas Murdock classified Japanese kinship as Eskimo type along with Yankee, Andaman, and Eskimo. Japanese kinship in this sense was a derivative that was assessed in comparison to other more classical kinship types anthropologists were familiar with, such as the African descent system or the Dravidian kinship system. Hence its classification as an “Eskimo” type, not a “Japanese” type. But, just as any copies can challenge the original in terms of authenticity and precision, Japanese kinship, as a latecomer to western anthropology, posed some serious challenges to the existing nomenclature in hindsight – it is just that it was not seen that way by the practitioners of the anthropology of Japan, who tried to make the Japan case fit the existing atlas. When the researchers accepted or tried to accept Japanese kinship as an Eskimo type, as did Harumi Befu and Edward Norbeck in their 1958 article, the problem became recognizable, however. On the one hand, Norbeck and Befu express surprise at the fact that their Japanese informants did not know the names of collateral kin such as aunts and uncles, adding that such was not the case a century earlier; on the other, they raise no question about classifying Japanese kinship as an Eskimo type, which is characterized predominantly by a nuclear residential pattern, thereby making it not surprising that individuals did not have close contact with aunts and uncles (Befu and Norbeck 1958: 86). More importantly, they note that the Japanese use a wide range of

Locating Japanese kinship 129 “homemade” or inventive terms and names referring to their kin, making it very difficult to delineate objective terminology and subjective expression of affective relations. In another article, Norbeck and Befu document the fact that the Japanese apply kinship terms to non-relatives, thereby obscuring the boundaries of the kin group – as understood in the west, that is (Norbeck and Befu 1958). Also, an individual, it seems, would not necessarily stick to the same terms in addressing the same relative consistently, as he or she goes through infancy to maturity, while there is a multitude of difference between formal address and informal address, written document and verbal reference, third-person reference and person-to-person address, male address and female address, ego-centric terms and referential names, and so on, rendering it hard for Japanese kinship to be classified on a par with other types of kinship terminology. Two other articles on Japanese kinship more clearly laid bare the problem implied in the existing classification. Robert Smith, following Dole’s stance, examines in his 1962 article the viability of classifying Japanese kinship as the Eskimo type. Already among Andaman, Eskimo, and Yankee systems, which Murdock groups as the Eskimo type, there are internal discrepancies. Whereas the Andaman and Eskimo systems are classificatory – classing the same generations together, regardless of lineal or collateral relation to the ego – the Yankee system is descriptive, distinguishing all collateral relatives from lineal kin and separating offspring of the ego’s siblings from offspring of his cousins, among other points, although all three systems disapprove of marriage between cousins. Smith raises a question, by citing the not infrequent occurrences of first-cousin marriages in Japan, pointing to the fact that Japanese kinship does not conform on this account with other Eskimo types (1962: 356). Smith cautiously suggests that, while isolated examples need to be distinguished from generalization, a solid methodology needs to be established, alluding to the problem with the existing kinship nomenclature (1962: 358). Smith, furthermore, alerts researchers to the fact that spoken Japanese kin terms and written records stand in discrepancy – a point that further suggests that kinship systems in literate and non-literate societies may require entirely different theorization (1962: 357). Smith is of the opinion that Morgan “completely failed to understand” the Japanese kinship system by regarding it as a classificatory system (1962: 353). The study by Morgan (1871), possibly the first written account of Japanese kinship systems in English based on an interview with a native informant, is dealt with much more generously by Norbeck, who emphasizes that, despite classifying the Japanese system as classificatory, which is erroneous, Morgan was correct in most instances in his understanding of Japanese kinship, and that the answer to Morgan’s partial confusion lies precisely in the discrepancy between terms of reference and terms of address (Norbeck 1963: 210). In fact, discrepancies in Japanese kinship terminology are manifold: one between written and spoken, since the written system tends to imitate the Chinese system, which does not conform with Japanese

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vernacular practice; another between terms of reference and terms of address; and yet another among multiple regional varieties, quite apart from the standardized national language; in addition to other discrepancies already cited in reference to Norbeck and Befu (1958). Obviously, marking the Japanese kinship system as classificatory poses a problem, especially in the postwar context – that is, nearly eighty years after Morgan’s interview with a Japanese informant. The classificatory system, according to Morgan, operates in primitive society, and the descriptive system characterizes civilized society. Perhaps it would not be entirely impossible – with some sarcasm – to entertain the idea that the Japanese moved from “primitive” to “civilized” during these decades. But a more adequate approach seems to be to acknowledge that some systems may have elements of both classificatory and descriptive systems or, further, that the classificatory/descriptive division may not stand on a universal divide in the first place. For example, in Morgan’s understanding the Japanese term for grandfather is equally applied to ego’s grandfather and ego’s grandfather’s brother, classing lineal and collateral together, thereby making it look like the classificatory system (see Morgan 1871: 523–67). On the other hand, ego’s father’s sibling is not classed together with ego’s father himself, making this into the descriptive type. This is a contradiction with the criteria of a classificatory system, in which all the collateral kin should be called by the same name (i.e. all father’s brothers are fathers). Morgan did not recognize that in Japanese the term oj”san can denote both one’s grandfather and a generic old man who is a stranger. From this, it is not very clear whether the oj”san applied to brothers of a grandfather is still a kinship term or in fact closer to the term addressing the stranger, due to the remoteness from the ego. (One must also remember that Japanese life expectancy in Morgan’s time was much shorter than it is now, and it is unlikely that one would have met one’s grandfather’s older brother, for example.)14 There are further examples that destabilize the binary distinction of classificatory and descriptive in the materials taken from Japanese kinship. For example, in Kikai Island, south of Kyushu, where the influence of the national standard language has been minimal and the kinship system is distinct, as we saw earlier, one finds that all male children of bilateral cousins and siblings are called harachiui, and female children harachim”, denoting that there is a classificatory element in this since all members of the generation are called by the same name and siblings are not distinguished from cousins (Gam™ 1960: 192). In northeastern Japan, it has widely been reported that both a father’s younger brothers and the oldest son’s younger brothers (i.e. younger sons) are called oji: oji normally denotes ego’s uncle in standard Japanese and is not applied to one’s younger brother, but in the northeastern case oji makes no generational distinction, classing all the non-heir male (i.e. younger sons) of different generations together, while using oji in this way indicates that

Locating Japanese kinship 131 this is not an ego-centered address, but the general kinship reference term, thereby making it neither classificatory nor descriptive. In the duolocal large-scale household of Shirakawa village in Gifu prefecture (see pp. 135–6), only the heir and his wife and children address the household head and his wife (i.e. the children’s grandparents) in kinship terms; others, even grandchildren born to the household head’s daughter, call them by their first name. Furthermore, as in the northeastern example of oji, younger siblings of the heir address the heir’s wife as oba: oba in standard Japanese means aunt, not sister-in-law, which again challenges the classification of Japanese kinship as descriptive, as in this case oba is not an ego-centered term. When one looks at the written system, one of the two characters which makes up oji, uncle, is the character denoting father; one of the two characters which makes up oba, aunt, is the character denoting mother – making them look more like classificatory terms. In this way, the controversy reveals that the categorization of classificatory and descriptive or the typology of the Eskimo system fails to reflect or capture the rich regional diversity of kinship terms found in Japan. In this light, the case of Japanese kinship posed a challenge, or at least a serious question, to the previously accepted paradigms of kinship nomenclature and its typology in western anthropology. But more critical and fundamental questioning of existing kinship studies in anthropology came not from anthropologists of Japan, but from anthropologists who studied the west’s colonies or the people colonized (conquered) by the west – those localities and peoples which anthropology in the western metropolis originally relied on to establish the staple types. So, for example, Rodney Needham wrote in 1971 that “[a]nthropologists habitually use terms such as ‘patrilineal’ or ‘matrilineal,’ yet cannot easily claim that these are specific descriptions” (1971: 8), while David Schneider (1972) critically proposed that to equate kinship terminology with reality (i.e. real blood relations), as Morgan did, revealed the implicit ethnocentrism of the western researcher.

D™zoku: neither lineage nor descent Instead of critically reflecting on existing anthropological studies of kinship by using the Japanese material, then, what some anthropologists of Japan did was curious: they turned inward toward Japan itself and tried to establish a self-contained “Japanese” kinship system, effectively contributing to rendering Japan as a whole a kin-like national entity. To see this process, we need to go back to d™zoku again. On the basis of existing Japanese studies of d™zoku, a host of American researchers entered the debate, as it offered a number of different possibilities for interpretation. Here, contesting interpretations prevailed. As I have already stated, d™zoku is, in general, seen as a patrilineal stem family surrounded by kin and fictive kin branch families (Kitano 1962). But to call it simply “patrilineal” poses a problem when seen from a wider perspective of Japanese kinship in general and the practice of

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d™zoku in particular. As we saw earlier, there is a whole variety of different ways of incorporating non-patrilineal elements, including the adoption of a couple of servants by marrying them (see note 13) or the adoption of a sonin-law, for example. In a more orthodox patrilineal descent system, as in the case of the Tallensi, the married-in women have no place in the lineage. In the case of d™zoku, in contrast, even in the most extremely hierarchical d™zoku, without getting married a man by himself cannot enter a lineage, as it is a lineage of ie, a household, not of individual descent. Because of this structure, conventional approaches to d™zoku as a descent system created some trouble among researchers. Harumi Befu (1963) writes that d™zoku is a unilineal (patrilineal) descent system, while at the same time the Japanese also rely on bilateral kin, including affines, for family events and crises. This is rather confusing, since if a system is unilineal, how can individuals inside this system refer to bilateral kin? Understandably, Befu’s article provoked a strong reaction from Donna Nelson, who wrote: In view of the wealth and precision of scholarly data which are available on descent systems, kindreds, and the concept of corporate groups it is astonishing that such a thesis [as Befu’s] would be formulated. It is, therefore, the aim of this communication … to show that in patrilineal Japanese society “two systems of descent” are not “simultaneously operating,” that no “personal kindred” is present as the result of the application of a bilateral rule, that it is nonsense to attempt to include affines within a descent category, and lastly, that the definition of a “family” without a qualifying adjective as a corporate group is a contradiction of terms. (Nelson 1965: 91) As Nelson pointed out, Befu includes affines in bilateral kindred and, at the same time, concerns himself with existing studies that suggest that “the Japanese practice both patrilineal and bilateral rules of descent,” although, Befu adds, this does not mean that these two descent rules work simultaneously, but that there is regional variation in emphasis (Befu 1963: 1,328–9). In response to Nelson’s critique, Befu insists that he did not use the name bilateral descent “system,” only bilateral descent “group” (Befu 1965: 95). Befu goes on to state that Nelson “confuses a definitional problem with an empirical one,” suggesting, like Schneider (1972), that kinship terminology is one thing and reality another. In fact, as long as one insists, as Befu does, on descent as a basic unit for understanding d™zoku, one will run into this problem, since seeing descent in the d™zoku lineage is already a contradiction: as can be seen in the way d™zoku perpetuates itself, as presented by Ariga for example, it is a coalition of ie, that is, a hierarchical union of honke (ke = ie) and bunke under it. Furthermore, Befu’s use of “personal kindred,” which supposedly includes

Locating Japanese kinship 133 affines and remote relatives, begs the question: if kinship relations are sustained by assistance in times of crisis or by participation in funerals – as Befu suggests – how do they differ from friendship? It is altogether unclear, but for Befu there is “good reason for leaving the term ‘family’ unqualified” (1965: 96). Rather than “family,” the term “household” suits the d™zoku system better, inasmuch as the latter does not necessarily take consanguinity for granted and does not immediately denote “descent” or “lineage,” which do not conform with the mechanism of d™zoku. Nevertheless, the ambiguity lingers on as to how to understand d™zoku in particular and Japanese kinship in general. In his 1964 article Befu, in a more provocative way, regards Japanese kinship as “ritual” including a variety of both fictive and blood kinship relations, which includes d™zoku, tekiya or the semi-lawful street-vendor association, and other family or family-like organizations. Street-vendors, Befu says, are organized into a hierarchical command system, where the vendors pay a commission to the boss of the region, who monopolizes trade. An underground organization, tekiya members typically enter kin-like relations with the boss, by joining the “family” as minor members, gradually climbing up the hierarchy. We have seen this system in the context of the labor boss relations that the Occupation authorities were concerned about, i.e. the oyabun–kobun relations studied by Bennett and Ishino (see Chapter 3). It is obvious that this “family” relation is not purely economic or contractual, but there is much extra-economic give and take between the boss and members, including seasonal greetings, free labor services, favors, protection, loyalty, help in case of personal crisis, celebrations and funerals, and so on. This is not totally unlike the give and take between honke and bunke in d™zoku, and in this sense Befu’s grouping together of blood and non-blood kinship as “ritual kinship” may not seem too wrong – except for one important point: in the tekiya case, the unit for entering the family is the individual and, although there could be many ways to coerce individuals to enter this relationship, ultimately the act of joining the family is based on the choice made by an adult individual; in the d™zoku case, recruitment is predominantly either by birth or by adoption during infancy, and, more importantly, in d™zoku the unit of membership is the household, not the individual. Befu seems to be aware of these differences (1964: 160–1), yet still classes all of these together as “ritual kin.” The problem with this interpretation is that if we begin to see all kin-like and kin organizations as ritual, where does kinship (“true kinship” in Befu’s terms) start and end? Collapsing tekiya and d™zoku together would blur the analytical boundaries of categories, obscuring the internal structures of each. If we were to put kin and non-kin organizations together as “ritual kinship,” what is kinship after all? On a different level, Befu’s article raises an important point and is a precursor of the post-1970s understanding of Japanese society – notably,

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understanding the society as vertical ie (household) society (Nakane 1970). At the point of Befu’s 1964 article, this term was not coined yet, but it was becoming increasingly popular in Japan to emphasize kin-like relations inside business. Vogel’s 1963 study attests to the emergence of the surrogate family role played by the company for salary men’s families, and this notion of company as family will, as will be shown, grow even stronger as an axiom of studying Japan. In this sense, it is important to note that interpretations of Japanese kinship were clearly paving the way in mainstream western anthropology to regarding Japanese society on the whole as a kin-like or household-like society. Scholars during and immediately after the Occupation, including John Bennett, Iwao Ishino, and James Abegglen, drew our attention to the kinship-like aspects of labor units – be it the “undemocratic” labor boss system or the “family-like” modern factory (Chapter 3). But by looking at Japan from kinship studies per se, we begin to see how its society as a whole, and not a particular institution or specific population group or a factory or a company, has come to be accepted as a primary object of anthropological inquiry. In approaches such as Befu’s one can clearly see that Ariga’s notion of the national characteristics, minzokuteki seikaku, of the Japanese embodied in kinship and kin-like relationships in society emerge as the main frame of Japan anthropology. Befu earlier in his 1962 piece suggested that, for the Japanese family, occupation and the corporate aspect are more important than “genetic succession,” and he deemed that patrilineal descent in Japan is “a means of continuing the corporate group called ‘family’ …. Because it is more efficient than other rules of descent in carrying on the family occupation” (Befu 1962: 39; my emphasis). This is a highly functionalistic reasoning where the efficacy of the means is explained in terms of ends. In this interpretation, family is no longer a kin group, but primarily an economic occupational group, and kinship is a means to achieve this mission. Here again, we see an interesting precursor to the company-as-family approach later to be emphasized in the Japan field. But is this the reality? In other words, is kinship a means of continuing the family occupation? Is marriage, procreation, or creation of bunke in Japanese kinship a purposive act embedded in the culture to continue the family occupation? It seems to be a considerable reductionism to say so. For one thing such an approach disregards historical factors; prior to the Meiji Restoration, class and occupational boundaries were firmly set and there was no freedom for individuals or families to change them. Befu’s functionalism makes some sense only in inversion: since no one was allowed to change occupation, the family occupation ended up perpetuated in the lineage. Let us turn to another article of Befu’s, where he gives yet another interpretation of Japanese kinship. Based on a synthesis of other writers’ works, Befu presents his own reinterpretation of a large family system found in

Locating Japanese kinship 135 Shirakawa village in the mountainous area of the northeastern Gifu prefecture in central Japan, which I have mentioned elsewhere in this chapter (Befu 1968a). As stated, the residential arrangement in this village takes duolocal marriage for younger, non-heir sons, while only the oldest son brings his wife into his household. Not all households in this village have a large family with duolocal residence. One section, known as Nakagiri, consisting of seven hamlets (each hamlet made up of a cluster of between two and fourteen households), has this tradition. It has already been mentioned earlier in this chapter that in these hamlets younger sons choose their spouse by means of night-crawling courtship. Once a woman becomes pregnant and her commuting lover acknowledges genitorship, the marriage is established. The size of the household tends to be large, due to the co-residence of multiple generations as well as multiple collaterals such as non-heir sons and daughters and the daughters’ children born to the duolocal marriage (Ema 1942, 1943). The origin of this residential pattern has been a subject of academic attention in Japan (see Befu 1968a, 1968b); by and large researchers agree that this system is relatively new and short-lived, starting in the beginning of the nineteenth century and disintegrating by the end of the same century (Befu 1968a: 26).15 Befu initially – correctly in my view – determines the Shirakawa system to be neither purely patrilineal nor matrilineal (1968a: 32): seen from the perspective of younger sons, their children are all absorbed by matrilineage and their marriage is uxorilocal. Unless the heir’s union is exceedingly reproductive the household population is always outnumbered by matrilocally residing, matrilineally absorbed children born to the daughters, who will eventually be taken care of by the household head, their avuncular uncle; while children are small, the responsibility of feeding them is entirely undertaken by their mothers. In this sense, the Shirakawa system is unlike d™zoku in any of its varieties – the northeastern hierarchical large-family type, the southwestern egalitarian type, or Kyushu’s inkyo fission type. Nevertheless, surprisingly, Befu concludes: It is worth noting that, in this emphasis on the corporateness of the household, the Nakagiri system [in Shirakawa] does not differ from the general Japanese household system. As I have argued elsewhere (Befu 1962), the primary concern of the Japanese kinship system is the perpetuation of the family as a corporate group, for which purpose other features of the kinship system, such as descent and residence, are freely adjusted, modified, or fictionalized. The Nakagiri household system, for all its exotic practices, is simply an instance of this. (Befu 1968a: 40) How can one determine “the primary concern of the Japanese kinship system” as if the system has a mind of its own? Is this the “concern” of those who reside in the household or of those who study them?16 Again, I

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sense Befu’s strong functionalism, driven by purpose-oriented explanation, which in fact is a convenient reasoning which primarily serves the researcher’s own contentment rather than being an accurate description of reality and an imaginative interpretation of it, which may not be explainable using existing categories or classification. When there seems no strongly held lineage ideology – as found in neighboring Korea, where the ideology of patrilineage was promoted during the reign of the last dynasty (1392–1910) by making it known in every aspect of household succession – the Japanese family’s corporate continuity as an explanation of kinship perpetuation seems relatively weak. Unlike d™zoku, in Korea the patrilineal clan goes way beyond a local lineage consisting of immediate patrilineally related families. The idea of male succession is so strict that if the heir has no son he has to adopt a son in the prescribed fashion from his close male kin. All daughters who have no position in the succession are excluded from lineage and inheritance, while married-in women acquire a de facto position inside the household only after they give birth to a boy. The adoption of a son-in-law by way of keeping the daughter inside the family is unthinkable. Even today, beyond local lineage each patrilineal clan has its own nationwide organization, which in turn constitutes the boundaries of exogamy, as intra-clan marriage, let alone the marriage of cousins, is strictly prohibited (Nakane 1987: 256–79). Memorial services for patrilineal ancestors continue to be strictly observed. Unlike in Korea, in Japan no concept of the patrilineal clan beyond the immediate locality exists and therefore there is no way of tracing patrilineage (or any lineage) beyond the local community. In Japan the practice of adoption of an heir is loosely determined; it does not have to be patrilineal kin, as is shown in the case of the adopted son-in-law. In light of these loose conventions, it is hard to categorize Japanese kinship firmly as patrilineal compared to other more orthodox patrilineal systems. Befu’s point is that, despite varying practices and exceptions, in terms of corporate perpetuation Japanese kinship is unified. But compared to the Korean case, for example, Japanese corporate perpetuation is full of anomalies and rule-bending, to the extent that to call it a system is stretching credibility somewhat. Yet what seems to be agreed among researchers of Japanese kinship, including Befu, is that they nevertheless insist on “Japanese” kinship; the assumption is that there is a quintessential Japaneseness that runs through the nation’s system, which goes against ethnographic reports that testify otherwise (such as Ariga’s, Fukutake’s, and Gam™’s). This would be tantamount to describing Nayar marriage or Dravidian kinship with one name, “Indian” kinship. Japan anthropologists based their research from early on on an assumption of ethnic homogeneity and national unity; exceptions were either disregarded or molded to fit the national type by way of forceful reasoning (as Befu has done), in a manner not totally unlike the way early Occupation anthropology insisted on national representativeness on the basis of highly

Locating Japanese kinship 137 localized ethnography (as in Takashima (Norbeck 1954) and Village Japan (Beardsley et al. 1959)). The debate over kinship systems was given an unexpected closure when in 1967 Chie Nakane dealt a decisive blow. Nakane conditions the Japan case by stating that the Japanese kinship structure, “unlike that of the Chinese or of the Hindus, does not belong to the category of unilineal systems, nor to any kind of descent pattern found in the published literature of social anthropology” (Nakane 1967a: v; my emphasis). She then emphasizes that “Japanese society lacks not only a unilineal descent system but also lacks any kind of principle upon which to form a descent group with its own function that takes precedence over local economic factors” (1967a: 170). Nakane’s contention supersedes the contesting interpretations of Befu and others and controversies over kinship theories, as in a way it does away with concern over kinship altogether, which is of course paradoxical: if Japanese kinship was unlike any of the existing kinship systems studied by social anthropology, the logical outcome would have had to be that the Japan case would cast serious doubt about existing categories and that Japanese kinship would attract increased scholarly attention. Neither happened: kinship per se failed to become a prime site of research in the Japan field.17 Instead, what we see from the 1970s onwards is a unification of Japanese social and kin relations into the homogeneous “Japanese social structure” that is interchangeably read as “Japanese national character,” in the name of the ie society or the household society. Note how far we have come from Kawashima’s exposition of kinship on the basis of economic exploitation. Indeed, studies of kinship in the Japan field supplemented – or, better, provided the grounds for – the understanding of Japanese society as homogeneous and harmonious on the basis of its household-like structure. The approach to Japan as the ie society is a sort of holism. But this is a holism that is different from what Ruth Benedict produced. Whereas Chrysanthemum applied a panoramic focus on Japanese culture, only to present a rather partial vision built around a finite number of notions such as on and giri – which did not become gate-keeping concepts in Japan anthropology as a whole – the notion of ie society firmly gained the position of an all-around principle to found the edifice of Japan research from the 1970s on. The origin of this approach existed in kinship studies and their transformation. By first analytically disposing of local varieties of kinship system, then unifying “Japanese” kinship, and finally declaring that there was no such thing as a Japanese kinship system, categories that were seen as categories of kinship studies were now applied to society as a whole. In retrospect, such a shift was possible in part due to the severe critique that kinship studies received within the wider anthropological discipline in the 1950s and 1960s. The irony is that a major critical reflection on westerncentrism in the discipline’s tradition came to enforce another ethnocentrism, that of Japanese cultural uniqueness.

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Significantly, Nakane concludes her book by citing three characteristics of “Japanese social organization”: • • •

Personal relations are confined to the tangible and local sphere. Personal relationships and the system of organization function along a vertical line. Groups become independent of each other, just like each d™zoku is independent. (Nakane 1967a: 172)

Her conclusion suggests that, although the d™zoku relation is disappearing from rural life, the relations that are based on the above characteristics persist in “various modern communities such as factories, business firms, schools, intellectual groups, political parties, etc.,” which Nakane promises to deal with in another work (1967a: 172). Indeed she was to do so by publishing the phenomenally influential Japanese Society in 1970 – let us look at this in the chapter which follows.

5

The emergence of national anthropology

Chie Nakane and ie society As suggested in Chapter 2 post-World War II Japanese scholarship in the social sciences took an inward turn to the self-inquiry of the Japanese about who they are and what Japan is about in an historical moment of self-reflection created by the war’s defeat. The first step of such discourse was laid down by Benedict’s Chrysanthemum. Vast numbers of the postwar generation of Japanese writers, from the most serious to the most frivolous, left and right alike, wrote about Japan and the Japanese. In anthropological studies of Japan, as was shown in the previous chapter, the rise and demise of kinship studies resulted in a peculiar type of holism, which sought to conceive Japanese society and culture as a whole in kinship terms. This in turn made the idea of Japanese homogeneity look persuasive, resulting in a virtual erasure of the population who do not fall into the category of “Japanese.”1 Here, the boundaries of Japan’s national state overlapped with the boundaries of Japanese culture. In other words, Japanese culture was perceived as Japanese national culture. This process eventually and effectively made Japan emerge as a “national cultural” field of anthropology, the field inhabited by the people called the Japanese, whose identification was in their being members of the Japanese nation-state, or members of one large Japanese ie (household). There was a certain obliviousness when anthropology treated Japan: its “culture” and “society” existed, but not its “national state.” For example, the Japanese language was discussed as if it was the external expression of a natural attribute of the people called the Japanese, not the result of state-instituted national language education and standardization. When Japanese TV shows were analyzed, attention was paid to how older, male hosts and younger assistants interacted, for example, equating this interaction with gender relations inherent in Japanese society as a whole, leaving out the political economy of media production in the national-state system. This kind of obliviousness regarding Japan as a national whole by anthropology ultimately lent itself to being co-opted by the Japanese government to project its nation as homogeneous and its amnesia regarding prewar and wartime

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histories as irrelevant. The oblivious perception of Japan’s national character as a given, shared by the anthropology of Japan and the Japanese state, paradoxically rendered Japan anthropology “national anthropology.” What I mean by this is that sections of the anthropology of Japan actively contributed to legitimizing the Japanese national state’s existence by remaining silent about its policies and its stance toward marginalized populations and minorities in Japan, who did not fall into the category of the average Japanese national type. This practice in turn reinforced the image of Japan as nationally homogeneous. As a result, the anthropology of Japan in part failed to offer an ongoing criticism of the existing relations of power in Japan, which were based on the national-state structure, through institutions such as national education, language standardization, law, and other cultural apparatuses such as the media. Rather than criticizing what the existing relations of power reproduce, in the form of unequal distribution of material and non-material wealth, many practitioners of Japan anthropology studied institutions in such a way as to replicate those relations of unequal power distribution, by simply accepting them as “uniquely Japanese” in most cases. Such an approach, again, is possible only because anthropologists effectively assumed national unity and homogeneity in Japan, while not explicitly analyzing it. Hence my term “national anthropology.” This, of course, did not happen in the simplistic way I have just depicted; nor was it the only trend found in the anthropology of Japan. Indeed there are many ethnographic texts that depict local events and small-scale social interactions, or that take up the task of in-depth inquiry into relatively narrowly focused problems, without sliding into the nationalizing framework of the field of study. Nevertheless, the type of holism that saw Japanese society as a whole as a household-like entity, what I called the second holism, distinct from the Benedictian approach to Japan as a cultural totality (see Introduction), continued to be upheld by the now more widely practiced anthropology of Japan in the west, involving in-depth and lengthy fieldwork. The kinship idiom played a key role in this process. As we shall see in this chapter, the holism created by the kinship idiom was then fed into a new phase of essentialism that emphasized Japan’s cultural uniqueness and, more importantly, its superiority. The trend toward seeing Japan as a kin-based society – and this kinship relation is nothing like how westerners understood it to be – was already found in Occupation anthropology. Let us briefly summarize: the reason why oyabun–kobun relations were seen by Occupation authorities as undemocratic was because it was strange, in their mind, to conflate kin terms with business relations, the boundaries of which should not cross over each other. In reality they do – even in the west – but the contemporary understanding of the correlation between individualism and the Industrial Revolution, for example, did not allow business and kinship to intermingle; business was for individuals, while family provided an oasis for working

The emergence of national anthropology 141 individuals. Therefore notions such as the business as family or the familylike company were contradictions. Occupation anthropology looked at Japan as idiosyncratic in the first place, and this is how anthropologists of Japan (including Japanese anthropologists) eventually turned the epistemological gap between the west and Japan into a discourse of Japanese cultural uniqueness. The 1970s was the time when Japan’s post-Korean War economic boom began to show its effects on society. Banks and big corporations rose and shone as everyone’s ideal. While economic inequality still existed in society, with a widening gap between the rich and the poor, the perception that everyone in Japan belonged to the middle class was successfully established in society. The manufacturing production index in Japan reached 8,143 in 1965 (it was 340 in 1945), while in the US it was 1,227 (T. Ishida 1971: 2). How was such economic growth possible while society still looked culturally Japanese, i.e. non-western? The notion of a kin-based, household-like society offered an answer. In academic as well as popular discourse, what was a discourse of selfcriticism either of aggressive warfare or helpless defeat in war took a distinct bright turn, and the body of discourse which was later named nihonjinron, or study of the Japanese, proposing the uniqueness and superiority of Japanese culture and people, began to emerge, as has already been noted. As Roger Bowen notes, compared to other Asianists, who were blacklisted in the McCarthy era or denounced during the Vietnam War, “Japan and the Japanologists looked good [in the Cold War context] in comparison with China and Sinologists. … More and more a process of self-selection along ideological lines separated conservative Japanologists from radical Sinologists” (Bowen 1989: 186). In Japan itself, too, throughout the Vietnam War sections of Japanese intellectuals remained indifferent and conservative, and instead concentrated on exploring what Japan’s essence was about and what it meant to be Japanese, while the once nationwide student movement against the US–Japan security treaty and for academic freedom quickly collapsed into sectarian infighting. By the 1970s, Japanese anthropologists and western anthropologists of Japan established a division of labor regarding the study of Japan. The Occupation was long gone and traveling abroad became much easier for the Japanese from around the time of the Tokyo Olympic Games in 1964. Whereas more and more western and Asian anthropologists came to Japan for fieldwork and research throughout the 1970s and 1980s, fewer and fewer Japanese anthropologists were interested in Japan, preferring instead to conduct fieldwork abroad, notably in areas with less economic power than Japan’s (see Sofue et al. 1989).2 The Japanese anthropologists who wrote about Japan were limited in number and it was often the case that they had studied other societies first before writing about Japan. Chie Nakane was one of them. Nakane was originally interested in Tibet and spent two years in India studying matrilineal kinship (Nakane 1957,

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1967b, 1975). Published in 1970, Nakane’s Japanese Society was the result of her intellectual odyssey comparatively applying her insights into Indian society to the home field, Japan. This book is still widely regarded as seminal in Japanese studies in English. It sold phenomenally well in Japanese in its original form – Tateshakai no ningenkankei: Tanitsushakai no riron (Human relations in vertical society: a theory of a homogeneous society) (Nakane 1967c). Nakane’s book was enormously influential. According to Ross Mouer and Yoshio Sugimoto, whereas Harumi Befu’s Japan: An Anthropological Introduction (1971) was cited in a total of thirteen works from 1973 to 1981, Japanese Society was cited in 153 works from 1971 to 1981 (Mouer and Sugimoto 1986: 144–5). In many senses Nakane’s book resembles Ruth Benedict’s Chrysanthemum and the Sword. It represents Japanese society by using a limited number of constructs and, as such, like Chrysanthemum, it involves a great deal of reductionism, a lack of historicity, and essentialism. But the distinct turn it created was the introduction of the kinship idiom in a holistic approach to Japan. Let us examine this closely. Like Benedict, Nakane tries to show how hierarchical the Japanese are, and how well this particularly Japanese form of hierarchy works. Exactly as Benedict did, Nakane takes Japan to be a group-oriented society. In the case of Nakane, the key terrain that defines this group is ie. Ie means many things, including household, the building itself, and family. Both metaphorically and conventionally, it can mean one’s people, boundaries, and something like “inside,” depending on how it is positioned in usage. More esoterically, it can refer to the artisans’ and artists’ lineage, such as various schools of flower arrangement or tea ceremony, pottery or performing arts. Whereas Benedict took a more conceptual approach (i.e. hierarchy), Nakane took a semi-metaphorical approach emphasizing the operative framework of Japanese society – that is, ie. The key to understanding Japanese society is thus derived from kinship terms, but interestingly it was not d™zoku that captured the imagination of researchers from the 1940s on. The difference between d™zoku and ie is that, whereas the former denotes a coalition of households, the latter can denote both the whole (such as d™zoku itself) and parts, such as each household that makes d™zoku. The reason why ie replaced d™zoku is not clear, but we can extrapolate that, whereas d™zoku was predominantly a rural institution closely connected to farming, the term ie covers a more generalized terrain in Japanese society, including urban residents and the merchant class (see Chapter 4, note 11). Given that by 1975 the agricultural population had dropped to 12.6 per cent, from 37.9 per cent in 1955, and the number of fulltime farmers declined from 50 per cent in 1950 to 12.4 per cent in 1975 (Kawamura 1989: 215), it is understandable that the term d™zoku, favored by anthropologists and sociologists since the 1940s, looked obsolete by the 1970s. The principle that governs ie is the emphasis placed on vertical human relations. One’s position is defined by who one’s direct superior is and who

The emergence of national anthropology 143 one’s direct junior is. According to Nakane, one finds ie in every aspect of Japanese society: family, business corporations, schools, and so on, and, furthermore, within departments and sections within business corporations, for example. All this echoes more or less what Benedict told us about the Japanese internal cultural logic, i.e. a circle of obligation such as on and giri, although nowhere in the book does Nakane acknowledge Benedict. But, unlike Chrysanthemum, which was a pioneer and a lone preacher of Japanese cultural logic at the time of its first publication, Nakane’s Japanese Society was in synchrony with the vast number of studies that were emerging in the nihonjinron milieu. Nakane is Professor Emeritus of the University of Tokyo, the country’s most prestigious academic institution. In the ranking of Japanese universities, Tokyo University remains at the top and its privilege disproportionately exceeds that of other universities below it in terms of budget allocation by the Ministry of Education and the employment rate of graduates in government sectors, social recognition, and name value, for example. Nakane entered the University of Tokyo in the second year that it accepted female students. Of 6,000 students who were accepted in 1947, only eighteen were women, and she was one of them (Hendry 1989b). She has held numerous research positions in British and American universities, including the London School of Economics (University of London) and the University of Chicago. When Nakane wrote the book, she was a professor at the Institute of Oriental Cultures in Tokyo University. She was under the influence of structural-functionalism and had already published in English (see Nakane 1967a, for example), a rare accomplishment among Japanese anthropologists of the day, let alone a female anthropologist. She worked in an institution that itself was governed by a hierarchical “lineage” system related to who your professor was. Deviation from his protection was often euphemistically referred to as iede, deserting the family, and practically meant the end of one’s academic career. Given this, it would not be going too far to say that her insights into the hierarchy of Tokyo University combined with structural-functionalism ultimately produced Japanese Society, which attempts to explain Japanese society in terms of a hierarchical ie. The most prominent principle that governs the ie-type society is that of vertical human relations. According to Nakane, the Japanese group model is sustained by an inverted “V.” This type of group is maintained by the link that each subordinate in the two branches of the inverted “V” reports to the superior located above them. The human relation in this case flows only vertically and in principle each subordinate branch does not even have to know that the other exists. All that matters is that the superior has control over each subordinate, thereby curtailing any horizontal co-operation between the lower ranks (Nakane 1970: 57). This hierarchical, ie-type structure of Japanese society allows individuals to identify themselves with the

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group to the extent that their personal identity overlaps with the group’s identity. In this type of hierarchical, vertically connected, and yet perfectly functional group, an individual’s freedom of choice is not the primary issue. According to Nakane, Japanese leaders have a set of distinct attributes. They should not be too independently minded and strong willed. In fact, it would be quite desirable if they were poor decision-makers so that subordinates could be consulted, which would in turn boost the latter’s sense of loyalty and usefulness. Also, one of the most important attributes is age. The seniority of the leader provides good grounds to unify the opinions of subordinates. According to Nakane, the picture of a Japanese leader is that of benevolent tyrant or, better, benefactor for the group. They are the ones who can hold their opinion back and listen to what others say and work harder than anyone else for the sake of the group’s survival and growth (Nakane 1970: 63ff.). Also, Japanese-style management is not just about the intra-company ethic, but the entire network of companies, which offer distinctly Japanese features. Nakane asserts that companies form lineage systems resembling the segmentary kinship system. In this system, the only important thing is the immediate linkage between those above and below, who form the descent group. This link is the only viable relationship that offers help in case of emergency. Notable here is that Nakane, who suggested in 1967 that there was no such thing as a Japanese kinship system, now portrays Japanese socio-economic organization in kinship terms: “Through such vertical relations the group manifests a lineage-like organization” (Nakane 1970: 59). In a society like this, Nakane contends, revolution is impossible. Referring to the student revolts and other social unrest Japan witnessed in the 1960s, she writes: This structural persistence [of Japanese cultural uniqueness] manifests one of the distinctive characteristics of a homogeneous society built on a vertical organizational principle. Such a society is fairly stable; it is difficult to create revolution or disorder on a national scale, since there is segmentation of the lower sectors into various group clusters fenced off from each other. Structural difficulties stand in the way of a broad scope of joint activity – members of a trade union for example, are too loyal to their own company to join forces with their brothers in other company unions; student unions are unable to muster the great majority of students, but develop groups where the solidarity of one group differentiates it from another. (Nakane 1970: 149) It is somewhat disconcerting to hear this from Nakane, since University of Tokyo students waged the toughest and longest resistance against the educational establishment of Japan during the 1960s, occupying the university hall for months. Even though it is true that in the end these student

The emergence of national anthropology 145 movements were suppressed and the radicals became immersed in infighting in isolation from society at large, I have serious doubts about the depiction given by Nakane. She virtually reduces the student revolt to a child’s temper tantrum directed toward its loving but stern parents, and hence very emotional, but having “little social significance” (Nakane 1970: 150) – and in principle “a domestic discord” (1970: 149). Here Nakane’s use of the notion ie is typically structural-functionalist in assuming the basic equilibrium in society. But is it acceptable to equate social conflict with a domestic row? In what way were students placed in “domestic relations” with their teachers and the university administration? These questions are left unanswered, while Nakane simply asserts her interpretation. The book has a number of problems – in its partial use of empirical data, predetermined selection of historical data, and generalization. Again, all of these problems were applicable to Benedict, and, as well as Chrysanthemum, Nakane’s book has also has been hounded by criticism. But let us nevertheless identify what kind of effects are produced by writing about Japanese society in this way. We can recognize that the book is about kinship, the class of notion that is so central to structural-functionalism, and furthermore the book is trying to show that kinship is very useful in studying such a complex society as Japan. Nakane’s proposition is that the notion of kinship should be taken more broadly, going beyond consanguinity, affines, or lineage, extending it metaphorically or pragmatically to non-family organizations such as business corporations, universities, trade unions, and the nation at large. It is here that ie becomes a crucial key. She further writes: The essence of this firmly rooted, latent group consciousness in Japanese society is expressed in the traditional and ubiquitous concept of ie, the household, a concept which penetrates every nook and cranny of Japanese society. … The concept of ie, in the guise of the term “family system,” has been the subject of lengthy dispute and discussion by Japanese legal scholars and sociologists. The general consensus is that, as a consequence of modernization, particularly because of the new post-war civil code, the ie institution is dying. In this ideological approach the ie is regarded as being linked particularly with feudal moral precepts; its use as a fundamental unit of social structure has not been fully explored. (Nakane 1970: 4; my emphasis) She states: “the principles of Japanese social group structure can be seen clearly portrayed in the household structure. The concept of this traditional household institution, ie, still persists in the various group identities [in Japan]” (Nakane 1970: 7). If we remember how the traditional household system, represented in the authoritarian and hierarchical d™zoku of the northeastern type, was seen by

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scholars such as Kawashima Takeyoshi and Fukutake Tadashi as withering away together with feudalism in postwar Japan under the US-led military occupation and democratization, Nakane’s book emerged as a revision to such an assumption by declaring that the traditional household system was viable, if not in concrete and regionally specific forms of d™zoku, then in a more generalized level of national consciousness, behavioral pattern, social principle, and a fundamental unit of society. Seen from the perspective of kinship study, Nakane releases real concrete ie to the society at large and turns it into the national family type instead of the regional or local family type. This is why I see Nakane’s book as playing a decisive role in consolidating the erasure of regional diversity in Japan’s kinship relations and replacing it with the now homogeneous and unique Japanese national form. By relying on a native term such as ie, Nakane effectively “nativizes” what Benedict suggested was Japanese cultural logic, which included a circle of obligation and groupism. Moreover, she suggested that, despite the social and historical change found in Japan at least from the end of World War II, the ie principle remained unchanged. Nakane effectively argues for the naturalness and pregivenness of this notion, rendering it inherently “Japanese” and thereby mystifying it as something non-Japanese would not fully understand. This effectively separates Japan from other cultures and at the same time elevates the knowledge of Japan into an unreachable citadel. To use the kinship term as Nakane does is not just an anthropological twist: it has a real political implication in studies of Japan. It effectively occludes unequal power relations and exploitation in what can be otherwise seen as a class-differentiated capitalist society under the cover of family congeniality. For example, Nakane depicts the multi-layered contractual, subcontractual, and sub-subcontractual relations of companies (1970: 95–6). This top-down relation includes commissions, exploitation by middlemen, longer working hours, and lower wages for the companies in the lower strata. Yet in Nakane’s prose it is represented as paternal help given to the descent company by the parental company, as if all we have to see here is a metaphorical kinship symbiosis and not a system of capitalist economy. This is reminiscent of Ariga’s contention: Ariga emphasized the symbiosis between honke and bunke and, despite the vast complexity he himself found in the d™zoku system, Ariga eventually endorsed the large household system as essentially Japanese and hence part of Japan’s national character; this hides exploitative relations in the name of kinship, as has been pointed out by Kawashima and Fukutake (see Chapter 4). By emphasizing the symbiotic relations between the higher-ranking company or the employer and the lower-ranking company or the employee, Nakane hides industrial exploitation and the capitalist mechanism of unequal distribution of wealth, while actions are justified on the grounds that this ie system is Japan’s homogeneous national system. The assumption that underpins Nakane’s book is in itself tautologous. First, she tells us that vertical relations are deeply rooted in Japanese social behavior, and then says that because verticality is essential

The emergence of national anthropology 147 in Japanese social life every Japanese person cannot help but be conscious of it. Which comes first, consciousness or essence? Nakane’s book presents Japan as a harmonious and homogeneous society with hardly any class conflict or ethnic diversity. Implicitly, it attempts to place Japan above non-homogeneous, non-harmonious societies. As such, it is ultimately linked to the ideology of ethnic cleansing, racial purity, and other fascist and racist ideologies that humanity has witnessed in history. Let us remember that in every important historical conjuncture totalitarian regimes, including that of prewar Japan, have invoked a familybased solidarity, the nation-as-kin metaphor. Nakane’s insistence on the ie notion and a transhistorical and unique homogeneity of Japanese culture is not fundamentally far removed from this. In Nakane’s mode of homogenization, those who stand on the margin are conveniently forgotten, as if they are not “Japanese.” Or, indeed, they are not in Nakane’s view. For example, Burakumin (traditional outcastes), ethnic minorities such as the Ainu, Chinese, Koreans, and Okinawans, regional marginals such as northeasterners, economic drop-outs such as day laborers and the homeless, and single mothers, who have no husband with lifetime employment – where in Nakane’s book do they count as Japanese or as residents of Japan? Another important omission to note in Nakane’s work is that of women. Resonating with Geoffrey Gorer’s logic that studying Japanese men is equal to studying Japanese culture during wartime – due mainly to the fact Japanese women were not in the military and, according to him, because of Japan’s male-dominated culture women’s voice in Japan did not count (see Chapter 1) – Nakane’s purview of Japanese society shows a distinct male bias, and not just that of any male, but an elite male bias seen from the vantage point of the University of Tokyo. It is interesting to note that in a later interview Nakane denies the existence of gender hierarchy in Japan, insisting that Japanese hierarchy is based on status. Strikingly, she is quite insensitive to the position of women and other marginals in Japan, oblivious of the fact that she herself is in an extremely elite category (see Hendry 1989b). Already in recent history, thirty years after the publication of Nakane’s book, the picture of ie society has proven to be otherwise. Contrary to Nakane’s emphasis that Japanese politicians cannot work in coalition, we have seen that since 1993 the Japanese government could not be anything but one based on coalition. Lifetime employment is already history: at this time of long economic recession after the burst of Japan’s bubble economy, many large firms have given up this policy. In recent years Japan has seen an influx of Asian and Southeast Asian workers and the return of Japanese descendants from South and Latin America. As for hierarchy and the rankconsciousness of the Japanese, I wonder if we can be so certain that in the west rankings are not the primary conditions of socializing. For example, Cambridge colleges have a much more elaborate set of formal and hierarchical codes for dress, etiquette, seating arrangements, speech, and so on

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than do Japanese universities (for a more comprehensive, empirical critique of Nakane, see Mouer and Sugimoto 1986). The representation of Japanese society as homogeneous and culturally unique effectively makes Japan the territory of the Japanese, the nationalcultural space. By the same token, the representation of Japan as ie society creates national boundaries, excluding those who do not fit in this unique national identity called “the Japanese” and their large household. What enables such a representation as ie society to appear plausible is not just Nakane’s personal competence and intellectual luck, but also the previously reinforced historical build-up of the perception of Japan in the west as uniquely (“Japanesely”) modern ever since the time of Occupation anthropology.3 Compared with Benedict, Nakane seems to be trying to invert the inversion: whereas Benedict, from her cultural relativism, shows that the US can be as peculiar as Japan and Japan as natural as the US, Nakane tries to show that Japan is peculiar, essentially different from the US and the west, and indeed the rest of the world. It is, according to Nakane’s logic, this peculiarity of Japanese society that makes Japan superior. Hence her mention of the American management style being put more on a par with the ie-type management of Japan’s economic success (Nakane 1970: 86). If Benedict’s work was an attempt to measure different cultures on an equal footing according to the principle of relativism, Nakane’s is an attempt to make Japanese culture stand out, demanding that we use different measuring scales – by using the kinship idiom for this one, rather than that of economics or politics, which other capitalist societies are measured by. Peculiar, but superior, ie society – this is a label that became very influential in Japan anthropology and Japanese studies from the 1970s.

All-pervasive ie Following the notion of ie as suggested by Nakane, many anthropologists, both western and Japanese, participated in the process of making this notion into one of the most important gate-keeping concepts for the study of Japanese society. Anthropologists took various looks at the concept of ie, criticizing it for its lack of internal logic and its problematic cultural practices. Importantly, few raised the fundamental question, why ie? The background to the emergence of ie as the key to Japanese society in the 1970s onwards needs to be considered beyond anthropology. While Nakane’s book has had a decisive role in disseminating this notion in English-speaking academe, in Japan ie was an important part of nihonjinron to explain Japanese cultural uniqueness – and superiority. In 1979 a book entitled Bunmei toshiteno ieshakai (The ie society as civilization) was published (Y. Murakami et al. 1979). Jointly authored by three historians, the book sees Japanese civilization as having a unique structure and historical dynamics distinct from all other cultures and societies. For

The emergence of national anthropology 149 example, historical materialism analyzes history in terms of unequal socioeconomic power relations, contradictions stemming therefrom, and the class struggle to overturn them. According to Bunmei toshiteno ieshakai, such an explanation is not suited to the Japanese case. The driving force of Japanese history is that ie civilization does not work in terms of contradictions and their dialectical relations, but in terms of the endless formation, dissolution, and perpetuation of ie. According to the authors, ie first emerged in Japanese history as part of an effort to establish an alternative force against the imperial authorities. This was first recognized in the eastern peripheral provinces in the eleventh century when the Kamakura government seceded from the imperial court without having to confront it face to face or overturn it in a forceful manner. Here, rather than destroying the central imperial power, an alternative peripheral polity emerged as a co-existing entity. Similarly, rather than trying to punish the peripheral polity, the imperial court connived, though maybe with much displeasure, with its existence. This was the beginning of the co-existence of plural polities, or ie. Henceforth, Japanese history repeated this pattern of secession and merger of various ie. The authors maintain that, through the absence of a strong centralized power, Japan came to possess a unique culture and civilization (see Kawamura 1989 for a summary). The 1970s saw wave after wave of books on the uniqueness of Japan (nihon) and the Japanese (nihonjin). These were usually not much different from each other in the sense that they basically assumed that the essence of Japanese culture and psyche was group orientation as opposed to western individualism. The social psychologist Minami Hiroshi called the phenomenon of this spate of books on Japanese cultural studies, or nihonjinron, a form of Japanese introspective examination of national character. He connected the 1970s eruption of nihonjinron to the uproar over the writer Mishima Yukio’s exemplary harakiri suicide in November 1970 and the enormous changes in US–Japan and Japan–China relations, among other things (Minami 1973: 164). Such a quick connection is perhaps too cryptic: Mishima’s suicide itself was a culmination of the postwar frustration of right-wingers who felt Japan’s prewar purity had been polluted by western influence, while the restored Japan–China relationship signified a closure (or the beginning of the long process of closure) at least in one area of postwar reparations and compensation. As such, this incident was not necessarily the trigger for the spate of nihonjinron literature. In fact, as far as the Japanese cultural discourse of nihonjinron is concerned the vast literature on nihon and nihonjin has existed ever since the early Meiji period. When Japan’s newly formed national identity was challenged by the procrastination of western powers about removing extra-territoriality from the unequal nineteenthcentury treaties, when Japan’s national prowess was manifested by the victory over China in 1895 and was soon denied its reward by the Three

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Powers Intervention, when Japan’s national pride was satisfied by the signing of the Anglo-Japanese Alliance in 1902, when Japan manifested Oriental power by defeating Russia in 1905, when Japan took Korea (1910) and advanced with its invasion of northeast China and southeast Asia (1930s–1945), and when Japan entered the war against the most evil of the evil, the “monstrous and beastly” United States (1941), Japanese national character, national spirit, national identity, national soul, national body, or, in a word, national-ness, was passionately discussed and explored. As such, it was not a postwar phenomenon. What makes the 1970s nihonjinron different from the previous discourse is that it invited the participation of an unprecedented number of national writers and a national readership or audience, due in no small part to the nationwide television network and other mass media technology. Technological innovations coincided with the peak of the economic boom, a time when Japanese of different classes were made to feel that their lives had improved in tangible ways. By proposing a distinct law of historical development unique to Japanese society and culture at this juncture, Bunmei toshiteno ieshakai provided a rationale for the Japanese to replace the westcentric world outlook with an ethnocentric world outlook. Another important aspect of the historical background to the sustained focus on ie in Japanese studies was the general reception in the west of “Japanese-style management,” a key factor in Japan’s ongoing economic boom in the 1970s and the early 1980s. The consensus was that since Japan could achieve such a high level of economic modernization, and yet continue to look exotic and different in the eyes of westerners, there must be something typically Japanese about its industrial management strategy. This view predated the 1970s, as can be seen in Abegglen’s work (see Chapter 3), but with the endorsement of Japan’s economic growth in the 1970s Japanese-style management came with a certain persuasiveness and was celebrated. Indeed, ie-style business management offered the answer to the question of modernization without westernization. As has already been emphasized by the critics of nihonjinron, the discourse clustered around the notion of Japanese cultural uniqueness. This inevitably led to an emphasis on the revival of the Japano-centric prewar nationalism, as was most succinctly put by Peter Dale (1986), although, pace Dale, the recent reinterpretation of history emphasizes that the notion of anti-western pan-Asian unity under the Empire was as dominant an ideology as that of Japano-centrism during the prewar period (Oguma 1995).4 Just as the concept of westernization, for example, can be as empirically determinable as it can be ideologically constructed, cultural nationalism can be very complex and does not always have to take a purely national-centric position. It can behave in an intricate way by entering into solidarity with apparently opposed ideas such as pan-Asianism. If it was the phrase kazokukokka or the family state that held sway over Japan’s prewar public discourse (Gluck 1985), it was ieshakai or household

The emergence of national anthropology 151 society that became central to post-1970 public discourse in Japan. One thing to emphasize is that the post-1970s ie discourse was not constrained by the internal contradiction that the prewar kazokukokka discourse faced. The Empire by definition was a coalition of different national and racial groups. Although the Japanese were always placed at the apex of the coalition, assigned the role of leading nation/race, the identity of the colonizer was often destabilized, especially in the colonies. For example, when Japan legalized the conscription of Korean men into the emperor’s army toward the end of its Empire, this had to be rationalized in such a way as to make the Koreans into Japanese by reforming the system of household registry, disseminating slogans such as naisenittai, or Japan and Korea forming one body, among other measures. The post-1970s ie discourse, by way of contrast, stood on the postwar premise that non-Japanese were removed by way of the two-party dialogue between the US and Japan. The fact that former colonial subjects in Japan such as the Chinese and Koreans were both legally and discursively excluded from postwar rebuilding of the nation was a crucial historical precondition for the emergence of ie discourse. Against this background, anthropologists, including Jane Bachnik, took ie seriously. Bachnik’s article “Recruitment Strategies for Household Succession: Rethinking Japanese Household Organisation” (1983) is an empirical study of Japanese ie as a household unit, based on her own ethnographic data in rural Japan. Bachnik suggests that we focus not on ie as an entity, but on ie as a locale or process whereby ongoing succession takes place for the self-perpetuation of ie. She proposes that we read a dual system in one process: 1 2

Continuity of ie as corporate group. Continuity of ie by its members. (Bachnik 1983: 162)5

Bachnik’s key terms are “position” and “members.” Each member of the ie occupies a certain position in the ongoing reproduction of ie. What is important here is that we distinguish permanent and temporary members of ie. This is because at a crucial point in the generational change there are two (not one) positions to be filled by ie members. Those who occupy these positions – a married couple, normally – are the permanent members, while the rest, including their children, become temporary members (Bachnik 1983: 165–6). The same will be repeated in the next generation. The principles for choosing the permanent members are arbitrary and left with the decisions of a retiring couple. Sometimes primogeniture is preferred, sometimes a daughter and adopted son-in-law (her husband) are selected, and sometimes the adopted child succeeds by marrying someone in, while at other times a married couple is adopted as a couple and designated as heir. So far, Bachnik’s discussion does not depart from the existing studies of d™zoku.

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Upon closer reading it becomes clear that her purpose in this study is not to explore kinship, but to apply a kin-like principle to Japanese society at large. Just as Nakane did, Bachnik elevates ie into the societal level, conferring on it the status of the principle of general socio-organizational relations in Japan. She calls it “positional ie” that “emerges as an organization characterized by work and enterprise rather than kinship” and this “allows the questions which have been asked in a kinship frame-of-reference to be rephrased in a positional one” (1983: 177). Then, she does a U-turn and suggests that “kinship be viewed through the relationship of the facets in various Japanese organizations – relationships which have gradually changed over Japanese history” (1983: 177). Her grounds for this seem to be that because Japanese household succession does not insist on biological kinship, the notion of kinship should be regarded as applicable to the non-kin organizations found in society at large. But there is no logical bridge to connect her ethnographic data, which were obtained from a concrete study of a rural community, and her generalization that Japanese corporations and organizations work in the same way as household succession; ie is simply taken for granted as a “Japanese” institution, nationally unified and historically constant. This makes Bachnik’s understanding of ie tautologous: the continuity of it is what ie is about, or ie is what ie explains (or tries to explain). Ie, in other words, is at both the beginning and the end of the proposition, while ie itself remains opaque as a concept. However, in my view ie is not an a priori, just as kinship is not a selfexplanatory, category. One year after Bachnik’s article was published, David Schneider delivered an important critique of the anthropological studies of kinship with his book A Critique of the Study of Kinship (1984). Following the critique of kinship debated among anthropologists since the 1960s, Schneider raises the question that neither Nakane or Bachnik ever raised: “why kinship?” In Marilyn Strathern’s words, “[h]is book is an attack on the unthinking manner in which generations of anthropologists have taken kinship to be the social or cultural construction of natural facts” (1992: 45). Schneider’s focal point comes from the example of the Yap household called tabinau. At first glance tabinau looks very much like ie. It is, on one hand, a domestic group and lineage unit, being a patrilocal extended family as well as patrilineage; on the other hand, it is a cultural unit with multiple meanings – it is a house itself, a relative or relatives related through ties to the land, land tenure of various sorts, the place where a marriage exists, and so on (Schneider 1984: chs 2 and 3). The first definition follows the existing anthropological kinship terminology, splitting tabinau, one unit, into a dual function of patrilocality and patrilineage. Schneider is critical of this separation, as he sees it as imposing anthropology’s technical convention that splits tabinau into two distinct functions, while an indigenous understanding can have only one tabinau. Bachnik’s separation of positional ie and members of ie would have made

The emergence of national anthropology 153 Schneider uncomfortable. In fact, as we discussed in the context of the study of d™zoku in Chapter 4, such a separation was dominant in anthropological studies of Japanese kinship: the household is a corporate group as well as a residential group, and at the same time a kinship unit and a hierarchical and politico-economic organization. A more important critique of Schneider’s is focused on father–child relations among the Yap. Father, citamangen, can be the biological father of the child, fak, but if the biological father is no longer alive the father’s brother would be the fak’s citamangen. Until all the male members of this generation are exhausted – that is, while all the male siblings of one’s father are alive – one will always have citamangen, as it is constantly replaced by one of the uncles – a system Schneider calls a “reservoir system” (1984: 12). The citamangen is simultaneously father and landholder; the fak is child and the holder of future entitlement to the land. The fak’s entitlement is earned by his citiningen’s (mother’s) work on tabinau land. The citamangen– fak relationship is that of “dependence, obedience, respect, and propriety, to take good care of the citamangen during the latter’s old age, and then be given the land which the citamangen holds” (1984: 72). Unless the fak conforms to the code of conduct expected of him, he can be thrown out, terminating the citamangen–fak relationship. Note that here consanguinity does not count. Schneider sees a crucial importance in the deeds of a fak rather than there being a biological link between fak and citamangen. From this, he raises doubts about understanding citamangen–fak relationships as pertaining to kinship at all, because the term “kinship” in western understanding conventionally assumes a blood relationship and therefore calling it kinship will only cause confusion. In sum, Schneider’s critique derives from two concerns: first, the study of kinship by classifying tabinau as a patrilocal, patrilineal entity imposes on the native perception the anthropologist’s preconceptions derived from his own cultural assumptions; second, to see kinship as the most important category to explain other instances such as politics, economics, and religion and ritual in “simple” societies seems unwarranted. The first point is about the cultural and intellectual ethnocentrism of anthropological studies of kinship; the second questions the assumption that “simple” societies are necessarily kin-based (1984: 187). The doubt about placing kinship in a privileged position in the studies of “primitive” societies had been raised in the 1960s and the 1970s (see Chapter 4), but by adding to it an explicit critique of western ethnocentrism Schneider sharpened the critical edge. Schneider’s critique was met with a countercritique by a Japanese anthropologist, Akitoshi Shimizu, who suggested that to see kinship as a consanguinity-based relationship is itself euro-centric, and in the Japanese case one sees no such weight placed on blood relations and therefore the term kinship does not necessarily have to be interpreted as a blood relationship. To see the term kinship as always denoting a blood relationship, as Schneider does (in Shimizu’s view), is itself ethnocentric, according to

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Shimizu in his “On the Notion of Kinship” (1991).6 For Shimizu, Schneider conflates “analytical concepts” of kinship with western folk categories of kinship. In highly obscure language, Shimizu suggests the following: Anthropologists who write in English can adopt English terms of kinship, “father, mother”, etc., and use them as analytic concepts. As noted previously, when used in this way, these English terms should be entirely abstracted from their cultural context and be given distinct analytic meanings; once so defined, they are to be used as general concepts indicating comparable folk categories. (Shimizu 1991: 395; my emphasis) Just how we can “entirely abstract” cultural context from a language is not clear to me, as any language is at once a reflection and a constitutive part of the culture to which it belongs. Of course, one language can be part of many different cultures, as is the case with English, which has gained the position of lingua franca in many ways. This by no means renders English free of its cultural contexts, let alone “entirely abstracted” from them. The crux of his proposition, it seems, is to see kinship as something that is multiply constructed and divided into many phases of native perception (Shimizu 1991: 397). He then suggests that with the concept of multiplicity we can look at the Yapese or the Japanese kinship system to understand the kinship category better: both Yapese and Japanese systems have anomalous, non-biological members such as an adoptee or domestic servants, who are “continuous with one another in a polythetic way” (1991: 397), which we saw to be the Japanese case in Chapter 4. Following this proposition, Shimizu gives an historical overview of how in Japan ie has been understood as a multifaceted and multifunctional unit; he refers to the controversies revolving around non-kin members of the rural household such as servants and its implications for interpreting ie either as biological kin group or non-biological domestic group; his conclusion is that it is normal for the household system, at least in Japan, to have various compositions, kin and non-kin, hierarchical and egalitarian, cousin marriages, adoption marriages, etc. It is, following his line of argument – and I take this to be correct – only abnormal or surprising to western eyes because of their preconception that kinship should denote consanguinity. What is strange about Shimizu’s article is that, though he claims that it is a criticism of Schneider’s work, he is repeating what Schneider has spent a whole book doing – showing that kinship is not just a single layer of consanguinity. The only difference is that Shimizu, on the same grounds as Schneider, insists that kinship be retained as an independent analytical category separate from politics, economics, and religion, for example, while Schneider suggests a skepticism about doing so on the grounds that, no matter how multifaceted tabinau may be in the eyes of anthropologists, for the natives it is a single whole tabinau.

The emergence of national anthropology 155 More importantly, Shimizu appears to be suggesting that it is sufficient to cite the Japanese case in order to replace western-centrism. Implicit is a presumption of his own native authority – a Japanese anthropologist writing about Japanese ie – as opposed to Schneider writing about Yapese kinship. The Japanese ie cannot be a general or universal guide (if there is such a thing) to study other kinship systems such as the Yapese, since Japanese ie in itself is, borrowing from Shimizu’s own terminology, not an analytical and abstract category; instead, it is firmly entrenched in Japanese cultural specificity. We have done an interesting loop: Nakane nativized the Benedictian approach by nationalizing ie beyond the confines of kinship terms; Bachnik took Nakane as a point of departure to generalize her ethnographic data to the society at large, with ie as a cultural principle internal to Japanese social organizations; Shimizu then brought ie back to kinship studies and tried to elevate Japanese ie into a generalizable category in studies of kinship in an attempt to overcome the Eurocentrism of western scholars. In all these works ie is firmly presupposed as the national-cultural institution of the Japanese, and no analysis of or skepticism about this concept was called for. This is different from the anthropological studies of Japanese kinship during the 1950s and 1960s, as we saw in Chapter 4, where one recognizes differing interpretations and contesting analyses in attempts to synthesize empirical variety in regional and historical specificities. By the 1970s, rich diversity had disappeared and, instead, ie emerged as an authoritative concept to mark the boundaries of Japan as a nationalized field.

In search of the cultural core How does the national culture/character of the Japanese emerge if it does not presuppose the kinship idiom as the main framework? In this section I leave ie for now and consider an approach to Japan with a more generalized search for its cultural core that attempts to explain Japanese national culture with one keyword. Joy Hendry’s book Wrapping Culture: Politeness, Presentation, and Power in Japan and Other Societies (1993) is one that falls into this category. Different from the holism inspired by kinship studies such as Nakane’s, Hendry’s is closer to Benedict in that she bases her generalization on a limited number of observations, which she unifies under one category, “wrapping.” As such, Hendry presents Japanese society as even simpler than Benedict’s depiction. Whereas Benedict pursued the patterns of Japanese culture, which in the end she resisted reducing to a single concept, Hendry’s study revolves around only one concept. Joy Hendry is a leading British anthropologist of Japan. Considering that Britain does not possess strong anthropological interest in Japan compared to the US, and that practitioners of anthropology of Japan are extremely limited in number, Hendry’s contribution to British academe has been significant (see Hendry 1981, 1986, 1987, 1989a, 1998, 1999, for example), which

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is in part the reason to take up her work here, although her work may not be influential in the US. Just as ie was the key to understanding Japanese society at large for Nakane and Bachnik, for Hendry it is “wrapping” that explains Japanese culture, for it is pervasive in Japanese society: Apart from the wrapping of gifts, the wrapping of the body, and the wrapping of language, this book will also show parallels with spatial and temporal examples of the wrapping principle it aims to elucidate. In the Japanese case, architectural style and the layout of domestic and religious edifices can be seen to use layers of “spatial wrapping” in the way they enclose the inner sanctums, just as people use layers of “linguistic wrapping” to express themselves. The temporal version of the wrapping principle is concerned with the ordering of meetings, drinking sessions, and other events of significance in Japanese life. To demonstrate structural principles of this sort, which underlie categories of thought and organization, may seem a trifle outmoded, but the argument does not quite end here. (Hendry 1993: 4) According to Hendry, wrapping is the essence of Japanese culture; most phenomena, institutions, and social relations in Japan can be understood in terms of wrapping. These include religion, language, aesthetics, gender relations, social hierarchy, social order, childhood, or the way Japanese think and live in various spheres of home and work in different regions within Japan. Hendry gives an elaborate typology of wrapping, as the above quotation shows, including gift-wrap of various materials and design, the symbolism of presentation and skills involved in wrapping gifts, the rules of rituals for presenting the wrapped gifts on a variety of formal occasions, and so on. According to her, the sacred demarcation symbolically made by a rope at the entrance of a shrine is wrapping; the paper doors and walls of (traditional) Japanese housing are wrapping; costume adornment, especially of women in the traditional kimono, which requires multiple layers of undergarment to be worn, complete with the binding of the body by a conspicuous sash, just like the ribbon on the gift package, is wrapping; the use of polite language that often enables individuals to avoid direct confrontation is wrapping. Hendry’s point is that wrapping is not just a metaphor or convenient reference point due to its pervasiveness in Japanese society; wrapping is a “cultural template” of the Japanese (1993: 172) and, as such, wrapping for her is the key to understanding Japanese society, culture, and language. Let me focus on the internal logic of Hendry’s wrapping, first, by looking at the list of wrapping: gift wrapping (gifts and presents), body wrapping (kimono costume), space wrapping (traditional architecture), time wrapping

The emergence of national anthropology 157 (ordering of drinking sessions), language wrapping (polite speech), and social wrapping (seating arrangements). Are these consistently unifiable as wrapping? The problem is that each example Hendry cites wraps as much as it exposes nodes of social positionings and various attributes pertaining to the relations of power. Here is why. Wearing layers of clothes may be to hide the body, but it also reveals the opulent status of the wearer or the traditional formality of the occasion – given particularly that the kimono costume costs conspicuously more than regular clothing. Spatial wrapping could be compartmentalization or classification of the space. Again, a particular style of architecture reveals an artistic school or regional tradition and the socio-economic status of the resident. As for the use of polite language, if polite language is as prominent in the Japanese language as Hendry suggests, we have a reason to believe that speakers are familiar with the rules of the game and that therefore the effect of polite statements is already part of convention, thereby enabling polite speech to reveal irony, sarcasm, or even ridicule; far from wrapping anything behind it, polite speech reveals the intention of the speaker (if there is indeed any intention). Of course, there is no reason to assume that polite language is necessarily false, i.e. wrapping the true intention behind it: politeness could simply reveal politeness. Regarding seating arrangements, again, if everyone in the room is familiar with the convention it wraps nothing, but abundantly demonstrates the clear hierarchy of the people according to that convention. Hendry’s concept of wrapping does not have integrated logical principles to enable it to be used as a measuring point or a unit of analysis. Among the examples Hendry cites some are forms of concrete wrapping such as gift wrapping, while others are metaphor or interpretation. This is another inconsistency. On the metaphorical level, of course, everything can be wrapping. Our body is a wrapping: our skin wraps bones and flesh; our flesh wraps blood and veins; and, in the Cartesian sense, our body wraps our mind. Our vision is wrapping: eyeballs are surrounded by eyelashes and eyelids, and the eyes are wrapped with ideology to the extent that what we see may not be what it is. However, to say that “the body is wrapped by skin” and “the mind is wrapped by the body” are two different things, in the sense that the first is a direct statement pertaining to the anatomy, while the second is metaphysical. Similarly, the statements “our eyes are wrapped with eyelashes” and “our eyes are wrapped with an ideological smokescreen” are different, in that the first is again a statement on the anatomy, while the second pertains to social analysis. If wrapping in Japan is, as Hendry suggests, a structural principle of society, it needs to be located in the empirical reality of daily life and not in a totalizing overgeneralization that conflates inconsistent instances. Certainly, one can describe gift-wrap and call it wrapping. However, if one were to extend the scope through analogy after analogy, one would move from direct statement to a metaphoric realm, forcing the two statements that pertain to the heterogeneous spheres into one category. By extension, if one

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were to call Japanese culture wrapping culture, the description of gift wrapping is now metaphorically employed to explain Japan. By this stage empirical data becomes irrelevant. One only wonders what purpose the introduction of a concept such as wrapping serves. Let us now be more concrete and imagine the anthropology of US culture in parallel with the anthropology of Japanese culture as presented in Hendry. The pervasive presence of fast-food franchise eateries may tempt us to call the US culture a fast-food culture. Indeed, in the media and popular discourse US society shows such traits. Men and women enter and exit marriage just like they eat fast food. People change cars and careers just like they eat fast food. The American dream is all about getting superrich overnight, just like eating fast food. Americans speak in a high-pitched tone and fast compared to the British. One could, as it were, empirically study the fast-food outlet and then metonymically apply this data to the rest of the society by calling the US culture a fast-food culture. What did our imaginary anthropologist do in this process? Did he come up with a general theory about US society, culture, and language? No, since there is a gap between an empirical study of a fast-food outlet and the metonymical application of the empirical data from a fast-food outlet to society at large – because US society is far more complex, ethnically and culturally diverse, and replete with a variety of regional, class, and occupational practices. We are aware that East Coast Americans may speak fast, but Southerners may not. We are aware that, depending on ethnic and cultural background, speech varies enormously. To push these under one key term would be nonsensical. Why, then, is Hendry able to do this for Japan? Is it because Japan is homogeneous and its culture much simpler than American culture? No, Japan is not a homogeneous social space composed of the “average Japanese” alone: there are ethnic minorities and foreign guest workers, diverse classes and a marginalized population. Yet Hendry depicts Japanese culture under the rubric of “wrapping” since she is not able to see the complexity and diversity in Japanese society by buying into studies such as Nakane’s which represent Japan as homogeneous and internally unified by its unique culture. Unless homogeneity is taken as a given, no one can possibly unify Japan’s culture in one key word such as “wrapping.” Interestingly, Hendry suggests that her contention is to look at the surface; looking beneath the surface is a misleading intellectual exercise, since there may not be anything beneath it (1993: 7). This approach brings about an unfortunate superficiality. For example, she looks at honorifics in terms of power relations, but the power she discusses is “a combination of abilities: first, the access to different forms of language, and, secondly, an ability to manipulate the use of those linguistic forms” (1993: 67–8) – as if to say that if one is equipped with these abilities one can acquire social power. But power does not derive simply from within the abilities of individuals: it lies in society and the social relations inside society.

The emergence of national anthropology 159 What does the recognition of a linguistic form such as honorifics do in terms of understanding a society or a culture? It only gives us a tool to begin an investigation and, as such, in itself it does not provide a conclusive understanding of a society. One way to validate the identification of a certain linguistic form as a research unit of a society is to analyze the social effect of the deployment of such a linguistic form. What Hendry does, however, is first to identify a linguistic form and then, as it were, to work back on individual psychology to determine the motivations of individuals. Hence examples such as the use of honorifics when a housewife is said to be wanting to distance herself from a salesperson, when a rural woman is supposed to wish to be recognized as sophisticated, when a woman is seen as intending to be authoritative vis-à-vis a man, etc. What is discussed are individual utterances, not the social practice with its ramifications to explicate the social effect of such a practice.7 Hendry does raise an important point in her book, as she states that it is “important not to try to take off the layers of wrapping … always to be seeking essences” (1993: 173). Yet Hendry herself is trapped by the search for an essence: to decode the use of honorific language as she does as a strategy to do something else – in this case, to elevate the status of the speaker – is precisely to go behind the surface of wrapping, to discover the “real” intention behind the façade. It is true, as was noted by several reviewers (e.g. Befu 1994; Smart 1996), that focusing on wrapping itself is a novel approach. But the minute Hendry steps into the realm of metaphor and functionalist interpretation, connecting surface and what lies beneath, she is no longer focusing on wrapping as wrapping; her focus has shifted to what is behind wrapping. After all, it is far from clear from her book where “wrapping” starts and ends. What gets obscured in an analysis such as Hendry’s is the real concrete power relations between the rich and the poor, old and young, men and women, and the marginals and the mainstream, for example, which cannot be fundamentally adjusted or subverted by a cosmetic linguistic manipulation of polite speech. In this sense, Hendry effectively “wraps” social division of power and stratification in Japanese society behind an excessively culturalist presentation. The following quotation from Mike Filby, who criticized Hendry’s treatment of gender in her 1987 book Understanding Japanese Society, fits here as well: Hendry’s book is at its weakest in analyzing aspects of social divisions where there is no systematic data presented, and she stretches the limits of cultural relativity when discussing gender relations in particular. Gender inequalities occupy some space in the text in one form or another, but the tenor of the discussion is naturalizing and voluntaristic and pays scant regard to the considerable movement of women who, since the Meiji Restoration, have resisted male definitions of their “proper place”. (Filby 1992: 6)

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National anthropology As has been shown here, the emergence of the Japan field as a national anthropology that studies national culture as a whole – be it under the notion of ie or “wrapping” – has been a tangible development since the 1970s. In this sense there has been both a notable shift from postwar Occupation anthropology and a continuity with it: whereas in Occupation anthropology the assumption of modernization theory that Japan would soon shed feudalism and democratize itself added an evolutionistic tone, the national anthropology of the 1970s onwards created a sense of static equilibrium; if Occupation anthropology coincided with the process of reducing the rich regional diversity in Japanese culture to an entity called “Japanese” culture, post-1970s anthropology consolidated it into a national culture. This does not mean that in the post-1970s anthropology of Japan there were no regional studies. Nevertheless, the power of presenting Japan in a holistic manner has been very tempting for anthropologists ever since Nakane’s Japanese Society (1970). Even when a specific locality or a particular institution was the location of fieldwork, researchers would, one way or the other, make generalizations about Japanese national trends, national proclivity, and national culture. Some, moreover, made a conscious effort to grasp Japan as a whole. I explore one such book in the last section of this chapter, Japan as Number One by Ezra Vogel (1979). This book has an interesting subtitle: “Lessons for America.” Just like Benedict’s Chrysanthemum, it was translated into Japanese and sold phenomenally well. According to Aoki Tamotsu, contrary to the book’s intention to be “a lesson for America,” it had a wider readership in Japan (Aoki 1990: 121). This is also similar to the fate of Chrysanthemum, in that eventually it taught the Japanese, more than Americans, what Japanese culture was about. Regarding the popularity of Vogel’s book, Donald Hellmann reports that “it has met with astounding success in Japan, where close to 500,000 hardback copies of the translation have been sold and it promises to become the all-time non-fiction bestseller written by a Western academic!” (Hellmann 1980: 425). It will become clear why it had such an effect when we look at the contents of the book. Vogel opens his book questioning why the US has been so unsuccessful in general education, economic growth, crime control, and the overall sustaining of morals, especially since the Vietnam War, and asks how it is possible for Japan to be so successful, not only in terms of economic and technological modernization, but also in average educational levels, human relations, and moral standards, which is even more shocking considering that Japan had been devastated by World War II and the US was its guiding light during the military occupation – a phenomenon he calls the “Japanese miracle.” The book abundantly registers the efficiency, cost-saving devices, effectiveness, cordiality, stability, and security prevailing in Japanese society, businesses, and social relations.

The emergence of national anthropology 161 In 1952, Vogel says, Japanese gross national product (GNP) was “little more than one-third [that] of France or the United Kingdom”; by the late 1970s it was the size of the UK’s and France’s combined (Vogel 1979: 9–10). “In 1975 one Japanese worker could produce about one thousand English pounds worth of cars every nine days, whereas at Britain’s Leyland Motors, to produce the same value a worker took forty-seven days” (1979: 11–12). By 1974 “Japanese productivity in steel was estimated to be two to three times that of England” (1979: 12). Transportation and communication in Japan are incredibly efficient and Japanese individuals are eager to absorb an enormous amount of factual data. The difference between the US and Japan in wages and living standards is decreasing. Vogel is impressed with the eagerness that the Japanese, from students to bureaucrats, demonstrate in absorbing foreign experiences, with a system where the state supports researchers and projects, with the manner by which big companies channel a wealth of information and encourage their employees to learn more, and with the role which the media plays in disseminating useful and educational information (Vogel 1979: ch. 3). Vogel does not, however, explain the role played by the state. Why, for example, are individuals made to study? Is this not related to the country’s educational system, which is heavily engineered by the Ministry of Education, and which assumes the form of “examination hell,” the dread of which Vogel himself is aware of better than anybody else (see Vogel 1963)? Yet he presents a picture in which Japanese individuals learn as if it is because they want to and are voluntarily inclined to learn, thereby making diligence in learning into a part of national culture. Furthermore, is the learning that Vogel discusses really about knowledge? It may be true that Japanese students memorize a lot of incidentals, from the birthday of Shakespeare to the wedding anniversary of Napoleon, because of the way school tests are designed, but rote memory can only be useful in a prearranged question-and-answer test setting, while such information may not equip individuals with an ability for application and creativity, logical thinking and comprehension. What Vogel calls knowledge, it seems, is better understood as efficiency. Such an understanding of knowledge is very much part of a utilitarian modernization theory that regards the fast and costeffective solution to a problem as the optimal strategy, while the search for deeper issues pertaining to ethics and morality is neglected. However, for Vogel, Japanese society has already overcome the moral dilemma of modern society that can be seen in the crime rate. The low crime rate in Japan, according to Vogel, is sustained by the general public’s trust in the police force and their cooperativeness on the one hand and the humane attitude of the police on the other. Vogel writes: Part of the public’s cooperativeness stems from its general deference toward government agencies. The Japanese are more prepared to cooperate with authorities than Americans, whose widespread alienation and

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The emergence of national anthropology tradition of righteous indignation toward authorities cause them to sympathize more with persons committing crimes against the government and big business. … Toward anyone who departs significantly from his expected role, the Japanese automatically respond with visible disapproval, whether by gesture, subtle comments, or very strong, even if indirect, criticism. Just as the public is less willing to understand and excuse lateness, sloppiness, and laziness than the American public, so is it less patient with the transgressor and more willing to cooperate with the police in maintaining the public order they so firmly believe in. (Vogel 1979: 216–17)

He then connects the “low level of alienation in Japan” with “the widespread pride of individuals in their work and workplace” (Vogel 1979: 217). This is rather a superficial, and in some ways unsettling, statement. First, the low crime rate or the high level of cooperation with the police does not automatically imply less alienation. In fact, the way the Japanese police manipulates the population by using its leniency selectively only to those who are willing to offer information (Vogel 1979: 216) is a concrete form of surveillance. Second, if, as Vogel says, the Japanese public is less tolerant of transgression, this fact itself indicates that neighbors act as policing agents towards each other, rendering Japan a cost-effective police state – not dissimilar to the prewar totalitarian neighborhood watch in Japanese cities and villages. But the problem does not end here. What is a low level of alienation? Is it merely group cohesion and being in harmony with one’s own kind, as Vogel seems to imply? What about the capacity to judge right from wrong and the freedom to exercise such judgment even if it goes against the current? History tells us of many stories where mob justice brought about genocide – consider, for example, the massacre of Koreans by Japanese civilians following the great Kanto earthquake of 1923 (see M. Weiner 1989; Allen 1996; Ryang 2003). Similar to pogroms, it was an incident where the Japanese suddenly turned against their Korean neighbors, dragged them from their homes into the street, lynched them in a bloody manner, and displayed the bodies as proof of due punishment (for fuller documentation, see K«m 1989, 1996a, 1996b, 1998). This was because Koreans were believed to be taking advantage of the chaos following the earthquake to loot houses and rape women; the rumors rapidly circulated, inflaming the suspicion of Japanese citizens of the affected area, while the government completely failed to control the situation and, in some ways, even appeared to fuel the rumors. The police took advantage of the double chaos created by the natural disaster and the excited mob hunt of Koreans to arrest and execute anarchists and leftists, who had been under special surveillance. Here, Japanese civilians were at one with their national police, national authorities, and the national group, cohesive and harmonious in decisionmaking regarding the elimination of Koreans from their neighborhood in a

The emergence of national anthropology 163 brutal manner. If this is freedom from alienation, it would be nothing but false: freedom from alienation must include freedom from indoctrination also. Vogel also fails to qualify what constitutes crime in Japan, as the definition of criminality depends in large part on a culturally specific understanding and on the legal institutions as an organic partner of such an understanding. The Japanese police would detain a 14-year-old Korean girl in a police cell if she wasn’t carrying her alien registration certificate on her person. They could have detained her indefinitely if they wanted to, as it is a serious offence under the Japanese alien registration law, which stands on the assumption that Koreans and foreigners are susceptible to criminal elements. Indeed, most of the “crimes” committed by Koreans in Japan are violations of the alien registration law, either failing to report a change of address within the two-week time limit, or failing to carry their alien registration cards at all times. Of course, since these crimes are committed by Koreans, i.e. non-Japanese, they do not get classified in the same bracket as crimes committed by Japanese in the Ministry of Justice statistics. It seems that the low crime rate Vogel so admires is achieved at the expense of the freedom of a certain section of society. For example, Japan failed to admit seventeen Vietnamese refugees when the US was accepting 14,000 per month at the time Vogel’s book was published and popularized (Hellmann 1980: 429). Of course, since the US was primarily responsible for causing the movement of refugees in the first place, it would be unfair to compare Japan with the US. But even compared to other countries such as Canada or Australia, Japan lagged far behind in accepting refugees. This indicates how the Japanese government saw the constituency of “the Japanese” and who should be given the privilege of living in Japan. If this restricted membership is what makes the Japanese Japanese, it would not be going too far to assume that the Japanese police is there primarily for the surveillance of the non-Japanese and marginalized Japanese.8 Vogel’s Japan as Number One is, following Nakane, another positive endorsement of Japan’s postwar achievement. Just as Benedict had done thirty-three years before, but in a way more explicitly, Vogel’s admiration granted Japan international carte blanche to rank in the world’s advanced nations – written by a Harvard Professor and one of the most highly regarded experts on Japan, the value the book carried as part of the nihonjinron discourse was immeasurable. Vogel’s book, along with Nakane’s, was widely criticized by subsequent scholars of Japanese society, though interestingly, yet perhaps understandably, not so much by anthropologists of Japan. To cite only one example, Ross Mouer and Yoshio Sugimoto, referring to Vogel’s, Nakane’s, and Takeo Doi’s work (see Chapter 6) and the shared similarities among them, write as follows: First was the fact that the vast majority of statements have no solid evidence and lack a firm empirical base. Many statements which are

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The emergence of national anthropology classified as having some kind of evidence are, in fact, supported only by isolated examples and personal authority. Second was the heavy reliance on illustrative examples rather than carefully gathered data. Third was the failure to cite the sources of evidence. (Mouer and Sugimoto 1986: 147)

Apart from the methodological problems that Mouer and Sugimoto point out, I wish to draw the reader’s attention to the social effect that research such as Vogel’s and Nakane’s and to some extent Hendry’s creates. First, as has been stressed, their depiction of Japan in its socio-cultural totality creates the effect of making Japan the land of “the Japanese.” Only those who count as Japanese are the Japanese, and this effectively marginalizes and ultimately excludes the social and economic underclass, ethnic minorities, and other non-mainstream populations. The portrayal of Japan as a homogeneous national-cultural whole effectively renders those people invisible and naturalizes the unequal distribution of power within Japan. Second, as with other writings in the genre of nihonjinron, the books by those authors reduce Japanese culture to a set of finite dimensions. This trend has long historical roots – the origin being Benedict’s Chrysanthemum, if not earlier – yet it seems to be generally accepted by anthropologists and other scholars of Japan. It is doubly ironic considering that in the postwar years, when Japanese anthropologists were eager to study Japan proper, regional diversity and the historic complexity of cultural institutions such as kinship were widely recognized. But by the 1970s, reflecting Japan’s economic recovery and re-emergence as a world-class nation, diversity was no longer the issue. It may be true that Japan’s resistance to westernization was well recognized, but the presupposition of modernization’s power to homogenize culture was too firmly and uncritically held on to by researchers. National anthropology emerged precisely from within this process by sharply drawing national boundaries around Japan and excluding the population and phenomena that did not fit the economically healthy image of “the Japanese.” Unlike anthropological studies of some other industrialized capitalist societies where complex state structure and multi-layered relations of power are assumed, in the Japan field convenient keywords denoting the cultural core – be it ie or “wrapping” or Japanese miracle – maintained a holism. This holism is of a distinctly national sort. Since Vogel’s Japan as Number One, hardly any books on Japanese culture and society as a whole have been so influential, and by the end of the last century no serious and important author was writing about “the Japanese” in general. But the ideas and assumptions inherent in national character studies originating in wartime enemy studies have far from disappeared, as can be seen in studies of the Japanese self, to which I shall turn in the next chapter. If national anthropology erased Japanese individuals’ faces from the surface of their text, it was the study of Japanese self that took up

The emergence of national anthropology 165 the task of looking at them. Just like the national anthropology of Japan, studies of the Japanese self in good part overlapped with many works of nihonjinron. The discourse in this area also aimed to render Japanese uniqueness prominent and sought after the consensual model of “the Japanese,” thereby excluding marginals and ethnic groups. More importantly, studies of the Japanese self stand on a less complicated continuity with Benedict’s probing into Japanese personality, creating holism built around the “typical Japanese.” Studies of the Japanese self are an important, or, one might say, “organic,” partner of holistic national anthropology of Japan and they continue to thrive to this day, as I hope to show in the remainder of this book.

6

The Japanese self

From medicine to society Although in anthropology it is no longer fashionable to talk about “such and such people’s mentality” or “such and such group’s disposition,” the long-lasting popularity of the study of self has sustained the viability of psychological anthropology, the heir of the culture and personality school (see Hsu 1972). The self as a locus of investigation continues to attract attention from a wide assortment of clinical and sociological disciplines beyond the obvious fields of philosophy, psychoanalysis, and psychiatry, including social psychology, psychology, sociology, literary studies, gender studies, history, and, of course, anthropology. The study of the Japanese self is in this sense by no means a monopoly of anthropologists, although, as Sofue Takao notes, in US anthropological studies of Japan the sociopsychological and socio-psychiatric trend is uniquely strong (Sofue 1992: 237). As I stated earlier in this book, in the Japan field the study of the Japanese self was developed hand in hand with the approach to Japan as a national-cultural field as one of the two branches that stemmed from The Chrysanthemum and the Sword. What is distinct in the study of the Japanese self is that its origins can be traced back to medicine as well as to sociological and anthropological traditions. During the formative years of studying the Japanese self, participation by medical researchers (psychiatrists and psychoanalysts) played a crucial role. Though obviously not simply the study of the self, the way psychiatry and psychoanalysis redefined themselves in the face of the newly formulated Japanese relationship with the west, especially with the US, after Japan’s defeat in the war was crucial in understanding the subsequently flourishing studies of the Japanese self. Traditionally, psychiatry had been a minor field in Japanese medicine and the devastation of the war created more difficulties. During the war, about half of Japan’s 143 mental hospitals, with a combined bed capacity of 21,883, went out of operation (Cotton and Ebauch 1946: 342). As late as 1955, ten years after the war, the number of psychiatrists nationwide was estimated to be only about 800; the population of mentally ill in Japan,

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excluding neurotics but including severe character disorders, was about 3,500,000, of which 700,000 were psychotic; of those psychotics, 150,000 were deemed in need of hospitalization, but there were only 27,000 beds available, i.e. 18 percent of the necessary number of beds; the Japanese ratio of mental hospital beds to the total population was 2.2 per 10,000, while the US figure was 50 per 10,000 (Doi 1955: 693). But certainly there was a qualitative change between the periods before and after the war. During the prewar period, psychiatry developed under the heavy influence of the German school, with a focus on neurology and psychopathology with somatic treatment, including psychosurgery and the use of shocks and drugs. Very little emphasis was placed on counseling and especially clinical psychology with dynamic orientation (Tsushima 1958: 231). According to one observer, Japanese patients themselves requested somatic treatment rather than counseling therapy (Kato 1960). After the war, with the military occupation, US influence became predominant. But the process of switching to this influence was not smooth: the ethnocentrism of American practitioners and the insistence on cultural uniqueness on the part of Japanese practitioners clashed on multiple fronts. The excessive emphasis of American dynamic psychiatry on childhood experiences in explaining adult behavior was not easily accepted by Japanese practitioners (Uchimura 1954). If psychiatry was marginalized in the overall field of medicine in Japan, psychoanalysis was even more so. Before the war, analysts, who were very few in number, had received minimal training in Europe and their practice was unsystematic. Freud’s work had been known to Japanese practitioners from 1912, but its translation had to wait until the 1930s. It was only in 1955 that the nationwide association of analysts was founded, although provincial associations had existed (Y. Kitami 1956). Japanese psychiatrists paid little attention to Freud and psychoanalysis, and the relationship between psychiatry and psychoanalysis was one of antagonism, if not complete denial of each other. The most established native psychotherapy in Japan was Morita therapy. Invented by Morita Sh™ma, a psychiatrist, in the prewar period, this therapy treats nervosity or neurosis, which Morita and his followers broadly called nervous personality.1 The characteristics of this personality include hypochondriasis, extreme anxiety, avoidance of accepting facts and reality, obsessive perfectionism underpinned by an inferiority complex, lethargy and lack of purposefulness, and so on (A. Kondo 1953: 31–2). Morita therapy treats this condition with step-by-step therapy in an institutionalized environment, through hospitalization. During the first step, patients are confined to strictly isolated bed rest, they are not allowed to do anything, not even the most basic chores; during the second step, they are allowed to read and write, must keep a diary that will be commented on by the doctor, and also allowed to clean their room, wash, and take care of themselves; during the third step, they are allowed to do light manual work, while the

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diary entries continue; finally, they engage in hard work with the prospect of completing the therapy (Kora and Sato 1958; see also Jacobson and Berenberg 1952). Morita and his associates interpreted the philosophical background of the therapy as Zen Buddhism (Kora and Sato 1958; see Morita 1960). Ultimately, the therapy aims to bring the individual to a point where he or she can exist at one with his or her own self as well as with others, without an insatiable desire to be superior or to stand out. In other words, a harmonious personality that can accept his/her external environment is the goal of the therapy. In the postwar period the effectiveness of this therapy declined; one observer attributed this to the authoritarian attitude of healthcare practitioners and the changing attitude of Japanese patients, especially younger patients, resisting the authoritarian regimentation that was involved in the therapy (Tsushima 1958). Psychoanalysts in Japan confronted Morita therapy from an early stage. Since clinical psychology was almost non-existent in Japan, the minority psychoanalysts had a hard time establishing their methods and ideas as science or medicine (Kaketa 1958). Early Japanese psychoanalysts, including the pioneering practitioner Marui Kiyoyasu at Tohoku University, were in general antagonistic towards Morita and his associates. Marui investigated neurosis from a Freudian standpoint, which Morita’s Zen-oriented therapy was fundamentally against. In the prewar meetings of psychiatrists, Marui and Morita publicly engaged in fierce verbal exchanges (Doi 1955: 692). But their disagreement might have been exaggerated on the surface because in their orientations they were much closer to each other than they were to their western counterparts. Morita and his associates helped patients to face and accept their condition and to live with it from the Zen point of view, while psychoanalysts were also interested in “the psychoanalytical clarification of the Japanese people who have a particular and unique cultural background and the psychoanalytical study of Oriental religions such as Buddhism on which [sic] Freud was not able to delve into” (Kaketa 1958: 249). Seen from the west, both psychotherapies were suspect: whereas Japanese psychoanalysis was seen as another wing of nationalist thought (see pp. 169–70), Morita therapy was not fully understood. For example, two US military psychiatrists who visited Kyushu University Medical School to investigate its practice of Morita therapy were more interested in what was in their eyes the bizarre sexual behavior of the Japanese (some information was simply false) and noted that Morita therapy did not pay attention to dreams, failing to understand that Morita therapy was not intended to be psychoanalysis (Jacobson and Berenberg 1952).2 With the introduction of Morita therapy to the US after the war, western practitioners raised their concerns about the goal of the therapy, which was by and large understood to be social “conformity.” This was for Japanese practitioners a cultural difference that the ethnocentrism of western practitioners failed to appreciate.

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The western reaction to Japanese psychoanalysis was even stronger. James Moloney, an American psychiatrist, was most vocal in this regard. His book Understanding the Japanese Mind (1954) is a scathing attack on the Japanese (national) character, enhanced by psychoanalysis, as he saw it, although his premise is not a sound one, as I shall argue. Moloney is sensitive to history, at first glance, as he attributes Japanese submissiveness and conformity to the authority of the historically generated state apparatus and institutionalized thought control during the militarist regime. However, on the basis that the Japanese have retained for centuries, even prior to the prewar regime, an ideology that corresponds to the wartime notion of “national entity,” or kokutai – that is, the idea that all Japanese formed part of the whole national body, with the emperor at the core – Moloney insists that the end of the war and the US military occupation did not change their mentality. Furthermore, according to Moloney the Japanese are good at preserving their own way under a westernized surface, given their traditional two-facedness. For Moloney, Japanese psychoanalysis was wrong, since it aimed to uphold the emperor as superego and suppressed the ego’s development into maturity, with key concepts such as ie (household), k™d™ (the imperial way), chù (loyalty to the emperor), jich™ (self-restraint), musubi (harmony), among others (Moloney 1954: ch. 13). He states: It is quite evident that the Japanese policy is for the most part a policy that dissolves ego boundaries of the Japanese person, or in less technical jargon, the Japanese policy disindividualizes the Japanese. Their policy encourages a confluence of disindividualized persons into a homogeneity having no beginning nor end and is coeval with heaven, earth, and the person of the emperor. (Moloney 1954: 151) Moloney then quotes from a case treated by Kosawa Heisaku, a Japanese analyst, whose patient recovered a personality that was “as harmonious a one as can ever be reached by human beings” (1954: 200), and criticizes (almost mockingly) the case as a heresy of psychoanalysis.3 He continues: “A system so foreign to the national entity program as western psychoanalysis – stressing as it does the importance of adult stability, maturity and especially individualism – would have to be drastically overhauled to render it compatible with Japanese political requirements” (1954: 201). Moloney did not realize that his stance was as ideological as that of Japanese analysts: individualism, just like Japanese nationalism, is an ideology that was born of particular historical conditions. (One sees this most clearly thanks to the excellent example of the McCarthy frenzy in the US at around the time Moloney was writing his book.) In fact, the passages above show Moloney’s own limitations as much as the limitations of Japanese psychoanalysis.

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What Moloney was doing was in fact psychoanalyzing the Japanese nation, by using some government-issued doctrine – a method itself incompatible with general principles of psychoanalysis. In this process he showed his western-centrism, prejudice against the Japanese that one would find difficult not to call racism, still deeply entrenched in the wartime enemy studies approach and its understanding of the Japanese as immature and infantile, with strict toilet training in infancy which was supposed to have formed their aggressive personality (see Chapter 1 in this volume). His study echoed the postwar national security concern that was closely connected to war efforts and the emerging Cold War qualities – maturity, individuality, and self-reliance. The irony is, as will be shown, that one half-century later this negative take on the Japanese self, with almost exactly the same set of attributes, becomes a positive take on the Japanese self. The reaction to Moloney’s interpretation came from a former internist who was newly converted to psychiatry and then psychoanalysis, Takeo Doi, who was to play a key role in the upcoming boom in studies of the Japanese self. Doi was placed in an interesting intersection between Japan and the US. After graduating from Tokyo University School of Medicine, Doi served in the Japanese Army from 1942 to 1945. After the war he worked in internal medicine. In 1950 he became a fellow in the Menninger School of Psychiatry for two years, before returning to Japan as a psychiatrist in 1952. He did research in the San Francisco Psychoanalytic Institute (1955–6) and was a visiting scientist in the National Institute of Mental Health in Bethesda, Maryland (1961–3). His interest in psychiatry and psychoanalysis originated from his exposure to the books that were stored in the US Army hospital library, located in St. Luke’s International Hospital, where he worked during the Occupation (Maeda et al. 1958). Doi’s journeys between Japan and the US reflected his fall-out with the leading Japanese psychoanalyst, Kosawa: Doi did not agree with Kosawa, who is, according to Doi, “a devout Buddhist.” He said of Kosawa that “there seems to be no distinction in his mind between his religion and psychoanalysis” and that his approach to patients was quite authoritarian (Doi 1955: 694), a critique somewhat resonating with the ideas of Moloney. But Doi could not disagree more with Moloney regarding the latter’s view about Japanese psychoanalysis. He admits that Japanese analysts were not properly trained, but denounces Moloney for being one-sided about the goal of Japanese psychoanalysis: “Would [Japanese analysts or patients] be more Occidental after analysis than before, as may be derived from Dr. Moloney’s tacit assumption that the goal of psychoanalysis is co-existent or identical with that of Occidental individualism?” (Doi 1955: 694) Doi emphasizes cultural differences between westerners and Japanese and warns western practitioners against possible omission, misunderstanding, and misinterpretation of Japanese cases due to their lack of cultural literacy: “The reason for my apprehension is very simple, that the typical psychology of a given nation can be learned only through familiarity with its native language”

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(1955: 694). Interestingly, in the face of the western values imposed on Japan, Doi defends “national psychology” by way of “national language” – this is to become the anchoring point for his future study of the Japanese self (see Doi 1956, 1960a). One area in which Doi finds a difference between Japanese and westerners is the desire to be (passively) loved – or, as will subsequently become clear, the ability to verbally express such a desire. Receiving inspiration from Michael Balint, who placed emphasis on passive object-love as the key to remaining healthy (Balint 1965), Doi observes that, whereas Balint saw the completion of treatment when the patient could naturally express the desire to be loved, i.e. passive object-love, Doi sees the emergence of such desire at a relatively early stage among his Japanese patients. He raises a question: if passive object-love is an archaic desire that even precedes narcissism, as Balint suggests, how is this difference caused between Japanese and western patients? He seeks the answer to this question in the existence of an ordinary Japanese word, amaeru, whose equivalent is not easily found in European languages (Doi 1960b, 1960c, 1962). Amaeru is the verb form of amae, passive love, dependency, or indulgence. In his 1963 paper entitled “Some Thoughts on Helplessness and the Desire to Be Loved,” Doi states: I am attempting … to convey the main elements of what is a single concept in the Japanese language and culture, expressed most specifically in the verb amaeru, although there are other words which express variations on this theme. I have chosen this as the subject of this paper for two reasons. First, in my clinical work in Japan I have found that this concept is very useful in formulating the psychodynamics of neurotic patients. Furthermore, it seems to be useful for understanding the cultural context of Japanese society as well. Second, I think that what can be said about this concept may have a broader implication beyond the mere description of the regional characteristics of Japanese patients or society. In other words, although there is no single term in English which expresses this concept, I doubt that the underlying psychology is alien to English-speaking peoples, and I believe that this concept may serve as a kind of corrective for a certain type of thinking which is prevalent in American psychiatry. (Doi 1963: 266) By the time Doi wrote the above he had acquired an American collaborator, William Caudill, an anthropologist, who had visited Japan many times since his first fieldwork in 1954 and discovered in 1958 that he had similar interests to Doi while researching in Japanese psychiatric hospitals (Caudill 1961). As Doi moved from internal medicine to psychiatry and culturespecific psychoanalysis, Caudill moved from anthropology to psychiatry and psychoanalysis (see Caudill 1962a and Doi 1990, for example). Caudill had

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worked with Japanese Americans in Chicago on their adaptation after (forced) wartime relocation, focusing on their achievement, socialization, and emotional structure. His basic approach was within the influence of the culture and personality school and, through the use of psychological tests such as Rorschach and Thematic Apperception Test, he tried to understand the Japanese and Japanese-American personality (Caudill 1952; Caudill and De Vos 1956; Caudill 1962b).4 In one of their early collaborative works, Caudill and Doi studied three mental hospitals in Japan with three different types of therapies: organic, Morita, and psychoanalysis (Caudill and Doi 1961). They noticed that in the hospital that used organic therapy the use of non-medical nursing staff called tsukisoi was emphasized: tsukisoi were assigned to patients on a oneto-one basis and tended to assume the role of surrogate mother or sister, invoking the kinship relation widely found in Japan, according to the authors (see also Caudill 1961). In the Morita therapy hospital the standard treatment course that this therapy advocated was carried out (see pp. 167–8). The authors criticized it as excessively present-oriented and lacking in “digging deeper” into the psychodynamics of the patient – a point that is somewhat unjustified, given that Morita therapy was not meant to be a psychoanalytic treatment.5 In the third type of hospital, the psychoanalytical one, the authors also found shortcomings: although it was said to be psychoanalytical in method, treatment there depended more on insulin injection than on therapeutic counseling sessions with doctors. What I wish to emphasize about their study is not so much its content and findings as the authors’ assertion of the possibility of finding out about Japanese culture by studying various types of Japanese psychiatric hospitals. What they jointly emphasize about Japanese psychiatric hospitals is the patient–doctor relationship; they stress that there is a hierarchical boundary between doctor and patient, which prevents the patient from understanding his or her real self, which is not necessarily attributed to the techniques of Japanese psychiatry but, more broadly, to Japanese culture itself. For example, the fact that a greater number of firstborn male patients are found in those hospitals, according to Caudill and Doi, corresponds to the Japanese kinship structure, in which greater responsibility falls upon firstborn sons, thereby increasing the stress inflicted on them. In itself, this observation is accurate. But when they apply this data to Japanese society in general, beyond the confines of an institutionalized environment (i.e. psychiatric hospitals), a problem emerges. In other words, although their observation is confined to a clinically enclosed setting, they directly extend their data by applying its interpretation to Japanese society as a whole, with a focus on the Japanese personality without theoretical elaboration or matching empirical data found in Japanese society of the non-clinical population. Their working definitions and hypotheses are drawn from concepts and categories employed by wartime enemy studies and the culture and personality school, including the close tie between mother and child in early

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childhood and the internal containment of unfulfilled desire to return to infancy among adults; this is reminiscent of Geoffrey Gorer and Ruth Benedict (Caudill and Doi 1963).6 Through collaboration with Caudill, Japanese studies of self initiated by Doi and supported by his concept amae were introduced to American anthropology. From this point on, assertions about Japanese culture in general, which are derived from Japanese psychiatric institutions, and observation of the Japanese personality, which is formed on the basis of the taken-for-granted understanding of Japanese culture, would reinforce each other. For example, in a series of articles comparing the US and Japan, Caudill and his collaborators show that Japanese psychiatry, Japanese schizophrenics, and Japanese mother–infant relationships all need to be measured against their cultural background, and not by the US standard. Although this observation is correct, the authors then extend psychotic symptoms of Japanese patients to the non-psychotic population by broadly interpreting those as national personality traits (Caudill 1959; Schooler and Caudill 1964; Caudill and Weinstein 1969; Draguns et al. 1971). Caudill’s focus on mother–infant relationships should be understood in light of the postwar controversy over “momism” and its influence on psychiatry in the US (Wylie 1942). By the early 1950s, through the participation of psychiatrists, psychoanalysts, and other experts, the term “momism” was coined as a cultural menace for American masculinity that undermined national security in the Cold War era. Such a perception echoed the concern over combat exhaustion during World War II, which had been attributed to the overbearing intervention of the mothers of servicemen. By the early 1960s, white middle-class America was arguing for a new relationship between mother and infant: experts such as Karl Menninger suggested that the prewar sentimental ideals of motherhood were harmful for both mothers and infants and, except for the very early developmental stage (i.e. pre-genital), mothers should not handle children with intense love, as this would lead to guilt-consciousness in the child (Menninger with Menninger 1942; see also Lundberg and Farnham 1947).7 Interestingly, Caudill finds in Japan the opposite to what was found in the US. He reports that Japanese mothers are eager to meet the baby’s needs more promptly, while Japanese infants are less vocal compared to American babies. Regarding vocalization, Japanese infants tend to use negative vocalization, American infants positive. Japanese mother and baby stay in the same room close together and more often than not sleep together. Japanese mothers keep umbilical cords, the connection between mother and child. In sum, Japanese mothers have a hard time registering that their babies are autonomous individuals separate and independent from them (Caudill 1976). Some of the premises of Caudill and Doi derive from the work of Ruth Benedict and wartime national character studies. Their method of using finite data in a generalized manner to understand culture at large corresponds to Benedict’s method. Benedict’s focus on personality formation in

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close connection with cultural totality is evident in Caudill and Doi’s approach. The difference can be found in the object of explanation: whereas in wartime enemy studies it was Japanese aggressiveness that needed to be explained, it is now their passive and dependent self that needs to be explained. Doi and Caudill connect psychiatric symptoms with cultural factors without theoretical and empirical mediation and by doing so present Japanese symptoms as culturally inherent and generalizable, shared by both the mentally ill and the healthy, in turn constituting the Japanese self and not just Japanese psychiatric symptoms (see Caudill 1973). This generalization, unlike that of Benedict, is given more validation in the name of medicine and psychiatry. Through this process, the location of the self was displaced from psychiatric hospitals to society at large. In a way – and not totally unlike Moloney’s psychoanalysis of the Japanese nation – the psychopathology of Japanese society is taking place here, and this is what I call the medical origin of studies of into the Japanese self. This process went hand in hand with locating Japan in an anthropological framework: if Japanese kinship was unique – so unique that it could not fit into any of the existing categories of kinship, as Nakane (1967a) asserted – the Japanese self is fundamentally distinct from the western self: it is the self that does not assert itself, the self that does not have a clear self, the self that subverts western conventional notions of the individual and individualism, and the self that is not alienated from the society and environment. Most importantly, this non-assertive, non-individualist self is emerging (or preserved) despite Japan’s rapid postwar modernization. Reflecting this paradox, studies of the Japanese self flourished from the 1970s onwards, heralded by Doi’s best-selling The Anatomy of Dependence (1973), with Japan’s economic achievement and high-level industrialization increasingly capturing the world’s attention.

Amae, the universal derived from the cultural particular Just like Nakane’s Japanese Society (1970), Takeo Doi’s The Anatomy of Dependence sold phenomenally well in and outside Japan, both in Japanese (published in Japanese as Amae no k™z™ in 1971) and in English translation (in 1973). This book was relied upon as both a source and method of interpreting the Japanese self and is still used as the bible for the study of the Japanese self by practitioners of the psychological anthropology of Japan. Written in lay terms, the book is free from professional jargon. In fact, Doi’s use of clinical data in the book is minimal, compared to his use of other sources such as dictionaries, literature, philosophy, history, psychoanalysis, and sociology. “The key analysis of Japanese behaviour” – as the cover page of the 1973 English edition reads – the book is meant to propose an all-encompassing, once-and-for-all solution to understanding the enigma of the Japanese self and

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Japanese society. Amae is the keyword for this: we have already seen that Doi had been interested in this concept since the 1960s, although amae as “passive love” has always occupied a central place among Japanese psychoanalysts, and as such Doi was hardly original in this respect (see Dale 1986: ch. 8). Amae means many things, some of which are complementary, some contradictory. I can list at least the following from Doi’s text as meanings of amae: sweetness, optimism, satisfaction, self-indulgence, conceit, flirtation, presumptuousness, dependence, desire to belong to a group, fear of dropping out of a group, arrogance, servility, lack of pride, friendliness, stubbornness, a baby’s desire to have close contact with its mother, attention-seeking behavior, childishness in adults, and so forth. As such, it can be interpreted as denoting an emotion, an ideology, a set of behavioral manners, a state of mind, an ontological state, psyche, language, and culture, among others. According to Doi, amae is a thread running through all activities in Japanese society, just as ie is for Nakane. Whereas Nakane did not claim that ie is a universal practice or consciousness found in human societies beyond Japan, Doi is more ambitious in his claim for the scientific truth of amae: he proposes that the concept and reality that correspond to amae exist in other societies – meaning western societies. However, according to him it is in the Japanese linguistic repertoire of amae that we find a most readily accessible explanation for human psychology – westerners are not sensitive to it (Doi 1973: 68). We can see an element of elevating Japanese cultural uniqueness to Japanese cultural superiority. What is amae, though? For amae is not as straightforward or consistent as Doi hoped it would be. If it is at once both self-indulgence – as in a child insisting on his or her immediate wish being granted – and dependence – as in an adult conforming to a group decision even when it is contrary to his or her view – how can such a concept logically sustain itself, let alone be a unifier of a society or of social psyche (if such a thing exists)? For Doi, the New Left’s rebellion in the 1960s or Japan’s restoration of the emperor system in 1867 equally come down to the amae phenomenon; the Japanese sense of defeat following World War II as well as its postwar economic recovery are motivated and maintained by the amae mentality. When individuals are uptight, it is because of amae. When they are relaxed and feeling at home with the environment, it is also because of amae. When one dislikes one’s mother, that is because of the twisted amae. When one loves one’s mother, that is because of the honest amae. At least three criticisms need to be made here. First, for Doi’s amae world, historical transformations are taken supra-historically. Similar to Nakane’s ie, Doi’s amae fills Japan’s history and society of different times under different conditions. The conflation of individual psyche and national mentality is rooted in his handling of language and linguistic data – as has already been indicated in his earlier work (see pp. 170–1 here) – which is in my view problematical, and this is my second criticism.

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My second criticism is important and therefore I shall dwell on this by taking time before moving on to my third point. Resonating with the thoughts contained in his 1960s work, Doi writes: The typical psychology of a given nation can be learned only through familiarity with its native language. The language comprises everything which is intrinsic to the soul of a nation and therefore provides the best projective test there is for each nation. (Doi 1973: 15) What is a national language and how is it made? Japanese standard language as it is taught now in schools under the guidelines of the Ministry of Education was born about a century ago and is even more recent if we take into account how long it takes for it to be learned and used by various local vernacular speakers in Japan. Provincial language (not just accents), ethnic language (such as Ainu, Okinawan, and Korean), occupational jargon, constantly imported foreign words, frequently updated vogue expressions, never-fixed catchphrases of media and advertisements, and more – where are they placed in Doi’s “national language”? Furthermore, when he says “the soul of a nation” who does he include in the nation, only those who speak good standard language? (See K. Tanaka 1981; Masiko 1997.) A nationally unified standard language is necessarily the product of state intervention and is subjected to constant intervention thereafter. Sometimes, the state creates a brand new language for the nation, portraying it as traditional; sometimes it re-coins the old language, portraying it as brand new. The process of the making of a national language, as we can see from Bourdieu’s (1993) critique of Parisian French, always involves the suppression of marginal languages. In Japan itself, the process of national standardization of the language took the form of privileging the Tokyo vernacular and suppressing other regional vernaculars. Such a process has nothing to do with the national psychic disposition: it has more to do with the top-down imposition of rules and codes which is institutionally implemented through the school education system. In other words, there is no such thing as a naturally given national disposition that is supposed to be embodied in the national language as the “soul” of a nation. Let us look more closely at Doi’s equation of national language and national psyche. If we were to concede that there is one unified national language, corresponding to a unified national mentality, how is it legitimized to see this as “comprising everything which is intrinsic to the soul of a nation”? Here, two sets of questions arise: 1 2

Can language and thought be equated? In other words, is language a reflection of what one thinks? Can words and meaning be equated? In other words, is a name a reflection of what it is in its nature?

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The second set of questions arises from nomenclaturism – that is, a doctrine that sees a correspondence between essence and natural names. Ever since Plato, the conflict between arbitrary names and natural names has been discussed in philosophy and linguistics, among other academic disciplines. It is Plato’s view that everything has a right name of its own, which comes by nature, and that a name is not whatever people call a thing by agreement, just a piece of their own voice applied to the thing, but that there is a kind of inherent correctness in names, which is the same for all men, both Greeks and barbarians. (Cratylus 383, A/B; quoted in Harris 1988: 9) Thus, in this Platonic passage, natural names are seen as an outer expression of the nature of that which is named, and there is an inherent connection between nature and the name. This is nomenclaturism. A trend which is in parallel to nomenclaturism is surrogationism. According to Roy Harris, surrogationism “accepts as axiomatic the principle that words have meaning for us because words ‘stand for’ – are surrogates for – something else. Hence the key question is always ‘How does this word relate to what it stands for?’ ” (1988: 10). Some philosophers are troubled by this tradition of nomenclaturism and surrogationism. Wittgenstein was one of them. He opens Philosophical Investigations with the following quotation from St. Augustine: I grasped that the thing was called by the sound [my elders] uttered when they meant to point it out. Their intention was shewn by their bodily movements, as it were the natural language of all peoples: the expression of the face, the play of the eyes, the movement of other parts of the body, and the tone of voice which expresses our state of mind in seeking, having, rejecting, or avoiding something. Thus, as I heard words repeatedly used in their proper places in various sentences, I gradually learnt to understand what objects they signified; and after I had trained my mouth to form these signs, I used them to express my own desires. (Confessions, I. 8; quoted in Wittgenstein 1963: 2) What Augustine suggests is in fact what we experience when we learn a foreign language: we learn foreign words by tracing the correspondence between the words we already know from our first language and then making a corresponding pair. This is a surrogationistic approach, the only difference being that in this case there is a word-to-word correspondence, not a word-to-object correspondence. Wittgenstein ultimately rejects this correspondence, or surrogationism, by proposing to see language not as the aggregate of isolated names, each

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“standing for” some designated object, but to see it as a system or corpus of word uses: “The meaning of a word is its use in the language” (1963: 20). With this, Wittgenstein rejects the nomenclaturist premise of relying on name–nature identicality; instead, he comes up with the notion of the language game. For example, in playing chess it would not be sufficient to register a knight as a sound/name and what it looks like; one has to know how to move it according to the rules of the game. Names are not uttered or learned in isolation from the entire set of rules. This is a view that regards meaning not as an innate, self-sufficient thing behind words, but as something that is created through playing the game, through working the system – that is, usage or use: unless it is in use, the meaning of a word is not fully explored or materialized. When the utterance is made, the meaning is created not in isolation, but through activating the institution – that is, in the sense of custom or habit. Nothing here, including utterance, meaning, and rules, is fixable or stands alone. Rather, they all form part of the entire system. When I say the language system, I do not mean a semantic or syntactic system as written in a grammar book: language is only used socially, and no other way of language use is possible and, as such, it is always an ideological act, in the sense that there is no society that is free from ideology (see Volosinov 1973). Bearing this in mind, let us think about Doi’s approach again. Doi gives us list after list of Japanese words, which he thinks are closely related to amae (1973: ch. 2). Except for a small number of cases where he cites his patients’ words, idiomatic examples are taken predominantly from dictionaries. Even his patients’ words are the words that are uttered in a clinical setting, where social interaction bears limited dimensions of that between doctor and patient. In other words, the linguistic data Doi cites come in isolation from social practice and everyday life.8 A mere list of words in itself cannot be justified as having a social effect or function, since the meaning of the word has to be considered in a socially institutionalized usage. A mere chain of deductively collected words, picked up from the dictionary, is meaningless in terms of explaining the words’ social life or the social game in which each word plays its role in relation to other words. Doi, however, in a manner combining surrogationism and nomenclaturism, assumes a stable nature or real essence behind the word amae. Hence amae “stands for” many things, as we saw. A good example of Doi’s surrogationism is manifested when he refers to the Japanese habit of apologizing. Unlike Nakane, who does not acknowledge Benedict, Doi takes many examples from Benedict and builds his discussion around them. In one such exercise, he concentrates on the word sumanai, which was also explored by Benedict. Literally, this word means “things have not finished yet” and can be interpreted as “I still owe you a favor.” But, of course, in most ordinary senses its English equivalent is “I’m sorry” or “I’m obliged.” According to Doi:

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The question here, however, is why the Japanese are not content simply to show gratitude for a kind action but must apologize for the trouble which they imagine it has caused the other person. The reason is that they fear that unless they apologize the other man will think them impolite with the result that they may lose his good will. (Doi 1973: 31) They “fear,” says Doi, but on what basis? Do Japanese “fear” discommunication or miscommunication whenever they say “sorry”? Hardly. Whenever we say in English “Oh my God,” do we think about God? No. Similarly, when Japanese or anyone else apologize, it is an act as much of convention as of feelings. This kind of utterance bears the function that is attributed to what J. L. Austin (1975) calls “performative speech.” Performative utterance is the utterance that is built into the ritual routine of everyday language and, as such, it acts more than it says, as in the case of the efficacy of saying “I do” in the wedding ceremony. “I’m sorry” more often than not belongs to this kind of statement; it does more – showing an apology or, to a lesser degree, indebtedness – than it says. In this sense, whether Japanese “fear” or not is irrelevant; it is more important to say this in order to make an apology, which might or might not be felt with the utmost sincerity. This, again, is not unique to the Japanese language. In cases of casual apology, the use of “sorry” is ubiquitous in England, while in the US “excuse me” would be heard more often. Both are predominantly performative statements, rather than statements that bear particular emotion.9 Let me now move on to my third criticism, which concerns the following passage from Doi: By his very nature man seeks the group, and cannot survive without it. If the rejection of the “small self ” in favor of the “larger self ” is extolled as a virtue, it becomes easier for him to act in concert with the group. In this way friction in human relations within the group is kept to a minimum, and the efficiency of group activity enhanced. It is this, chiefly, that accounts for the way the Japanese have been able since ancient times to pull together in times of national danger. In the same way, the rapid modernization that startled the West following the Meiji Restoration, and the energy which, following the end of World War II, raised Japan within a quarter of a century from exhaustion to a position as one of the world’s great economic powers, were both due, not only to the willingness to adapt and assimilate … but also to the ease with which the national effort can be bent towards a single end. (Doi 1973: 135) I have already pointed out that language use is necessarily an ideological act and in this light the above extract is a worrying one: it explicitly celebrates

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the Japanese capacity to get even with the west, while totally condoning Japanese nationalism, imperialism, and domination of other nations in the region.10 Although Doi takes a scientific outlook in his clinical analysis of amae, his text has a number of side-effects of ideological propaganda regarding Japanese cultural uniqueness and superiority.

Words and ontology Although Doi is not an anthropologist, the influence of his work has been tremendous in anthropological studies of the Japanese self. More specifically, it is the influence of his methodology, deciphering the national culture from the national language, which has been most enduring in the study of the Japanese self. Often, anthropologists who rely on linguistic data in order to reach the cultural core of the Japanese and the Japanese self pay little attention to the historical process by which the current Japanese language has become the national standard language and, just like Doi, take for granted that whatever is spoken in Japan should reflect the Japanese inner self. Brian Moeran’s article “Individual, Group and Seishin” (1984) is one such example. Although this is a short article, I shall discuss it here in some detail because it shows the typically Doi-inspired national psycholinguistic approach to the Japanese self. Throughout his article, Moeran relies on David Parkin’s notion of “key verbal concepts” (Parkin 1978) and “set words” or “invariable words” (Parkin 1976), which constitute the core component of a given culture. He suggests that the “set word” of Japanese culture is seishin, or spirit, on the basis that this word was discussed by many Japanese specialists, including Befu (1980a), Frager and Rohlen (1976), and Dore (1958). The usage of the term varies: Befu suggests that seishin provides an alternative to the group model in understanding Japanese society;11 Frager and Rohlen saw it as an ideology connecting Japanese individuals with their nationalist tradition and national entity; Dore saw Japan’s seishin collapse with Japan’s defeat in the war. For Befu, it is a tool to understand Japanese society and, as such, in itself it does not have any particular ideological value; for Frager and Rohlen and Dore, seishin is a particular ideology that is historically redefined or diminished. Interestingly, therefore, for Befu seishin is an ideology in general in the Althusserian sense, while for the rest it is an ideology in particular. The former is not subject to historical change, while the latter is (Althusser 1984). In other words, although there have been many discussions on seishin, it is far from agreed upon among specialists of Japan exactly what it means and how it functions in society. What is seishin? According to Moeran, it contains in itself concepts that are widely used in Japan to explain “strength,” “fortitude,” “perseverance,” “single-mindedness,” “group spirit,” “self-discipline,” “loyalty,” and “devotion” (Moeran 1984: 258). Moeran’s seishin thus encompasses many things which Benedict, Nakane, and Doi suggested in other forms, including on,

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giri, ie, and amae. According to Moeran, “[s]eishin is being called upon to combat what are seen to be the evils of Western capitalism and individualism. Somehow people – especially young people – have to be guided into identifying with a ‘Japaneseness’ which will conquer these evils” (1984: 259). In a way, then, seishin is a versatile, convenient, very useful keyword in Moeran’s view that explains Japanese cultural values. Against this broad claim, Moeran’s ethnographic data comes through a peculiarly narrow channel: the language used in TV high-school baseball tournament broadcasts. According to him, despite baseball simply being a sport, the tournament broadcast abounds with words that have moral disciplinary implications, including “conscientious,” “resolve,” “ending,” “perseverance,” “austere,” and so on. Moeran draws our attention to the rhetoric, in which the baseball games are assumed to be not just about strength and skill, but really a lot about spiritual discipline. From this, Moeran assesses the tournament to be not merely an educational event organized for high-school students under the sponsorship of the Ministry of Education, or more pragmatically an opportunity for recruitment of future professional baseball players. Rather, he sees it as touching a core of Japanese culture and argues that it is the notion of seishin that connects the games with the Japanese spiritual essence. For him, the tournament is particularly relevant in the sense that its moral education is geared not only toward the self-discipline of young individuals but also the need to show team spirit, which is crucial in this case, since the most important part of this notion is its function to unify individuals as a group through the bond of the Japanese spirit. He suggests that what could be taken as oldfashioned and dying out, as in Dore’s assessment of seishin, is not only alive and well in Japanese society but thrives as modernization progresses since the Japanese self is in constant connection with society at large. In a way Moeran collapses the distinction between ideology in general and ideology in particular in his interpretation of seishin. As such, this is an original formulation. For him, seishin is both the content and the vehicle of the ideological workings of Japanese society. In many senses, Moeran’s discussion reflects the shift in the tradition of the culture and personality school in anthropological studies of Japan. As David Plath and Cora Du Bois playfully put it, national character had left the nursery at last, meaning that childhood studies would no longer suffice as an explanation of the Japanese self and that studies of the Japanese self have now moved on to explore maturity and individuals’ maturation processes (Plath and Du Bois 1974). Whereas Doi’s amae continued to obtain clues from the mother–infant bond, later researchers such as Moeran freed themselves from this obsession with infancy and expanded the analytical scope of the Japanese self to diverse social terrains. Nevertheless, the basic methodology of extracting the essence from finite linguistic data remains identical to Doi’s, as shown in Moeran’s discussion of another word, kokoro. From its mention in Doi’s work (1973), kokoro

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became one of the gate-keeping words in studies of the Japanese self.12 In Moeran’s view kokoro, or heart, has an ambivalent relationship to seishin. Just like seishin, kokoro refers to self-discipline and moral standards, which need to be kept high. But, unlike seishin, kokoro excludes skill and technique as negative or irrelevant. Whereas the self-disciplinary seishin moves individuals toward the achievement of higher goals involving technical attainment, kokoro is more about sincerity, feelings, and emotion, without involving manipulation of any sort. Just like Doi, Moeran gives a long list of kokororelated words chosen from dictionary entries. Interestingly, according to him, whereas seishin is more about Japaneseness, kokoro can be used in combination with non-Japanese and western concepts. But, there is definitely an original aspect to the Japanese use of kokoro: “[t]hat kokoro is the most popular word in Japanese advertising copy represents at one level the triumph of irrational ‘feeling’ over rational ‘mind’ ”, and, on another level, “kokoro’s use poses a fundamental question concerning the relation between the Japanese and Western concept of ‘mind’ ” (Moeran 1984: 263). Here, what was “mind” in the western concept is adopted into and modified by Japanese cultural logic as “heart.” The problem with Moeran and many other linguistically oriented psychological anthropologists of Japan is their use of language. Language in itself is not culture; the two do not completely overlap. Language can create a culture, but is also created by a culture; language is a reflection of culture, but is also constitutive of it. In this sense, following how some isolated words are used in the media should not allow a researcher to draw a conclusion such as Moeran’s that: “Western culture and Western technology are seen by the Japanese as products of Cartesian rationalism” (1984: 263) or “[t]here is … a ‘hard core’ of keywords numbering perhaps not more than a hundred, which seems to deal adequately with all aspects of Japanese culture” (1984: 264; my emphasis). Language and culture or language and intellectual tradition cannot be equated in this way: it is not necessary, for example, that “Cartesian rationalism” is understood by the Japanese, or, for that matter, by so-called westerners; to see “the west” as foreign is one thing, but to see it as “Cartesian” is entirely another, since the former presupposes otherness as opposed to nativeness, while the latter presupposes a knowledge of Cartesian philosophy shared between the anthropologist and the natives. Nor is it guaranteed that because Moeran may have heard “perhaps not more than a hundred” words on TV or advertisements, “all aspects of Japanese culture” can be explained “adequately” by using these words only (1984: 264; my emphasis). Nevertheless, Moeran makes a further point, suggesting that in Japan the domains in which keywords are found, including politics, esthetics, economics, and so on, overlap, while in English these domains are kept separate from each other. So, for example, whereas seishin and kokoro can be used in such diverse spheres as politics, baseball, and pottery exhibition, in

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England words that are used in politics are not used in commercial advertisements or cricket matches. From this, he concludes that there is a correlation between the greater overlap of the domains of keywords and “close-knit social organization such as is found in Japan” and less overlap of these domains corresponds with a “fairly loose-structured type of society, of which England and US are examples” (1984: 264). This is puzzling: what is a close-knit or loose-structured society? In what way is Japan more closely knit than Britain or the US? It does not take an expert to realize that even in the English language words used in politics and sports or commercial advertisements overlap, sometimes completely: “strategy,” “tackle,” “presentation,” “chart,” “calculation,” “trust,” “profit,” “margin,” “risk,” “stock,” “yield,” “victory,” etc. When the politics resembles so much of the marketing, as in the US, how can one talk about the separation of politics and advertising, unless a party is barred from media access by the government, as Sinn Fein was for a long time? Moeran’s proposition is, therefore, not tenable. I shall cite one other psycholinguistic example akin to Moeran’s. Jane Bachnik’s work, represented in the volume she co-edited with Charles Quinn, Jr., Situated Meaning: Inside and Outside in Japanese Self, Society, and Language (1994), starts from an insight that is shared by all the contributors to the book, that “ ‘inside/outside’ coordinates are fundamental to Japanese self, society, and language” (Bachnik and Quinn 1994: xiii). The inside–outside coordinates she discusses are uchi and soto in Japanese, which are ordinarily in binary opposition, meaning inside and outside, respectively. More broadly, uchi can mean “the house,” “our group,” “our/us/we,” “inclusive,” “internal,” “during,” “family,” and so forth; in a way its parameters heavily overlap with those of ie. Conversely, soto can mean “out,” “foreign,” “others,” “excluding,” “outside,” “outsiders,” and so on. Building on what has largely been spelled out in Takeo Doi’s The Anatomy of Self (1988), Bachnik characterizes the way these co-ordinates are used in the Japanese language as deictic and indexical, meaning that, depending on the point on which one stands, one can create a new uchi/soto pair by pointing in various directions. In this way, Bachnik proposes that social relations in Japan are based on the principle of constantly adjusting and readjusting who constitutes the in-group/inside/same team on the one hand and the out-group/outside/other team on the other, i.e. the principle of relative and situational distancing, implying that the same person can be insider or outsider depending on the situation (see Bachnik 1994a). The merit of seeing Japan this way, according to Bachnik, is that it opens up discussion of a de-centered self, the self as a vacuum, which is simultaneously a space that can be filled with a web of human relations and social entanglements, rather than a space that is governed by self-sufficient, selfconstituting principles, as is often assumed in the self portrayed by traditional western individualism.13 Furthermore, Bachnik proposes to link the uchi/soto opposition with the study of Japanese society and culture that

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goes beyond contemplation of the Japanese self. In a manner similar to Nakane, who, as we have seen, places her entire study on the principle that the ie system is the foundation of Japanese society – the approach Bachnik herself followed in her other work (see Chapter 5 in this volume) – Bachnik states: [T]he significance of uchi/soto extends beyond the directional coordinates of “inside” and “outside”; and … specifically these terms link the directional coordinates with self, society, and language; moreover, they provide an organizational dynamic for this linkage. To put this another way, we propose that the universally defined orientations for inside/outside are linked with culturally defined perspectives for self, society, and language in Japan. (Bachnik 1994a: 7; original emphasis) In other words, if one understood the uchi/soto coordinates, one would understand Japan and the Japanese for the most part.14 Can there be such a convenient window to allow a society as complex as Japan to reveal itself in such a simplistic way? Would any anthropologist state that US society and culture consist of ego-centered principles simply because the existing theories of the self in the US suggest this? In other words, are we here to assume that theories of a particular self can be unproblematically taken as theories about the society to which this self supposedly belongs? Without waiting for theoretical scrutiny, our vocational intuition would tell us to hesitate in labeling US society simply in accordance with what existing studies of the self in the US suggest. The main reason why we hesitate is because it is apparent to everyone that US society is a complex organization which is hard to unify under the single orientation of its disposition, proclivity, and culture, given its tradition of “freedom of speech,” ethnic and racial plurality, multiple religious orientations, class division, diverse sexual orientations, to cite only a few. Of course, this diversity is only relative and in some aspects US society is less tolerant of individual freedom than other societies. Nevertheless, common sense has it that it would be intellectually risky to present a view of US society, culture, and self under one all-embracing principle. Such is not the case for Japan. “The Japanese” as framed by the previous works headed by the paradigmatic Chrysanthemum are invoked and reinvoked in the same mold, since there exists an a priori idea of who the Japanese are and how they should be behaving, how their society is supposed to work and how their cultural logic should surface – to us, the researchers, or, better still, western or western-trained anthropologists. It was still possible in the 1990s, as it were, to study the Japanese with the methods used from the 1940s to the 1970s. The Japanese became an unchanging people whose tradition runs through and through under the surface of a modern economy and high-tech capitalism.

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To inherit the old methods for studying 1990s Japan was to inherit the old problems also. As has already been pointed out, Chie Nakane’s study was effective in obscuring various forms of power by focusing overly on one set of relations within an elite group and yet representing it as Japan’s national culture. A similar side-effect is evident in Bachnik’s work when she singles out a finite number of linguistic tendencies and calls them fundamental to Japanese self, society, and language. Rather than listing these directional co-ordinates as fundamentals of Japanese society, the question seems to be who is regarded as the insider, on what criteria, and in what context. Commonsensically, everybody distinguishes insider and outsider depending on the distance from him/herself or his or her own group. Everyone – not just the Nuer and the Japanese – allies him/herself with certain people and adjusts the alliance when the situation changes. What needs to be seen in Japan is who is whose “insider,” who is whose “outsider,” and how historically the insider and outsider are formed and regrouped, reflecting whose interest and which kinds of power relations prevailing in society. Just to say that “Japanese culture works on the principle of insider/outsider distinction” is a truism, but it also ultimately replicates the existing exclusion of certain people from mainstream society on the basis of ethnic, occupational, or other difference. Such a view endorses and naturalizes the social exclusion and marginalization of certain people. Methodologically, just like Nakane’s, Bachnik’s approach would be to effectively celebrate the Japanese national character as it stands, rather than critically analyzing it. There is one more problem with her methodology, notably in terms of the level of analysis: she concentrates on person-to-person exchange, or, to borrow her vocabulary, “indexical” relations. Conversational data are taken from personal exchanges of words and presented to the reader in isolation from social relations of power, historical conditions, economic change, and political economy. Not only Bachnik but many other researchers of the Japanese self appear to believe that the presentation of conversational pieces on a personal level suffices to substantiate their study of self, as if to reason that the study of self is about verbally expressed personal perceptions. This is misleading. No self stands in isolation from society. Even the socalled individualistic self of the west stands in opposition – that is, in a certain relation – to society. If the Japanese self is, as Bachnik (1994a, 1994b) suggests, so tightly and intricately connected to society, the personal conversational data need to be analyzed with reference to the socio-historical terrain in which specific utterances are enunciated.15 Furthermore, no utterance is innocent, politically neutral, or free from the effects of the dominant ideology. One needs to explore why particular linguistic data are presented in this specific way, and what kind of social mechanism makes these words, and not others, dominant in day-to-day utterances, since all utterances are historically conditioned.

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Let us take uchi, for instance. During World War II Americans were placed in soto, in the sense that Japan fought the war against the US. Asians were, on the other hand, seen as uchi, reflecting the belief in the East Asian Co-prosperity Sphere. After the war the US became an ally against the communists, while Asians were relegated to the soto domain; with this, Japan’s wartime exploitation of Asians and war crimes against them disappeared from Japan’s public discourse and the everyday conscience of Japanese individuals. In this picture, the constituents of uchi and soto historically shifted. But Bachnik’s approach would not allow us to see it this way, since it emphasizes the timeless principle of Japanese society and culture as a natural component forming the Japanese self in “indexical” relations: there is a crucial absence of historical and political-economic sensitivity in her presentation of uchi and soto. Bachnik parallels the Japanese directional orientation with Pierre Bourdieu’s habitus, among others (Bachnik 1994a: 22). It is true that Bourdieu uses many linguistic references and social effects created by the deployment of certain utterances. A deployment of a linguistic form is a product of the interaction between spontaneous individual utterances and the structural norm that precedes and hence defines the scope of such individual utterances. The mode of interaction between individual, spontaneous utterances and the socially prescribed norm is what we can identify as habitus. The study of a habitus can be complete only when we look at both individual utterances in the person-to-person situation and the structural norm that is a product of the historically generated mode of social reproduction, involving state intervention, economic relations, media and education, and international power relations. Only to list individual utterances, no matter how likely it seems that there is a kind of regularity among speakers, is an incomplete account of habitus, and without giving the sociohistorically generated structural norm such a listing is arbitrary in the final analysis. A Japanese person who has gone through at least nine years of compulsory education, in addition to three more years of high school and probably between two and four years of college, is not free from the stateimplemented national language education, or the school-disseminated moral value system as embodied in the state-engineered school textbooks, the mass media, the print industry, and other cultural apparatuses. They would also possess the ability to reflect critically on the social environment and historical conditions within which they are placed. We cannot account for those by merely looking at their utterances.

Construction and deconstruction In recent years, studies of the Japanese self have been subdivided into two overlapping, yet different, streams: one that implicitly but directly inherits the culture and personality school, replicating Japanese national character

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discourse and the discourse on the Japanese personality; and another that seeks to explore identity and subject positions as perceived by individuals in the field, under the influence of postmodernism. The former view is entrenched in the myopic merry-go-round of collecting psychological traits that are in their method most readily observed in language and behavioral patterns, often acquired in historically and socially decontextualized vacuum-like settings – in the survey or mechanical observation of interactive subjects in an artificial setting, for example. The latter is different, in that this type of study is explicitly oriented toward rethinking the much-loved models and gate-keeping concepts such as amae. But they often overlap due to some shared problems in methodology that are entrapped in an essentializing tendency toward the Japanese self in stark distinction from the western self, thereby preserving and at times reinforcing the cultural dichotomy between Japan and the west (or, indeed, the rest). Although much of the achievement of Dorinne Kondo’s Crafting Selves (1990), which I classify in the latter stream of the above and which I will closely look at in this last section of the chapter, comes from her lucid discussion on the multifaceted Japanese self, I start my discussion of Kondo’s work with a focus on the connection between her notion of ie and her study of multiple selves; this connection will illuminate in important ways aspects of advantage as well as disadvantage in studies of the Japanese self as shown by Kondo. Her work, which utilizes many postmodern theories, retains some conservative aspects of the ie study, as I hope to show. The ie studied by Kondo is different from Nakane’s and Bachnik’s as discussed in the previous chapter in that Kondo focuses on both historical and discursive aspects of ie. Kondo, a third-generation Japanese American, who was studying for her Ph.D. at Harvard at the time, went to Japan for fieldwork. She relates in the earlier pages of her book how she found herself to be a stranger amidst her relatives and Japanese friends; she tells us how her own self was disrupted in the face of the discrepancy between her Japanese relatives’ expectation of the Japanese-looking anthropologist and her own American-bred social presumptions (1990: ch. 1). Working as a part-time worker at a confectionery factory in Tokyo, Kondo explores in her research the identities of her co-workers revolving around work, gender, and other social connections, including artisanal identity. She tries to understand these by looking at the workers’ relation to the tools of work such as machine and craftsmanship; the gender specificity of workers and gendered aspects of their work relations; and how differences in age and experience could influence the relationships among individuals. Her method is explicitly postmodern in the sense that she emphasizes the discursivity and discursively produced shifting identity within the field that is conditioned by the relations of power, rather than focusing on a fixed language of identity as so many of her predecessors and contemporaries studying the Japanese did. She resists encapsulating individuals in

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their pre-designated roles, presenting a lucid account of processes by which individuals assume various identities, by “crafting selves.” She suggests in her conclusion that selves are not single and one, but multiple. She shows how the process marked by the relations of power creates and reproduces the different aspects of self and how in this process individuals appropriate the available discourse to carve out their own identities. How do her contentions regarding self relate to her study of ie, and particularly, in her formulation, of discursive ie? Her emphasis on discursivity provides a way of connecting ie and self meaningfully; but this very strategy prevents her accounts of Japanese self from being completely free from the existing limitations of studies of the Japanese self. In order to see this we need to start with historical ie. Kondo’s historical ie is not a rural ie of the d™zoku type, but is a mercantile ie, a particular ie, as opposed to the more generic ie of Nakane, Shimizu, or Bachnik. Although she does not specify this, her particular mercantile ie is a Kansai type, found in western Japan, very different from the northeastern d™zoku (see Chapter 4, note 11). Historically, it is specific to the Tokugawa period of the seventeenth to late nineteenth centuries. Those who possessed ie were either wealthy or powerful or both. In Kansai mercantile ie, non-economic, familial relations were abundantly found. So the apprentices, typically recruited from the poor rural population not related to the main house, were not paid wages, but given various kin-like benefits including eventual semi-independence in managing their own branch store under the financial support and protection of the main house (D. K. Kondo 1990:162–6). According to Kondo, in the late nineteenth century two distinct factors changed these conditions. The first was the rise of the capitalist economy. Many large-scale manufacturing factories were built, where workers were recruited on cash terms and by economic contracts. The other was the rise of Japan as a modern state and the legal reforms that accompanied it. Legally, the kin group came to be defined as blood relations and no longer extended to apprentices who were regarded ambiguously as part kin and part employee. The solution was often legal adoption, but adopting someone as an apprentice and adopting someone as kin are two fundamentally different things on many fronts, including inheritance. The legal separation of the mercantile ie head and his apprentices was to render relations between them more economically accountable, rather than explainable in terms of extra-economic, family-like ties (D. K. Kondo 1990: 166–72). Having established the relevance of the historic evolution of mercantile ie, Kondo shifts the focus to concrete ethnographic data in which the notion of “the company as family” is central in maintaining the employer–employee relationship in her confectionery factory. Her ethnography is compelling: she skillfully depicts individuals and their delicate calculations and concerns through disagreements, frictions, confrontations, favoritisms, jealousy, complaints, solidarity, ambivalent obligations, loyalty, etc.

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Kondo’s key idiom is uchi no kaisha, which can be translated as “my company,” “our company,” or “our family company.” By following how this idiom is appropriated by both employer and employees, Kondo gives us a good insight into it: In many instances, there is a sharp demarcation between the shach™ [the company owner] and his family, and the employees, a demarcation played out in spatial symbolism, in the payment of wages, in the according of respect and deference, and in working conditions. It is difficult always to maintain the guise of harmonious familial relations when, for example, you have installed cameras on the shop floor to check up on your workers. In another sense, though, the “company as family” metaphor must embrace all workers at least some of the time, and the Sato family attempts to impart the family flavor (kazoku no aji o tsukeru) through a variety of institutional and informal practices. (D. K. Kondo 1990: 203) Behind the intention of “imparting the family flavor” on the part of the employer and his family, the same “company as family” notion is taken very differently by the employees. For example, the company trip that she describes was from the employer’s point of view a benevolent act extended to the workers, while from the workers’ point of view it was nothing beyond their entitlement as employees. The same goes for other incidents, such as a discount sale of the leftover gateaux; the employer saw it as a generous, paternal act, while the workers took it as an insult (D. K. Kondo 1990: ch. 6). When we see the uchi no kaisha idiom on this scale, the term is used by employers and employees in almost opposite ways, and even employees among themselves can use it in contradictory and contrasting ways depending on the situation. For example, from one employee’s point of view, when the company owner denotes only his own immediate family when using uchi it is too narrow a definition of uchi, which contradicts Japanese familialistic tradition. For skilled workers, who have a stronger artisanal identity than do part-timers, uchi is accepted as a positive identification point with their company and the confectionery products they create; quality-wise and technique-wise, uchi’s gateaux are far better than others. Here, uchi is associated with pride in oneself and self-esteem, although it is closely connected to the group identity of the Sato factory. For the employer, uchi denotes his authority and the boundaries to which his authority extends. In his uchi, the company owner can be a dictator and ultimately expel those who do not obey him. But, equally, within uchi he is constrained not to behave in an extreme way so as not to alienate employees and he has to maintain a symbiotic relation with his employees – not totally dissimilar to the honke–bunke relation of d™zoku, as shown in Chapter 4. The parameters of uchi expand or shrink depending on its deployment, and the function varies depending on its use; whether uchi denotes a positive or

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negative meaning depends entirely on the position individuals define when using this discourse. This idiom is “transformed by various actors in a multiplicity of creative ways” (D. K. Kondo 1990: 212). As such, the idiom functions as a vessel that can be loaded with varying meanings. And this is how a certain family resemblance emerges between the use of the uchi no kaisha deployed by various individuals and the different selves that individuals craft. But this idiom cannot be an empty vessel that can contain just any meaning; there is a limit to meaning here, since after all it denotes the entity to which individuals belong in unequal capacities – how they belong, how far, and how little, are all different. It is in this connection that Kondo develops the self’s identification with others and the group one belongs to. And in this connection she rejects a clear-cut notion of the resisting self that aspires to move to a “place beyond power” (1990: 224), as is often assumed in the western ethnographies on power and resistance (e.g. Scott 1985; Willis 1977; Lamphere 1987). According to Kondo, A term like resistance, when considered in all its living complexity, seems inadequate at best, for apparent resistance [in a setting like the Sato factory] is riven with ironies and contradictions, just as coping or consent may have unexpectedly subversive effects. (D. K. Kondo 1990: 224) It is here that I suspect a conservatism in Kondo’s thesis, since, I wonder, can one throw away resistance? Although Kondo argues for a multiple, more flexible view of lifestyle and selves’ relation to society which may not necessarily exclude resistance in toto, her reluctance to concur with resistance-oriented studies appears to be of concern. For Kondo herself does not suggest any alternative, but merely emphasizes “multiplicity of selves” and “actors’ discursive strategies.” Kondo relies on Foucault in forming such a position. But what is curious here is that Kondo’s position does not necessarily coincide with what Foucault proposes with regard to resistance. For example, the following passage from Foucault gives us more encouragement, through new angles, to rely on the notion of resistance: There is no single locus of great Refusal, no soul of revolt, source of all rebellions, or pure law of the revolutionary. Instead there is a plurality of resistances, each of them a special case: resistances that are possible, necessary, improbable; others that are spontaneous, savage, solitary, concerted, rampant, or violent; still others that are quick to compromise, interested, or sacrificial; by definition, they can only exist in the strategic field of power relations. But this does not mean that they are only a reaction or rebound, forming with respect to the basic domination an underside that is in the end always passive, doomed to perpetual defeat. (Foucault 1978: 95–6)

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Far from doing away with resistance, Foucault sees resistance in a very positive light and as existing ubiquitously in our everyday life. Multiple selves and discursive strategies are not pre-given: they have to come from somewhere, be acquired through the process of learning (as in Willis 1977), being subjected to a certain set of norms, and in the process overcoming such a set of norms (as in Scott 1985; Lamphere 1987). If so, to do away with the notion of resistance would pose a risk of neutralizing the conflicting power relations and rendering the reality much more benign than it might be in reality. The proclivity of postmodernism that evades grand theory and the notion of fundamental revolution may be exerting its influence here, in such a way as not to hastily connect small resistances into a large revolt. Nevertheless, resistance is resistance, no matter how small or insignificant it may be, and therefore to understate it would be to inevitably present a conservative interpretation of the everyday life of ordinary individuals. Another more taxing problem in Kondo’s work is related to the distinctness of the Japanese self that she proposes. Her accentuation of the Japanese self – multifaceted, flexible, and sociocentric – in stark contrast to the western self – self-sufficient, ego-centric, and solidified – effectively replicates Japanese uniqueness in a manner that is ultimately not totally different from other approaches to Japan as a national anthropological field, as we have seen so far in this book.16 Although it is true that Kondo challenges the fixed notion of self in general as west-centered and of the Japanese self in particular as a mono-dimensional opposite of the west, her challenge nevertheless takes the form of stressing the difference in the formation of self in Japan from the west. As Spiro (1993) and others have argued, the so-called bounded, independent western self is not totally separated or separable, conceptually and empirically, from the so-called non-western self. Adrie Kusserow points out that western philosophical tradition has often been misunderstood and simplified to mean that the independent self is kept completely separate from the social (Kusserow 1999). Indeed, no western thinker – be it Freud or Marx – took it as a given that the western individual is immutable and solidly independent. The opposition between western individualism and Japanese self – be it “interdependent self ” (Kitayama et al. 1995), “iecentric” self (Lebra 1984), “an interactionist self ” (Smith 1983: 74), or “a self that can feel human in the company of others” (Plath 1980: 218) – cannot be validated unless it is shown exactly what the western self is.17 Japanese individuals, as much as any others, do show personal feelings, guard their boundaries, and independently and self-reliantly make decisions – any good fieldworker can see that. Indeed, Kondo’s own fieldwork substantiates this. Kondo’s reliance on the notion of ie appears to play the key role in this stark juxtaposition of the Japanese self and western self. Throughout the book she takes ie as a given point of departure for her analysis, rather than

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a concept that could be subverted or whose validity should at least be reevaluated. Underneath there is an assumption on Kondo’s part that ie is the distinctly Japanese institution that makes the parallel conception of a distinct Japanese self possible. But, as was suggested earlier, her ie is a mercantile ie of Kansai type; in other words, historically and geographically specific even within the corpus of the studies of Japanese kinship. Thus, we are placed in an interesting dead-end. When fieldwork data are superficially taken through the skimming of verbal presentation and teleologically organized surveys, as in the case predominantly of social-psychologists and some anthropologists (as in the examples shown in earlier sections of this chapter), the Japanese self can be boxed into convenient catchall names such as “interdependent self,” which themselves are often the invention of researchers. When the fieldwork data are taken from in-depth observation and interaction with informants, as in Kondo’s case, the Japanese self can equally be boxed into terms such as “multiple selves.” This paradox may point us in the direction of setting aside adjectives and definitional prefixes for self and, instead, letting the selves emerge through the text, which embodies the intricacies of life in society and history.

Afterword

The anthropology of Japan has made many turns since Ruth Benedict. No longer is it a quotidian hobbyhorse of quaint connoisseurs; it incorporates a wide participation of well-trained anthropologists and capable fieldworkers. It is today highly diversified and enriched in terms of branches of inquiry and topics of exploration, including labor and industrial relations, tourism and rural revitalization, urban communities, popular culture, schools and education, women and gender, ethnic minorities, marginalized and disprivileged groups, identities, sexual orientation, and continuing studies of the Japanese self, among many other issues.1 Needless to say, these often overlap. On the other hand, studies of multiculturalism in Japan and life on the margins and peripheries are emerging as conceptual and empirical sites for new research and fieldwork. At times, these studies even appear to dominate more traditional mainstream topics such as ie society and family-like businesses. At first glance, we have come a long way from the wartime national character studies. This is distinctly a phenomenon of the late 1980s onwards, for as late as 1977 Robert Smith wrote the following: [M]ost of the one-of-a-kind studies had come to be used as primary sources by those wishing to make generalizations about Japan or to compare Japan with other societies. Statements about the character of industrial relations in Japan seemed almost invariably to use Abegglen’s (1958) factory to stand for all Japanese factories. For those writing about urban phenomena in Japan, Dore’s (1958) Shitayama-ch™ represented city life. Comparative surveys of the family around the world took as typically Japanese Embree’s (1939) farmers of Kyushu in the mid-1930’s. And Benedict’s (1946) “most alien enemy” emerged as the quintessential Japanese, at once repressed and sustained by patterned sensitivity to obligations and their repayment. (Smith 1977: 2) A doubt, however, remains – have we really overcome the situation depicted by Smith? Upon closer reading, Smith’s statement does not seem resonant of

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the past. We do indeed see that well-worn “classics” continue to be used as primary reference points in anthropological studies of Japan, especially in today’s college courses that bear generic titles such as Introduction to Japanese Society. In some ways, it seems that the quantity of the books on Japan may have increased, but in terms of methodology there may not have been a fundamental shift – at least there has been much less change than we might otherwise have hoped to have. We have seen in this book that certain concepts such as the vertical ie society, the company-as-family model, and a culturally unique and racially homogeneous Japan, in other words, what I categorize under the term national anthropology, have continued to exist in the sub-field of Japan anthropology. Japan has been perceived as a nation that has a distinct internal cultural logic, a nation that has forgotten its imperialist and colonialist past and the problems this past produced. A consequence of this has been that some anthropologists of Japan write about Japan without paying critical attention to how stratified, diverse, and unequal Japan is, replicating the image of a culturally unique, harmonious, and homogeneous Japan. In this sense, there certainly remains a strong continuity in Japan anthropology from wartime, through the postwar years, to the post-Cold War period. I shall take up this issue of uncritical continuity in this short final segment of the book. The most obvious example that comes to my mind is drawn from the area of studies of the Japanese self, an example that eloquently suggests that what Smith wrote of above has been only partially overcome. I take up this issue again, as an addendum to the previous chapter, Chapter 6, but more so because this is the area in which anthropologists of Japan most obstinately display reluctance to change their ideas and preconceptions. As such, it represents at once both the historic and contemporary problems that Japan anthropology carries with it. My example comes from an ongoing quest for the collective (read “national”) self of the Japanese in a number of works by Emiko OhnukiTierney (1993, 1995, 1996). Finding her grounds in historical relations between the Japanese and rice, Ohnuki-Tierney interprets the symbolism of rice as historically constituted through rituals and an upper-class value system, as well as the custom of eating domestic rice for the Japanese. She uses food as metaphor of self; for her, rice is the most appropriate metaphor for the Japanese collective self. Questioning Brackette Williams’s emphasis on how nation-building relies on the invention of purity, Ohnuki-Tierney suggests that purity “is often embedded in tradition, if only we are willing to look farther back in historical processes,” effectively suggesting that tradition is not invented, and she further states that “purity is an integral part of the conception of the self ” and antedates “the modern political movements of ethnicity or nationalism,” as if to suggest that therefore purity is a genuine item (Ohnuki-Tierney 1996: 170–1; see Williams 1989). But, tradition is indeed invented according to many historians, including Eric Hobsbawm

Afterword 195 (Hobsbawm and Ranger 1983). Furthermore, social theorists including Anthony Giddens have shown that the self in modernity is fundamentally separated from the self in other socio-historical settings in terms of its deployment of critical reflexivity, among other factors (Giddens 1990). So, whatever self Ohnuki-Tierney assumes to have existed in ancient primordial Japan cannot be taken to have continued unproblematically through to the present day. Moreover, it is not clear from Ohnuki-Tierney’s work when exactly in history genuine purity existed, if indeed such a thing ever existed. Mark Hudson’s recent archeological study suggests that the relation between rice and the residents of the Japanese archipelago has not been smooth and all-encompassing. According to Hudson: Ohnuki-Tierney (1993) has argued that rice has served as a metaphor of the Japanese Self since the Yayoi period. While this is undoubtedly so in contemporary Japan, nothing in her analysis convinces me that it is not a relatively recent development. Obviously, rice was important in ancient times, playing a significant role in imperial rituals, for instance. Since agricultural surpluses provided the basis of state power, it is not surprising that rice and rice fields developed a ritual significance. To go beyond this, however, and argue that rice has always served as a metaphor for Japanese identity, is pure speculation that itself relies on the premise of a unified sense of Japaneseness in the first place. (Hudson 1999: 236) Also of interest is how Japanese historians such as Amino Yoshihiko have argued that Japan was never mono-cultural or mono-racial and it is likely that the Yayoi people were immigrants from the Asian continent through the Korean peninsula (Amino 1991). What is the collective self of the Japanese for Ohnuki-Tierney if it is not the national self ? Why this much obsession with defending the (national) boundaries of the “pure” Japanese? Ohnuki-Tierney’s is a good example of the nationalizing effect of ethnographic studies of Japan, despite their authors being oblivious to this effect. For otherwise it would be difficult to understand why Japan in ancient times is seen as unproblematically connected to today’s Japan despite all the political and cultural disintegration and reintegration that has repeatedly occurred in the long history of the archipelago. Historical research is one thing, but to impose it ahistorically on today’s Japanese society is quite another. For example, Japanese suspicion of imported rice in Japan’s domestic market is not a reflection of the age-old love for Japanese authenticity: if we look carefully, there is a protectionist economy and infrastructural reasons as well as political and cultural reasons of recent origin that fuel this suspicion. This itself would be an interesting ethnographic site for exploration, but to connect it uncritically to the quintessential sense of Japaneseness would be highly problematic. Ohnuki-Tierney’s approach

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suggests a dependence on the national purity and unity as a given. She firmly assumes the existence of a Japanese identity existing prior to inquiries into self, culture, or nation-state, and therefore in her studies self in Japan always appears to be the Japanese self and nothing else. It is true that many Japanese individuals do give the anthropologist the “textbook” description of their society and culture: vertical and hierarchical, unique and homogeneous, collectivist and group-oriented, interactional and sociocentric self, etc. Rather than taking them as a privileged truth, one needs to question where these unified discourses come from. Rather than taking them as an original text and taking fieldwork as a task of copying (and translating) them, one needs to see them in close connection to the existing political and socioeconomic relations of power that produce them.2 If, as many researchers of the Japanese self suggest, the Japanese self is so closely connected to society, it needs to be so investigated. This does not mean one observes person-to-person utterances in isolation from history and society. But this means that we explore the two-way process of constituting the self as involving the individual and the conditions that house him/her, such as the nation-state, hegemonic ideology, dominant discourse, and the political economy of everyday interaction (see, e.g., McVeigh 1998). Yet this does not mean that any treatment of history will do – as can be seen in OhnukiTierney’s approach. History needs to be taken as a process, not a frozen point of origin that eternally defines pure Japanese culture and personality. The area of studies of the Japanese self, in my view, has a great potential to transform the Japan field in anthropology and this is perhaps more of a matter of methodology than ethnographic data. For example, if combined with the Foucauldian notion of the technologies of domination and of the self, studies of the Japanese self can offer a very useful and perhaps subversive intervention regarding how Japanese society and culture are understood today. The task that emerges is not so much one of delving into a collection of lexical and behavioral patterns that distinguish the Japanese from others, as many continue to do, but to explore the intersection between the technologies of domination and of the self – what Foucault calls “governmentality” (Foucault 1997: 225). A society such as can be found in Japan is not necessarily indifferent to the self of individual citizens. On the contrary, self-reform, self-cultivation, self-discipline, and self-mastery on the part of its citizens have always been of great importance to the state ever since the Meiji Restoration of 1868, if not earlier. This may not be related to individualism as such, but the way individuals are seen and valued, engineered, and reproduced by the state’s concern – be it in the imperialist project of territorial expansion or in postwar economic reconstruction and nation rebuilding – is highly relevant to the studies of the Japanese self. According to Foucault: There are … societies in which private life is highly valued, in which it is carefully protected and organized, in which it forms the center of refer-

Afterword 197 ence for behaviors and one of the principles of their valuation – this appears to be true of the bourgeois classes in the Western countries of the nineteenth century. But, for this very reason, individualism in such societies is weak and the relations of oneself to oneself are largely undeveloped. … [T]here are societies or groups in which the relation to self is intensified and developed without this resulting, as if by necessity, in a strengthening of the values of individualism or of private life. (Foucault 1986: 43) In this approach the process of the emergence of self, the efficacy of ideas that enable the individual to understand himself, and a set of concrete techniques that the individual masters for self-improvement become important. In contemporary Japan, private life is valued and protected, but maybe not as active rights of individuals but more as a laissez-faire area of nonintervention. While individualism may not exist as everybody’s ideal, it is embedded in lifestyle in the form of solipsism and personal choice. On the other hand, during the war individuals were valued as carriers of the emperor’s will; each individual was confronted with the task of perfecting his or her loyalty to the emperor. As such, collective devotion to the emperor was possible only through individuals’ self-discipline. This did not necessarily mean they were subjugated or oppressed. Just like the notion of positive freedom proposed by Isaiah Berlin (1969), individuals were made to believe that their obeisance to the emperor would eventually free them from backwardness and oppression. Either way, concepts such as privacy, freedom, and individualism are activated in radically different practice from western conventions. If Japanese society or social groups in it make the Japanese self always conscious of the collective, the mechanism needs to be decoded in an historically specific manner. Logical and empirical data need to be demonstrated and analyzed – not in a manner directly connecting the pre-assumed primordial Japaneseness to fragmentary words one hears in the field or sees in the dictionary. Rather than merely stressing how different the Japanese self is – or how Japanese the Japanese self is – one can profit from critically using and analytically deploying the concepts that exist in the western scholastic corpus, striking back against those concepts by way of empirical findings in anthropological fields, including Japan. The weakness of the existing studies of the Japanese self exemplified by Ohnuki-Tierney lies not in the fieldwork – as researchers seem to have abundant field data in this area – but in direction. For example, whereas feminist and psychoanalytical studies of self and identity see it as important to trace the point of origin and the process of production and reproduction of identity through discourse (see p. 198), studies of the Japanese self rest on discourse as the end-product and do not apply thorough analysis or critique to it. Hence the endless listing of words pertaining to the formation of self – seishin, uchi no kaisha, ie, amae, uchi/soto, etc. – and hardly any scrutiny

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exists as to how in the first place these words emerge as keywords from within the historically configured field of unequal relations of power. Without this foundation, the selection of idioms, as we have seen in this book, can be nothing but unwarranted and arbitrary. Alternatively, one needs to reflect on why one is made to think that these idioms, and not others, present themselves as keywords. Often what scholars take to be the final explanation is only the beginning, be it “interdependent self ” or “multiple selves.” The self is a highly unstable ontological site for identity and is not necessarily culture-specific. According to Judith Butler, “[i]dentity can never be fully totalized by the symbolic, for what it fails to order will emerge within the imaginary as a disorder, a site where identity is contested” (1997: 97). Jacqueline Rose writes: The unconscious constantly reveals the “failure” of identity. Because there is no continuity of psychic life, so there is no stability of sexual identity, no position for women (or for men) which is ever simply achieved. … There is a resistance to identity at the very heart of psychic life. (Rose 1987: 90–1) In these authors’ words the distinction between western and Japanese selves becomes irrelevant. The challenge for studies of the Japanese self is to go beyond this multiplicity and contested identity, exploring what it is that makes studying the Japanese self instrumental in enabling us to see what it means to understand identity’s diversity. For such a quest, the existing framework of “collective self ” or “national self ” of the Japanese needs to be discarded, as such an understanding of the self already presupposes national singularity and a reified monolith behind the thick ideological smokescreen of nationalism and ethnocentrism. It is this kind of understanding that makes studies of the Japanese self sterile and barren; it is this kind of understanding that renders, deceptively, the “Japanese self ” something that is supposed to be so fundamentally distinct from other selves that it is beyond the comprehension of anybody but the Japanese. And it is this kind of understanding that ultimately excludes “nonJapanese” from the anthropology of Japan. We can recognize here without fail one of the ways by which Japan anthropology is practiced as the anthropology of national culture. As such, this branch of Japan anthropology is nothing but an ideological enterprise (see Gjerde and Onishi 2000). In addition to the studies of Japanese self, in the foregoing chapters we have seen that in other areas of Japan anthropology such as kinship national boundaries have always been assumed to coincide with Japan’s cultural boundaries. There are other more recent examples. The notable trend in the Japan field since the 1990s has been studying popular culture. This development accompanied the reconfiguration of the notion “culture”; rather than probing into the inner cultural logic of the Japanese, recent researchers look

Afterword 199 directly at the materiality of culture, where hybridity and the Creole nature of culture are valued and explored. In this productive area, however, there is a problem: too much attention is given to end-products and their intratextual interpretation, with little connection to political economy and history. This inevitably leads to the billboard display of somewhat eyecatching collections of exotic and sensational pictures, posters, and photos of toys, games, women (old and young, nude or not), cell phones, stickers, animation, trademarks, etc. But to stop at merely documenting the display not only would not advance the research into further terrain but would also replicate the image of unfamiliar Japan. This unfamiliarity, interestingly, becomes part of a national image in the case of Japan anthropology. That is in part why we see the widespread appropriation of the adjective “Japanese” by existing popular-cultural studies, be it locality-specific trends or agespecific fads. This trend is rather widely recognized beyond popular-culture studies. Contrary to what Aram Yengoyan wrote in 1986 in his plea for the return of culture to anthropology, the Japan field never let “culture” go out of fashion (Yengoyan 1986: 368). The notion continued to thrive as the ultimate goal of Japan anthropology throughout the 1970s and the 1980s, with a distinct twist that this “culture” meant national culture.3 As has already been discussed, the case of Hendry’s treatment of Japanese honorifics and that of Bachnik’s approach to uchi/soto co-ordinates in the Japanese language are typical of this: rather than capturing the end-products – utterances, in this case – and then working backwards from there by probing into personal motivations and person-to-person interactions, one needs to look at the process of production and reproduction of those utterances, cultural products, and texts, which is embedded in history and society – and not, as Benedict tended to see, narrowly confined in a cultural logic or “cultural epistemology” (Dissanayake 1996). One needs to locate the process by which a certain cultural form has acquired efficaciousness as opposed to others and discern the seat of power that decides which group (or groups) in society differentiates the mainstream from the margin. If too much privileging of cultural products leads to exoticism and renders Japan unfamiliar and unknowable, it has been known that too little acknowledgment of cultural logic, stemming from the vantage point of the west, can lead to the problem of rendering Japan identical with the west. But, as has been demonstrated in this book, the latter problem quickly disappeared in the anthropology of Japan after the 1970s, once Japan demonstrated that its modernization was recognizably of the non-western sort. Thereafter, the problem inherent in Japan anthropology has been overexoticization and romanticization of Japan. To call it simply “Orientalism,” however, would not bring about a constructive solution. Similarly, to label Japanese public discourse as auto- or reverse Orientalism does not get us out of the predicament (see p. 201 on Moeran). One of the most urgent tasks of Japan anthropology in my view is to denationalize Japan as an anthropological field. First, it is necessary to

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dismantle the privileged assumption that equates Japanese culture with Japanese nation. To do so, paradoxically, one needs to consciously bring the nation-state into concerned inquiry. Currently, the nationalization of Japanese culture naturalizes the role played by the Japanese state – both historically and contemporaneously in culture production and the reproduction of everyday lives. We need to correct this by consciously rendering the invisible visible – that is, by concretely locating the state apparatuses and their interventions in our ethnographies. Marilyn Ivy in her recent writing treats “the Japanese thing” as the thing of the Japanese nation-state and alerts our attention to the role played by the west’s relation with Japan, since “the Japanese national-cultural thing became recognizable as Japanese because of its imbrication with the west” (Ivy 1998: 95; original emphasis). Although I reject Ivy’s locating Japan as being colonized or “near-colonized” vis-à-vis western domination – this kind of thinking makes sense only when it is combined with an equally sensitive account of Japan’s colonization of others – her naming of the approach to Japan as ie society “state-approved anthropological arguments” is correct: we need to be more aware of the weight of the Japanese state in our understanding of Japanese culture. By this, I do not mean that the Japanese state is conspiring to globally disseminate the ideology of its national culture. While it is important to document and critique the state’s concrete role in the making of national culture through formal and institutionalized intervention such as budget allocation on projects and institutions that are geared toward heightening national consciousness and Japan-centrism by way of, for example, textbook engineering, media control, national language standardization, etc., it is equally, if not more, important for each practitioner of the anthropology of Japan to understand the principles and operating mechanism of mutual (and most often unconscious) articulation between insidious state apparatuses and private, non-partisan intellectual productions by both Japanese and non-Japanese, including those of anthropologists themselves. Second, it is necessary to be sensitive to the history and political economy that pervade Japanese society and culture. Failing in this would lead to rendering the relation of power into some kind of impervious yet insidious ideological occlusion, again naturalizing the “as is” of Japan, rather than subjecting the social reality to a more critical and penetrating analysis. We may explore this by, for example, ethnographically studying the defense mechanism of Japan’s national sovereignty in local forms as embodied in the debate over the pros and cons of granting non-Japanese residents (who are full taxpayers) local voter entitlement. Or we may look at the so-called international romance and marriage between Japanese and non-Japanese not simply as romantic human relations, but as a form of life that on multiple fronts fundamentally challenges existing cultural institutions such as “Japanese ie.” Furthermore, studying children’s horror stories and reading into them ideologies of nationalism and ethnocentric trends in tandem with

Afterword 201 children’s play or games; studying the way adolescent girls are involved in the “aid-date,” or enjok™sai, with middle-aged men, not simply as a Japanese form of sexuality but in close connection to the culture of confession or the lack thereof, which is radically different from the western history of sexuality; or studying unresolved historical events ethnographically, such as the 1923 massacre of Koreans in the aftermath of the Great Kanto Earthquake.4 One clear methodological flaw that continues to plague the Japan field in relation to the nationalization of culture is the way Japan is often generalized. The following passage from Brian Moeran is a good example: The Japanese perceive “the West” in large collective terms or in abstract generalities, in just the same way that Orientalists refuse to conceive of humanity as consisting of individuals. … They prefer abstractions about the West to direct evidence, and ignore particular details that would contradict such abstractions. They see the West as at bottom something to be feared (yabanjin, barbarians; ket™, “red-haired devils”) or to be dominated (by the arts, trade, the establishment of factories that occupy and convert foreign workers to the “Japanese way”). (Moeran 1990: 9) This statement is irresponsible in that Moeran is completely oblivious of the historical role played by anthropologists of Japan (himself included) in formulating this kind of image of “them, the Japanese.” Here, the Japanese are totalized and nationalized as much as they were in the eyes of wartime anthropologists such as Gorer and Benedict, as we saw in Chapter 1. Denationalizing the Japan field, however, cannot be achieved by simply juxtaposing minority and majority, as studies of marginalized minorities can be as essentialistic as the national anthropology of Japan. In this regard, the budding new sub-field in Japan anthropology of studies of ethnic minorities requires some caution. It is all very well to celebrate “multicultural, multiethnic Japan,” but the problem starts when this image is assumed, not empirically identified and critically assessed. For example, it would be empirically wrong to assume that the presence of ethnic minorities in Japan is only a recent phenomenon.5 What is recent is their visibility: they have existed in Japan ever since the end of the nineteenth century, if not before (Morris-Suzuki 1998; Howell 1996). And, of course, minorities were and have always been studied. During the naissant period of Japanese ethnology in the late nineteenth century, ethnic minorities such as Ainu and Okinawans, as well as populations that fell under Japan’s colonial ambitions, were avidly studied by physical anthropologists, ethnologists, folklorists, and linguists (S. Tanaka 1993; Murai 1992, for example). It is only after the modern Japanese nation-state more or less completed the assimilation and Japanization of these minorities in postwar Japan that Japan’s ethnologists relegated the studies of, say, un-Japanese ethnic minorities such as Koreans

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and Burakumin to the Japanese leftist sociologists, “native” scholars (i.e. Korean scholars in Japan and Burakumin scholars), and some interested western anthropologists such as George De Vos and Hiroshi Wagatsuma (De Vos and Wagatsuma 1966; C. Lee and De Vos 1981). The question we need to ask is, then, what is the difference in the recent spate of interest in Japan’s minorities as compared to the past lack of attention (e.g. D. Suzuki and Oiwa 1996)? In other area studies and ethnographic inquiries, it was always ethnic or other minorities that were the first site of investigation, be it the Nuer or the Nayars, Yoruba or Ibo. We need to ask ourselves what silenced most western anthropologists regarding this topic for so long – it is no coincidence that the Japanese government has for a long time turned a blind eye to the problems that ethnic minorities face, and for an equally long time western anthropologists have abstained from commenting on these problems as central to Japan anthropology. It is related to what Brackette Williams states regarding the emergence of the category “ethnic” in 1970s/1980s anthropology: according to her, there are “differences in power between two categories of citizens: (a) those who claim ideological patterns institutionalized in the nation’s civic arenas as their ‘tribal’ past and (b) those identified with patterns not consistent with the institutionalized ones” (Williams 1989: 412). It would not be necessary to reiterate that in Japan anthropology only those members of the population who can have a claim over the orthodox (i.e. institutionalized) national past have been treated as ethnographic subjects, while the rest have been largely ignored. This extends not only to ethnic minorities, but to many different forms of marginalized existences inside Japan. To bundle them together and call them “multiethnic” or “diverse” would be to obscure the complexity of power relations. For example, in their collection entitled Diversity in Japanese Culture and Language, John Maher and Gaynor Macdonald (1995) present a fresh angle in showing how Japan is not homogeneous, but at the same time they conflate highly different forms of minority groups, including anorexic women, overseas returnee children, the Ainu, and Koreans, for example. Normally, children who return from overseas and who are known to face difficulty in readjustment back home are singled out and discriminated against in the process of reverse acculturation. But this discrimination is not the same as that which Koreans are subjected to, given especially that the majority of returnees are from the families of elites in big business and are quite well off economically. This does not mean that Koreans are one and the same, either. Terms such as “diversity” and “marginalization” need to be placed in proper perspective.6 Diversity can exist with little discriminatory connotation, while marginalization is directly the act of disadvantaging a certain group visà-vis others. Studies of marginalized groups in Japan in themselves cannot provide an effective site for denationalizing Japan anthropology: only when a proper political awareness accompanies research on Japan’s minorities can they make an effective intervention; a mere lumping together of the marginals

Afterword 203 as an appendix to the mainstream can be counterproductive, as it obscures the historic and social specificity of the discrimination and oppression each group has experienced.7 One possibility would be, as proposed by Appadurai, to cosmopolitanize the Japan field “without logically or chronologically presupposing either the authority of the Western experience or the models derived from that experience” (1996: 49). In Appadurai’s words, this takes a form of deterritorialization. In the case of Japan anthropology, this requires not rendering Japan unique, as enough is said about its cultural uniqueness. Rather, practitioners of Japan anthropology must try making Japan relevant to western and wider anthropology in general, in resistance to the institutionalized marginalization that Japan anthropology suffers in western academe. For example, there are a couple of prominent anthropology departments in the US that have scholars specializing in areas other than Japan, with no training in anthropology, as full professors of anthropology, while anthropologists of Japan have a hard time finding academic positions in anthropology departments even when they can offer courses on general anthropology or an introduction to anthropology in addition to area-specific courses. My guess is that there is an assumption that the anthropology of Japan is a “particular” kind of study, as opposed to the anthropology of India or Africa, which constitutes a “general” kind of study – thereby tacitly discrediting the relevance of Japan in anthropology in general. This kind of marginalization is a product not of a one-way process, but of a two-way process involving the participation of anthropologists of Japan themselves, in that they have emphasized the cultural uniqueness of the Japanese in stark contrast to the rest of the world. One suggestion would be to keep this emphasis for now, but combine it with a conscious project of reaching out to the issues of broader relevance and general theoretical interest in the discipline at large. Denationalizing Japan anthropology would be part of an effort to achieve a development of Japan research that speaks to the wider anthropological discipline, not one that moves away from the general-theoretical concerns of anthropology, escaping to the esoteric and self-gratifying corner of “Japanese studies” that excessively relies on Japan’s cultural uniqueness. Cultural specificity cannot overrule universal relevance, although the claim for universality should not obscure cultural specificity (if not uniqueness). Comparative relevance to other cultures must remain a central component of Japan anthropology. Before I close this book, it is appropriate to point to the conditions that have marginalized the anthropology of Japan in the west – that is, the continuing colonialist nature of anthropology as an academic discipline. Even today, there is a special romantic tension between the anthropology of the former colonies and the scholars based in the academic institutions of the former colonizer. I am not suggesting that this follows the individual belonging or nationality of anthropologists, but, for example, it is not a

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coincidence that in US anthropological academe more voices are heard from anthropologists of native America, Latin America, and South America. Similarly, there is an historical structure behind the fact that British Africanists and South Asianists speak about “anthropology,” as if they have the general theory, while Japan anthropologists speak about “the anthropology of Japan” – that is, a particular case. Again, it is no coincidence that the majority of Australian anthropologists study Aborigines and Papua New Guinea. The distribution of areas of expertise established in anthropology ironically mirrors the colonial map to this day. The sin of national anthropology, or its basic stance of happily living oblivious to the interventions of nation-states or colonial empire, is found, of course, among area studies as well as anthropologies of areas other than Japan. The marginalization of Japan anthropology in the west is in other words not related to its focus on national culture. Rather, it stems from other factors that nevertheless pertain to national-state institutions and nation-tonation relations, notably the historical fact that Japan was never formally colonized by the west. Its seven-year occupation by the US was not the same as colonialism. Its postwar reception of US influence is not the same as the effect of colonial rule. I often encounter colleagues who study Africa or other areas that the west colonized, asking me whether Yanagita Kunio was influenced by Lewis Henry Morgan or questions equivalent to that: it appears that it never occurs to them that Yanagita is as much a native intellectual as Franz Fanon is. Yet few non-Japan anthropologists ever recognize this and they assume that Japanese scholars must always follow western intellectual trends, unable to be original. But the marginalized state of Japan anthropology – as derived from and on the periphery of general anthropological inquiry – can, paradoxically, have the potential to create a non-colonist anthropology, again, of course, as long as one fully and critically understands Japan’s colonialist role in Asia. What needs to be done is not the study of Japanese uniqueness, the Japanese self, or the Japanese at large, but a study that dissolves these concepts, one that makes Japan appear in a different light with a heightened awareness of socio-economic problems, political contradictions, and power relations that currently come in the guise of culture – a study that makes Japan relevant in critically recasting the ongoing unequal power relations between the field and the west, between the areas of expertise, and between anthropologists and informants. Japan anthropology of the twenty-first century needs to be a discipline that questions, not condones, the current national entity called Japan. Chrysanthemum and the Sword (Benedict 1946) did inform us of many aspects of Japanese culture, but it also left out many more important aspects of Japanese society, culture, and everyday life. Anthropologists of Japan in the twenty-first century must – and can – begin with aspects of Japanese society that Chrysanthemum did not even begin to consider.

Notes

Introduction 1

2

3

4

5

A more recent list would include Clifford and Marcus (1986), Marcus and Fischer (1986), Abu-Lughod (1986), Clifford (1988), Collier and Yanagisako (1987), Sanjek (1990), Di Leonardo (1991), M. Wolf (1992), Narayan (1993), Behar and Gordon (1995), and Ryang (1997c). Many stimulated the debate by criticizing and reassessing the postmodern turn in anthropology (e.g. Fardon 1990; R. G. Fox 1991; Escobar 1993; Spiro 1996). Some also explicitly raised the problem of western centrism in postmodernist writings (e.g. Ong 1996). Critiques of anthropology from a Marxist point of view have died away, reflecting international politics, while feminist critiques remain strong, but with less radical implications compared to the serious challenge they posed to existing paradigms in the 1970s. The 1960s through to the 1980s were not just times when anthropology transformed itself due to historical developments in the world, including the Vietnam War and student movements. In terms of intra-disciplinary debate also, these times were a colorful period. For more on the development in American and British anthropologies during this period, see the now classic article by Ortner (1984). E. Valentine Daniel, interestingly, remarks: “to the extent that we may have succeeded in converting the Others to our point of view without reciprocity, in making them see themselves as we see them, our conquest is a resounding one” (1996: 3). Matthew Perry’s book Narrative of the Expedition of an American Squadron to the China Seas and Japan was published in 1856 and Napoleon’s expedition record was published by the French Commission of Arts and Sciences of Egypt (see Perry 1856; Commission des sciences et arts d’Égypte 1809–28). Some of my anthropologist colleagues try to label me as an “anthropologist of Koreans in Japan,” in distinction from an anthropologist of Japan, due to my past works, but due more to my ethnic origin, i.e. as a Korean born in Japan (Ryang 1997a, 2000b). Such a label reflects the Japanese government’s exclusion of ethnic minorities from Japan’s socio-cultural terrain, which is so deeply embedded that it is unconsciously repeated even by those of us who are supposed to be critically commenting on it. I mean by the “west” the US and Britain. In this book I have included anthropologists from both the US and Britain, not excluding, however, American anthropologists of Japanese origin who may or may not have been born in Japan.

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Notes

Anthropology and the war

1 According to Cooper (1947), one half of professional anthropologists worked full time in war-related government offices such as the OWI and the Office of Strategic Services, the precursor of the Central Intelligence Agency. This does not mean all anthropologists were in the same frame of mind. For example, Gregory Bateson and Margaret Mead both actively participated in the war effort, but with very different emotional outcomes – Bateson ultimately taking a stance against the involvement of anthropologists, and Mead the opposite. See Price (1998b), Mabee (1987), and Mead (1979). 2 La Barre’s observation took place in Topaz, Utah, one of the ten camps in which American citizens and residents of Japanese descent from all over the US were relocated. Peter Suzuki (1981) has published a detailed study of how documentation was carried out by anthropologists in the relocation camps. According to him, notes were taken and conclusions drawn in order to satisfy the bureaucratic needs of relocation authorities. Daily lives and culture were neglected, due to the lack of compassion for or understanding of the detained Japanese Americans. The camp study was carried out under the Community Analysis Section, which John Embree established within the War Relocation Authority. Embree himself headed the Section initially. Gorer, La Barre, and Meadow, who followed Gorer’s path, have been subjected to criticism ever since the postwar period (e.g. Kerlinger 1953), but it is also true that their approach still holds some influence in anthropological studies of Japan, as I hope to show in this book. As for the American attitude towards US citizens of Japanese ancestry and Japanese-born aliens, there is an interesting survey by Bloom and Riemer (1945). A total of 1,048 college students in the Midwest and 804 students on the Pacific coast were surveyed; 39.42 per cent of Midwestern respondents and 33.87 per cent of the Pacific coast respondents recommended deportation of Japaneseborn aliens after the war, while 73.38 per cent of Midwestern respondents and 63.43 per cent of the Pacific coast respondents regarded the wartime relocation of Japanese Americans as correct (1945: 166, 172). Raymond Okamura criticized the term “relocation-evacuation” as “distortion”: it is, according to him, a “cover-up euphemism” of horrible truth and injustice (Okamura 1982). 3 The “rape of Nanking” occurred in December 1937, when Japanese soldiers invaded the city of Nanjing and massacred civilians, including children, and mass-raped women (see Honda 1981, for example). 4 The emphasis on the mother–infant relationship dominates subsequent studies of Japanese culture and society, as can be seen by the influence of Takeo Doi’s work, discussed in Chapter 6. The theme is still popular among psychological anthropologists of Japan today. 5 Suye Mura was the first self-consciously ethnographic study of Japan. Other works that can be seen as ethnographically informative include Hearn (1904), Chamberlain (1905), and Haring (1929), among others. 6 In his essay, originally published in 1968, Anderson observes that in the postwar period British Social Anthropology was forced to admit its relation to colonialism, Leach’s Political Systems of Highland Burma (1954) being the first to explicate it (P. Anderson 1992: 95). But it was not until the early 1970s that social anthropologists launched major historical and anti-colonial criticism from within their discipline as an imperialist institution (Asad 1973). 7 Among notable life-history projects are Mintz (1974 [1960]) and Shostack (1981); for a more psychoanalytically oriented text, see Crapanzano (1980), and for a more politically motivated study, see Burgos-Debray (1984). Life-history projects are not free of controversies, as can be seen in the recent debate over Rigoberta Menchú’s testimonials (Stoll 1999). Participant observation, on the other hand, continues to be discussed (see, for example, Hastrup 1992). Both methods have

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8

9

10

11 12

13

gone through considerable readjustments through the intervention of reflexive anthropology, interpretive anthropology, postmodernism, and more fragmentary yet continuous discussion on native anthropology. The one other book that Embree produced as a result of the fieldwork in Suye is Japanese Peasant Songs (1944a). This is a beautiful and valuable record of local songs sung daily by the villagers on various occasions. In itself, the collection provides a vivid picture of how life was made up, following each step and moment of village life. Embree published at least three other articles with the Suye material, one on local bureaucracy on the village level (1944b), another on public health and sanitation (1944c), and one other on religion (1941). Embree also published two important studies on Japan during the war, The Japanese (1943) and The Japanese Nation (1945). These will be considered in detail later in the chapter (pp. 35–9). The complete list of Embree’s publications can be found in Pelzel (1952). Ella Embree, who played a crucial role in Embree’s fieldwork, later published her own account of Suye women (see Smith and Wiswell 1982). Embree’s Suye Mura was criticized in Japan soon after its publication by E. Suzuki (1940) for its lack of comparative reference to other studies in Japanese rural sociology. Similarly, although the fieldwork for The Nuer by Evans-Pritchard (1940) was carried out in roughly the same period as Embree’s, it, too, is oblivious of military tensions between the Nuer and the government of Anglo-Egyptian Sudan, except for some passing references (1940: 11, 131), which, despite their casual nature, appear serious enough to alert the reader to the strange absence of any further investigation into how the political and military tension around the Nuer shaped their lives. See also P. Anderson’s criticism to this effect (1992: 93–4). The fact that Japanese kinship is not “purely” patrilineal is often overlooked or not understood at all by researchers (see Chapter 4); compared to more orthodox Confucian societies such as China or Korea, Japan has a tradition of leniency regarding premarital sexual relations and offspring born to them. The ethnohistorian Takamure Itsue has shown that even after the patrilineal registration system was introduced following the Taika reform of 645 A.D. Japanese household records maintained a dual system of patrilineal documentation and matrilocal residence for centuries (Takamure 1938). Benedict was 34 when she went to Columbia to take a degree under Boas in 1919. Ruth Benedict, although she replaced Gorer as he wished, never obtained toplevel security clearance due to a past publication, a pamphlet entitled “The Races of Mankind” in collaboration with Gene Weltfish, her Columbia colleague (Benedict and Weltfish 1943). This piece was seen by some as communist, according to Hilary Lapsley, her most recent biographer (1999: 290–1). This pamphlet had its scholarly precursor, Race: Science and Politics, which Benedict published in 1940, and it emphasized the importance of learning to live with racial and cultural differences. This and Benedict’s other works attest to her thoroughly relativistic stance. In Barbara Babcock’s words, she was “committed to talking about human nature in plurals” (1995: 105). The complete list of Benedict’s publications can be found in A. Kroeber et al. (1949: 37–47) and Mead (1949). Benedict cites altogether only eight references as bibliographical sources used in The Chrysanthemum and the Sword. But according to Nanako Fukui and Yoshimi Ueda (1995) there were numerous other sources, including plays and novels, which were used for Benedict’s research on Japan during that time – included in Ruth Fulton Benedict’s papers stored at Vassar College. These appear to be more substantial than Embree’s sources for Suye Mura, although there is no way of knowing how many more materials Embree used for Suye Mura and

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15

16

17

18

19

Notes

his other writings on Japan. Neither author appears to have tried to consult Japanese-language materials. Clifford Geertz calls the child-rearing chapter “the sudden shift … from a confident descriptive idiom to a much less confident causal one” and “the longest and most rambling chapter in the book” (1988: 124). He attributes this to Benedict’s heavy borrowing from Gorer (1943) and Bateson and Mead (1942). This point aside, I do not agree with Geertz, in the sense that Benedict’s chapter is very different from Gorer’s study in terms of her writing position as well as the literary skill involved. As I state in the text (p. 32), Benedict puts due balance between Gorer’s causal deduction and her own sensitivity. In relation to this, Benedict uses a strategy familiar to the readers of her other works, Patterns of Culture being one of them – notably, in Clifford Geertz’s words, “the juxtaposition of the all-too-familiar and the wildly exotic in such a way that they change places” (1988: 106). This is not, however, how Japanese read it – see Chapter 2 in this volume. Embree’s letter to the editor of American Anthropologist provoked at least two responses. Jules Henry (1951) largely agrees with Embree regarding his critique of the reductionist explanation of the Japanese national character based on toilet training, but also emphasizes that wartime enemy studies need to be separated from the larger school of thought of the culture and personality school. A more stringent resistance comes from Douglas Haring, an old Japanist, who disagrees with Embree’s perception and emphasizes that there are just too few anthropologists of Japan to make a good judgment of the field. Haring here strangely forgets the influence that “new Japanists” such as Gorer, La Barre, and Benedict had on the Japan field. More interestingly, Haring endorses ethnocentrism if it meant “the right of native tribes to adopt civilized ways,” although he emphasizes that this should not enable any “superior military or political power to enforce such acculturation merely in the interest of power politics” (Haring 1951: 137). In retrospect, this confirms how politically farsighted Embree was, in that he did not let the dominant trend of the day deceive him, while others such as Haring naively welcomed what turned out to be the Americanization of the world by means of building military bases and economic subjugation. The war’s end, and perhaps more importantly the beginning of the Cold War, brought about the opposite trend, the study of culture at a distance. In 1947, under Benedict and Mead’s leadership, Columbia University Research in Contemporary Cultures (RCC) started. It was a short-lived project (1947–51) and, according to a former participant, Rhoda Metreaux, except for the projects designed by Benedict and Mead RCC projects failed. Metreaux places Chrysanthemum as a pioneering study of culture at a distance, although its publication predates the commencement of RCC (Metreaux 1980: 82; for more on this, see Mead and Metreaux 1953, 2000). Haring reprinted his articles in his 1956 volume Personal Character and Cultural Milieu (1956b). In its introductory chapter Haring (1956a) gives a very good summary of the history of anthropology in close connection to national character studies. Studies of national character have a long history and have taken various forms (e.g. S. Y. Lee 1990; Jasišska-Kania 1980; Kohn 1974; Stearns 1970–1; Vrga and Petras 1969; Klineberg 1969; Martindale 1968; Monk 1962; Rubin 1959). Although nation is not equated with race, in Barker’s view it is a legitimate scope of inquiry given that nations emerge as a result of sharing certain traits, including language, climate, economy, and location – not unlike Stalin’s definition (Barker 1927). It is a theme of substantial discussion even today, although the nation no longer appears to be a natural boundary-bearer, but the way the nation becomes a key to an ideology of belonging has become more of a

Notes 209 concern. Consequently, the role played by the state is explored with reference to international geopolitics (see, for example, Banac and Verdery 1995). Some authors, including Inkeles (1997), are still seeking particular traits inherent in certain nations from a psychosocial point of view. Inkeles’s study has been severely criticized: the notion he took from the culture and personality school, “modal” personality, has been shown to have very little internal consistency and hence was later dropped; the main sources of data are clinical, documentary, and opinion surveys, which can offer only partial accounts; national character studies are not appropriate for the study of social change and as a consequence have not produced a scholarly community of followers (Laitin and Gordon 1998). In our everyday life, however, national stereotypes and discourse on them are prevalent in the media and other popular texts (e.g. see Hodge 1989). The vast collection of books on Japanese cultural traits (which are perceived inherently as national traits) attests to the long life of scholarly and lay obsession with national character in Japan. In the context of the post-September 11 atmosphere in the US, it is obvious that anti-terrorist efforts are closely connected to racial profiling and national types. George Stocking has expressed doubts about the “death” of national character studies in anthropology (1986: 9). 20 Matthews notes that by the late 1930s cultural anthropologists “forged close ties with the émigré psychoanalysts” such as Karen Horney and Erich Fromm (Matthews 1988: 347). The interaction between psychology/psychoanalysis and anthropology was also strong in Britain (see Goody 1995: 110–11). In Japan anthropology also, the trend to associate closely with psychiatry was not only maintained but reinforced. See Chapter 6. 21 This assumption was reflected in the way Occupation authorities treated Koreans remaining in Japan. See, for example, Inokuchi (2000), Koshiro (1999), and Kobayashi (1992, 1994). The American attitude toward Koreans during the Occupation of Korea was even worse than their attitude towards Koreans in Japan. See, for detailed accounts, Cumings (1981, 1990). As early as 1946 at least one author wondered why officers stationed in Korea had been given no training or preparation (Fainsod 1946: 302). For an Occupation report on the Korean minority in Japan, see Wagner (1951). 22 For the connection between anthropology and the Cold War, see Nader (1997), Wallerstein (1997), and Price (1998a).

2

Benedictian myth

1

I must agree with M. Suzuki (1967) and Nishi (1983: 93ff.) in critically assessing Kawashima’s critique of Ruth Benedict: Kawashima misses the point of the culture and personality school and Benedict’s technique by trying to read into Chrysanthemum the assumptions of evolutionist history, that a certain historical stage must be discarded and replaced by the next stage. Kawashima, Tsurumi, and others formed a Benedict study group, which continued to study Chrysanthemum and the Sword (e.g. Kawashima 1951). Watsuji’s Fùdo (1979 [1935]) is seen by some as the origin of nihonjinron in the postwar period (on nihonjinron, or the Japanese cultural uniqueness thesis, see Chapter 5 in this volume). Very similar to Benedict’s Patterns of Culture in approach, Fùdo (Climate) explores Japanese and other cultures through classification with reference to climatic adaptation and types such as monsoon type, typhoon type, desert type, pastoral type, and so forth. It is interesting to note that one of the Japanese reactions to the defeat in World War II and the shock of it, according to Kitahara, was compensatory identification with the Occupation forces, i.e. Americans or the victor (Kitahara 1984; see also 1981). Interestingly, a controversial writer, Sakaguchi Ango, in one of his

2

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first essays in the postwar period, “Darakuron” (On the fall), eloquently demonstrates the bitter disillusionment of the Japanese with the war, its defeat, and the falseness of politics (Sakaguchi 1946). Perhaps no other anthropologist has had so many biographies written about her as Benedict. In addition to Margaret Mead’s two books on Benedict’s life (1959, 1974), which are more of a collection of Benedict’s papers than a study by Mead, Modell (1983), Caffrey (1989), and Lapsley (1999) wrote biographies of Benedict. They are all idiosyncratic in approach. Modell praises and admires Benedict’s life (see Stocking 1983; Kuklick 1984; Barnouw 1984; Langness 1984; Handler 1984, for reviews; see also Babcock’s 1986 critique). Caffrey suggests that Benedict was a feminist and modernist (Landman 1991; P. M. Glazer 1990; Clairmont 1990; see also Babcock’s 1990 critique). Lapsley, perhaps the best of all, places emphasis on Benedict’s lesbianism, among other topics. Sakuta is by no means the first author to discuss this issue in Japan. For example, a more scholarly essay on the theme of guilt and shame can be found in Moriguchi (1963). But Sakuta’s was far more influential with both academic and popular readers. A recent study by Yoshizaki (1995) explores the shame/guilt contrast from the religious studies approach. Cross-cultural works in this area are appearing in recent years, including Okano (1994), Crystal et al. (2001). See Chapter 6, note 11, in this volume.

3

Occupation anthropology

1

Dower lists Vogel as the foremost practitioner of this scholarship and distinguishes him and others from “conservative nihonjinron theorists in Japan” (Dower 1998: 11–12). This is interesting because, translated into Japanese, Vogel’s Japan as Number One (1979) became well entrenched in the nihonjinron corpus in Japan (see Aoki 1990). (See Chapter 5 on this.) It is important to note that in all these processes of defining the Japan field within the discipline of anthropology, a transnational constituency of scholars – Japanese-born, US-trained, or US-born, Japanese-educated, or a combination of these, what Lila Abu-Lughod (1991) would later call “halfies” – played an increasingly important role. In fact what is unique about the Japan field is that it has solicited the participation of native or half-native anthropologists from the very early stages, although how “native” native anthropologists were, and in what ways, is not consistent. The involvement of “native” anthropologists, however, did not necessarily ensure a higher degree of criticism of the sub-field or the centrality of the Japan field in anthropology in the west. By the end of the twentieth century we hear a certain denunciation of western anthropologists of Japan for using native anthropologists as informants rather than research partners (Kuwayama 2000, 1997). Close collaboration with Japanese anthropologists was necessary, especially in the early stages. Unlike the case of American historians of Japan, the ability of American researchers and anthropologists in Japan to read or converse in Japanese in those days does not appear to have been very accomplished. In the 1959 fieldwork guide to Japan, Richard Beardsley wrote regarding the linguistic proficiency of Japanese by American anthropologists: “Conversational skill is important for ethnological work; reading ability is more taxing to acquire and is less essential provided that one can employ assistants, for more Japanese can read and translate English understandably than can comprehend spoken English” (Beardsley 1959: 6), as if to suggest that it is the responsibility of the native assistant, rather than the fieldworker himself, to translate the written material. Today, it would be simply unthinkable for a Japan anthropologist not

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to be able to read Japanese, since now it is common sense that in Japan a wealth of anthropological studies have been written in Japanese. The booklet is a good witness to the very narrow channel of researchers who reached Japan from the US in those days. Judging from its minute instructions on how to behave in Japan – Beardsley even states that women must choose clothes conservatively – it was then perceived as possible to control and orchestrate American researchers in Japan, which attests to the fact that there were only a few of them. Incidentally, in 1970 Sofue Takao wrote that the situation was no longer so favorable for American researchers wishing to employ educated native assistants because of student revolts in Japan, and that in the future Japanese students would not be interested in serving western researchers; Sofue urges western researchers to learn to read and write Japanese (1970: 306). The situation is very different in history: US historians of Japan were by and large up to date with what Japanese historians of Japan debated about, and the mutual influence on scholarship has been substantial across the Pacific. Carol Gluck (1998) recently called it the trans-Pacific house of mirrors. Dr. Wilton S. Dillon, who served in the Occupation in Tokyo and later became a student of Margaret Mead at Columbia, recalls the strong influence of Benedict’s Chrysanthemum on Occupation officials. He and others bought the book at the Tokyo PX and used it to interpret or understand their daily interactions with the Japanese (personal communication with the author). Research on Okayama and the vicinity initiated during this period by the University of Michigan Center for Japanese Studies includes Smith (1952), Sutton (1953), Titiev (1953), Cornell (1956), Smith (1956), Smith and Reyes (1957), Beardsley (1962), and Ward (1962), for example. As for the monograph Village Japan (Beardsley et al. 1959), the initial research was carried out during the Occupation under the auspices of the center (pp. 84–7). For a paper on a rural community based on research undertaken during the Occupation, but independent of University of Michigan’s Okayama station, see Bennett and Ishino (1955–6): the authors studied a fishing village in Chiba prefecture near Tokyo and raise an interesting set of questions pertaining to the culture of poverty. Although Norbeck stresses the disappearance of folk beliefs and traditional practices in this article, his 1952 article shows that there still exist rich customs related to folk religion and deities, in terms of pollution and taboo (see Norbeck 1952). Like Norbeck and Beardsley and his collaborators, Bennett and Ishino also faced their share of constraints on research under the Occupation, on which they remarked: “A military occupation by its very nature is unsympathetic to the kind of intimate relationships and cooperation with ‘indigenous personnel’ needed in order to carry out research of any kind. And the rigidities of bureaucracy will always impede research effort” (Bennett and Ishino 1963: 23). For details of the General Headquarters of the Occupation, see Takemae’s recent study (2002). It is interesting to see that, whereas Abegglen identified the legacy of traditional elements and rural origin in Japanese industry at the time, inside Japan some entrepreneurs were more interested in adopting the American model (see Gordon 1998). I am aware that Dore’s City Life in Japan (1958) has not been mentioned in the text, although it is a book based on research during the Occupation and a pioneering work in Japanese urban sociology. Despite its original scheme of studying urban community, in my view Dore’s book is based on surveys and opinion polls and there is less of an ethnographic component. For this reason I omit this important work. This is not to deny that survey and public opinion polls provided important sources for research. For studies predominantly based

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on surveys, see Matsumoto (1960) and Sano (1958). A rather critical yet useful review of Matsumoto (1960) is found in Bennett (1961). 9 It should be added that it is only the upper handful of the “new middle class” that benefited from economic reconstruction, by way of acting as “go-betweens for the ruling class and the old middle class” (Fukutake 1962: 41). Needless to say, it requires a great deal of finesse and theoretical sophistication to locate classes in Japanese society: neither a mere application nor a categorical dismissal of Marxism solves the problem. 10 As late as 1980 Sugimoto and Mouer wrote as follows: [T]he absence of views on Japanese society which are linked to the conflict tradition is more pronounced in the English-language literature than in the Japanese-language literature … there is a solid Marxist/socialist tradition in Japanese scholarship on Japanese society which is not matched either in volume or in creative diversity by the small dribble which comes through from AMPO, Ronin or the Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars. (Y. Sugimoto and Mouer 1980: 8)

4

Locating Japanese kinship 1 According to Ariga’s study, there are a total of fifty-seven different names for kosaku in Japan. The same name can be used over wide areas, while some names are applied only narrowly in limited localities. These include: nago (the northeastern prefectures of Aomori and Iwate, Niigata and Shimane prefectures in central Japan on the Japan Sea coast, Tokushima prefecture in Shikoku, Okayama and Hiroshima prefectures in western Japan on the Pacific coast, Kumamoto, Fukuoka, Kagoshima, and Oita prefectures in Kyushu), okinago (Ishikawa prefecture of central Japan on the Japan Sea coast), tsukuriko (Hokkaido, Aomori, Iwate, Akita, central Japan, both inland and coastal, including Tochigi, Chiba, Yamanashi, Nagano, and Shizuoka, Niigata and Shimane on the Japan Sea coast, Kinki area including Kyoto, Wakayama, and Osaka, Shikoku including Tokushima, Kagawa, and Ehime, western Japan including Okayama and Hiroshima, and Yamaguchi, Kyushu including Fukuoka, Nagasaki, and Kumamoto), sakugo (Iwate and Akita), kamado (Aomori), yamanago, nagokamado, keraikamado, and kerainago (Iwate), dedokokamado (Iwate), daik™nin (Fukushima in the northeast), sandekosaku and sandehyakush™ (Fukushima), tatsukuri and kariko (Akita), hiyatoitori (Chiba), kadoya (Nagano and Gifu in central Japan), kado (Nagano and Shimane), kakee, uraya, kariya, fudei, fuseki, jige, kanaire, yakkai, kanaiire, and kakei (Nagano), kowaki (Shizuoka), hikan (Nagano and Aichi), kosakunin (Niigata), gesakunin (Hiroshima and Shimane), kabukosaku, kabugesaku, shakuyamon, honkosaku, yorikakari, muragagesaku, and kariiekosaku (Shimane), debyakush™ (Okayama), shitahyakush™, tsukurihyakush™, and kobun (Yamaguchi), keho (Gifu, Gunma, and Oita), fude (Oita and Fukuoka), fudai (Osaka and Nagano), deirinin (Osaka) takajita and mawari (Fukuoka), kanai (Gifu), uchi no mon (Oita), iribyakush™ and koie (Tokushima), ijùkosaku (Miyazaki), irifu (Wakayama), genin (Nagano and Hiroshima), jigari (Nagano and Gifu), and yanchu (islands off Kagoshima) (Ariga 1943: 258–65). 2 ïmachi does not tell us what happened to the non-heir sons and their families after the parents’ retirement. 3 See Fukutake (1949) on pp. 121–2. Readers are also reminded of the regional contrast referred to in relation to Village Japan (Chapter 3 in this volume). 4 We can now appreciate that the picture of Suye village depicted by John Embree (1939) and shown in Chapter 1 is only one among the rich variety of the

Notes 213

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8

9

10

Japanese village organizations, although its characteristics, such as wide neighborhood co-operation, belong to the southwestern type, in contrast to the northeastern type of rigid hierarchy running through the family coalition. Terms referring to the main house and branch houses again are extremely diverse all over Japan. Normally in western anthropology of Japan they are reduced to two: honke and bunke for main house and branch house, respectively. These are not incorrect, but grossly devoid of nuances reflecting the etymologically diverse terms preserved in different parts of Japan. A partial list of the terms referring to the main house includes jid™, ™ya, omoya, oe, oie, s™ke, and honke. That of branch houses includes kamado, hiwakare, bekka, bekke, bunke, nago, hikan, and keho. Note that some terms denoting branch houses (nago, hikan, and kamado) also mean kosaku (see note 1). Oikawa did not agree with Ariga, who classified the Japanese family as fundamentally an extended family that is subdivided into co-residence and separate residential types. He recognized more independence in the management of branch houses, as against Ariga’s theory of symbiosis (Oikawa 1939). Kitano emphasized in his interpretation of d™zoku the aspect of lineage, rather than subjugation as suggested by Ariga. See Emori (1966) for further discussion. Prior to Tokugawa rule (1603–1867), in the late sixteenth century, Hashiba Hideyoshi (later Toyotomi Hideyoshi) carried out a land survey; in order to increase the number of taxable units, Hideyoshi’s rule encouraged landholding by independent peasants and limited the large holdings of temples and shrines. By the seventeenth century, however, internal stratification of the village was obvious, resulting in a wide gap between wealthy landowners and landless peasants. Especially in the peripheral frontier regions (as seen from Kyoto), such as central and northeastern Japan, land accumulation by powerful local farming families continued. Thus the lower strata of the farming population became subjugated not directly to the lord of the domain, but to the local powerful farming family. Prior to Meiji land reform, Japanese villages went through numerous stages of transformation, influenced by both local or central legal policies and local economic conditions. Prior to the establishment of the Tokugawa shogunate (in 1603), change of status and occupation was relatively free, as can be seen in the case of the Kokashiwa d™zoku, whose head was originally a samurai, then became a farmer. After the establishment of the shogunate, time and again the shogunate and local lords tried in vain to prevent enslavement of poor peasants by rich farmers. Poor peasants often became indentured servants. Various types of blood and non-blood branch houses must be understood in relation to this centuries-long historical process (see Araki 1959). The Japanese term mura, normally translated as village, is very confusing. Prior to the Meiji Restoration, mura denoted the smallest unit of taxation and administration. They could be made up of as few as a dozen households. After the Meiji period, many small mura were combined to make one large mura as a basic administrative unit. In light of this, the pre-Meiji mura came to be referred to as buraku (hamlet) or other equivalent terms. In the context of my discussion, it should not matter whether I am referring to the hamlet or the village. For this reason, I forego the distinction between mura and buraku, and use “village” throughout. I have used the terms “family” and “household” interchangeably. They are not identical, of course, but in my discussion so far the distinction between them is not fundamental. I discuss this distinction later in the chapter. For a useful discussion on these, see Yanagisako (1979: 162–6). It must also be noted that both Kawashima and Fukutake wrote during the Occupation. This fact, by default, forced them to submit their manuscripts to the

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appropriate department of SCAP for censorship. This may explain their slightly too easy bias toward modernization and praise for democracy. The ethos of trusting that feudalism would quickly wither died away as it became increasingly clear to leftist intellectuals that Japan’s democratization was nothing but the preservation of the old hierarchy and inequality. Already in 1954, Fukutake wrote: “In today’s age of reactionary right turn … to call for democracy looks almost anachronistic”; and he added somewhat desperately: “we have inhaled the air of freedom, though briefly. The new shoots of the tree of democracy have not dried up yet” (Fukutake 1954: 9). McKeldin Library, at the University of Maryland, College Park, has a copy of the original imprint of Kawashima’s Nihonshakai no kazokuteki k™sei, which was a gift from the author to E. O. Reischauer in 1949. After the cover page, an inscription reads: “To Prof. Reishower [sic] with best regards. Takeyoshi Kawashima January 1949.” 11 The d™zoku system is also found in the traditional merchant class. Typically, apprentices called detchi or tedai, who are recruited from rural areas, would work from early childhood in a merchant house and then eventually be given a noren, or a cloth divider, in the shop that bears the house name. This is called noren wake, dividing the noren, and is equivalent to the creation of bunke in the villages. An interesting historical study of a Kyoto medicine company can be found in Nakano (1948). Similarly, the oyabun–kobun relationship is widely found beyond agrarian communities. Ariga shows how in urban areas the lowerstrata small merchants, who form a semi-yakuza hierarchical organization network, use the idiom of oyabun and kobun (Ariga 1959: 226–31). Bennett and Ishino (1963), who worked for the Occupation, also conducted extensive research on the paternal hierarchy in Japanese labor relations, as was shown in Chapter 3 in this volume. Ariga expresses skepticism as to whether we can classify all sorts of d™zoku-type coalitions under the name d™zoku, since already in 1959, at the time Ariga was writing, the everyday standard Japanese term “d™zoku” was less applicable to kin-related family coalitions, excluding its nonkin variables (1959: 236). Eventually, use of the term d™zoku indeed disappears, and in its place the term ie is used to denote kin-like organizations, as will be shown in Chapter 5. 12 Scott Matsumoto (1962), based on survey data, shows a large regional discrepancy regarding the practice and preference of primogeniture. It is notably much higher in the northeast and lower in the southwest. Pelzel mentions that “over the three generations prior to 1948 a son other than the eldest had … succeeded in about 25 per cent of all the relevant cases” (Pelzel 1970: 231). 13 Indeed, Brown (1966) interprets d™zoku as a bilateral system. Brown suggests that, although genealogically d™zoku is agnatic, ideologically it is cognatic, exhibiting either patrilineal or matrilineal links. He attributes this to the fact that descent is not the only criterion for d™zoku membership. Indeed, as Nakane (1967a) later clarifies (see p. 137 here), descent is not the criterion for d™zoku at all. Brown’s interpretation relies on existing western anthropological kinship terms, which obscures the d™zoku mechanism rather than clarifying it. What I suggest in the text is not this sort of solution: I am casting doubt on applying western anthropological terms to the Japanese case in a taken-for-granted manner. Rather than adjusting the interpretation of Japanese kinship to fit the existing kinship terminology, we might do better by doing it the other way around. Along with the d™zoku system, marriage in Japan is diverse, and anthropologists always knew that. For one thing, even today the controversy still runs regarding whether to see marriage in ancient Japan as uxorilocal or virilocal. Takamure Itsue, by archival investigation, concludes that the original concept of

Notes 215 marriage in Japan was tsumadoi, or visiting-the-wife marriage, where the wife stayed in her birth family, and after children were born the children lived matrilocally (Takamure 1938, 1953). Against this, Yanagita Kunio, in his 1929 essay on mukoiri, or the groom’s moving-in marriage, saw that ultimately there was no matrilocal or uxorilocal marriage, since eventually the wife and children would go live with the husband – as can be seen in the cases of the ashiire marriage of the Hachijo and Toshima Islands. Yanagita assumed that although wife and children lived separately from the husband for some time during the marriage, ultimately they moved to the husband’s house. He did not entertain, unlike Takamure, the possibility that prior to that form of marriage the husband commuted to the wife’s house for the purposes of procreation and the wife and children never joined him – this was possibly due to Yanagita’s male-focused bias (Fukuta 1992: 157–8; see also N. Murakami 1977). This controversy aside, even as late as the postwar period, in terms of affinal tie and treatment of in-laws there is striking variety in Japan, as can be seen in the text. Ariga reports that there is a marriage form that cannot be seen as either patrilocal or matrilocal: in the Sait™ family, when a male servant was married to a female servant through an arrangement made by the head of the main house, this marriage was referred to as oyakatatorikon, denoting that the fictive oya, i.e. the head of the household and their employer, hosted the wedding (quoted in ïmachi 1959: 126–7). In this case, whether the marriage is patrilineal or not becomes uncertain: although both wife and husband could well be given the Sait™ name, this does not reflect either the wife’s or the husband’s lineage. Thus the picture is further complicated. 14 Morgan was a lawyer by training, although his repertoire was encyclopedic. See Trautmann (1987) for more on Morgan’s work and life. 15 Ariga emphasizes that the large house found in Shirakawa could not have been built by local, intra-village co-operation; it involved highly professional architectural and carpentry skills, which suggested that, contrary or in addition to the existing ecological and functionalist argument – that the large family was necessary due to hard living conditions and the extremely adverse conditions for farming – there could have been a cultural or ideological dimension that made villagers consciously adopt and plan this type of living, inviting outside experts to build a magnificent dwelling (Ariga 1943: 301). As for the details of the building, Bruno Taut, a German architect who traveled to Japan and wrote on Shirakawa houses, says that “the entire house-plan has nothing in common with the usual [Japanese houses]. … How can this fundamental difference from all other Japanese buildings, this lost island of logical constructive comprehension, be explained?” (Taut 1936: 133). 16 It is very rare to find a society where humans do not procreate for the sake of perpetuation of the family – not a uniquely Japanese practice. Lévi-Strauss refers to the Caduevo of Brazil, whose aristocrats disliked procreation, but even in this case adoption solved the problem of perpetuating the lineage (Lévi-Strauss 1973: 180, 182). In a parallel debate, Brown (1968) attempts to capture d™zoku in terms not of economic group, but of primarily “kinship” group. His grounds for seeing it as such rest on the internal solidarity found in d™zoku households. But solidarity in itself is not exactly unique to “kinship”: there are many non-kin groups that are based on solidarity. In my view, to come up with the purpose of d™zoku or the “concern of Japanese kinship” by way of acknowledging kinship in this case as an independent relationship in isolation from the political economy of the larger community such as the village and beyond would be ultimately to present a one-sided picture (see Brown 1968; see also Brown and Suenari 1966 for further examples). This is also anachronistic in light of the critical reflection on the notion of kinship proposed by the anthropologists of the day.

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17 This does not mean that no studies of Japanese kinship were produced thereafter. For example, Kitaoji suggested in his 1971 article that we understand Japanese kinship not in terms of ego-centered points of view, but in terms of a set of positions in regard to recruitment and inheritance. Bachnik (1983) makes a similar point. What is different in later studies of Japanese kinship is that they are no longer part of the effort to locate Japan in the existing framework of western anthropology, but are incorporated well into the studies of Japanese cultural uniqueness. The situation is different in studies of overseas Japanese. For example, Yanagisako (1975) locates Japanese-American kinship relations and their historical transformation in the spectrum of western anthropological studies of kinship. The debate over Japanese kinship, incidentally, shifted to a focus on “Japanese family.” For example, referring to the size of the nuclear family in contemporary Japan, F. Kumagai labels it as “externally modern but internally traditional” (1986: 371), which not only obscures what is meant by modern and traditional, but is also completely oblivious of empirical data showing that Japanese families, especially in the areas adjacent to Kyoto, have always been small in size since the Tokugawa period (Nakane 1972a). It also ignores the regional diversity that we saw in Chapter 4. Sources in studies of the Japanese family can be widely found in the areas of demography, marriage, family planning, and aging (see, for example, Kumagai 1984; Plath 1988; and Jolivet 1997).

5

The emergence of national anthropology

1

This is not to deny holism in toto. That holism can be a powerful weapon for a critique of the sectoral approach that anthropology traditionally maintained was demonstrated by feminist critique, which suggested that kinship and gender be approached in connection to society as a whole (Collier and Yanagisako 1987). In the case of Japan research as presented in the text, the problem lies in an a priori assumption that a term such as ie can exhaustively explain Japanese culture and society; such a brand of holism involves a gross reductionism. Unlike the postwar period, by the early 1980s one can cite an impressive list of works on Japan, which covers all sorts of sub-fields in the Japan field. Not all of these works comment on the Japanese nation as a whole, but many make reference to some kind of Japaneseness and to Japan’s cultural uniqueness. For industrial relations, labor organization, and class division, see Cole (1971, 1979), Dore (1973, 1978, 1987), Rohlen (1974), and Steven (1983); for a study of marriage, see Edwards (1989); for studies of rural and urban communities and their change, see Bestor (1989), Kelly (1985), Norbeck (1977), and Smith (1974, 1978); for the Japanese way of dealing with conflict, see Krauss et al. (1984); for medical anthropology of Japan, see Norbeck and Lock (1987) and OhnukiTierney (1984); for adulthood and maturity, see Plath (1975a, 1975b, 1980, 1988), and Rohlen (1976); for Japanese schools and children, see Rohlen (1983) and White (1987); for women in Japan, see Bernstein (1983), Smith and Wiswell (1982), and Lebra (1984); for personhood and society, see Smith (1983); for delinquency and modern social problems, see Wagatsuma and De Vos (1984), to cite only the most widely read. Tsurumi (1988) is a collection of studies that portray Japan as heterogeneous and severely stratified in terms of socioeconomic differences in power and privilege. As such, the volume in itself becomes a critique of the cultural homogeneity approach, such as that of Smith (1983). For a critical review of Steven (1983) and Krauss et al. (1984), see Bowen (1989). A critical survey of Japanese sources in Japanese-style management can be found in Ishikawa (1982). Bernstein (1983) focused on the interpersonal relationship between herself and a Japanese woman, while Smith and Wiswell (1982)

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Notes 217

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7

8

revisited Suye village (see Embree 1939) and its women, and Lebra (1984; see D. K. Kondo 1985 for a review) presented a comprehensive view on Japanese women. The 1980s also saw the publication of Koreans in Japan (C. Lee and De Vos, 1981), which for a long time provided the only comprehensive study of the everyday lives of Koreans in Japan. With regard to Japanese corporate culture in Southeast Asia, Nakane writes apologetically on behalf of Japanese business behavior seen as unpopular by local people. She argues that it is not “Japanese ethnocentrism” or “prejudice against other peoples” (Nakane 1972b: 125). She continues to write patronizingly and from an ethnic supremacist stance, comparing the Japanese and Indian work ethic, as can be seen in the following sentence: “It is doubtful, however, whether the Indians have themselves given enough thought to how they must go about the industrialization of their country within their own given structure” (Nakane 1984: 62). For Nakane’s reflection on fieldwork in India, see Nakane (1975). As for the assessment of Dale’s controversial work, see Kelly (1988) for a positive review and Sako (1988) for a critical review. Interestingly, not all the nihonjinron writers insisted on Japanese cultural uniqueness. Umesao, for example, suggests that Japan and northwestern Europe are two unique civilizations that are similar to each other, arguing that they achieved modernization by using their own uniqueness (Umesao 1986). Umesao does not clarify which countries he regards as constituting “northwestern Europe.” Although Umesao is not insisting on Japan’s unique singularity as other writers of nihonjinron do, his view is no different from theirs in the sense that it nevertheless represents the superiority of Japan and so-called northwestern Europe over other civilizations. It is also interesting to see that Umesao alludes to the possibility that Japan may not have to belong to Asia, but could be placed close to Europe. In their innovative summary of the 1980s new school of Japanese modernization, McCormack and Sugimoto (1988) cite five trends, including the ie society model and Umesao’s civilization model, in emphasizing “unique Japan.” The remaining three are: Japan as a “post-modern society,” a thesis emphasizing that Japan is beyond the criticism of Euro-American cultural critics; Japan as part of a Confucian world; and “cultural physiology,” the racist view which sees the biological make-up of the Japanese as different from and superior to that of others (McCormack and Sugimoto 1988: 4–6). Bachnik’s major works combine ie and self, omote/ura or uchi/soto (inside/outside) co-ordinates and indexical relations (Bachnik and Quinn 1994). This will be discussed in Chapter 6. See also Bachnik (1989). Shimizu had published works on Japanese kinship and ie from 1970 (Shimizu 1970, 1972–3, for example). Shimizu suggests that we see Japanese ie as having at least three different functions: “symbolic ie,” an abstract entity separate from its members but entrenched in their ideology of perpetuation; “corporate ie,” consisting of a set of statuses which living members occupy according to rank; and “kinship ie,” a “cultural medium for the processes of mating and procreation” (Shimizu 1987: S88). Note that this is exactly what Schneider is skeptical about – that is, conferring multiple functions on what to the natives is a single whole unit. For a socio-linguistic study of Japanese attitudes toward honorific language, see Wetzel (1994), for example. For a study on Japanese women’s use of language and its historical background, see Inoue (2002). For a similar critique, see Chapter 6, on Bachnik. Unlike Nakane, Vogel is sensitive to non-Japanese minorities in Japan (1979: 23). However, since his book aimed to provide a positive account of Japanese society the issue of ethnic minorities, which could only cast a negative light on Japan’s record, was omitted. It was only after the Japanese government ratified the

218

Notes International Covenants on Human Rights (1979) and joined the United Nations Refugee Convention (1982) that the civil status of Koreans and other minorities began slowly to improve. Even today there remain a great many concerns pertaining to their civil and legal rights (see Kayano 1994; D. Suzuki and Oiwa 1996; and Ryang 2000b, for example). For a sharp critique regarding Vogel’s approach to the Japanese political system, see Hellmann (1980).

6

The Japanese self

1 Morita entered Tokyo University graduate school as a psychiatry researcher in 1903. In 1920, he first published a paper on psychotherapy (Nomura 1958). For more details about the therapy, see Morita (1960). For an English-language study of Morita therapy, see Reynolds (1976); see also Plath’s (1976) review of Reynolds; and, for related writing, see Miura and Usa (1974). 2 There were attempts to connect and compare Morita therapy with psychoanalysis (see A. Kondo 1958). According to Kora and Sato, an American psychoanalyst, Karen Horney, visited Japan in 1952 with the purpose of learning about Zen Buddhism and Morita therapy (Koro and Sato 1958: 219). It seems, however, that Japanese psychiatrists were undecided as to how to classify Morita therapy. Kond™ Akihisa, Morita’s successor at Jikeikai Medical College, in his 1953 article calls Morita therapy a Japanese therapy for neurosis, while in his 1958 article he clearly distinguishes it from the treatment of neurosis and calls it a therapy for shinkeishitsu, or nervous personality. The difference is subtle, but it is not exactly the same as neurosis (see A. Kondo 1953, 1958). 3 As for Kosawa and early Japanese psychoanalysis, see Dale (1986: 116–21). 4 Japanese anthropologists were also interested in the Rorschach and Thematic Apperception Tests in the postwar period (see e.g. Sofue 1951, 1957). There is an interesting study of Korean immigrants from Cheju Island, off the southwestern coast of Korea, to Tokyo. Using the Rorschach test, Japanese researchers concluded that Korean children who were born in Japan displayed a much lower alertness level compared to Japanese children in a similarly urban setting, while their response to the map of the Korean peninsula was very strong, which led Japanese researchers to conclude that their personality is quarrelsome and easily agitated emotionally, weak on intellectual elaboration and intellectual thought; apparently, political interest was, in the eyes of Japanese researchers of the day, synonymous with lack of intelligence. (See Izumi et al. 1951.) Also, a study by Wagatsuma tells us of the value orientation of Japanese villagers in regard to marriage, love, and women’s role based on the results of a Thematic Apperception Test (Wagatsuma 1959). Wagatsuma interprets his data as indicative of relatively liberated gender relations in a fishing community as opposed to those found in a farming community. See Hulse (1948) for an account of Japanese culture and personality immediately after the war. Many psychologically oriented articles are written by authors with or without psychological training and with or without psychological testing, including Vogel (1961) on family, personal immaturity, and emotional health in Japan, and D. C. Buchannan (1954) on Japanese character and personality (Buchannan was a CIA Foreign Affairs Officer). There is an historic background to this process. National character research, far from declining, gained fresh popularity in the fifteen years after the war (Terhune 1970: 205). Increasing Cold War tensions and the concern for national security ensured that quantitative measurements, surveys, opinion polls and psychological tests such as the Rorschach and Thematic Apperception Tests remained popular among psychological anthropol-

Notes 219

5

6

7

8

9

10

ogists, including Japan specialists. As late as the 1970s, psychologically minded anthropologists of Japan were using the “test” as a method to acquire field data. See, for example, Lebra (1973) and Sofue (1979). A brief survey of the use of psychological tests in the Japan field can be found in Norbeck and De Vos (1972: 30–3). In an ironical turn, in the 1990s the method used by Morita therapy came to be readily found in US psychotherapy, including detoxification programs, in which group counseling and the use of written communication between the inmate/patient and the care-giver were used and acceptance of one’s own situation as it is (admitting one’s dependency) were emphasized. I owe this information to Ms. Rita Setpaul of the Department of Psychology, University of Guam, who was my research assistant during summer 2001. The use of written communication in psychotherapy was discussed from early on: see, for example, Farber (1953). Even within national character studies, using extensive psychological tests, questionnaires, and opinion surveys, Stoetzel found already in 1955 that young Japanese were showing considerable deviation from the personality assumed in Chrysanthemum (Stoetzel 1955). For a detailed discussion of “momism” and Philip Wylie, see Plant (2001: ch. 4) and Terry (1998). For combat exhaustion and war neuroses, see Grinker and Spiegel (1943) and Henderson and Moore (1944); and for the expert opinion on mom’s threat, see Strecker (1945, 1946a, 1946b), for example. Strictly speaking, the doctor–patient relation is a social relation. As such, just like Wittgenstein’s (1963) example of bricklayers’ language, the exchange between doctor and patient represents a social use of the language, although Doi does not cite examples derived from specific sociality; his citations are isolated from it and deceptively devoid of explanation of social rules between the speakers. Doi contends that Benedict’s cultural prejudice prevented her from seeing the deep-seated Japanese sense of guilt, as shown in sumanai (Doi 1973: 50). An interesting question arises. Contrary to what Doi states, the Japanese nation-state is not so apologetic when it comes to postwar and postcolonial reparations. It continues to be difficult for the Japanese government to issue an apology regarding the wartime forced labor mobilization of peoples from the colonies and other parts of Asia, including forced military prostitution, proper compensation of victims, and the incorporation of such historical evidence into formal education. Why? Despite these problems, Doi’s amae has been taken as a point of departure by some researchers, albeit with some critical revision. See H. A. Kumagai and Kumagai (1986), H. A. Kumagai (1981), Wierzbicka (1991), for example. On the other hand, there are numerous insightful yet highly critical evaluations of Doi’s work. See, for example, Pelzel (1977). The tendency to attempt to decipher the Japanese cultural core from linguistic data largely divorced from their concrete social context continues to find its way into studies. In a take similar to Hendry’s approach to polite language (see Chapter 5), Wetzel examines Japanese female speech and considers power relations, but the analysis is done largely within the linguistic realm (Wetzel 1988). See also Wierzbicka (1991, 1996) for a key wordoriented study of Japanese culture; and Midooka (1990) for a similar study but with more emphasis on the uniqueness of Japanese-style communication. Earlier, Lebra (1976) portrayed the Japanese and Japanese culture under what is a very Benedictian title, Japanese Patterns of Behavior, which is full of descriptive linguistic data that take the existing repertoire of gate-keeping words in Japanese studies such as amae as a priori. For a more firmly language-oriented study of the Japanese, see Miller (1977, 1982).

220

Notes

11 What is beyond my comprehension is Befu’s alternative model, which includes: • ideology • social exchange • the concept of seishin. (Befu 1980a: 178) In this, seishin is distinguished from ideology. Why? Seishin as spiritual selfdiscipline or the belief in self-discipline is nothing other than ideology. It is not clear to me how Befu’s use of “concept” qualifies seishin as different from ideology. It is also interesting to see that Befu, in another article published in the same year which largely deals with the same topic, does not propose this “concept” at all (Befu 1980b). In my view, the attempt to propose a model of Japanese society as a counterargument to the nihonjinron premise is wrought with as many flaws as is nihonjinron itself, in that it basically remains within the same dead-end of generalization. 12 Another term that is often used in conjunction with kokoro is ki. Doi endorses ki and kokoro as part of the unique vocabulary of the Japanese. These words are still very popular among psychological and medical anthropologists of Japan (e.g. Lock 1980; Rosenberger 1992; Lebra 1976, 1992). According to Doi, ki is related to emotion, judgment, consciousness, or will. Again, he gives us an encyclopedic list of words and expressions relating to ki (see Doi 1973). 13 Much of what current studies of the Japanese self say was present in Benedict in her notion of shame culture: a notable difference between shame culture and guilt culture, as noted earlier, appears in the formation of self (Benedict 1946). But, as stated in Chapter 2 in this volume, Benedict’s suggestion that Japanese culture is shame culture occupies only a very small portion of her Chrysanthemum, as Plath wrote: As I count them, only four of the book’s 300 pages deal with guilt and shame. For nearly half of the book what she offers is an exposition of Japanese forms of self-discipline, self-respect, and the dilemmas of virtue brought on by a never-ending need to reconcile the claims of others in one’s circle of human attachments. (Plath 1989: 88) There are some variations of shame culture in the study of the Japanese self. For example, according to authors such as Bachnik and Rosenberger, Japanese self is split into the “two faces” of social and emotional (Bachnik 1992), and the “polar model” of sociocentric and ego-centric (Rosenberger 1989). As with other studies of the Japanese self, the problem with these authors is that they base their analysis only on person-to-person interaction, with little reference to historicity and the political economy of the nation-state. The studies of shame culture and the shame–guilt contrast in the studies of the Japanese self continue. See some essays in De Vos (1973) and Lebra (1971, 1973, 1983), for example. (See Chapter 2, note 6.) It is not only anthropologists of Japan that study shame and guilt. See, for example, Rosaldo (1983), Lynd (1958), and Lewis (1971). 14 As with other studies of Japanese culture and the Japanese that make grand claims such as hers, her ethnographic example comes from a very small circle of a host family in a provincial Japanese city. See Bachnik (1994b). 15 The same critique applies to the now popular social-psychological study of the Japanese self, represented by Markus and Kitayama, which relies heavily on surveys and questionnaires. Markus and Kitayama do not subject their survey findings to socio-historical analysis and simply quantify them in order to

Notes 221 substantiate their preconceived proposition, i.e. that the Japanese self is interdependent, intersubjective, interactive, etc. See note 17 for a list of their works. 16 For a brief but sharp critique of Dorinne Kondo, see Mathews (1996). 17 The tendency to readily accept the east–west binary dichotomy in the formation of self and to set it as a starting point is hard to stop. The social psychologists Markus and Kitayama, in their ongoing cross-cultural collaboration, broadly based on a survey of college students, suggest, with due caution and elaboration, that in Asian societies such as Japan the self is interdependent and in western societies such as the US it is independent; whereas US individuals enhance their positive qualities, Japanese individuals tend to describe themselves negatively (Markus and Kitayama 1994; Kitayama and Markus 1995; Kitayama et al. 1995; Kitayama et al. 1997; Kitayama et al. 2000; Kanagawa et al. 2001, for example; see the critique by Lindholm 1997; and Spiro 1993; see also Sato and Cameron 1999 for a Japan–Canada comparison). When discussing cultural dichotomy, we may need to take into consideration the class, ethnic, and gender divide, as well as the generational divide. Takata and Matsumoto, for example, suggest on the basis of their survey that in Japan so-called “Japanese” traits of self such as group-orientation are displayed more clearly among youths than among adults (Takata and Matsumoto 1995). What strikes me about all these studies is that, although they pretend to be comparative accounts of western and Japanese selves, the problem is not so much the shortage of data about the Japanese self as their facile assumption about the western self. There are excellent historical studies of western individualism (e.g. Macfarlane 1978; also Strathern 1992: ch. 1), but usually these are disregarded, while there is more than one “self ” in the west, which tends to be also forgotten. Furthermore, according to Arendt, it is only in the nineteenth century that the public citizen in Europe and North America was converted into a private individual who stood against society (1963: 140). In other words, there were and are many different individualisms, personhoods, and selves.

Afterword 1

Of recent Japan studies – mainly by anthropologists, but also by Japanologists in general with an anthropological inclination – the following come to mind: on labor, industry, and industrial relations, Roberts (1994), Turner (1995), Creighton (1995), Moeran (1996), and Ogasawara (1998); on tourism and rural and suburban communities, Kelly (1986), Robertson (1991), Ivy (1995), and Creighton (1997); on popular culture, Ivy (1993), Treat (1996), and Robertson (1998b): on women, Iwao (1993), Skov and Moeran (1995), Imamura (1996), Buckley (1997), and Tamanoi (1998); on minorities and the marginals, D. Suzuki and Oiwa (1996), Fowler (1996), Stevens (1997), M. Weiner (1997), Ryang (1997a, 2000b), Nakamura (2001, diss.), and Angst (2001, diss.); on children and education, Rohlen and LeTendre (1996) and Goodman (2000); on multiethnic space and foreign workers in Japan, Tsuda (1999a, 2003), Roberts and Douglass (2000), Ryang (2002a), and Hester (1999, diss.). I am not suggesting that all those listed are worth reading. There are several essential and seminal works, including Robertson (1991, 1998b) and Ivy (1995), that stand out for their quality of research and methodical scholarship. Some are critically reviewed: see Tsuda (1999b) for a useful review of Stevens (1997), and Ryang (1997b) for a review of Buckley (1997). In addition, there are works that are sensitive to history and especially colonial history, which is an important yet hitherto disregarded part of Japan anthropology: see Robertson (1998b) and Tamanoi (1998, 2000).

222 2 3

4

5

6

7

Notes Here, Asad’s discussion of translation and subversion is highly relevant. According to him, the act of translating a subversive text is not subversive in itself (see Asad 1995). When in the 1990s transnationalism became popular in anthropology, Japanmade technology or devices and their trans-Asian dissemination were studied, but from the receptive ends (e.g. Ching 1996). Not much is done in consideration of how Japanese culture itself is being radically redefined by the waves of immigrants and imports from Asia, as if to suggest that Japanese culture is secure in its identity as a center and it is the peripheries that need to adjust and readjust. In the spirit of exploring the ethnographic potential of the Japan field, I am currently writing a book on the interrelation between the massacre of Koreans in 1923 following the earthquake and the emergent process of Japan’s modern national sovereignty (see, for preliminary thoughts, Ryang 2003). For example, studies of Koreans in Japan written in English, though fewer in quantity and less lofty quality compared with the corpus of those studies and documentation in Japanese, can be traced to as early in the postwar period as 1950: see Wagner (1951), to be followed by Mitchell (1967), Newall (1967), C. Lee (1973), McKinstry and Lutrin (1979), C. Lee and De Vos (1981), Mihashi (1987), Hardacre (1984), Ryang (e.g. 1990, 1992), ïnuma (1992), and so on. If we consider how many books and articles have so far been published in Japanese on Koreans in Japan, it is difficult to understand why the topic did not attract more attention from western anthropologists much earlier. A parallel trap is described by Hein and Hammond, who suggest that Japan’s reorientation of itself in the heart of Asia (re-asianization) does not contradict nihonjinron’s proposition, i.e. Japan’s cultural superiority over other Asians (Hein and Hammond 1995). I should add that recent studies of Japan’s minorities and ethnic diversity are remarkably advanced in terms of scope and subject matter, and theoretical precision and focus (see, for example, Lie 2001b). For example, see Tsuda’s Strangers in the Ethnic Homeland (2003). Such a study can be usefully compared with Kurashige’s Japanese American Celebration and Conflict (2002), and affords us a chance to compare studies of ethnic minorities in Japan with those of Asian Americans, for example. The literary field in Japan has captured this for some time now (see, e.g. Ryang 2002b).

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Index

Abegglen, J. 79, 91–5, 96, 134, 150 Abu-Lughod, L. 210n adoption 82, 90, 93, 119, 151, 188, 215n; “bastard” 26; nankinkoz™ 115–16; Nosa 108; servant(s) 105, 108, 132; son-in-law 26, 132, 136 affinal 123, 124, 215n affines 132–3, 145 age-set 105, 124 Ainu 10, 81, 147, 201, 202 Althusser, L. 2 amae(ru) 13, 35, 171, 173, 174–5, 178, 180, 181, 187, 197, 219n Amino, Y. 195 Anderson, P. 23–4, 44, 207n Aoki, T. 47–8, 160 Appadurai, A. 3–4, 44, 203 area studies 44 Arendt, H. 221n Ariga, K. 12, 53, 59, 85, 101, 102, 103–14, 117, 118, 119–20, 121, 122, 122–3, 132, 134, 146, 212n, 215n Austin, J.L. 179 Babcock, B. 207n Bachnik, J. 151–2, 155, 156, 193–6, 199, 216n, 217n Balint, M. 171 Barthes, R. 62 Bateson, G. 21, 206n Beardsley, R. 79, 210n Beattie, J. 127 Befu, H. 8, 103, 128–9, 130, 132–7, 142, 180 Benedict, R. 6, 11, 12, 13, 16, 17, 18, 22, 28–35, 36, 37–9, 40, 41, 42, 44, 45–6, 47–72, 75, 76–7, 80, 84, 91, 98, 100, 114, 137, 139, 142, 143, 145, 148, 155, 160, 163, 164, 165, 173–4, 180, 193,

199, 201, 207n, 208n, 209n, 219n, 220n Bennett, J. 77, 79, 87–90, 114, 119, 123, 133, 134, 211n Berlin, I. 197 Bird, I. 6 Boas, F. 16 Bourdieu, P. 176, 186 Bowen, R. 141 Brown, L.K. 214n, 215n Bryn Mawr College 58 Buddhism 28 Burakumin 81, 147, 202 Butler, J. 198 Caduevo 215n Cambridge 147 Caudill, W. 171–4 Chamberlain, B. 6, 90 Chinese 10, 26, 50, 147 Clark, W. 6 colonialism 11, 36, 41, 64, 204, 206n Columbia University 16, 28, 29, 207n, 208n Confucian(ism) 118, 126 consanguinity 107, 112, 113, 133, 145, 153, 154 Creighton, M. 69–70 cultural uniqueness (of Japan) 47–8, 58, 75, 103, 137, 140, 141, 148, 150, 175, 180, 194, 203, 216n, 217n culture and personality 9, 11, 16–17, 19, 23, 24–5, 33, 36, 37, 39, 41, 44, 166, 172, 181, 186, 208n, 209n, 218n Dale, P. 150, 217n, 218n Daniel, E.V. 205n De Vos, G. 202 democracy 40, 52, 78, 90, 214n

254

Index

Dillon, W. 211n Dobu 29 Doi, T. 10, 13, 163, 170–4, 180–3, 206n, 219n Dole, G. 128, 129 Dore, R. 180, 181, 211n Dower, J. 30, 73–4, 76, 78, 80, 95, 210n d™zoku 102, 105, 106–14, 120–2, 122–6, 127, 131–6, 142, 145–6, 151, 153, 188, 189, 214n, 215n; and kosaku 107; Kokashiwa 106–7, 213n; merchant class 214n; Nosa 107–9, 125; Sait™ 85, 109–10, 112, 215n; Sugawara 110 Du Bois, C. 181 duolocal 124, 131, 135 eboshi 87, 89, 123, 124 Eco, U. 62 Embree, E. 25, 207n Embree, J. 11, 17, 23–8, 29, 34, 35–9, 40, 78, 79, 81, 82, 128, 206n, 207n, 208n, 212n equilibrium 16, 24 essentialism 13, 42, 140 ethnocentrism 39, 131, 137, 153, 168, 198, 208n Fanon, F. 204 feminist critique 2, 216n Filby, M. 159 Fortes, M. 127 Fortun, R. 29 Foucault, M. 62, 190–1, 196–7 Frager, R. 180 Freud(ian) 20, 167, 191 Fromm, E. 19, 209n Fukui, N. 70, 207n Fukuta, A. 112 Fukutake, T. 101–2, 120–2, 123, 125, 146, 213–14n Gam™, M. 102, 123, 127 Geertz, C. 29, 49–50, 70, 208n Gellner, E. 87 Giddens, A. 195 giri 30–1, 32, 33, 34, 36, 70, 118, 137, 143, 181 Gluck, C. 211n Goldman, M. 42, 44 Gorer, G. 17–21, 28–9, 32, 36, 37, 38–9, 40, 42, 44, 57, 147, 173, 201, 208n

Hall, J. 79 Hamaguchi, E. 68 Haring, D. 40–1, 208n Harris, R. 177 Harvard 42, 163, 187 Hashima, R. 57 Hearn, L. 6–7 hegemony 46, 48, 61 Hellmann, D. 160 Hendry, J. 155–9, 164, 199 Hobsbawm, E. 194 holism 3, 13, 35, 39, 48, 72, 137, 139, 140, 155, 164, 165, 216n homogeneity 42, 98, 101, 122, 136, 139, 140, 147, 158, 216n Horney, K. 209n, 218n Hudson, M. 195 hypochondria 22, 167 ideology 45, 60, 95, 114, 116, 117, 119, 120, 136, 147, 150, 157, 169, 175, 178, 180, 181, 185, 196, 200, 217n, 220n ie 12, 35, 96, 101, 102, 109, 122, 132, 137, 139, 140, 142–8, 148–55, 156, 160, 164, 169, 175, 181, 183, 184, 187, 188, 191–2, 193, 194, 197, 200, 214n, 216n, 217n Ienaga, S. 66 imperialism 1, 61, 64 incest 20 Ishida, E. 54, 55 Ishino, I. 77, 79, 87–90, 123, 133, 134, 211n Ivy, M. 200 Japanese American(s) 18, 19, 20, 21, 29, 33, 34, 54, 172, 187, 206n, 216n Jikeikai Medical College 218n Johnson, S. 75 Kawashima, T. 52. 54, 84, 96, 102, 114–20, 123, 137, 146, 213–14n Kent, P. 65–7, 70 Kitano, S. 106, 213n Kitaoji, H. 216n Kitayama, S. 220–1n k™kumi 120–2, 124, 125 Kondo, A. 218n Kondo, D. 187–92, 221n Korean(s) 10, 26, 36, 50, 64, 71, 79, 81, 125, 136, 147, 151, 162, 163, 195, 201, 202, 205n, 209n, 218n, 222n

Index 255 kosaku 103, 105, 107, 109, 110, 111, 112, 113, 114, 116, 121, 212n Kosawa, H. 169, 170, 218n Kroeber, A. 16, 32 Kula 3 Kusserow, A. 191 Kyushu University 168 La Barre, W. 17, 18, 21–2, 28–9, 30, 34, 36, 37, 40, 57, 208n Lapsley, H. 207n Lebra, T. 69 Lévi-Strauss, C. 1, 127, 215n life history 25 London School of Economics 143 Lummis, D. 58–67 MacArthur, D. 78 Macdonald, G. 202 Maher, J. 202 Mair, L. 24 Malinowski, B. 82 Manchuria(n) 26, 54, 65 Mandelbaum, D. 42 Markus, H. 220–1n Marui, K. 168 Marx(ism) 1–2, 64, 191, 212n Matsumoto, S. 212n, 214n McCormack, G. 75, 217n Mead, M. 16, 18, 21, 29, 33, 39, 41–2, 206n, 211n Meadow, A. 20–1 Menninger, K. 173 Metreaux, R. 208n Minami, H. 53, 149 Minear, R. 5, 17, 22, 23, 40 Mishima, Y. 149 modernization 1, 34, 73, 74–5, 81, 84, 90, 95, 100, 117, 122, 150, 160, 161, 164, 174, 181, 199, 214n, 217n Moeran, B. 180–3, 201 Moloney, J. 169–70, 174 momism 173, 219n Morgan, L.H. 128, 129–30, 204, 215n Morita, S. 167 Morita therapy 167–8, 172, 218n Mouer, R. 142, 163–4 Murdock, G. 127, 128 Nagai, M. 114, 119 Nakane, C. 8, 10, 126, 137–8, 141–8, 152, 155, 156, 163, 164, 174, 178, 180, 184, 185, 217n

Nanjing (Nanking) 18, 25, 50, 65, 206n nationalism 3, 41, 44, 66, 150, 180, 198, 200 Nayar(s) 136, 202 Needham, R. 128, 131 Neiburg, F. 42, 44 Nelson, D. 132 nihonjinron 8, 12, 45, 47–8, 49, 71, 141, 143, 148–50, 163, 164, 165, 210n, 217n, 220n, 222n Nishi, Y. 63–7 Norbeck, E. 79, 81–4, 128–30 Norman, E.H. 43 Nuer 127, 185, 202 Ohnuki-Tierney, E. 22, 194–7 Oikawa, H. 106, 213n Okamura, R. 206n Okinawan(s) 10, 64, 81, 201 on 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 51, 54, 70, 118, 137, 143, 181 OWI (Office of War Information) 11, 28, 29, 43, 61, 70, 206n pan-Asianism 150 Parkin, D. 180 participant observation 25 patriarchy 52 patrilineage 104, 124, 126, 136, 152 patron–client 106, 124 Pearl Harbor 11, 15, 50 Pelzel, J. 36, 214n Perry, M. 205n Plath, D. 48, 79, 98–100, 181 political economy 62, 65, 128, 186, 196, 199, 200, 215n, 220n primogeniture 104, 117, 124, 126, 214n psychiatry 12, 13, 43, 166–7, 170, 171, 173, 174, 209n, 218n psychoanalysis 12, 19, 22, 43, 155–71, 174, 209n, 218n Radcliffe-Brown, A.R. 17, 23, 35–6 Reischauer, E. 76–7, 214n Robertson, J. 48, 70 Rohlen, T. 180 Roosevelt, F. 15, 21 Rorschach 172, 218n Rose, J. 198 Saeki, S 69 Said, E. 5

256

Index

Sakaguchi, A. 209n Sakuta, K. 68, 69 Sapir, E. 33 SCAP (Supreme Command for Allied Powers) 75, 77, 78, 87, 214n Schneider, D. 127, 131, 132, 152–4, 217n sexist 44 sexuality 20 shame culture 31–2, 34, 48, 51, 56, 57, 58, 67–72, 220n Shimada, H. 68 Shimizu, A. 153–5, 217n Shinto 28 Sikkema, M. 20 Singleton, A. 30, 59 Smith, R. 48, 129–30, 193, 194 social structure 23, 26, 35, 36 Soeda, Y. 69 Sofue, T. 211n Spiro, M. 191 Stefansson, V. 39 Stocking, G. 209n Strathern, M. 152 structural-functionalism 1, 17, 23–5, 26, 27, 28, 35–6, 44, 143, 145 Sugi, M. 98 Sugimoto, Y. 75, 142, 163–4, 217n Suh, K. 71–2 Suzuki, P. 206n

Trobriand 3, 82 Tsuda, U. 58 Tsuda Woman’s College 58 Tsurumi, K. 51, 52, 54

tabinau 152–4 Takamure, I. 207n, 214–15n Takeuchi, Y. 69 Tallensi 127, 132 TAT (Thematic Apperception Test) 21, 172, 218n Taut, B. 6, 215n Tohoku University 168 toilet 19, 20, 21, 36, 41, 44, 76, 170 transnational(ism) 2, 33, 41, 42, 210n

Yale University 18 Yanagisako, S. 101, 213n, 216n Yanagita K. 53–4, 112–13, 204, 215n Yap 152–5 Yayoi 195 Yengoyan, A. 199 yobai 104

Ueda, Y. 207n ultimogeniture 124, 125 Umesao, T. 217n University of Chicago 17, 23, 143 University of Maryland 214n University of Michigan 81, 211n University of Tokyo 143, 144, 170, 218n Vassar College 207n, 49, 70 Vogel, E. 12, 34, 67, 79, 95–8, 119, 160–4, 210n, 217–18n Wagatsuma, H. 202, 218n Ward, R. 79 Watsuji, T. 54–5, 56, 57 Weltfish, G. 207n Williams, B. 194, 202 Wittgenstein, L. 177–8, 219n Wolf, E. 16 Worsley, P. 127 Wylie, P. 219n

Zen 168, 218n