01:研究課題——日本
1. Assignment: Japan
The JAPANESE were the most alien enemy the United States had ever fought in an all-out struggle. In no other war with a major foe had it been necessary to take into account such exceedingly different habits of acting and thinking. Like Czarist Russia before us in 1905, we were fighting a nation fully armedand trained which did not belong to the Western cultural tradition. Conventions of war which Western nations had come to accept as facts of human nature obviously did not exist for the Japanese. It made the war in the Pacific more than a series of landings on island beaches, more than an unsurpassed problem of logistics. It made it a major problem in the nature of the enemy. We had to understand their behavior in order to cope with it. (p.1)
Japanese soldiers are were disciplined to the hilt but are also insubordinate. (p.3)
1944年6月「私(ベネディクト)は日本研究を付託された。日本人とはどの
ようなものか、文化人類学者として駆使することのできる手法を総動員して説明せよ、とのことであった」角田訳(研究課題——日本『菊と刀』16ページ)
今の僕たちに必要なのは、本多勝一(1970)みたいに、ベネディクトの眼を 他者の眼として、見つめられた自分たちを(往時の)ベトナムの人たちや中国の民と同一化する——これが反帝国主義の命令語法だ——のではない。むしろ、ベ ネディクトの眼になって、自分たちの思念や行動をどのようにカメレオンのように変化することができるのか、そして、自分達の寛容と対話の働きかけによっ て、どのように他者もまた我々との関係を通して変容するのかという可能性に賭けなければならない。もちろん「自分達の寛容と対話の働きかけ」を可能にする のは、相手を十分に武装解除した後ではあるのだが……
Glossary [NOTE: Literal translations are in quotation marks. When no accent is indicated, give all syllables equal value. The accents which are marked are rough approximations meant only to help English-speaking readers. Vowels and diphthongs are sounded as follows: _a_ as in _art_ _i_ as in _police_ _ai_ as in _aisle_ _ǐ_ as in _tin_ _e_ as in _get_ _o_ as in _pole_ _ei_ as in _veil_ _u_ as in _rude_ _g_ is always hard, as in _go_.] _ai_, love; specifically a superior’s love of a dependent. _arigato_, thank you; ‘this difficult thing.’ _buraku_, a hamlet of some fifteen houses; a district in a village. _bushido_, ‘the way of the samurai.’ A term popularized during this century to designate traditional Japanese ideals of conduct. Doctor Inazo Nitobe in _Bushido, The Soul of Japan_, itemizes as Bushido: rectitude or justice, courage, benevolence, politeness, sincerity, honor, loyalty, and self-control. _chu_, fealty to the Emperor. _daimyo_, a feudal lord. _donen_, age-mates. _eta_, a pariah class in pre-Meiji times. _geisha_, a courtesan especially trained and given high prestige. _gi_, righteousness. _gimu_, a category of Japanese obligations. _Vide_ Chart, p. 116. _giri_, a category of Japanese obligations. _Vide_ Chart, p. 116. _go_, a unit of measure of capacity; less than one cup. _haji_, shame. _haraki’ri_ or _seppuku_, suicide according to the samurai code. Seppuku is the more elegant term. _hysteri_, nervousness and instability. Generally used of women. _ǐnkyo_, the state of formal retirement from active life. _Issei_, an American of Japanese ancestry born in Japan. _Vide_ Nisei. _ǐsshǐn_ to restore, to dip back into the past. A slogan of the Meiji Restoration. _jen_ (Chinese), good human relations, benevolence. _jicho’_, self-respect; circumspection. ‘To double jicho with jicho,’ to be superlatively circumspect. _jǐn_ (written with the same character as Chinese _jen_), obligation which is outside the obligatory code. But _vide_ ‘knowing _jin_,’ p. 119, footnote. _jǐngi_ (variant of jin), an obligation outside the obligatory code. _jǐri’ki_, ‘self-help,’ spiritual training dependent solely on one’s own disciplined human powers. _Vide_ tariki. _judo_, a form of jujitsu. Japanese wrestling. _jujǐtsu_, Japanese wrestling. _kabuki_, popular drama. _Vide_ noh. _kagura_, traditional dances performed at Shinto shrines. _kami_, head, source. Shinto term for deity. _kamika’ze_, ‘divine wind.’ The hurricane which drove back and overturned Genghis Khan’s invading fleet in the thirteenth century. The pilots of suicide planes in World War II were called the Kamikaze Corps. _katajikĕnai’_, thank you; ‘I am insulted.’ _kino do’ku_, thank you; ‘this poisonous feeling.’ _kǐnshǐn_, repentance. A period of withdrawal to remove ‘the rust of the body.’ _ko_, filial piety. _koan_ (pronounce _ko-an_), problems having no rational answer, set by the Zen cult for those in training. _ko-on_, obligation to the Emperor, the State. _magokoro_, ‘sincerity.’ _makoto_, ‘sincerity.’ _Meiji Era_, the period of the reign of the Emperor Meiji, 1868-1912. It designates the beginning of the modern era in Japan. _moxa_, powdered leaves of a certain plant, which are burned in a cone on the surface of the body for curative purposes. It cures ailments and naughtiness. _muga_, the elimination of the observer-self achieved by those who have taken training. _narǐkǐn’_, _nouveau riche_. ‘A pawn promoted to queen’ (chess). _nǐrva’na_ (Sanskrit), final emancipation of the soul from transmigration; state of not-being; absorption into the divine. _Nisei_, an American of Japanese ancestry born in the United States. _Vide_ Issei. _noh_, classic drama. _Vide_ kabuki. _nushi_, master. _on_ (pronounce _own_), a category of incurred obligations. _Vide_ Chart, p. 116. _oya_, parents. _ronǐn_, in feudal times samurai retainers who, because of disgrace or because of the death or dishonor of their overlord, had become masterless men. _sake_ (pronounce _sa-ke_), a rice-beer which is the principal alcoholic drink of the Japanese. _samurai_, in feudal times the warriors, two-sword men. Below them were the common people: farmers, artisans, and merchants. _satori_, Buddhist enlightenment. _seppu’ku_ or _harakiri_, suicide by piercing the abdomen. In feudal times it was the exclusive privilege of the nobles and samurai. _shogun_, in pre-Meiji times the actual ruler of Japan; succession was hereditary as long as a family could remain in power. The Shogun was always invested by the Emperor. _shuyo_, self-discipline; mental training. _sonno joi_, ‘Restore the Emperor and expel the barbarians (Westerners).’ A slogan of the Meiji Restoration. _sumimasen’_, thank you; I’m sorry; ‘this never ends.’ _sutra_ (Sanskrit), short collections of dialogues and aphorisms. The disciples of Gautama Buddha wrote such sutras in the conversational idiom of their day (Pali). _tai setsu_, Higher Law. _tari’ki_, ‘help of another.’ Spiritual blessing which is an act of grace. _Vide_ jiriki. _tonari gumi_, small neighborhood groups of about five to ten families. _yoga_ (Sanskrit), a form of ascetic philosophy and practice prevalent in India from earliest historical times. _zaibatsu_, big business; influential members of the economic hierarchy. _Zen_, a Buddhist cult introduced from China and important in Japan since the twelfth century. It was an upper-class cult of the rulers and warriors and still contrasts with the great tariki Buddhist cults with their huge membership. |
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01■The
Japanese were the most alien enemy the United States had ever fought in
an all-out struggle. In no other war with a major foe had it been
necessary to take into account such exceedingly different habits of
acting and thinking. Like Czarist Russia before us in 1905, we were
fighting a nation fully armed and trained which did not belong to the
Western cultural tradition. Conventions of war which Western nations
had come to accept as facts of human nature obviously did not exist for
the Japanese. It made the war in the Pacific more than a series of
landings on island beaches, more than an unsurpassed problem of
logistics. It made it a major problem in the nature of the enemy. We
had to understand their behavior in order to cope with it. |
1 |
02■ The difficulties were great.
During the past seventy-five years since Japan’s closed doors were
opened, the Japanese have been described in the most fantastic series
of ‘but also’s’ ever used for any nation of the world. When a serious
observer is writing about peoples other than the Japanese and says they
are unprecedentedly polite, he is not likely to add, ‘But also insolent
and overbearing.’ When he says people of some nation are incomparably
rigid in their behavior, he does not add, ‘But also they adapt
themselves readily to extreme innovations.’ When he says a people are
submissive, he does not explain too that they are not easily amenable
to control from above. When he says they are loyal and generous, he
does not declare, ‘But also treacherous and spiteful.’ When he says
they are genuinely brave, he does not expatiate on their timidity. When
he says they act out of concern for others’ opinions, he does not then
go on to tell that they have a truly terrifying conscience. When he
describes robot-like discipline in their Army, he does not continue by
describing the way the soldiers in that Army take the bit in their own
teeth even to the point of insubordination. When he describes a people
who devote themselves with passion to Western learning, he does not
also enlarge on their fervid conservatism. When he writes a book on a
nation with a popular cult of aestheticism which gives high honor to
actors and to artists and lavishes art upon the cultivation of
chrysanthemums, that book does not ordinarily have to be supplemented
by another which is devoted to the cult of the sword and the top
prestige of the warrior. |
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03■ All these contradictions,
however, are the warp and woof of books on Japan. They are true. Both
the sword and the chrysanthemum are a part of the picture. The Japanese
are, to the highest degree, both aggressive and unaggressive, both
militaristic and aesthetic, both insolent and polite, rigid and
adaptable, submissive and resentful of being pushed around, loyal and
treacherous, brave and timid, conservative and hospitable to new ways.
They are terribly concerned about what other people will think of their
behavior, and they are also overcome by guilt when other people know
nothing of their misstep. Their soldiers are disciplined to the hilt
but are also insubordinate. |
3 |
04■ When it became so important
for America to understand Japan, these contradictions and many others
equally blatant could not be waved aside. Crises were facing us in
quick succession. What would the Japanese do? Was capitulation possible
without invasion? Should we bomb the Emperor’s palace? What could we
expect of Japanese prisoners of war? What should we say in our
propaganda to Japanese troops and to the Japanese homeland which could
save the lives of Americans and lessen Japanese determination to fight
to the last man? There were violent disagreements among those who knew
the Japanese best. When peace came, were the Japanese a people who
would require perpetual martial law to keep them in order? Would our
army have to prepare to fight desperate bitter-enders in every mountain
fastness of Japan? Would there have to be a revolution in Japan after
the order of the French Revolution or the Russian Revolution before
international peace was possible? Who would lead it? Was the
alternative the eradication of the Japanese? It made a great deal of
difference what our judgments were. |
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05■ In June, 1944, I was
assigned to the study of Japan. I was asked to use all the techniques I
could as a cultural anthropologist to spell out what the Japanese were
like. During that early summer our great offensive against Japan had
just begun to show itself in its true magnitude. People in the United
States were still saying that the war with Japan would last three
years, perhaps ten years, more. In Japan they talked of its lasting one
hundred years. Americans, they said, had had local victories, but New
Guinea and the Solomons were thousands of miles away from their home
islands. Their official communiqués had hardly admitted naval defeats
and the Japanese people still regarded themselves as victors. |
5 |
06■ In June, however, the
situation began to change. The second front was opened in Europe and
the military priority which the High Command had for two years and a
half given to the European theater paid off. The end of the war against
Germany was in sight. And in the Pacific our forces landed on Saipan, a
great operation forecasting eventual Japanese defeat. From then on our
soldiers were to face the Japanese army at constantly closer quarters.
And we knew well, from the fighting in New Guinea, on Guadalcanal, in
Burma, on Attu and Tarawa and Biak, that we were pitted against a
formidable foe. |
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07■ In June, 1944,
therefore, it was important to answer a multitude of questions about
our enemy, Japan. Whether the issue was military or diplomatic, whether
it was raised by questions of high policy or of leaflets to be dropped
behind the Japanese front lines, every insight was important. In the
all-out war Japan was fighting we had to know, not just the aims and
motives of those in power in Tokyo, not just the long history of Japan,
not just economic and military statistics; we had to know what their
government could count on from the people. We had to try to understand
Japanese habits of thought and emotion and the patterns into which
these habits fell. We had to know the sanctions behind these actions
and opinions. We had to put aside for the moment the premises on which
we act as Americans and to keep ourselves as far as possible from
leaping to the easy conclusion that what we would do in a given
situation was what they would do. |
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08■ My assignment was difficult.
America and Japan were at war and it is easy in wartime to condemn
wholesale, but far harder to try to see how your enemy looks at life
through his own eyes. Yet it had to be done. The question was how the
Japanese would behave, not how we would behave if we were in their
place. I had to try to use Japanese behavior in war as an asset in
understanding them, not as a liability. I had to look at the way they
conducted the war itself and see it not for the moment as a military
problem but as a cultural problem. In warfare as well as in peace, the
Japanese acted in character. What special indications of their way of
life and thinking did they give in the way they handled warfare? Their
leaders’ ways of whipping up war spirit, of reassuring the bewildered,
of utilizing their soldiers in the field—all these things showed what
they themselves regarded as the strengths on which they could
capitalize. I had to follow the details of the war to see how the
Japanese revealed themselves in it step by step. |
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09■The fact that our two nations
were at war inevitably meant, however, a serious disadvantage. It meant
that I had to forego the most important technique of the cultural
anthropologist: a field trip. I could not go to Japan and live in their
homes and watch the strains and stresses of daily life, see with my own
eyes which were crucial and which were not. I could not watch them in
the complicated business of arriving at a decision. I could not see
their children being brought up. The one anthropologist’s field study
of a Japanese village, John Embree’s _Suye Mura_, was invaluable, but
many of the questions about Japan with which we were faced in 1944 were
not raised when that study was written. |
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10■ As a cultural
anthropologist, in spite of these major difficulties, I had confidence
in certain techniques and postulates which could be used. At least I
did not have to forego the anthropologist’s great reliance upon
face-to-face contact with the people he is studying. There were plenty
of Japanese in this country who had been reared in Japan and I could
ask them about the concrete facts of their own experiences, find out
how they judged them, fill in from their descriptions many gaps in our
knowledge which as an anthropologist I believed were essential in
understanding any culture. Other social scientists who were studying
Japan were using libraries, analyzing past events or statistics,
following developments in the written or spoken word of Japanese
propaganda. I had confidence that many of these answers they sought
were embedded in the rules and values of Japanese culture and could be
found more satisfactorily by exploring that culture with people who had
really lived it. |
10 |
11■ This did not mean that I did
not read and that I was not constantly indebted to Westerners who had
lived in Japan. The vast literature on the Japanese and the great
number of good Occidental observers who have lived in Japan gave me an
advantage which no anthropologist has when he goes to the Amazon
headwaters or the New Guinea highlands to study a non-literate tribe.
Having no written language such tribes have committed no
self-revelations to paper. Comments by Westerners are few and
superficial. Nobody knows their past history. The field worker must
discover without any help from previous students the way their economic
life works, how stratified their society is, what is uppermost in their
religious life. In studying Japan, I was the heir of many students.
Descriptions of small details of life were tucked away in antiquarian
papers. Men and women from Europe and America had set down their vivid
experiences, and the Japanese themselves had written really
extraordinary self-revelations. Unlike many Oriental people they have a
great impulse to write themselves out. They wrote about the trivia of
their lives as well as about their programs of world expansion. They
were amazingly frank. Of course they did not present the whole picture.
No people does. A Japanese who writes about Japan passes over really
crucial things which are as familiar to him and as invisible as the air
he breathes. So do Americans when they write about America. But just
the same the Japanese loved self-revelation. |
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12■ I read this literature as
Darwin says he read when he was working out his theories on the origin
of species, noting what I had not the means to understand. What would I
need to know to understand the juxtaposition of ideas in a speech in
the Diet? What could lie back of their violent condemnation of some act
that seemed venial and their easy acceptance of one that seemed
outrageous? I read, asking the ever-present question: What is ‘wrong
with this picture’? What would I need to know to understand it? |
12 |
13■ I went to movies, too, which
had been written and produced in Japan—propaganda movies, historical
movies, movies of contemporary life in Tokyo and in the farm villages.
I went over them afterward with Japanese who had seen some of these
same movies in Japan and who in any case saw the hero and the heroine
and the villain as Japanese see them, not as I saw them. When I was at
sea, it was clear that they were not. The plots, the motivations were
not as I saw them, but they made sense in terms of the way the movie
was constructed. As with the novels, there was much more difference
than met the eye between what they meant to me and what they meant to
the Japanese-reared. Some of these Japanese were quick to come to the
defense of Japanese conventions and some hated everything Japanese. It
is hard to say from which group I learned most. In the intimate picture
they gave of how one regulates one’s life in Japan they agreed, whether
they accepted it gladly or rejected it with bitterness. |
13 |
14■ In so far as the
anthropologist goes for his material and his insights directly to the
people of the culture he is studying, he is doing what all the ablest
Western observers have done who have lived in Japan. If this were all
an anthropologist had to offer, he could not hope to add to the
valuable studies which foreign residents have made of the Japanese. The
cultural anthropologist, however, has certain qualifications as a
result of his training which appeared to make it worth his while to try
to add his own contribution in a field rich in students and observers. |
14 |
15■ The anthropologist knows
many cultures of Asia and the Pacific. There are many social
arrangements and habits of life in Japan which have close parallels
even in the primitive tribes of the Pacific islands. Some of these
parallels are in Malaysia, some in New Guinea, some in Polynesia. It is
interesting, of course, to speculate on whether these show some ancient
migrations or contacts, but this problem of possible historical
relationship was not the reason why knowledge of these cultural
similarities was valuable to me. It was rather that I knew in these
simpler cultures how these institutions worked and could get clues to
Japanese life from the likeness or the difference I found. I knew, too,
something about Siam and Burma and China on the mainland of Asia, and I
could therefore compare Japan with other nations which are a part of
its great cultural heritage. Anthropologists had shown over and over in
their studies of primitive people how valuable such cultural
comparisons can be. A tribe may share ninety per cent of its formal
observances with its neighbors and yet it may have revamped them to fit
a way of life and a set of values which it does not share with any
surrounding peoples. In the process it may have had to reject some
fundamental arrangements which, however small in proportion to the
whole, turn its future course of development in a unique direction.
Nothing is more helpful to an anthropologist than to study contrasts he
finds between peoples who on the whole share many traits. |
15 |
16■ Anthropologists also have
had to accustom themselves to maximum differences between their own
culture and another and their techniques have to be sharpened for this
particular problem. They know from experience that there are great
differences in the situations which men in different cultures have to
meet and in the way in which different tribes and nations define the
meanings of these situations. In some Arctic village or tropical desert
they were faced with tribal arrangements of kinship responsibility or
financial exchange which in their moments of most unleashed imagination
they could not have invented. They have had to investigate, not only
the details of kinship or exchange, but what the consequences of these
arrangements were in the tribe’s behavior and how each generation was
conditioned from childhood to carry on as their ancestors had done
before them. |
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17■ This professional concern
with differences and their conditioning and their consequences could
well be used in the study of Japan. No one is unaware of the
deep-rooted cultural differences between the United States and Japan.
We have even a folklore about the Japanese which says that whatever we
do they do the opposite. Such a conviction of difference is dangerous
only if a student rests content with saying simply that these
differences are so fantastic that it is impossible to understand such
people. The anthropologist has good proof in his experience that even
bizarre behavior does not prevent one’s understanding it. More than any
other social scientist he has professionally used differences as an
asset rather than a liability. There is nothing that has made him pay
such sharp attention to institutions and peoples as the fact that they
were phenomenally strange. There was nothing he could take for granted
in his tribe’s way of living and it made him look not just at a few
selected facts, but at everything. In studies of Western nations one
who is untrained in studies of comparative cultures overlooks whole
areas of behavior. He takes so much for granted that he does not
explore the range of trivial habits in daily living and all those
accepted verdicts on homely matters, which, thrown large on the
national screen, have more to do with that nation’s future than
treaties signed by diplomats. |
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18■ The anthropologist has had
to develop techniques for studying the commonplace because those things
that are commonplaces in the tribe he was studying were so different
from their counterparts in his own home country. When he tried to
understand the extreme maliciousness of some tribe or the extreme
timidity of another, when he tried to plot out the way they would act
and feel in a given situation, he found he had to draw heavily on
observations and details that are not often noted about civilized
nations. He had good reason to believe they were essential and he knew
the kind of research that would unearth them. |
18 |
19■ It was worth trying in the
case of Japan. For it is only when one has noted the intensely human
commonplaces of any people’s existence that one appreciates at its full
importance the anthropologist’s premise that human behavior in any
primitive tribe or in any nation in the forefront of civilization is
_learned_ in daily living. No matter how bizarre his act or his
opinion, the way a man feels and thinks has some relation to his
experience. The more baffled I was at some bit of behavior, the more I
therefore assumed that there existed somewhere in Japanese life some
ordinary conditioning of such strangeness. If the search took me into
trivial details of daily intercourse, so much the better. That was
where people learned. |
19 |
20■ As a cultural anthropologist
also I started from the premise that the most isolated bits of behavior
have some systematic relation to each other. I took seriously the way
hundreds of details fall into over-all patterns. A human society must
make for itself some design for living. It approves certain ways of
meeting situations, certain ways of sizing them up. People in that
society regard these solutions as foundations of the universe. They
integrate them, no matter what the difficulties. Men who have accepted
a system of values by which to live cannot without courting
inefficiency and chaos keep for long a fenced-off portion of their
lives where they think and behave according to a contrary set of
values. They try to bring about more conformity. They provide
themselves with some common rationale and some common motivations. Some
degree of consistency is necessary or the whole scheme falls to pieces.
|
20 |
21■ Economic behavior, family
arrangements, religious rites and political objectives therefore become
geared into one another. Changes in one area may occur more rapidly
than in others and subject these other areas to great stress, but the
stress itself arises from the need for consistency. In pre-literate
societies committed to the pursuit of power over others, the will to
power is expressed in their religious practices no less than in their
economic transactions and in their relations with other tribes. In
civilized nations which have old written scriptures, the Church
necessarily retains the phrases of past centuries, as tribes without
written language do not, but it abdicates authority in those fields
which would interfere with increasing public approval of economic and
political power. The words remain but the meaning is altered. Religious
dogmas, economic practices and politics do not stay dammed up in neat
separate little ponds but they overflow their supposed boundaries and
their waters mingle inextricably one with the other. Because this is
always true, the more a student has seemingly scattered his
investigation among facts of economics and sex and religion and the
care of the baby, the better he can follow what is happening in the
society he studies. He can draw up his hypotheses and get his data in
any area of life with profit. He can learn to see the demands any
nation makes, whether they are phrased in political, economic, or moral
terms, as expressions of habits and ways of thinking which are learned
in their social experience. This volume therefore is not a book
specifically about Japanese religion or economic life or politics or
the family. It examines Japanese assumptions about the conduct of life.
It describes these assumptions as they have manifested themselves
whatever the activity in hand. It is about what makes Japan a nation of
Japanese. |
21 |
22■ One of the handicaps of the
twentieth century is that we still have the vaguest and most biased
notions, not only of what makes Japan a nation of Japanese, but of what
makes the United States a nation of Americans, France a nation of
Frenchmen, and Russia a nation of Russians. Lacking this knowledge,
each country misunderstands the other. We fear irreconcilable
differences when the trouble is only between Tweedledum and Tweedledee,
and we talk about common purposes when one nation by virtue of its
whole experience and system of values has in mind a quite different
course of action from the one we meant. We do not give ourselves a
chance to find out what their habits and values are. If we did, we
might discover that a course of action is not necessarily vicious
because it is not the one we know. |
22 |
23■ It is not possible to depend
entirely upon what each nation says of its own habits of thought and
action. Writers in every nation have tried to give an account of
themselves. But it is not easy. The lenses through which any nation
looks at life are not the ones another nation uses. It is hard to be
conscious of the eyes through which one looks. Any country takes them
for granted, and the tricks of focusing and of perspective which give
to any people its national view of life seem to that people the
god-given arrangement of the landscape. In any matter of spectacles, we
do not expect the man who wears them to know the formula for the
lenses, and neither can we expect nations to analyze their own outlook
upon the world. When we want to know about spectacles, we train an
oculist and expect him to be able to write out the formula for any
lenses we bring him. Some day no doubt we shall recognize that it is
the job of the social scientist to do this for the nations of the
contemporary world. |
23 |
24■ The job requires both a
certain tough-mindedness and a certain generosity. It requires a
tough-mindedness which people of good will have sometimes condemned.
These protagonists of One World have staked their hopes on convincing
people of every corner of the earth that all the differences between
East and West, black and white, Christian and Mohammedan, are
superficial and that all mankind is really like-minded. This view is
sometimes called the brotherhood of man. I do not know why believing in
the brotherhood of man should mean that one cannot say that the
Japanese have their own version of the conduct of life and that
Americans have theirs. It sometimes seems as if the tender-minded could
not base a doctrine of good will upon anything less than a world of
peoples each of which is a print from the same negative. But to demand
such uniformity as a condition of respecting another nation is as
neurotic as to demand it of one’s wife or one’s children. The
tough-minded are content that differences should exist. They respect
differences. Their goal is a world made safe for differences, where the
United States may be American to the hilt without threatening the peace
of the world, and France may be France, and Japan may be Japan on the
same conditions. To forbid the ripening of any of these attitudes
toward life by outside interference seems wanton to any student who is
not himself convinced that differences need be a Damocles’ sword
hanging over the world. Nor need he fear that by taking such a position
he is helping to freeze the world into the status quo. Encouraging
cultural differences would not mean a static world. England did not
lose her Englishness because an Age of Elizabeth was followed by an Age
of Queen Anne and a Victorian Era. It was just because the English were
so much themselves that different standards and different national
moods could assert themselves in different generations. |
24 |
25■ Systematic study of national
differences requires a certain generosity as well as tough-mindedness.
The study of comparative religions has flourished only when men were
secure enough in their own convictions to be unusually generous. They
might be Jesuits or Arabic savants or unbelievers, but they could not
be zealots. The study of comparative cultures too cannot flourish when
men are so defensive about their own way of life that it appears to
them to be by definition the sole solution in the world. Such men will
never know the added love of their own culture which comes from a
knowledge of other ways of life. They cut themselves off from a
pleasant and enriching experience. Being so defensive, they have no
alternative but to demand that other nations adopt their own particular
solutions. As Americans they urge our favorite tenets on all nations.
And other nations can no more adopt our ways of life on demand than we
could learn to do our calculations in units of 12’s instead of 10’s, or
stand on one foot in repose like certain East African natives. |
25 |
26■ This book, then, is about
habits that are expected and taken for granted in Japan. It is about
those situations when any Japanese can count on courtesy and those
situations when he cannot, about when he feels shame, when he feels
embarrassment, what he requires of himself. The ideal authority for any
statement in this book would be the proverbial man in the street. It
would be anybody. That does not mean that this anybody would in his own
person have been placed in each particular circumstance. It does mean
that anybody would recognize that that was how it was under those
conditions. The goal of such a study as this is to describe deeply
entrenched attitudes of thought and behavior. Even when it falls short,
this was nevertheless the ideal. |
26 |
27■ In such a study one quickly
reaches the point where the testimony of great numbers of additional
informants provides no further validation. Who bows to whom and when,
for instance, needs no statistical study of all Japan; the approved and
customary circumstances can be reported by almost any one and after a
few confirmations it is not necessary to get the same information from
a million Japanese. |
27 |
28■ The student who is trying to
uncover the assumptions upon which Japan builds its way of life has a
far harder task than statistical validation. The great demand upon him
is to report how these accepted practices and judgments become the
lenses through which the Japanese see existence. He has to state the
way in which their assumptions affect the focus and perspective in
which they view life. He has to try to make this intelligible to
Americans who see existence in very different focus. In this task of
analysis the court of authority is not necessarily Tanaka San, the
Japanese ‘anybody.’ For Tanaka San does not make his assumptions
explicit, and interpretations written for Americans will undoubtedly
seem to him unduly labored. |
28 |
29■ American studies of
societies have not often been planned to study the premises on which
civilized cultures are built. Most studies assume that these premises
are self-evident. Sociologists and psychologists are preoccupied with
the ‘scatter’ of opinion and behavior, and the stock technique is
statistical. They subject to statistical analysis masses of census
material, great numbers of answers to questionnaires or to
interviewers’ questions, psychological measurements and the like, and
attempt to derive the independence or interdependence of certain
factors. In the field of public opinion, the valuable technique of
polling the country by using a scientifically selected sample of the
population has been highly perfected in the United States. It is
possible to discover how many people support or oppose a certain
candidate for public office or a certain policy. Supporters and
opponents can be classified as rural or urban, low income or high
income, Republicans or Democrats. In a country with universal suffrage,
where laws are actually drafted and enacted by the people’s
representatives, such findings have practical importance. |
29 |
30■ Americans can poll Americans
and understand the findings, but they can do this because of a prior
step which is so obvious that no one mentions it: they know and take
for granted the conduct of life in the United States. The results of
polling tell more about what we already know. In trying to understand
another country, systematic qualitative study of the habits and
assumptions of its people is essential before a poll can serve to good
advantage. By careful sampling, a poll can discover how many people are
for or against government. But what does that tell us about them unless
we know what their notions are about the State? Only so can we know
what the factions are disputing about, in the streets or in the Diet. A
nation’s assumptions about government are of much more general and
permanent importance than figures of party strength. In the United
States, the Government, to both Republicans and Democrats, is almost a
necessary evil and it limits individual freedom; Government employment,
too, except perhaps in wartime, does not give a man the standing he
gets from an equivalent job in private enterprise. This version of the
State is a far cry from the Japanese version, and even from that of
many European nations. What we need to know first of all is just what
their version is. Their view is embodied in their folkways, in their
comments on successful men, in their myth of their national history, in
their speeches on national holidays; and it can be studied in these
indirect manifestations. But it requires systematic study. |
30 |
31■ The basic assumptions which
any nation makes about living, the solutions it has sanctioned, can be
studied with as much attention and as much detail as we give to finding
out what proportion of a population will vote yes and no in an
election. Japan was a country whose fundamental assumptions were well
worth exploring. Certainly I found that once I had seen where my
Occidental assumptions did not fit into their view of life and had got
some idea of the categories and symbols they used, many contradictions
Westerners are accustomed to see in Japanese behavior were no longer
contradictions. I began to see how it was that the Japanese themselves
saw certain violent swings of behavior as integral parts of a system
consistent within itself. I can try to show why. As I worked with them,
they began to use strange phrases and ideas which turned out to have
great implications and to be full of age-long emotion. Virtue and vice
as the Occident understands them had undergone a sea-change. The system
was singular. It was not Buddhism and it was not Confucianism. It was
Japanese—the strength and the weakness of Japan. 1. |
31 |
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