The Chrysanthemum and the Sword and the Study of Cultural Patterns

Jun 2018 · history

Disclaimer: This post was originally written in Chinese and translated into English by GPT-5.2.

Ruth Benedict’s The Chrysanthemum and the Sword is a remarkable book in the history of anthropological research. The author was an American scholar who neither knew Japanese nor had ever been to the Japanese mainland, yet this work—studying the basic patterns of Japanese culture, or Japanese national character—became a guide for U.S. occupation policy toward Japan after World War II. The postwar plans for Japan proposed in the book were later almost all realized and proved effective—an astonishing fact indeed. Wikipedia holds that the book not only shaped Americans’ basic understanding of Japan, but also influenced Japanese people’s self-understanding; although it faced considerable criticism after publication, that has not hindered its continuing influence. Some scholars even believe that, to some extent, later related studies are merely footnotes to this book[1]. Even C. Douglas Lummis, a critic of the book, has to admit that The Chrysanthemum and the Sword is a founding work of postwar Japanology, and that it essentially laid the research framework for the entire field of Nihonjinron[2]. You Guolong believes that, in terms of research significance, this book: (1) announced that anthropology had moved from the study of primitive societies into the study of large-scale civilized societies; (2) demonstrated how one can understand the developmental trends of larger socio-cultures by studying human psychology[3]. Like the author, I neither know Japanese nor have ever been to Japan, and the general reader’s understanding of Japan is also quite limited. The basic facts above about The Chrysanthemum and the Sword are of some help for us to grasp the overall value and significance of this book.

The book is divided into thirteen chapters: it first introduces the research purpose, research method, and research positioning (Chapter 1); next it discusses in detail the basic patterns of Japanese culture (Chapters 2–12); and finally it offers several specific recommendations for U.S. policy toward Japan after World War II (Chapter 13). Given my shallow knowledge of Japan and its people, I dare not ignorantly point fingers at the main body of the book—its depiction of the basic patterns of Japanese culture and of national character under those patterns. This article mainly offers a few observations about the cultural-pattern approach employed in the book.

The cultural-pattern approach used in this book is called the study of culture and personality. According to You Guolong, “culture” here, in the narrow sense (i.e., not referring to material objects), refers to the shared ideas and concepts that exist in the minds of the majority of a people; and “personality,” as a psychological concept, refers to a shared mentality formed in the majority of society under the influence of social relations and cultural factors, abstracting away from individual traits. In this sense, the two are different terms for the same thing[4]. This claim can be verified in Benedict herself. Her study of Japanese cultural patterns began from the following theoretical premise: every human society must design for itself a certain way of being for coping with and evaluating various situations; those who live within it take this way of being for granted as the basis for knowing and dealing with the world, integrating it into a system of values on which they depend for survival. This system becomes a kind of general rationale and general motive for their everyday behavior and thought. Because of the need for consistency in maintaining this system of values, this means that, at the individual level, behaviors that seem most minute and unrelated are to a certain extent systematically connected to one another; at the social level, people’s economic behavior, the way families operate, religious rituals, and political pursuits are also systematically connected to one another. This systematic interconnectedness serves to maintain the dynamic stability of that system of values on which people depend for survival—what the author calls the need for consistency[5]. From the perspective of the whole book, this system of values—widely accepted by members of society and existing in a long-term stable way—is in fact the book’s subtitle: Patterns of Japanese Culture. The research positioning of the book lies in testing and describing this set of basic patterns of Japanese culture. This set of patterns is why Japan is Japan rather than some other country or region; it is the foundation of Japan’s nation-building, and at the same time the assumption on which Japanese people’s everyday words and deeds are based. Benedict’s cultural-pattern study that unifies the individual and society is called the study of culture and personality, and this book established a paradigm for this method.

Benedict is very restrained in presenting the above theoretical premise. She repeatedly uses English words such as “some” and “certain,” indicating “to some extent” or “in some sense,” and only then arrives at the conclusion that Japan can be studied—without relying on statistical data—by researching all relevant literature and Japanese Americans or Japanese people in the United States (including immigrants and war criminals). Her technique—especially studying Japan through literature without conducting fieldwork—has long been controversial. Collecting raw data through field investigation is itself foundational work in anthropology; how can we ensure the authenticity, timeliness, and validity of data obtained purely from desk work? Moreover, even the Japanese Americans or Japanese people Benedict could access in the United States—especially Hashima, whom she explicitly thanks by name in Chapter 1—have been noted to have limited representativeness and authority, and thus cannot guarantee that conclusions derived from him are strong and accurate[6]. In short, all the research means she relied upon have serious defects. We believe, first, that the reason the author did not go to Japan to conduct fieldwork was not that she was unwilling, but that she was unable. As she pointed out in the book, because the United States and Japan were at war at the time, she did not have the conditions to conduct in-person field research in Japan. Obviously, if conditions had permitted, she would not have given up the opportunity to witness Japanese life with her own eyes and to conduct fieldwork herself. Second, according to the author’s theoretical premise, if the basic patterns of Japanese culture do exist, and Japanese words and deeds and Japan’s nation-building principles all revolve around these basic patterns, then after describing the basic patterns of Japanese culture by other means, any additional informants and any additional statistical studies would be icing on the cake, and would not suffice to further confirm some other conclusion. Just like opinion polling, which rose in the United States in the mid-1930s and was continuously refined, such surveys do not pursue massive or even census-like statistics; rather, they emphasize using scientific methods for sampling, investigating specific groups, yet the conclusions they yield can be astonishingly accurate—beyond the reach of massive surveys and censuses. In this sense, Benedict’s Japan-research method of cross-verifying people and texts has certain shortcomings, but it is still rigorous. And who can guarantee that endless data-collection research is free of shortcomings? Of course, in today’s world, which is increasingly globalized yet increasingly diversified, along with the development of computer technology and the application of big data and cloud computing, statistical research based on the law of large numbers is increasingly demonstrating strong applicability and irreplaceable advantages. It seems that in a future where the internet becomes ever more widespread, the culture-and-personality research method Benedict adopted will become the principles and parameters (principle and parameter) or theoretical model set before statistical research is carried out—and this theoretical model will only become more and more refined and more specific. About 30 years after The Chrysanthemum and the Sword was completed, Francis L. K. Hsu’s monograph on Japan, Iemoto—The Heart of Japan, embodied this trend in anthropological research[7].

What Benedict did was a systematic qualitative study of Japan; any quantitative research also serves this purpose—that is, ultimately returning to the qualitative. In theory, as long as the “quality” of the “qualitative” can be determined, then indeed any further quantitative research is redundant. Since the principle is clear, why say more? But in fact, the key question is: how can we ensure that the “quality” she assigns to Japan is 100% correct, such that no additional statistical tests are needed? What’s more, the author was an American scholar who neither knew Japanese nor had ever been to the Japanese mainland. This, too, is an endless question, because no one has final interpretive authority over it—not even Japanese people. Thus, solving this problem falls to the explanatory power of this assigned “quality” in reality: the stronger the explanatory power, the more reliable the qualitative determination. The explanatory power of The Chrysanthemum and the Sword is strong; as we noted in the first paragraph, this is reflected in its lasting influence and its practical usefulness in handling Japan-related issues. This irrefutably proves the great success the book achieved in qualitatively characterizing Japan. Yet the numerous later criticisms and revisions of the book likewise irrefutably show the shortcomings behind that success. These two facts suggest that the book’s holistic grasp of the basic patterns of Japanese culture was pioneering, but that this achievement was inevitably rough and biased. As for the degree to which this achievement is correct, that lies outside the scope of this article; in fact, it cannot be discussed. This real-world predicament of theory is also why Benedict was so restrained in proposing her theoretical premise: in terms of modern scientific research procedures, or in terms of Thomas Kuhn’s paradigm theory, a theoretical premise is a research starting point that cannot be explained and need not be explained. Once the starting point is established, what remains is the work of applying and explaining that theoretical premise. In the process of applying and explaining it, there may be a trial-and-error—revision process in which the premise is continuously optimized and made maximally compatible with reality. But once a theory has already been applied into a book, then for that book, as long as the author has good logical training, the theory is self-consistent and systematic, constituting a unified loop from beginning to end: the theory guided the writing of the book, and the writing of the book in turn verified the correctness of the theory. For example, The Chrysanthemum and the Sword portrays the shame culture and the hierarchical system in the basic patterns of Japanese culture; these two keywords then explain the organic connections among many domains such as Japanese society and economy, literature and art, ethics and morality, the imperial institution, military policy, childrearing methods, government reports, and the behavior of Japanese POWs, and so on. The revelation of this organic connection, in turn, substantiates the validity of the theoretical premise proposed in Chapter 1. What is precious is that when Benedict portrays shame culture and the hierarchical system, she can always maintain a comparative perspective—for example, comparing Japan’s shame culture with America’s guilt culture, and comparing Japan’s hierarchy with India’s caste system and Germany’s hierarchy. This makes the Japanese-ness of these two cultural patterns plain to see, and also helps readers understand.

Beneath the smooth, concise, and elegant prose narrative of The Chrysanthemum and the Sword lies its thick and profound theoretical coloration. The theoretical implication behind this is: in specific examples or even in analysis, the book may contain deviations and inaccuracies—after all, the author neither knew Japanese nor had ever been to the Japanese mainland, and the book took only about a year to write. But as long as its theory is reliable and its argumentation is broadly self-sufficient, then the conclusions it draws will not be altered because of local errors in examples or analyses. The author herself says: “The habits of the Japanese that are expected and taken for granted, that is, in what situations they act according to courtesy and in what situations they do not; when they feel shame, when they feel embarrassment, and their demands upon themselves… even though such a description may be inadequate, it is still ideal.”[8] This is the fundamental reason why the book has long vitality. However, apart from the lack of fieldwork, the main controversy over its examples also lies in the fact that, when using documentary materials, the author almost catered to her own intentions; for the sake of theoretical integration she even ignored the influence of historical factors and social strata on the basic patterns of Japanese culture or Japanese national character. In other words, in Benedict’s description, the basic patterns of Japanese culture or Japanese national character are almost a static existence that transcends social strata. Whether this, as her theoretical premise claims, conforms to facts and to general people’s understanding, is hard to say. Our understanding of this is: The Chrysanthemum and the Sword was written at the commission of the Office of War Information, so its writing had a highly practical purpose. The author’s citation of historical materials, on the one hand, certainly contains her theoretical convictions; on the other hand, this selective historical sorting-out also undeniably, in effect, explains the historical causes of Japan’s existing cultural patterns at the synchronic level—perhaps unconsciously. For example, in Chapter 3, when the author sorts out Japan’s hierarchal system from the 7th century to the contemporary era, she concludes: “This extremely explicit hierarchical system, from outcasts up to the Emperor under Japan’s feudal era, has left a strong imprint on contemporary Japan. After all, it has been only 75 years since the legal end of feudal rule, and such strong hierarchical remnants will not disappear within the time of a single generation.”[9] In addition, as early as 1950, two years after the Japanese translation of The Chrysanthemum and the Sword appeared, someone in Japan pointed out: “Bushido is the way of life of the samurai class. Although it is right to say that the samurai are the backbone of the nation, bushido education was limited and there were many exceptions. Outside the samurai class, no other class here was influenced by bushido.”[10] I am not qualified to judge, but there are clearly two interpretations here: ① Benedict’s indiscrimination is an overgeneralization, and therefore her conclusions may not be free of bias. ② The spirit of bushido is the reflection of Japan’s hierarchy in the samurai class; just as under a hierarchical system, the emperor’s stratum has the emperor stratum’s ethics and morality, and the commoners’ stratum has the commoners’ ethics and morality. But these different ethics and moralities are all class-based variations (hierarchal variations) of the same basic pattern of Japanese culture, namely the hierarchical system; therefore the author’s conclusion remains correct, though her analysis process may be imperfect. Here I tend toward interpretation ②: first, Benedict’s discussion of basic cultural patterns has a core of reasonableness that is hard to deny; second, similar ways of analysis run throughout the whole book and are not accidental. For example, Chapter 1 holds that Japanese people’s behavior, whether in wartime or in peacetime, is acted in character; Chapter 6 says that the demand of loyalty is less coercive the higher the social class, and at the level of the emperor it has no effect at all; Chapter 10 discusses the Japanese national character of treating different virtues differently depending on the situation, with only the demand for sincerity being consistent throughout. Of course, even so, interpretation ② cannot be the only correct interpretation.

Perhaps as a kind of real-world irony, works that study a country’s political-cultural institutions or national character often seem most eye-catching when written by foreign scholars—for example, Arthur H. Smith’s Chinese Characteristics for China, Tocqueville’s Democracy in America for America, and Benedict’s The Chrysanthemum and the Sword for Japan. This phenomenon is intriguing. Fei Xiaotong’s From the Soil seems to be some kind of exception, but we must also realize that when he wrote this book, he had already systematically received Western anthropological training; his theoretical horizon was no longer purely that of an ordinary Chinese person, and the Chinese society he depicted was a traditional world that had already been gradually receding, one he could treat as an outsider. Ancient Chinese had profound observations about this; for example, Mencius pointed out: “They do it but do not make it manifest; they have become accustomed to it but do not examine it; they follow it all their lives yet do not know its Way—such are the multitude.”[11] Benedict was not unaware of this either. She has a similar discussion in Chapter 1 of The Chrysanthemum and the Sword, and explicitly points out: it is impossible to conduct anthropological research on a people by relying entirely on that people’s habits of thought and behavior[12]. People of a nation can understand one another because, consciously or unconsciously, they share a set of assumptions on which their daily words and deeds are based. Research originates from comparison. Benedict studied Japan from a purely American perspective that was vastly different from that of Japanese people—this was her innate advantage. As a cultural anthropologist, she was well trained and broadly knowledgeable; she could study Japan as an American scholar and also conduct extensive cross-cultural comparisons—this was her acquired advantage. Most importantly, with an experimentally restrained attitude[13], she consciously presupposed that Japan is Japan just as America is America, France is France, and Russia is Russia: each is singular and distinctive (the system was singular). But based on the above theory, we can also arrive at another antinomic conclusion: it is impossible for a person to completely break free from the assumptions underlying their own nation’s daily words and deeds; even if an anthropologist claims to study other peoples from an objective angle, purely objective research is also impossible. In The Chrysanthemum and the Sword, this is manifested as a Western-centrism. Interestingly, Benedict, whose research attitude was very restrained, did not conceal this at all: at the very beginning of Chapter 1 she declares with a strong sense of superiority, “The war conventions that Western nations have come to accept as realistic and humane clearly do not exist for the Japanese.”[14] Lummis even believes: “This book teaches the Japanese that being defeated by the United States was the best thing that could have happened, and that in fact they should be grateful for it… that it was their only hope of developing into a free country.”[15] But if we insist on this anti-Western-centrism stance, we will find another antinomy: in fact, this anti-Western-centrism cosmopolitanism is still a kind of Western-centrism that superficially advocates non-discrimination and pure objectivity, because it likewise advocates a superior and universal value scale—yet this value scale still unconsciously originates in the West. Benedict’s Western-centrism is obvious, and so is her description of the distinctness of the basic patterns of Japanese culture[16]. If the above antinomy is unavoidable, then rather than letting this theoretical predicament remain hidden, it is better to put it on the table. This should be the rational attitude toward the Western-centrism in The Chrysanthemum and the Sword—an attitude of understanding rather than criticism.

At this point, while fully affirming the pioneering nature and explanatory power of Benedict’s research on Japanese cultural patterns, we also have to point out two main shortcomings in this application in The Chrysanthemum and the Sword: ① In its theoretical application, the book is too accommodating, all-encompassing, and seems somewhat unprincipled: it uses culture to command other domains of human society, and arbitrarily holds that all changes in other domains revolve around culture, while culture itself can remain constant and unchanged. This is clearly in sharp contrast to the restrained attitude the author displayed when discussing her theoretical premise. Ultimately, this is because the book’s theoretical model is still too rough, so the basic patterns of Japanese culture provided to readers are only broad-directional and key. This may have been very useful for the U.S. government at the time in formulating occupation policy (using Japanese to control Japanese), but for readers to take it as an unalterable rule, believing that with this book in hand one can handle all matters Japanese with ease, is clearly an oversimplification. The book not only has shortcomings in the selection of materials (for example, no fieldwork and no data research), but also shows signs of overgeneralization and oversimplification in the interpretation of materials. Of course, this is the book’s historical limitation, and to some extent it is unavoidable. ② Unlike its rough application of the cultural-pattern approach without distinguishing social strata and stages of historical development in Japan, the book, without any theoretical explanation, suggests to readers that early childhood family education in Japan plays some decisive role in forming the basic patterns of Japanese culture or Japanese national character (see Chapter 12). As Shang Huipeng points out: Benedict “believed that the compulsive tendency in Japanese national character, showing habits emphasizing ritual, cleanliness, and order, mainly originates from strict early toilet training.”[17] This is a theoretical non-self-sufficiency. In addition, the author has a famous conclusion about the duality of Japanese character: “The Japanese are by nature both rash and gentle, both martial and aesthetic, both arrogant and polite, both stubborn and changeable, both submissive and resentful of being pushed around, both loyal and untrustworthy, both brave and weak, both conservative and innovative. They are extraordinarily concerned with what others think of their conduct, but when others know nothing of their misdeeds they are overcome by guilt. Their soldiers both obey discipline from the bottom of their hearts, yet they will also resist their superiors.”[18] The author attributes this conclusion to the deep-rooted contradiction between the not-thoroughly-homogenized part of Japanese people in childhood and the part later homogenized by family, education, and society—an attribution that is clearly rough and inaccurate, and likewise reflects theoretical arbitrariness.

The Chrysanthemum and the Sword is widely recognized as representing the highest level of Japan studies or Nihonjinron studies of its time. That Benedict could write such a remarkable book for posterity under very limited research resources makes her a remarkable person indeed. Given the book’s thick and profound theoretical coloration, we believe its success foreshadows the success of the author’s cultural-pattern research; and its historical limitations likewise foreshadow the historical limitations of that cultural-pattern research. This cultural-pattern research pioneered a new paradigm in anthropology, and its powerful explanatory power has even been regarded as ethnological magic. As the first chapter—the book’s theoretical manifesto—it is undoubtedly a classic document in the history of cultural anthropology and in the history of cultural-pattern research, and is worth rereading again and again.