When I was studying Japanese at UCLA, the 1946 book “The Chrysanthemum and the Sword” was required reading. This is a book that came out when my mother was college age. In it anthropologist Ruth Benedict (5 June 1887 – 17 September  1948) gives her analyses of Japanese culture based on interviews she did for the US Office of War Information. The book influenced how people in the US understood Japanese culture, particularly during the US Occupation of Japan.

C. Douglas Lummis in a 12 July 2007 article wrote some valid criticisms of Benedict’s analysis of Japanese culture, “Ruth Benedict’s obituary for Japanese Culture.

The original version of “Ruth Benedict’s Obituary for Japan” was serialized in the journal Shiso no Kagaku (Science of Thought) in 1980, and then appeared as part two of my book Uchi Naru Gaikoku (The Abroad Within) (Jiji Tsushinsha, 1981). In English it was published in the form of an annotated textbook for Japanese college students, under the title Rethinking the Chrysanthemum and the Sword (Ikeda Masayuki, ed. Shohakusha, 1982).

Looking back on it now, I think this essay can be considered as a fairly early study of what is now called the critique of orientalism, though at the time I wrote it I did not know the term, and was blithely ignorant of Edward Said’s then-recently-published book of that title. At the same time, it can also be seen as an, again fairly early, example of post-colonial studies (early because the term had not yet been coined). (Or if there are those who object to using the word “colonial” in relation to Japan, shall we call it “post-occupational studies?”) But while the essay got some attention in Japan, it has pretty much remained unknown outside the country.

Benedict also wrote about Germany. From Lummis’ point of view: .”..the two works could not be more different. In Germany, Nazism is a recently cobbled together ideology; in Japan, totalitarian militarism is – just Japan.”

The Chrysanthemum and the Sword established the cultural paradigm for post-war U.S.-Japan relations. It depicted/invented Japan as the country the most appropriate for the U.S. to have defeated and occupied.

In its tendency to treat Japan as an absolute Other, and to explain the complexities of this state-run industrial society with a small number of generalizations about its “culture”, The Chrysanthemum and the Sword qualifies as a work of what Edward Said labeled “orientalism”. However, while Said analyzed Western stereotypes as they appeared under the gaze of Europe facing east, Chrysanthemum represents an orientalism as it appeared under the gaze of America facing west. Its view of the Japanese as the “most alien” of peoples, inscrutable to the “Western” mind until unlocked by the “ethnographer’s magic,” opposed to and incompatible with the “West,” had deep roots in the encounter between Asia and that section of Western civilization that reached the eastern shores of the Pacific Ocean in the late 19th Century. But the book must be located more specifically than that.

That would ignore the centuries of Japan not seeking to conquer other nations and the centuries of isolation. It also ignores the influence of Western culture on Japan. Imperialist Japan was a nation attempting to modernize using countries like the UK and Germany as examples. The Japanese used Germany to model their constitution.

Lummis notes that “the core” of her observations in “The Chrysanthemum and the Sword” come from Robert Hashima. The name should give away the problem.

Robert Hashima was born in the U.S. and brought to Japan by his parents in 1932, at the age of 13, where he entered school. At that time he knew no Japanese. He also knew little of the official government ideology that dominated the school system during this period….

Hashima was advised by an uncle to get out of Japan before the war started, but after he arrived in the U.S. in 1941 he was, ironically, sent to an internment camp. There he met the anthropologist John Embree, who got him a job working for the Office of War.

Of course Hashima was by no means Benedict’s only informant, and her vision was doubtless informed by her wide reading in the English literature, but it seems that he became a kind of touchstone, the authority against which she would test information from other sources.

According to her book, she met Hashima in Washington, DC.

Her analyses were research at a distance. She did champion human equality, writing the pamphlet “The Races of Mankind” with her college Gene Weltfish.

But her analyses ignored the centuries of Japan not seeking to conquer other nations and the centuries of isolation. It also ignores the influence of Western culture on Japan. Imperialist Japan was a nation attempting to modernize using countries like the UK and Germany as examples.

And there is the problem of race. Benedict was a White woman in academia at a time when few women were, but she was still White and she still had White privilege. Lummis has the benefit of speaking Japanese, having lived in Japan, but he is also a White person with White male privilege.

When analyzing the interviews, I wondered if Benedict was able to conceive what it was like to be an immigrant to a hostile nation. Benedict had briefly been in Los Angeles, but was she aware of the level of animosity targeting East Asians in California? Did she understand what it was to be a minority? And did she understand how immigrants were different from the general population of their home country? Most Japanese did not seek to live abroad, like the Issei. Most of the Issei were not the first-born sons with the inherited family wealth and attached responsibilities. The Nisei were born in the US with Japanese spoken at home, but not in their schools. The Kibei-Nisei, those US-born Japanese Americans who returned to Japan, were different still. Robert Hashima was a Kibei-Nisei. Some of my relatives are also Kibei-Nisei. Unlike Hashima, my Kibei-Nisei relatives spent WWII in Japan and not incarcerated. Yet some of them were never considered Japanese enough by the Japanese, just as all Nisei were not considered American enough in the US.

One must also consider why Embree (26 August 1908 – 22 December 1950) chose Hashima. Embree has been to Japan and his wife, Ella Lury, had grown up in Japan. With his wife, he studied a Japanese village in 1935, publishing a book in 1939.  According to Denshō:

As one of the foremost experts on “Japanese,” Embree was in demand. After a brief stint doing intelligence work for the Office of the Coordinator of Information/Office of Strategic Services, he joined the War Relocation Authority as head of the Documents Section of the Office of Reports in Washington DC. Along with John Province , chief of the Community Management Division, he advocated for bringing in professional social scientists to aid in the smooth administration of the camps in which Japanese Americans were detained, an effort that was given a boost after the disturbances at Poston and Manzanar in the fall of 1942. Shortly after the Manzanar riot/uprising , Embree was given the authority to set up what was to become the Community Analysis Section (CAS). As head of the CAS, Embree hired and trained “community analysts”—nearly all of whom held Ph.D.s in either anthropology and sociology—assigned to every camp but Poston (a separate social science project, the Bureau of Sociological Research , was already established at Poston) as well two additional analysts and an assistant in the Washington, DC, office. He coordinated the work of the analysts, reviewed their reports and routed the information to appropriate people. As the CAS’s expert on “Japanese,” he also made a number of field visits and authored his own reports on important events in the camps.

After six months heading the CAS, Embree resigned in August 1943 to take a position with Civil Affairs Military Training School at the University of Chicago, a school set up by the War Department to train personnel for the eventual occupation of Japan. He remained there until 1945, when he moved to the Office of War Information, where in worked in the psychological warfare program with many other anthropologists including Ruth Benedict, who would be strongly influenced by Embree’s Japan field work. Anthropology historian David H. Price writes that Embree was critical of much of the work of anthropologists who had not worked in Japan—including some who based conclusions on the study of Japanese Americans as in the case of former Poston community analyst Weston LaBarre—finding their work one-dimensional and based in stereotypes and was frustrated when his own work was largely ignored by higher ups who found that the more simplistic analyses jived better with their own prejudices.

There was a concern about social scientists aligning themselves with the War Relocation Administration.

Critics of the community analyst program point out that the social scientists who participated were in compromised positions. In a 1986 article, Peter Suzuki admonished community analysts for aligning themselves with the WRA and for using tools of social science as an intelligence-gathering mechanism. As a case in point, Suzuki’s article points to a confidential memorandum in which John F. Embree recommended that the anthropologists act as channels of information for the FBI.

Embree also quelled organized protest  over resistance to the loyalty oath at Topaz.

At Topaz (Central Utah), the Issei formed a Committee of Nine, which informed the project director that the Issei could not properly answer question 28. The project director contacted WRA headquarters in Washington DC, but before there was a response, the Committee of Nine sent a stronger petition, stating that the Issei resolved not to answer question 28. To appease the Issei, WRA director Dillon Myer’s staff drafted alternative wordings for question 28 on forms passed out to the Issei.

Encouraged by the Issei’s success, the Kibei and Nisei at Topaz organized around the registration issue. The Nisei formed a Committee of Thirty-Three but resistance against registration was thwarted when the WRA sent Dr. John Embree, director of WRA’s Community Analysis Section, who was able to stir up patriotism coupled with threats of criminal prosecution.

Embree likely chose Hashima because he felt Hashima was a safe choice. Hashima wasn’t going to make wave. Hashima wasn’t going to be a No No Boy. Was Hashima and other interviewees guarded in their replies, perhaps suspecting a certain level of cooperation with the wartime authors by the anthropologists?

Embree himself, as I noted above, was critical of most of the work of anthropologists who had not been in Japan, “finding their work one-dimensional and based in stereotypes” and found his own work ignored.  Japanese in Japan share some things with Japanese Americans, but they are not the same, culturally.

It was the inability of the US government to allow East Asians to naturalize, the very repugnance to have East Asians become citizens and then the inability to differentiate between Japanese nationals and those US citizens of Japanese descent that allowed for the largest single forced migration in US history to take place, where over 120,000 people were incarcerated without due process.

While I think it is worth reading Benedict, it should be in context of both more recent books and writers who were not White and might better understand the racism that drove state, national and international policies. In particular, I was surprised that someone as prominent as WEB DuBois was not included in any of the classes I took on Japan or Asia. Until recently, I did not know that he had traveled in Asia, visited Japan and written about Asia.

WEB DuBois (23 February 1868 – 27 August 1963) was older than Benedict, but lived longer. Benedict (5 June 1887 – 17 September  1948) was born in New York City. DuBois was born in Massachusetts. They were East Coasters and Northerners. Neither spoke Japanese, but DuBois visited Asia twice, decades apart (1936 and 1959).  In 1936, he visited Japan and the Japanese-occupied Manchuria. In 1959, when he was 91, he visited China and met with Mao Zedong. The FBI revoked his passport as a result, but what was left were his thoughts and experiences as he analyzed the “world color line.”