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National character studies in America and Japan: Toward a new understanding of nihonjinron

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National character studies in America and Japan: Toward a new understanding of nihonjinron

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Content NATIONAL CHARACTER STUDIES IN AMERICA AND JAPAN:
TOWARD A NEW UNDERSTANDING OF NIHONJINRON
/
Copyright 2004
by
George Lazopoulos
A Thesis Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
MASTER OF ARTS
(EAST ASIAN AREA STUDIES)
August 2004
George Lazopoulos
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UMI Number: 1422393
Copyright 2004 by
Lazopoulos, George
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ii
TABLE OF CONTENTS
ABSTRACT iii
INTRODUCTION 1
1. THE ENEMY APPEARS: JAPANESE ULTRANATIONALISM 7
2. JAPAN AND AMERICA DIVERGE 17
3. THE ENEMY REAPPEARS: NIHONJINRON 28
4. QUESTIONS AND POSSIBILITIES 43
BIBLIOGRAPHY 49
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ABSTRACT
In World War II, American social scientists studying the Japanese character
reacted to Japanese ultranationalism and the behavior of Japanese soldiers, and
portrayed the Japanese as the opposite and inferior of the West. After the war,
American interest in national character studies declined, but flourished in Japan and,
influenced by the holistic methodology of cultural anthropology, evolved into
nihonjinron. In the United States, knowledge of the Japanese character became urgent
again during the trade conflict of the 1980s. This time, American social scientists
reacted to nihonjinron and Japanese business behavior. Essentialism and the
characterization of Japanese as categorically different and unknowable had fallen from
favor in America, and American scholars dismissed nihonjinron as intellectually
unsound and unrepresentative of the Japanese. The historical origins of nihonjinron in
postwar national character studies, and the resonance of these studies with the
experience of postwar Japanese remain unexamined by Western scholars.
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INTRODUCTION
Nihonjinron first appeared in the mid-1970s. The term “nihonjinron” is usually
translated as “Theories of Being Japanese.” It is also known by the names nihonron,
nihonbunkaron, and nihonshakairon. Nihonjinron is a body of thought that seeks to
define being Japanese by subsuming the minutiae of daily life and individual behavior
into an overarching paradigm of Japaneseness. Almost anything is fair game as
evidence for nihonjinron, from Japanese economic trends to the mannerisms of
individuals. However, it is possible to discern three assumptions common to all
nihonjinron writers. First, they assume the homogeneity of the Japanese in terms of
race, culture, language, cognitive style, management practices, and society. Second,
they assume that only Japanese can understand what it is to be Japanese. Finally, they
rely on comparisons of Japan with the West in general, and often with America in
particular, as a methodological device for defining Japanese uniqueness.1 Together,
these three principles have produced a vast body of literature of varying quality.
Nihonjinronsha (writers of nihonjinron) generally present their conclusions as the
result of empirical observation of Japanese behavior or biology. For example, the lack
of verbal communication between a husband and wife is taken as evidence of haragei,
regarded as a distinctly Japanese mode of non-verbal communication. More
1 For definitions of nihonjinron see Harumi Befu, Hegemony o f Homogeneity: An Anthropological
Analysis o f Nihonjinron {Melbourne: Trans-Pacific Press, 2001), 66-76; Peter N. Dale, “Introduction”
in The Myth o f Japanese Uniqueness (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1986); Rotem Kowner,
“Deconstructing the National Discourse: Laymen’s Beliefs and Ideologies” in Exploring Japaneseness:
On Japanese Enactments o f Culture and Consciousness, ed. R. T. Donahue (Westport: Ablex, 2002),
168-172; Karel van Wolferen, The Enigma o f Japanese Power: People and Politics in a Stateless
Nation (New York: Vintage Books, 1989), 263-272.
2 Dale, 18.
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famously, an agricultural official rationalized resistance to the importation of
American beef on the grounds that Japanese intestines were one meter longer than
those of foreigners. In these ways, any observable detail of the Japanese provides
evidence for nihonjinronsha, whose conclusions are often of dubious merit.
In the mid-1970s, there was an explosion not only in the output of academic
nihonjinron, but in the public demand for a more popular form of the literature. A
bibliography of nihonjinron writings compiled by the Nomura Research Institute in
1978 counts 698 titles between 1946 and 1978, with twenty-five percent of that
number published in the three years immediately preceding the study. Commenting on
these statistics in 2001, anthropologist Harumi Befu notes that the present number
must certainly be in the thousands.4 Also, Befu points out that the bibliography only
counts book-length works, and that if magazine and newspaper articles were included,
the number would triple. Because of the sudden surge in popular demand, many non
academics seeking extra income were drawn to the field. The infusion of laymen into
the production and consumption of nihonjinron resulted in a large body of
questionable scholarship.5
The nihonjinron literature and its popularization, as described above, are the
subjects of the present study. This paper has two objectives: to demonstrate the
inadequacy of current Western language scholarship on nihonjinron, and to correct
those inadequacies by proposing a new approach to the study of nihonjinron. The first
J Van Wolferen, 265.
4 Befu, 2001,7.
5 Ibid, 7-8.
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objective will be taken up in the first three sections, and will be accomplished by
recounting the postwar history of Western, and particularly American, studies of the
Japanese character. Western scholars generally regard nihonjinron as poor-quality
scholarship or an instrument of political oppression. Such factors as American self-
identity, America’s diplomatic relations with Japan, and the particular Japanese
articulations of the Japanese character to which Americans reacted have colored the
perspectives of American scholars of nihonjinron. The result has been a failure to
properly understand the historical origins and social significance of nihonjinron.
Postwar American writing on the Japanese character is centered around two
conflicts: World War II, and the Japanese-American trade conflict of the 1980s.
During each of these conflicts, knowing who the Japanese were became important for
Americans, and in each instance social scientists rose to the task of providing that
information. As will be shown in section 1, social scientists seeking to explain the
Japanese character during World War II reacted to Japanese ultranationalist ideology,
which appeared to Americans as a primary representative articulation of Japanese
identity. According to this ideology, the Japanese were a family-nation, arranged in a
hierarchy under the divine emperor. Employing the social scientific methodology of
cultural anthropology that was often used in studies of national character, Americans
created a portrait of the Japanese as the opposite of, and inferior to, Westerners. As
World War II receded into the past, knowledge of the Japanese character became
increasingly less imperative. It did not become urgent again until the economic
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conflict of the 1980s, when scholars showed a new set of reactions to the
contemporary articulation of Japaneseness, which at that time was nihonjinron.
Section 2 will deal with the intervening period, during which the wartime
studies of the Japanese character exerted different influences in Japan and America. In
Japan, postwar intellectuals shared Americans’ views of Japan as the opposite and
inferior of the West, and were also influenced by the methodology of Western social
scientific studies of national character. As intellectuals gradually lost their self-critical
orientation, national character studies evolved into a social-scientific discourse on
Japanese identity that was substantially different from the prewar appeals to
mythology and tradition, but continued to stress difference from the West and cultural
particularism.
In the United States, however, intellectuals moved away from the methodology
of cultural anthropology. Students of Japan came to emphasize Japan’s compatibility
with the West; rather than inferiority and backwardness. The strategic importance of
Japan for the Cold War strengthened this trend. At the same time, in the wake of the
American cultural revolution of the 1960s, American self-identity was changed into a
nation of many voices and many peoples, and the spirit of opposition had been
institutionalized. Thus, Americans moved away from characterizations of Japan as the
stark opposite of the West, while the Japanese continued to embrace them. Also,
Americans came to decry homogeneity and deference to authority, while the Japanese
extolled these traits.
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5
The divergence described in section 2 had created an unbridgeable gap by the
1980s, the subject of section 3. The trade conflict between Japan and America
provided a new occasion for American social scientists to explain the Japanese
character to other non-Japanese. This time, scholars reacted to nihonjinron, the
popular literature described at the outset of this study, and the product of the national
character studies that had been incubating in Japan during the interim period. Unlike
their wartime predecessors, American scholars of the Japanese character in the years
of nihonjinron refused to accept the contemporary articulation of Japanese identity as
an indication of how the Japanese thought and acted in reality. As a result, Western
scholars have largely ignored nihonjinron, despite its huge influence in Japan. Section
3 will contain a detailed survey of Western thinking on nihonjinron, and a discussion
of its shortcomings.
Thus, the first three sections will place the authors described in section three in
historical context. A new possible avenue for studying nihonjinron will be suggested
in section 4. The intellectual currents of postwar Japan that gave rise to nihonjinron,
described in section 2, were largely unknown to American analysts, who reacted to
nihonjinron as if it were either an isolated phenomenon, or a relapse of a recurrent,
unchanging discourse on nationalism.
Section 4, then, will be devoted to a more detailed understanding of the larger
intellectual currents from which nihonjinron was drawn. Furthermore, section 4 will
attempt to revise the scholarship reviewed in section 3 by exploring the possibility that
nihonjinron was, in fact, not an unreasonable representation of postwar Japaneseness,
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6
and by illustrating how it fit into the larger social and cultural matrix of those years.
Specifically, I will argue that nihonjinron is a popular form of a discourse on national
identity that was unique to the postwar period. Emphasizing a rational understanding
of an egalitarian “people” through empirical observation, this discourse was a
significant break from prewar discourses that emphasized a hierarchical social
structure under the emperor, understood in terms of mythology and appeals to
tradition. The social and economic transformations that the Japanese experienced since
the 1930s predisposed large portions of the population to receptivity toward ideas of
social homogeneity, national solidarity, and cultural particularism. In short,
nihonjinron, and the larger discourse it was drawn from, appeared to many as
progressive and reasonable. It was not the reappearance of prewar ideology enforced
upon the Japanese.
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1. THE ENEMY APPEARS: JAPANESE ULTRANATIONALISM
To Americans during World War II, the Japanese appeared to be an inscrutable
and alien menace. Indeed, they seemed more threatening than the Nazis, and were
more hated by Americans and British, even before Pearl Harbor. For while the Allies
distinguished between “good Germans” and “bad Germans,” they attributed Japanese
atrocity and fanaticism to defects in the Japanese race.6 In other words, the Germans
were seen as political enemies, and the German people could be liberated from unjust
leadership. The Japanese, however, were, by their very existence, a threat to
civilization. Unlike the Germans, the Japanese were depicted by the Allies as
monkeys, as super-human hordes, as children, or as madmen; that is, as sub-human,
super-human, immature human, or defective human— anything but human.7 The war
with Japan was seen as a war against a truly unknown enemy, one that could only be
o
defeated by total extermination.
In order to combat such a vicious and alien foe, it was necessary to learn as
much as possible about the nature of the enemy. The thoughts and behaviors of the
Japanese, being a non-Western and apparently barbaric enemy, were thought to be
totally unpredictable by the Allies. Knowing as much as possible about the Japanese
personality became a strategic priority. In 1944, the United States Office of War
Information charged Ruth Benedict with the task of using the techniques of
6 John W. Dower, War Without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War (New York: Pantheon,
1986), 8-10,33-36.
7 Ibid, 8-10.
8 Ibid, 8-10.
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8
anthropology to provide a portrait of the Japanese personality that may be useful in
understanding the enemy.9 Benedict summarized the problem at hand:
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... Crises were facing us in
quick succession. What would the Japanese do?1 0
Benedict faced several handicaps in answering this question, in that she had
never been to Japan, and certainly could not conduct field research under the
circumstances of 1944. Instead, she had to rely on interviews with Japanese in
America, on books, and on movies for clues to those Japanese phenomena that were
visible from her vantage point: Japanese military behavior and ultranationalist
propaganda. The behavior of Japanese soldiers and POWs seemed irrational and
puzzling? they believed that spirit would triumph over matter; they universally
venerated the emperor and denied that he bore responsibility for the war; Japanese
would rather die than be captured, or even rescued; paradoxically, those who were
captured switched loyalties to the United States; most famously, the kamikaze attacks
and banzai raids made the Japanese seem especially fanatical.1 1
9 Ruth Benedict, The Chrysanthemum and the Sword: Patterns o f Japanese Culture (Tokyo: Tuttle,
1946), 3.
1 0 Ibid, 1-3.
" Ibid, 20-41.
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Equally conspicuous and unsettling to the American observer was the ideology
of emperorism that was inculcated into the Japanese through education and
propaganda. Ideological tracts such as Shinmin No Michi (The Way of the Subject),
Kore Dake Yomeba Ware Wa Kateru (Read This and We’ll Win the War), and
Kokutai No Hongi (Cardinal Principles of the National Entity of Japan) outlined the
social and moral obligations of all Japanese, the origin of the state, and their mission
against the West. Kokutai No Hongi is perhaps the most complete expression of
Japanese ultranationalism. It is sometimes characterized as the Japanese equivalent of
Mein Kampf although the differences far outnumber the similarities.1 2 300,000 copies
of Kokutai No Hongi were distributed to schools by 1937, and the copies in circulation
by the war were innumerable.
Kokutai No Hongi contained the official policy of wartime Japan. Much of the
content is concerned with the mythic history and divine origins of Japan, describing
the descent of Amaterasu (the Sun Goddess) to Japan and the subsequent creation of
the Japanese imperial house, a line of descendants of Amaterasu unbroken by
1 3
revolution. The Japanese, as subjects, must be selflessly loyal to the emperor,
harmonious in relations with one another, and observant of filial piety both to the
family and to the state.1 4 The national mission is the extirpation of Westernization
from Japan— specifically, of individualism, the root of all Western culture and the
1 2 Robert King Hall, “Introduction” in Kokutai No Hongi: Cardinal Principles o f the National Entity o f
Japan, trans. John Owen Gauntlett, ed. Robert King Hall (Newton: Harvard University Press, 1949), 7-
8.
1 3 John Owen Gauntlett, trans. Kokutai No Hongi: Cardinal Principles o f the National Polity, ed.
Robert King Hall (Newton: Harvard University Press, 1949), 59-68.
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10
cause of disharmony in Japan.1 5 Thus, in both deeds and words, the Japanese appeared
to be the mirror opposite of American values of democracy and individualism.
Such phenomena, conspicuous to the American observer, inevitably became
the focal point for American scrutiny of Japan and impacted American formulations of
the Japanese character. The result of Ruth Benedict’s efforts, The Chrysanthemum and
the Sword: Patterns o f Japanese Culture (1946), continues to be reprinted in both
English and Japanese translation. Although its authoritativeness has diminished, The
Chrysanthemum and the Sword still retains classic status. Before summarizing
Benedict’s conclusions, a brief review of her methodology and intellectual background
is warranted.
The methodology Benedict employs in Chrysanthemum is that of cultural
relativism, a school of anthropological thought rooted in the years between the World
Wars. In the years preceding World War I, empiricism and objectivism dominated the
social sciences in America, founded upon unswerving faith in progress and reason.
After World War I, they continued to dominate, although more pessimistic intellectual
currents began to appear. The application of science to mechanized warfare and
systematic killing in World War I created skepticism about the possibilities of
objective knowledge, of absolute truths, of history as progress, and of the scholar as
disinterested observer. Although in the minority, some scholars began to emphasize
1 4 Ibid, 79-92.
1 5 Ibid, 51-55.
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11
relativity of meaning and multiplicity of perspective over universal truth and
perspective.1 6
One of the significant developments in the relativist stance during the interwar
years was the rise of cultural anthropology. Developed by a circle of scholars led by
Franz Boas and including Ruth Benedict, cultural anthropology was based on cultural
relativism, the notion that any society was governed by its own internal logic, which is
not readily apparent to outsiders. Boas and Benedict understood the internal logic of a
given culture as an overarching pattern that conditioned all thoughts, behaviors, and
1 7
perceptions of the enculturated. Benedict writes in Chrysanthemum:
No matter how bizarre his act or opinion, the way a man thinks and feels 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 the details of daily intercourse, so much the better. That was
where people learned. As a cultural anthropologist I also 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 of living. It
approves certain ways of meeting situations, certain ways of sizing them up.
People in that society regard these solutions as the foundations of the universe .
.. Economic behavior, family arrangements, religious rites and political
1 8
objectives therefore become geared into one another.
Cultural relativists, then, produce holistic portraits of the societies they study.
Individual behaviors and thoughts are subsumed into an essentialized, overarching
paradigm. Cultural relativism also developed into an ethical position, as well as an
intellectual one. Cultural anthropologists sought to affirm the validity of different
1 6 Peter Novick, That Noble Dream: The "Objectivity Question” and the American Historical
Profession (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 143.
1 7 Ibid, 144.
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12
cultural perspectives, rather than criticizing those that appeared alien and therefore
deviant.1 9
With the coming of World War II, however, cultural relativism fell out of
favor. The very notion that Nazi Germany, for example, had an inner logic that could
not be criticized by outsiders, was intolerable. Cultural relativism was attacked by the
intellectual community as irresponsible, and held as partly accountable for creating an
atmosphere in which such noxious cultures as Nazism could grow. It became an
obstacle to popular mobilization, which relied on a universal standard to judge the
justness of leaders and the humaneness of societies. Historian Peter Novick notes:
Cultural relativism in anthropology was a prime target, since nothing could be
more disarming in a global struggle of ideologies and social systems than to
suggest that there was no universal, absolute standard by which belief systems
20
and practices could be judged.
The free-totalitarian world dichotomy was born in the war years, and rendered
untenable cultural relativism as a moral stance.
Benedict herself had come to question the moral implications of cultural
relativism after Pearl Harbor, declaring that the real task of anthropology is to
9 1
understand why freedom grows in some cultures, and not in others. However, it is
clear that Benedict had not completely abandoned relativism in Chrysanthemum.
Avowals of her relativist stance are scattered throughout the book. For example, she
notes at the outset, “My assignment was difficult. America and Japan were at war and
1 8 Benedict, 11-12.
1 9 Novick, 144.
2 0 Ibid, 283.
2 1 Ibid, 284.
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it is easy in wartime to condemn wholesale, but far harder to see how your enemy
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looks at life through his own eyes.” And later,
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 each 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 quite a different course of action from the ones
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.2 3
And again,
“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.2 4
Benedict appears as the voice of reason amid the wartime atmosphere of hatred toward
the alien and backward enemy. Even other anthropologists, put to similar tasks, were
9 ^
not as neutral as was Benedict in her relativism. At the same time, Benedict is
careful to point out where Japanese culture has inhibited freedom, and how this
26
inhibition has led to the horrors of the war. In sum, Chrysanthemum contains
elements of both interwar relativism and wartime universalism. Benedict induces from
individual behaviors and thoughts an essentialized pattern of personality that, in the
2 2 Benedict, 5.
2 3 Ibid, 13.
2 4 Ibid, 150.
2 5 Dower, 118-146.
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context of Japan, is perfectly logical. However, she is critical of the dangers of cultural
practices that place impositions on personal freedom.
Benedict applied the qualified cultural relativism described above to the
problems that were facing America regarding Japan. Why are they so fanatical? Why
do they worship the emperor? How have they come to regard themselves as a family?
In answering these questions, Benedict made use of the ultranationalist ideology and
wartime behavior as data, or the Japanese explanation of the Japanese personality in
their own words and deeds. And, in agreement with such explanations, Benedict
produced a model of Japanese personality that was the exact opposite of the American.
The famous argument rests on two fundamental concepts: the distinctions
between guilt culture (tsumi no bunka) and shame culture (haji no bunka), and
77
between individualism (kojin shugi) and groupism (shudan shugi). Japan is a
groupist society, and there is no concept of the individual as there is in America, an
individualist society. An individual thinks and acts in accordance with his own will,
his ego. His sense of right and wrong is internalized; he has his own principles to
guide him. This internal moral code is the basis of guilt culture, in that the individual
will punish himself with guilt if he violates his own internal code. The Japanese, not
being individuals with independent egos, have no internalized moral code. Theirs is a
shame culture, in that the punishment for wrongdoing is dispensed by the disapproval
of others, not by an internal moral compass. Simply put, an action is not wrong if
nobody sees it.
2 6 Benedict, 290-296.
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Keeping one’s reputation free of blemishes is therefore of utmost importance
for the Japanese, and the basis of Japanese ethics. Maintaining an honorable reputation
requires meeting all obligations to others (giri), and putting those duties above one’s
own feelings (ninjd). These duties are arranged in a hierarchy: at the bottom are those
incidental obligations incurred in daily life; higher up are debts owed to one’s teacher;
then to one’s parents, and, at the top, to the emperor.2 8 While individuals in America
regard themselves as autonomous, and debt as a shameful thing that may be avoided,
the Japanese believe debt to be part of the human condition, especially debts owed to
one’s parents and to the emperor. Failure to observe these obligations is a mark of
poor character, and result in ostracization. The threat of ostracization is what ensures
the cohesion of society, and what instills the ethics of shame culture into the
Japanese.2 9 Thus, the Japanese become less free as they become adults, as their
participation in society consists of constantly maintaining an increasingly complex
web of obligations. Americans, by contrast, become freer as they near adulthood, as
parental discipline, which instills a sense of guilt in the child, is gradually
TO
withdrawn.
In the cultural system outlined by Benedict, Japanese worship of the emperor is
observance of the gravest obligation; the preference of death over surrender is a desire
to maintain a clean reputation; the willingness to participate in banzai raids and
kamikaze attacks is the dutiful expression of giri over ninjd; the ability of POWs to
2 7 Ibid, 222-227.
2 8 Ibid, 116.
2 9 Ibid, 145.
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switch allegiances is due to an absence of internal principles. In many ways,
Benedict’s analysis is more objective and reasonable than many of her
contemporaries, who saw the Japanese only as fanatics, as children, or as non-humans.
Nevertheless, Benedict is critical of the lack of freedom inherent in Japanese culture,
and is clearly not neutral in the pure, relativistic sense. Most importantly, the data
from which Benedict induces her pattern of Japanese personality consist of
ultranationalist ideology and of wartime behavior as seen from the United States. The
book is geared to explaining only that which is most conspicuously alien to
Americans, and that is what ultimately become the defining characteristics of Japan.
In sum, The Chrysanthemum and the Sword exhibits three qualities that are
critical to the present inquiry. First, like other cultural anthropological studies of
national character, it is based on the assumption that a culture is governed by an
essential pattern of personality that subsumes all behaviors, thoughts and actions.
Those raised within the culture have access to understanding the culture, and outsiders
do not. Second, despite Benedict’s often diplomatic language and avowals of the
dignity of all cultures, it is based on the assumption that the lack of individualism and
its concomitant lack of freedom is problematic, and that Japan is therefore in a
position of inferiority and in need of correction. Finally, it is ultimately a reaction to
those impressions of Japan that were most visible from the vantage point of America
during the war years. Ultranationalist ideology was understood as a representative
expression of the Japanese personality, and was largely taken at face value.
3 0 Ibid, 253-254.
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2. JAPAN AND AMERICA DIVERGE
After the Pacific War, social-scientific scrutiny of the Japanese character
waned in the United States, but became intense in Japan. Although knowledge of the
Japanese personality did not again become a pressing issue for American social
scientists until the late 1970s, changes in the American intellectual climate, in
America’s international position, and in Japan-American relations during the interim
made the views of those social scientists substantially different from the views of their
wartime predecessors. Meanwhile, the Japanese, disillusioned after years of total
mobilization for a lost cause, became introspective, and critical of themselves and the
war effort. Many accepted the notion that Japan was a defective culture in need of
guidance, and looked to American studies of the Japanese character to understand
better where those defects lie. Studies of the Japanese national character became a
large, dynamic discourse in Japan, just as they were declining in America. The pre-
1980 histories of Japanese character studies in America and Japan will each be taken
separately below.
Although Japan studies generally grew in postwar America, they were not
directed toward the study of Japanese national character. Nevertheless, several
developments conditioned, directly and indirectly, the ways social scientists analyzed
the Japanese character in the 1980s. These developments were as follows: the strategic
importance of Japan for the United States in the Cold War; the increasing temporal
distance between social scientists and the years of Japanese ultranationalism; the
recovery of the Japanese economy; increased personal interaction of Americans with
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18
Japanese; and the American cultural revolution instigated by the Vietnam War, the
Free Speech Movement, and the Civil Rights Movement. None of these was directly
engaged in the discussion of the Japanese character, but since they exerted a collective
impact later, a brief description of the influence of each is in order.
As noted in section 1, social scientists mobilized a free-totalitarian world
paradigm in the years leading up to World War II, and continued to do so throughout
the Cold War. Wartime analysts of Japan were in agreement that Japan was the
opposite and inferior of the West— a diagnosis that placed Japan in the Second World.
As early as 1948, the importance of Japan for American Cold War strategy became
apparent; even more so a year later, when Mao Tse-tung became the leader of all
China. As an industrial nation in East Asia, Japan was needed as a foothold of
capitalism in an otherwise Communist-dominated part of the world. However, Japan’s
pathological nationalism and non-Western tradition meant that Japan was of the
Second World and therefore highly susceptible to communist infiltration. Delmer
Brown observed in 1955:
The influence of nationalism upon Japan’s relations with the outside world
becomes a subject of vital importance as Japan moves into the Far Eastern
sector of the two-world struggle. The fact that she is the only industrialized
area in the Far East makes her one of the primary targets of the Communist
advance and also the keystone of any effort of the free nations to create
economic stability in the non-Communist areas of the Far East. In such a key
position it is logical to find a sharp Communist-free world struggle for the
support of Japanese nationalist sympathies. In all areas of Asia the
Communists have proved themselves to be quite energetic and astute in
harnessing nationalist power, and they have already made significant advances
in Japan. In this ideological conflict the United States and the free world have
definite advantages; but in the absence of enlightened, positive moves that are
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19
closely geared to nationalist forces, we may very well meet with still another
disastrous failure in the Orient.3 1
The negative characterization of the Japanese as prone to nationalistic fanaticism,
common to wartime personality studies, is implicit in Brown’s analysis. The tendency
of the Japanese toward a virulent, oppressive nationalism places Japan in a precarious
situation.3 2
The first significant development regarding the Japanese character and the
two-world struggle came from the application of modernization theory to Japan. By
the late 1950s, eminent scholars of Japan including Edwin O. Reischauer, John
Whitney Hall, and Marius Jansen revolutionized the field of Japan studies by
fashioning Japan into the premier model of modernization theory. In brief,
modernization theory assumes that modernization is a universal, not particularly
Western, process, and that the level of modernization of any nation can be assessed
thorough the analysis of quantifiable criteria. These scholars discerned in indigenous
Japanese culture the seeds and flowering of modernization, independent of Western
tutelage. The model of Japan as hopelessly backwards and in need of Western
instruction in the ways of civilization was gone. Instead, Japan had become a non-
Westem society with a demonstrated capability of modernization.3 4
3 1 Delmer M. Brown, Nationalism in Japan: An Introductory Historical Analysis (Berkeley: University
of California Press, 1955), vi-vii.
3 2 Ibid, 4-5.
3 3 John Whitney Hall, “Changing Conceptions of the Modernization of Japan” in Changing Japanese
Attitudes Toward Modernization, ed. Marius B. Jansen (Rutland: Tuttle, 1965), 16.
3 4 Ibid, 40-41.
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20
The new, positive evaluation of Japan helped to pull Japan out of the Second
World and into the First. Although modernization theorists maintained that Japan was
a novel synthesis of a non-Westem tradition with the universal criteria of
modernization, the previous emphasis on the insurmountable differences dividing
Japan from the “civilized world” was gone. The motivation of some modernization
theorists may have been political. H. D. Harootunian has argued that the
modernization project was specifically aimed at combating Communist infiltration in
o r
Japan. On the other hand, nearly all the participants in the modernization project
were involved in the military occupation of Japan, and some had had missionary
experience there. Some commentators have argued that the personal experiences of
these scholars with Japanese motivated them to combat the wartime characterizations
o z
of a fanatical, non-human horde by “humanizing” the Japanese. Whatever the
reason, the alien Japan of Ruth Benedict was becoming out of date.
An intellectual shift more directly addressed to the impact of Japanese
ultranationalism on wartime studies of the Japanese character occurred in the late
1960s. Enough time had passed that Japanese ultranationalism no longer cast as dark a
shadow over the newer generation of scholars, which included Kenneth Pyle, H. D.
Flarootunian, and Tetsuo Najita. They criticized the subjectivity of previous scholars
who, attempting to guard against a relapse into oppressive ultranationalism, viewed all
Japanese nationalism as a pathological social illness (as Brown did). They advocated
3 5 H. D. Harootunian, “America’s Japan/Japan’s Japan” in Japan in the World, ed. Masao Miyoshi and
H. D. Harootunian (Durham: Duke University Press, 1993), 200.
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21
moving beyond the “know the enemy” approach by unyoking the study of Japanese
nationalism from wartime ideology.3 7 Although these scholars were more immediately
concerned with the subject of nationalism as intellectual history, acknowledgement
that American reactions to Japanese ultranationalism had clouded scholars’
perceptions was another indication that “alien, inscrutable” Japan was becoming a
thing of the past.
One final development warranting mention is the intellectual, social and
cultural sea change that had occurred in America by the 1980s. As noted above,
Western social science in the twentieth century rested on the assumption of objective
and universal truth. Since the 1960s, the possibility of objectivity has been challenged
on a number of fronts. Clifford Geertz made a challenge specific to the field of
cultural anthropology. He proposed that culture and meaning were subjective, and
generated by the individual; the individual was not subsumed by an objective pattern
38 • •
of culture. This shift made obsolete the holistic approach used by Benedict and (as
will be demonstrated) appropriated by Japanese social scientists. The term
“essentialism” subsequently took on a negative connotation, and became synonymous
with politically incorrect stereotyping.
Other changes in America, unrelated to the narrow subject of national
character studies, also conditioned the way later scholars would view the Japanese
3 6 Sheldon Garon, “Rethinking Modernization and Modernity in Japanese History: A Focus on State-
Society Relations,” The Journal o f Asian Studies Vol. 53, No. 2 (May 1994), 347-348.
3 7 H.D. Harootunian, “Nationalism in Japan: Nationalism as History,” The Journal o f Asian Studies Vol.
33, No. 1 (Nov 1971), 57-62.
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22
character. Dissident scholars, suspicious of official information about the Vietnam
War, began formulating oppositional historiographies that questioned the moral and
->Q
intellectual orthodoxy of the establishment. Marxist historians shifted the locus of
historical analysis from the top of society to the bottom.4 0 Women and blacks entering
academia further fractured the social landscape by arguing for the separateness of
historical experience of women and blacks from that of white men. Underrepresented
groups claimed their own identities, their own histories, and their own versions of
truth 4 1 In short, the old orthodoxy of one America with one voice was shattered into
many Americas with many voices, and the spirit of opposition to authority became
institutionalized. American identity was vastly different in the 1980s from what it had
been in the 1940s. This difference in identity, as will be shown in section 3,
profoundly influenced the way American social scientists viewed Japanese character
in the 1980s.
Meanwhile, social-scientific scrutiny of the Japanese character became as
intense in Japan after the war as it had been in America before and during the war. As
the loser in an all-out struggle, the defeated Japanese were confronted with profound
questions: was there any value in the cause for which they had worked and sacrificed;
why were they persuaded by appeals to mythology and tradition that defied reason;
why were they unable to prevent an avoidable and irrational war; how should Japanese
3 8 Clifford Geertz, “Thick Description: Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture,” The Interpretation
o f Cultures: Selected Essays by Clifford Geertz. (New York: Basic Books, 1973) p. 5.
3 9 Novick, 415-417,522-524.
4 0 Ibid, 417-468.
4 1 Ibid, 469-521.
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23
society be reconstructed? Many relied on the American victors for answers to these
questions, and embraced the criticisms of the victor in an act of repentance for their
own past sins.4 2 Many were in agreement that the failure of Japanese civilization to
produce individualism prevented the Japanese from resisting war mobilization and
stopping the disastrous Pacific War, and looked to American studies of the Japanese
national character to better understand their own flaws.
Japanese cultural anthropologist Aoki Tamotsu has argued that American
wartime studies of the Japanese character had major influences on postwar Japanese
thought. In “Sengo Nihon to Nihonbunkaron: Kiku to Katana Igo” (“Postwar Japan
and Nihonbunkaron: Since The Chrysanthemum and the Sword’), Aoki demonstrates
that The Chrysanthemum and the Sword, translated into Japanese in 1948, was widely
circulated among the intelligentsia and the general public, and continues to be
reprinted in large numbers every year. Japanese social scientists both praised and
criticized particular aspects of the book, but were in general agreement that Benedict
had correctly identified and diagnosed the defects in the Japanese character 4 3
Aoki holds that Chrysanthemum left two enduring legacies in the Japanese
social scientific community. The first was that of its methodology. Aoki credits
Benedict with introducing the holistic approach to Japanese social scientists; he argues
that, because of the wide acceptance of Chrysanthemum, all postwar Japanese studies
4 2 Andrew Barshay, “Postwar Social and Political Thought, 1945-90,” Modern Japanese Thought, ed.
Bob Tadashi Wakabayashi (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 283; Aoki Tamotsu,
“Sengo Nihon to Nihonbunkaron: Kiku to Katana Igo,” Child Koron Vol. 104, No. 6 (June 1989), 156-
173.
4 3 Aoki, June 1989, 160-166.
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24
of national character have been holistic, subsuming isolated individual behaviors into
an essential personality.4 4 Chrysanthemum's second legacy was that of its inherent
Western values. Benedict’s argument is predicated on the dichotomy of
West/individualism/free vs. Japan/groupism/unfree, which assumes that individualism
is the desired norm and therefore infers that Japan is defective, inferior, and even
strange.4 5 The Japanese intelligentsia appropriated this model, which was reflective of
Western values, as it provided valuable answers to the hard questions they were asking
of themselves.
The legacy of holism persisted throughout the postwar period, but the Western-
oriented model implicit in Chrysanthemum was eventually contested. Throughout the
1950s, Japanese social scientists produced studies of the Japanese national character
that were similar to Chrysanthemum, in that they were holistic and utilized such
concepts as groupism and shame culture. These studies were universally negative in
their assessments of the Japanese, and still reflected the repentant attitude of Japanese
intellectuals.4 6
However, as time passed, the self-critical position of social scientists began to
abate. As the Japanese economy recovered and Japan, independent since 1952,
became more self-confident, more positive evaluations of the Japanese character
began to appear. Social scientists studying national character in the 1960s eschewed
4 4 Ibid, 165-166; see also Tetsuo Najita, “On Culture and Technology in Postwar Japan,”
Postmodernism and Japan, ed. Masao Miyoshi and H. D. Harootunian (Durham: Duke University
Press, 1989), 3-20.
4 5 Aoki, June 1989, 163-166.
4 6 Ibid, 168-169.
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25
the self-criticism of their predecessors, but retained both the holism and the Japan-
West dichotomy of the earlier works.4 7 Sociologist Nakane Chie’s Tale Shakai no
Ningen Kankei (translated “The human relations of vertical society”; the English title
is simply Japanese Society){\970) and psychologist Doi Takeo’s Amae no Kozo (The
Anatomy o f Dependence)) 1971) are two of the most famous examples of the more
positive national character studies 4 8 These works are both holistic in their description
of Japanese personality, and characterize Japan as a groupist society.
As Japan achieved greater affluence and strength vis-a-vis America throughout
the 1970s, Japanese social scientists began to rebel against the value-laden Japan-West
dichotomy. In Nihonrashisa no Saihakken (The Rediscovery o f Japaneseness)(\911),
Hamaguchi Eshun argues that groupism (shudan shugi) does not reflect the reality of
Japanese identity or interpersonal relations.4 9 As the opposite of individualism (kojin
shugi), groupism denotes the submersion of the individual in the group. This implies
that the individual, as an independent actor, is the norm for a healthy society, and that
in a groupist society, this independent actor is drowned in the larger group.
Elamaguchi refers to this Western construct of groupism as ‘collectivism,’ and denies
its validity for the Japanese case.5 0 Instead, Hamaguchi proposes the concept of
‘contextualism’ (kanjin shugi) as the basic unit of Japanese society. Unlike the
4 7 Aoki Tamotsu, “Nihon Tataki no Arashi no Naka de: Sengo Nihon to Nihonbunkaron,” Chuo Koron
Vol. 104, No. 7 (July 1989),158-162.
4 8 Nakane Chie, Japanese Society (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1970);
Doi Takeo, The Anatomy o f Dependence, trans. John Bseter (Tokyo, New York, and San Francisco:
Kodansha International, Ltd., 1971).
4 9Aoki, July 1989, 162-165; see also Hamaguchi Eshun, “A Contextual Model of the Japanese: Toward
a Methodological Innovation in Japan Studies” trans. Kumon Shumpei and Mildred R. Creighton,
Journal o f Japanese Studies, Vol. 11, No. 2 (Summer 1985), 289-321.
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26
independent ego of the individual, or the oppression of the group, contextualism posits
that the individual and his relationships together constitute the basic unit of identity.5 1
That is, the individual’s identity is dependent in part on whom he or she is relating to
at a particular moment. Japanese identity is neither the totality of the group (as in
Western totalitariansim), nor the narrow confines of the ego (as in Western
democracy), but the context of one’s situation.
Kumon Shumpei, Murakami Yasusuke, and Sato Seizaburo applied this new
methodology to the construction of Japan as an alternative mode of modem
civilization in their 1979 co-authored work, Bunmei to shite ie no shakai. (Ie Society
52
as a Civilization) This dense and technical work describes the historical evolutions
of world civilizations, each developing distinctive characteristics. To summarize
briefly for the purposes of the present inquiry, the authors argue that the contextual as
a basic unit of society gave rise to the ie (“familiy”; it connotes a unique Japanese
social construct) as the basic form of community, which evolved in the eastern
samurai societies of Japan and was eventually molded into present-day Japan.
Social scientific studies of the Japanese character thus came to occupy very
different place in Japan and America by the 1980s. In sum, knowledge of the Japanese
character virtually lost all urgency after the war. Scholars in the 1950s and 1960s
gradually tried to correct the negative wartime stereotypes of Japan by emphasizing
Japan’s capacity for universal modernization, by generally “humanizing” them, and by
5 0 Hamaguchi, 289-297.
5 1 Ibid, 297-305.
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recognizing the negative impact of ultranationalism upon scholars of Japanese
nationalism. In Japan, studies of national character grew in importance, and social
scientists adopted the holism and models of Western studies. While the methodology
of holism persisted, Japanese social scientists later rejected the individualist-groupist
distinction and proposed that Japan was a unique society built by a unique personality.
By divesting wartime character studies of their Western bias, these social scientists
attempted to restore the ideal of relativity, positing that Japan was fundamentally
different from, and largely unknowable to, the West. While American analysts had
been moving away from notions of the Japanese as categorically different and
unknowable, the Japanese moved towards them. Furthermore, the emphasis
Americans placed on social heterogeneity and opposition to authority was indeed the
opposite of much of the content of Japanese national character studies, which stressed
social homogeneity and deference to authority. Social scientists criticized wartime
scholars for allowing American values to cloud their perspective, but, as shall be
demonstrated in section 3, scholars of nihonjinron would be influenced by the new
postwar American values. This divergence set the stage for the hostile reception of
nihonjinron in America in the 1980s and 1990s.
5 2 Aoki, July 1989, 165-167; see also Murakami Yasusuke, “Ie Society as a Pattern of Civilization:
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28
3. THE ENEMY REAPPEARS: NIHONJINRON
Understanding the Japanese personality became a priority for American social
scientists again in the 1980s. Japan was basking in the affluence of the “Japanese
Miracle,” having recovered from wartime devastation to become the second largest
GNP in the world, second to the United States. While America was beset by a flagging
economy, pollution, crime, and disintegrating values, Japan boasted a booming
economy and a well-functioning society dealing with the same problems as America,
only better. Economic tension between America and Japan had been growing
throughout the 1970s, becoming openly hostile as early as 1972 when Richard Nixon
tried, unsuccessfully, to reduce the volume of Japanese imports by taking America off
53
the gold standard. The antagonism surrounding the trade friction aroused latent anti-
American sentiment in Japan, and growing pride in what many (such as the authors of
Bunmei to shite Ie no Shakai) believed to be a uniquely Japanese mode of society, of
capitalism, and of civilization that excelled America. In America, anti-Japanese
sentiment caused by fears that Japan would eventually “own” America reactivated
wartime images of a superhuman horde of fanatics, this time in the office instead of on
the battlefield.
The urgency of understanding the Japanese, as a matter of socioeconomic
defense and survival, was made clear by sociologist Ezra F. Vogel in Japan as
Number One: Lessons for America (1979). Vogel acknowledged that Japan seemed to
be dealing much more successfully with the same problems that faced America, and
Introduction,” Journal o f Japanese Studies Vol. 10, No. 2 (Summer 1984), 279-363.
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29
made the scandalous proposition that America abandon some of its own practices and
adopt those of Japan. Vogel writes:
I have wondered why it is that the full scope of Japanese successes has not
been presented more forcefully to the American people, especially since the
most knowledgeable American business, government, and academic specialists
on Japan are so acutely aware of them . . . Our confidence in the superiority of
Western civilization and our desire to see ourselves as number one make it
difficult to acknowledge that we have practical things to learn from Orientals. .
.. In the effectiveness of its present-day institutions in coping with the current
problems of the postindustrial era, Japan is indisputably number one.
Considering its limited space and natural resources and its crowding, Japan’s
achievements in economic productivity, educational standards, health, and the
control of crime are in a class by themselves.5 4
Japan’s cultural traditions of group loyalty and consensual relationships have allowed
the development of social structures and economic and government institutions that
Vogel saw as desirable for America, and he advocated importing them into America.
These include government trade and industrial policies that specifically promote areas
in which America may be most competitive, rather than attempting to maintain
industries that are losing competitiveness; a governing body of permanent bureaucrats
who can apply long-term plans, rather than frequently elected short-term leadership;
the implementation of communitarian groups in the organizational structures of
government, universities, and companies, rather than the antagonism of individual
leaders and special interest groups; and cooperation and aggregation of interests
between companies, rather than pure competition.5 5 In many ways, Japan an Number
One was an American analog to Bunmei to shite Ie no Shakai, in that it described
5 3 Gary Allinson, Japan’ s Postwar History (London: University College Press, 1997), p. 154.
5 4 Ezra F. Vogel, Japan as Number One: Lessons fo r America (New York: Harper-Collins Books,
1979), ix, 22.
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30
Japan as a unique and admirable mode of civilization, fundamentally different from
the West, but equal to it— or, in this case, better.
As Americans heeded Vogel’s warning, a cottage industry of publications
dealing with these phenomena appeared in the United States. The widespread
American interest in the subject created a lucrative field for writers, many of which
were not Japan specialists. The literature explained in detail the intricacies of the
Japanese character and the culture that produced it, and advised readers how to
successfully deal with their Japanese colleagues and competitors. This trend produced
a large volume of writing, both academic and popular, ranging from books to
magazine articles. The contributors to this body of popular literature often
incorporated notions of nihonjinron into their works.
It was around the time that Vogel’s warning appeared that the explosion of
nihonjinron described in the first pages of this study took place. The newly affluent
and legitimately proud Japanese were receptive to the notions that Japan was a unique
civilization, and that this uniqueness was the reason why Japan was succeeding while
America was lagging. The popular literature that fed the public curiosity was drawn
from the national character studies that had been evolving throughout the postwar
period, and similarly emphasized the uniqueness of the Japanese personality, its
differences from the Western models, and the homogeneity and cohesiveness of
society. Moreover, this literature also used the holistic technique that had become the
hallmark of national character studies, subsuming isolated behaviors into an essential
5 5 Ibid, 231-8.
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personality. However, it was necessarily less academically rigorous, as it was intended
for a popular audience, and often employed glaringly flawed reasoning and cliched
concepts.
The popularity of nihonjinron made it an attractive target for appropriation by
the state and big business. A group of scholars called the Bunka no jidai kenkyu
gurupu (The Age of Culture Research Group), which included Yamamoto Shichihei
and Kumon Shumpei, co-authored Bunka no jidai: Report o f the Policy Group o f
Prime Minister Ohira—Number One (1980). This work drew on the developments
taking place in the proper social scientific studies of the Japanese character, which
gained official government sanction with Ohira’s appointment of this group.5 6 In the
business world, large firms like the Nippon Steel Corporation provided their
employees with literature to instruct them on Japanese culture for the purposes of
57
increasing solidarity, as well as disseminating a specific image of Japan abroad.
More important, however, is the application of Japanese personality studies to the
concept of Japanese-style management. This discourse began in the 1960s with Odaka
Kunio’s Nihon no keiei, and played an important role in disseminating the notion that
58
Japanese success was rooted in unique Japanese culture.
Nihonjinron was therefore ubiquitous by the 1980s. Like ultranationalism in
the 1940s, nihonjinron appeared to Americans intent on learning about the Japanese as
the representative text of the Japanese personality, and shaped American impressions.
5 6 Befo, 2001,80-81.
5 7 Befu, 2001,28.
5 8 Aoki, July 1989, 161.
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Nihonjinron exhibited the characteristics of social scientific character studies of the
1970s, and were arrogant in tone. A telling example is Nakagawa Yasuhiro’s “Japan,
the Welfare Super-State,” which appeared in the Journal o f Japanese Studies in
1979.5 9 This article presents the familiar portrait of the nation of the Japanese Miracle:
the nation as corporation, and citizens as employees. Japan is a homogeneous,
classless, conflict-free society of group consensus in which the people, the government
and industry live and work in harmony. In extremely self-congratulatory language,
Nakagawa discusses Japan’s welfare payments, income distribution, health care, diet,
housing, and educational system as products of Japan’s unique character, which he
holds as superior to that of the West. For example, part of the reason why Japan has
overtaken so many Western countries is the Japanese zeal for working, as opposed to
the Western contempt of work. The class-conflicted West has stigmatized work
through its association with slavery and serfdom, whereas in Japan, labor-intensive
farming has been a source of group-cohesion.6 0
Unlike American social scientists during World War II, social scientists of the
1980s refused to take the contemporary articulation of Japanese character as a
legitimate representation of how the Japanese were in reality. Americans during World
War II believed that all Japanese worshipped the emperor, following the Kokutai no
Hongi, and did not raise the possibility that such ideological tracts might not represent
the actual Japanese. By the 1980s, Americans were more disposed toward
5 9 Nakagawa Yasuhiro, “Japan, the Welfare Super-State,” The Journal o f Japanese Studies Vol. 5, No.
1 (Winter 1979), 5-51.
6 0 Ibid
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characterizing the Japanese as “more like us;” and in this case, “like us” meant having
a heterogeneous culture and society, a competition-driven economy, and an
adversarial relationship to authority (see section 2). For these reasons, nihonjinron has
been largely ignored and poorly understood by Western social scientists. Indeed, most
scholars showed the same disdain for nihonjinron that nihonjinronsha displayed for
America.
Western scholarship on nihonjinron falls roughly into four groups: the
literature-philosophy school; the ideology school; the school of “debunkers”; and the
sociology-anthropology school. The literature-philosophy school is represented by
Peter N. Dale’s 1986 book, The Myth o f Japanese Uniqueness. (1986)6 1 Dale is
primarily concerned with nihonjinron as a body of thought, and the soundness of its
arguments. Unsurprisingly, his objective is to expose the illogicality and invalidity of
nihonjinron by pointing out logical contradictions within the literature itself, and
anomalies between the discourse and the reality it purports to represent. Dale does not
hide the fact that he regards nihonjinron as utter nonsense. Indeed, the sarcastic tone
of the book conveys the general sentiment of Western scholars in the 1980s toward
nihonjinron. Dale is not a Japan specialist, but a classicist who went to Japan for a
comparative study of epic poetry.6 2 The Myth o f Japanese Uniqueness is the product
of Dale’s frustration with the obstacles nihonjinron presented for his research, and this
hostility is palpable in his prose.
6 1 Peter N. Dale, The Myth o f Japanese Uniqueness (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1986); Dale is
Australian, not American, but his work is important enough to the American academic community to be
considered representative of a significant portion of professional opinion.
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34
Dale locates the origins of the literature in the years of 1906 to 1912, arguing
that conservative forces institutionalized a paranoid, reactionary nationalism to resist
Western intrusion. The original motivation of the Meiji modernizers was to revive
Japan’s disintegrating feudal order, not to overcome it. Westernization provided Meiji
leadership with the means of perpetuating the old order, allowing them to consolidate
the nation under an imperial monarch and annex colonial territories.6 3 The original
celebration of Westernization brought a denigration of things Japanese. Soon, rising
sentiments of nostalgia during the modernization process gave rise to a resurgence of
national pride; advocates of national identity argued that Japan’s “uniqueness” was in
its preservation of feudal tradition and o f things that were “exotic” vis-a-vis the
modem West.6 4 When Japan was not awarded reparations from Russia after the Russo-
Japanese War of 1905, conservative forces expelled the liberal cabinet then in power,
and crushed a nascent political activism movement. At the same time, intellectuals
such as Nishida Kitaro provided an intellectual counterpart to the political
conservatism of late-Meiji. These thinkers formulated a school of thought based on the
common assumption that suspension of subject-object reasoning is a pre-modern, non-
Westem, and uniquely Japanese concept. Dale characterizes this movement as a retreat
from the modern to feudal consciousness, and also as a retreat into pre-Oedipal
infantilism.6 5 The conservative government co-opted this thought to repress
individualism and opposition. The three-part progression from denigration of
6 2 Ibid, “Introduction.”
6 3 Ibid, p. 202.
6 4 Ibid, 205.
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35
Japaneseness. to affirmation of Japaneseness, to celebration of Japaneseness was
played out again in the postwar period, culminating in nihonjinron of the 1970s.6 6
In brief, Dale regards nihonjinron as a recurrent symptom of a defect buried
deep in Japan’s modernization process. He uses the term nihonjinron indiscriminately,
including all articulations of national identity since the Meiji period under its rubric.
He therefore draws a continuous line between Meiji conservatism and the nihonjinron
of the 1970s, characterizing it as an immature, pathological nationalism. Dale’s
argument is targeted at exposing the irrationality of nihonjinron, focusing mainly on
the arguments of famous Japanese thinkers. Although he gives less attention to
explaining the ubiquity and role of nihonjinron in society, Dale does make clear that
he regards nihonjinron, indeed, all modem Japanese thought, as an instrument
designed to keep the population in submission.6 7
While scholars in the ideology school are in agreement with those of the
literature-philosophy school that nihonjinron is not an intellectually valid body of
thought or an acceptable representation of the Japanese, they are more immediately
concerned with nihonjinron as an instrument of power and control. Scholars of the
ideology school generally characterize nihonjinron as the ideological arm of neo-
emperorism. That is, the prewar system is virtually intact, and Japan is, in effect, a
fascist society. In this model, nihonjinron producers are agents of right-wing
repression, and the popularity of nihonjinron is evidence of the cultural poverty of a
6 5 Ibid, 210-212.
6 6 Ibid, 213.
6 7 Ibid, 21-23.
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36
society obsessed with materialism and consumerism. Contributors to this school
generally describe a ‘dark’ or ‘hidden’ Japan, in which the insidious ubiquity of
nihonjinron hints at an Orwellian society of self-censorship and repression.
Karel van Wolferen’s The Enigma o f Japanese Power: People and Politics in
a Stateless Nation (1989) is the definitive statement of the ideology school of
thought.6 8 Van Wolferen is more precise than Dale in his definition of nihonjinron,
limiting his use of the term to the popular literature of the late 1970s and 1980s. He
characterizes the ubiquity of nihonjinron on TV, in newspapers, books, and films as a
bombardment of propaganda designed to keep the Japanese public docile, and to
perpetuate the status quo. As noted earlier, nihonjinron received official sponsorship
in 1980 under Prime Minister Ohira.6 9 Prime Minister Nakasone, who often invoked
concepts of homogeneity and consensus in his speeches, actively continued the official
sponsorship. By discouraging dissent and reminding the Japanese that they are unique
in the world, and that the Japanese are not individuals in the Western sense,
nihonjinron essentially sends the Japanese into a stupor, according to van Wolferen.
Van Wolferen describes some of the previous appeals to uniqueness in
Japanese nationalism, but specifically locates the origins of the literature in the prewar
fascist system. He notes:
The myth covers up the interminable conflict among members of the governing
elite, who can be counted on to agree absolutely on one thing: a continuation of
present power arrangements. It also conceals chronic, albeit largely ritualized,
6 8 Karel van Wolferen, The Enigma o f Japanese Power: People and Politics in a Stateless Nation (New
York: Vintage Books, 1989); van Wolferen is German, but, like Dale, is representative o f a significant
portion of professional opinion in America.
6 9 Ibid, 264.
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37
political conflict between, on the one hand, the administrators of the System
and, on the other, the Japanese left and some other circles and individuals who
disagree with what the System stands for . . . Nihonjinron is basically kokutai
ideology minus the military factor. Japanese are once again telling themselves
and outsiders that they are all part of what is essentially one big happy family .
. . Japanese whose intellectual capacities and personal inclinations might
otherwise cause them to wonder at the reason for it all are systematically
presented with intellectual garbage . . . The success of the modern ideology of
Japaneseness is partly due to the general intellectual poverty of postwar
• 70
Japanese life.
Like Dale’s argument, however, van Wolferen’s is weakened by the assumption that
nihonjinron is the continuation of a prewar discourse that has remained unchanged.
Also, his exclusive focus on the use of nihonjinron as an instrument of political
control ignores the important possibility that nihonjinron may simply resonate with
the public for other reasons. The assumption that the entire nation has been taken in by
simple-minded appeals to nationalism produced by the government is unconvincing.
The school of “debunkers” is an outgrowth of the previous two. Strictly
speaking, these authors do not directly study nihonjinron. Rather, their efforts are
directed at exploding one or another of the tenets of nihonjinron by demonstrating the
disparity between those tenets and reality. The homogeneity principle has come under
especially heavy fire, as a large and growing body of literature dealing with the
minorities of Japan attempts to depict a multicultural and multiethnic portrait of the
country.7 1 Other scholars have attempted to refute the consensus thesis by pointing out
7 0 Ibid, 269,271.
7 1 See John Lie, Multiethnic Japan (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001); Donald Denoon, ed.
Multicultural Japan: Paleolithic to Postmodern (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001).
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38
instances of conflict.7 2 These scholars are generally in agreement with Dale that
nihonjinron is nonsense and therefore meaningless. Others share van Wolferen’s goal
of demonstrating that nihonjinron is an instrument of repression, and attempt to
debunk it by showing that, beneath the oppressive ideological veneer, there are
73
Western-type individuals and diversity waiting to be liberated. All of these projects
are motivated by the conviction that the Japanese must surely be “more like us,” and
attempt to prove it by removing the “mask” of nihonjinron.
The anthropology-sociology school is comprised of the works of two people:
cultural anthropologist Harumi Befu, and sociologist Kosaku Yoshino. Befu, with
sociologist Kazufumi Manabe, conducted a survey in 1987 in Nishinomiya (a suburb
of Osaka and Kobe) to determine the degree to which average Japanese espoused the
tenets of nihonjinron.7 4 Based on a return from over 900 respondents, Befu concluded
that although not all tenets of nihonjinron were universally espoused, nihonjinron
itself was a subject of intense popular interest at the time of the survey. Similarly,
Kosaku Yoshino collected data between 1986 and 1988 from businessmen and
educators, and concluded that the businessmen were more receptive to, and played a
greater role in disseminating, nihonjinron.1 5 Both Befu and Yoshino conflate
7 2 See T. J. Pempel, “The Unbundling of “Japan, Inc.”: The Changing Dynamics o f Japanese Policy
Formation,” The Journal o f Japanese Studies Vol. 13, No. 2, Special Issue: A Forum on the Trade
Crisis (Summer, 1987), 271-306.
7 3 See Patrick Smith, Japan: A Reinterpretation (New York: Vintage Books, 1997).
7 4 Harumi Befu and Kazufumi Manabe, “An Empirical Study o f Nihonjinron: How Real is the Myth?”
Kwansei Gakuin University Annual Studies Vol. 36 (December 1987), 97-111; David McConnell, Sug-
In Kweon, Harumi Befu, and Kazufumi Manabe, “Nihonjinron: Whose Cup of Tea?” Kwansei Gakuin
University Annual Studies Vol. 38 (December 1988), 129-133.
7 5 Kosaku Yoshino, Cultural Nationalism in Contemporary Japan: A Sociological Enquiry (London and
New York: Routledge, 1992).
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39
nihonjinron with all constructions of Japanese self-identity, and use the term even
more indiscriminately than Dale. Befu in particular is guilty of this over
simplification, going as far back as the Tokugawa nativists to locate the origins of
nihonjinron. For Befu, any discussion of Japanese identity, whether it is literary
aesthetics of the nineteenth century or neurophysiology of the 1970s, falls under the
all-inclusive rubric of nihonjinron.76 Unlike Dale and van Wolferen, Befu explains the
significance of nihonjinron in terms of external, rather than internal function. He
analyzes nihonjinron as a form of resistance to Western encroachment, and attributes
any change in the form or content of the discourse to changes in Japan’s power
77
relationship with the West.
Having surveyed the four schools of thought on nihonjinron, some general
similarities to wartime assessments of the Japanese character can be discerned. In both
instances, friction and hostility between Japan and the United States (World War II,
the trade conflict) necessitated social scientific analysis of the Japanese character.
Each time, there existed in Japan a discourse on the Japanese character
(ultranationalism, nihonjinron) that emphasized Japanese uniqueness, as well as
superiority to, and hostility toward, the West. Also, Japanese behavior in a particular
area of interest (military behavior, business behavior) came under heavy scrutiny.
From the vantage point of America, these two bodies of evidence were most visible,
and became the points of reference for social scientific study of the Japanese
character. The subjectivity of perspective has therefore colored the conclusions drawn
7 6 Befu, 2001, 123-141.
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40
by social scientists, as the extreme, hostile, and often irrational images of the Japanese
created by those conspicuous behaviors and discourses conditioned the lens through
which Americans saw them. Social scientists in the decades after World War II
became aware of this error, and made efforts to correct it. The errors of the four
schools of thought on nihonjinron are still in need o f correction.
The differences in each case are also striking. In the case of World War II,
American analysts took ultranationalist ideology and wartime behavior as legitimate
indications of how the Japanese thought and acted. Social scientists concluded that the
Japanese were categorically different from Westerners, and that the Japanese
personality and the civilization that produced it was defective and in need of
rehabilitation. In addition to the limited perspective of Americans that made
ultranationalism and war behavior most visible, the confidence in American values
and institutions affirmed the conviction that the Japanese were intrinsically inferior.
Later scholars addressed the subjectivity of this position, as occasioned by American
perspective and values. Scholars like those of the modernization school refuted the
ideas that the Japanese were fundamentally alien, unknowable, and inferior. Others,
like the aforementioned scholars of nationalism, eliminated Japanese ultranationalism
as the point of reference for studying Japanese nationalism. Such efforts brought
increasing objectivity to the study of Japan.
Nevertheless, American perspective and values obstructed the views of social
scientists responding to the postwar Japanese economic miracle and nihonjinron. The
7 7 Ibid, 123-124.
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changes in the intellectual community of Japan, described in section 2, were largely
unnoticed by American scholars. The appearance of nihonjinron therefore led many to
believe that it was the uninterrupted continuation of wartime ultranationalism, of late-
Meiji conservatism, or even of nineteenth-century nativism. American values tainted
American perspectives as well, although those values were fundamentally different
from those of the World War II era. Social, cultural, and ethnic diversity,
institutionalized opposition to authority, and economic competition had become the
esteemed values of the American intelligentsia by the 1980s. Combined with the
political incorrectness of viewing the Japanese as alien and backward, these values led
scholars to deny any legitimacy of nihonjinron as an indication of how Japanese
thought and acted in reality. As demonstrated by the four schools, scholars have
sought to contradict, vilify, or ignore nihonjinron, as its writers esteem the values of
social, cultural, and ethnic homogeneity, of deference to authority, and o f economic
cooperation. Conviction of American social scientists in their own values has
compelled them to look for those values in Japan in the various ways described above,
and to deny the contentions of nihonjinron as a matter of principle.
The irony of American scholarship on nihonjinron is that postmodern scholars
emphasize relativity of meaning, particularity of experience, and difference of identity,
yet oppose nihonjinron precisely because its authors resist being seen as similar to the
American model. Nihonjinron writers rely on notions of relativism, particularism, and
identity difference in their constructions of Japanese identity, but the values articulated
in those constructions are objectionable to American analysts. Postmodern scholars of
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42
Japan look for diversity and opposition within Japan, and locate Japan’s identity there,
because that is the American definition of identity. In this sense, the universalism that
postmodernists purport to revise is still present.
In a sense, American scholars who reject nihonjinron on these grounds are
performing a kind of penance, in that they are denying the older conservative
American values that the cultural revolutions rendered outmoded. In the case of Japan
studies, there is more literal than figurative truth to this. As demonstrated in section 2,
the methodology of essentialist, holistic social scientific character studies was
transmitted to, and cultivated in, postwar Japan. While such studies fell out of favor in
postwar America, and “essentialism” became politically incorrect, they evolved in
Japan into a discourse from which the popular nihonjinron was drawn. In this sense,
American social scientists confronted with nihonjinron may have felt that the ghost of
their own defunct and disavowed values were returning to haunt them. The
condemnation of nihonjinron may be interpreted on this level as a microcosm of a
debate among Americans that has nothing to do with Japan at all.
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43
4. QUESTIONS AND POSSIBILITIES
It still remains for scholars to revise the original reactions to nihonjinron. As
the economic conflict that provided the occasion for Western scrutiny of the Japanese
character becomes increasingly distant in time, the possibility of a more objective,
balanced analysis becomes possible. The antagonistic atmosphere surrounding the
trade conflict, the value biases of Western commentators, and the limited perspective
which made nihonjinron most prominent in the views of Western analysts all exert
less influence with the passage of time. In these closing pages, important but unasked
questions about nihonjinron will be raised. In considering these questions, a brief
sketch of a possible new approach to the subject will be offered.
Let us agree that Japan is not a unique, racially homogenous, conflict-free
society. The disparities between the claims of nihonjinron and the reality of Japan
have been well demonstrated. The inadequacy of nihonjinron to present a literal
representation of the Japanese identity is not contested by this study. That having been
said, a social phenomenon of the magnitude of nihonjinron cannot be dismissed on the
simple grounds of inaccuracy. The four schools of thought reviewed above have given
insufficient answers to the basic questions regarding the origin and significance of
nihonjinron.
As already noted, there are three general schools of thought regarding the
origin and definition of nihonjinron. Peter N. Dale locates its origin in the
conservatism of the late-Meiji period of 1906 to 1912, defining nihonjinron
indiscriminately to denote any articulation of Japanese identity in the modem period.
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44
Karel van Wolferen locates its origin in the immediate prewar period, arguing that it is
merely the continuation o f kokutai ideology into postwar Japan. Harumi Befu places
the origins of nihonjinron the furthest back in time— in the kokugaku (National
th
Learning) nativism of the 19 century. His definition of the term is even more
embracing than Dale’s, allowing any discussion of Japanese nationalism at any time in
the nation’s history to fall under its rubric. An error common to arguments that use the
term “nihonjinron” indiscriminately is the equation of nihonjinron with the assertion
of uniqueness. Uniqueness has consistently been an esteemed national value in
modern Japanese history, comparable to liberty in the United States. Many discourses
appropriate the notion of uniqueness, but these discourses are still separate and distinct
in substance. Discourses that articulate Japanese national identity in terms of
aesthetics, mythology, victimhood, nostalgia, or national mission all make use of the
concept of uniqueness, but have little in common otherwise. Even the use of
homogeneity in nihonjinron is an expression of uniqueness. The error has obscured the
complexity of nationalist discourses by amalgamating them into a single,
undifferentiated discourse on uniqueness.
Breaking with the above arguments, I contend that the term “nihonjinron”
refers specifically to the popular literature dating from the late 1970s, and that its
origin is located in the occupation period. The evidence supporting this argument has
already been presented in section 2. Aoki Tamotsu has indicated the influence of
Western social scientific character studies upon nihonjinron, but he, like Befu and
Dale, consider nihonjinron a continuous, all-embracing term for discussions of
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45
Japanese identity. For Aoki, the introduction of holism was a change in form of the
already existing discourse. Instead, I argue that the creation of a discourse on national
identity based on empirical, social scientific observation of the Japanese is a break
from, and reaction against, all previous discourses on nationalism, in that hierarchy
and tradition became stigmatized and associated with the military government, who
bore responsibility for the war. In the interest of overcoming the past through modern
science and democracy, the locus of identity moved downward from the emperor, the
apex of a hierarchy, to a monolithic and egalitarian “people.”
In the intellectual matrix of the occupation, a number of discourses emerged
that sought to define, through scientific scrutiny, a Japanese identity located in the
“people.” The two discourses to gain the widest followings were Marxism and
78
Modernism. Other, more distinctly Japanese discourses that would not mature until
the later 1950s also began to emerge. One of these held that the Japanese were
exceptional in their status as war victims, citing the atomic bombs and the
victimization of the Japanese “people” by the government—a view that seems to
70
match the postwar social configuration more closely than the prewar. Another
nascent discourse, which may be called Japaneseness-as-science, was the result of the
introduction of national character studies into the immediate postwar Japanese
intellectual matrix, as described in section 2. Such writings replaced tradition and
myth as the definitive discourse of Japaneseness, as they located identity in the
7 8 Barshay, 279-308; Aoki, June 1989, 168-169.
7 9 James J. Orr, The Victim as Hero: Ideologies o f Peace and National Identity in Postwar Japan
(Honolulu: University o f Hawaii Press, 2001).
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46
behaviors and conventions of “people” and were articulated and constructed in the
language of science. These qualities made Japaneseness-as-science seem progressive,
modem, and reasonable to intellectuals who wished to break with the old order. This
discourse evolved in the manner described in section 2, and was the discipline from
which the more popular nihonjinron were drawn.
Existing Western scholarship has also failed to explain sufficiently the ubiquity
of nihonjinron in Japan. Dale regards it as symptomatic of systemic defects in modem
Japanese society. Karel van Wolferen attributes the prevalence of nihonjinron to
government coercion. Befu, focusing on the prevalence of Japan-West comparison in
nihonjinron, sees the discourse as a response to Japan’s uneven power relations with
the West. Breaking with these assessments, I argue that Japaneseness-as-science was
produced and consumed in ever increasing quantities precisely because it resonated
deeply with the experiences of postwar Japanese. To investigate this possibility, I
propose examining the evolution of Japaneseness-as-science in the changing context
of social and economic configurations through the prism of a base-superstructure
relationship. Like the discourse itself, the social and economic configurations of the
postwar period were substantially different from their prewar predecessors. The social
and economic transformation of Japan, much of which was also carried out in the
ostensible interest of democratizing Japan, leveled society and narrowed the gap
between the top and the bottom. Also, the generations who lived through the war
years, occupation, and period of high-speed growth underwent a high degree of
collectively felt experience. The leveling of society and the relative uniformity of
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47
experience predisposed large sections of the Japanese to articulations of a
homogeneous and consensual society, and strengthened feelings of national
identification and community.
Total popular mobilization of the 1930s, social disruption and dislocation, and
destruction of environment and wealth, and the emperor’s announcement of surrender
brought an unprecedented degree of collective experience to the Japanese population,
and leveled society. Moreover, these experiences instilled in those who lived through
them a universal desire for material improvement, and steeled them for the sacrifices
that would be necessary to achieve it. SCAP reforms of the occupation leveled society
even further. The emperor, exonerated of war guilt, was declared human, separated
from the government, and made into a symbol of democracy as the people’s emperor.
The elimination of rural tenancy, the weakening of unionism, and the strengthening of
local government furthered the social de-stratification, the dispersal of wealth, and the
social cohesiveness begun in prewar Japan.8 0 The high-speed growth of the 1960s also
strengthened national identity, not only in terms of pride in accomplishment, but
through the collectively felt spectacular transformation of the social and material
environment. By the 1970s, 70% of the population was employed in a secure position
drawing an annual salary that was dependent on the national market. The lowest
income levels rose in proportion with the highest, maintaining the narrow economic
distribution.8 1 By the mid-1970s, the Japanese had achieved affluence, as well as
8 0 Allinson, 66-75.
8 1 Ibid, 110-120.
8 1 Ibid, 125.
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48
strength and independence vis-a-vis the United States. These achievements brought a
sense of arrival to the postwar Japanese, and affirmed the validity of Japanese culture
and institutions. Having lived through such collectively experienced transformations,
the newly affluent Japanese became increasingly interested in the notion of a unique
Japanese culture that had produced such transformations. Drawn from Japaneseness-
as-science, nihonjinron appeared to meet this new interest, and, because of this
interest, was appropriated by big business and government.
In sum, I hope to demonstrate that Japaneseness-as-science, and its popular
counterpart nihonjinron, are not unreasonable reflections of the postwar Japanese
experience, as they resonated with the social and economic experiences of the postwar
Japanese. The above outline is, obviously, a very cursory sketch, but it is my hope that
it may serve as a basis for a larger study that will shed much-needed light on the
central importance of Japaneseness-as-science in postwar Japanese history.
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49
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Creator Lazopoulos, George (author)

Core Title National character studies in America and Japan: Toward a new understanding of nihonjinron

Degree Master of Arts

Degree Program East Asian Area Studies

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag anthropology, cultural,history, Asia, Australia and Oceania,OAI-PMH Harvest

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