Japan and National Anthropology: A Critique

Sonia Ryang

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2004
• Print ISBN: 9780415700320
• eBook ISBN: 9781135995904
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Japanese History
• Index: History

Japan and National Anthropology: A Critique is an empirically rich and theoretically sophisticated study which challenges the conventional view of Japanese studies in general and the Anglophone anthropological writings on Japan in particular. Sonia Ryang explores the process by which the postwar anthropology of Japan has come to be dominated by certain conceptual and methodological and exposes the extent to which this process has occluded our view of Japan.

1 Anthropology and the war

Compulsive, anally eroticized Japanese

On January 6, 1942, a month after the Japanese surprise attack on Pearl Harbor, Franklin Roosevelt concluded his State of the Union address with the following passages:

We are fighting today for security, for progress and for peace, not only for ourselves, but for all men, not only for one generation but for all generations. We are fighting to cleanse the world of ancient evils, ancient ills.

Our enemies are guided by brutal cynicism, by unholy contempt for the human race. We are inspired by a faith which goes back through all the years to the first chapter of the Book of Genesis: “God created man in His own image.”

We on our side are striving to be true to that divine heritage. We are fighting as our fathers have fought, to uphold the doctrine that all men are equal in the sight of God. Those on the other side are striving to destroy this deep belief and to create a world in their own image – a world of tyranny and cruelty and serfdom.

(Israel 1966: 2,867)

Among the “ancient evils, ancient ills” that were trying to “create a world in their own image – a world of tyranny and cruelty and serfdom” was Japan. With the outbreak of the Pacific War it now became an urgent task to know, in order to defeat, the world of their own image.

The Pacific War produced unexpected, yet in retrospect wholly logical, collaborations, the one between anthropologists and military intelligence being one of the most important and perhaps one of the least studied historically.¹ The by-product of this collaboration was to provide a major opportunity to promote the studies of Japanese culture and society in US anthropology. Whether the content of these studies was close to the truth or not is a separate matter. The shock of Pearl Harbor and the subsequent display of extreme wartime behavior on the part of Japanese soldiers in the eyes of the Americans, such as the unthinkable kamikaze suicide bombers, stirred up a great enthusiasm among the Americans to know this formidable alien enemy.

Studies of Japanese national character, or “character structure” as the practitioners often put it, were dominated by scholars of the culture and personality school, a school of thought developed under the leadership of Franz Boas, or, more precisely, by “a new generation of Boasians” (Kuper 1988: 150): by the time the culture and personality school emerged, it was Boas’s students such as Alfred Kroeber, Ruth Benedict, and Margaret Mead who played a major role, while “Papa Franz” lent wisdom and authority where necessary. Although they were based at Columbia University, the discourses in this field were produced by scholars with diverse academic and institutional affiliations. Due to the limited intellectual and anthropological resources on Japan at that time, their works heavily influenced each other, which may have also been a reflection of the wartime need to come up with a relatively unified and clear picture of Japanese culture.

Unlike evolutionism, the basis on which classical anthropology was formed, the culture and personality school stood firmly on the premise of cultural relativism. In this school of thought, each culture functions according to its own internal logic and individuals in that culture are immersed from childhood in this cultural logic. Therefore, according to the culture and personality scholars, by looking carefully at cultural logic one can understand the personality type and national character that a particular culture tends to produce (Sargent and Smith 1949). In turn, cultures are “explained” in terms of psychological characterization and the personality type associated with it (Lindesmith and Strauss 1950: 587). What was seen as important was the earliest stage of the process of personality formation, childhood. In the words of Eric Wolf, it was assumed that “a common repertoire of child training would produce a single national character” (1999: 11).

Compared to a more biologically deterministic approach, the culture and personality school was open to the possibility of historical change: if a certain personality and character were produced through cultural logic and a social environment including childhood, it would be perfectly possible for such a personality to change in accordance with the changing culture and society over time. Rather than condemning or labeling certain cultures biologically backward, the culture and personality school maintained that there was no superior or inferior culture and pertinent personality (see Barnouw 1963).

Although it contained a strong potential to account positively for cultural diversity in human societies, the culture and personality school came with its own shortcomings. Its practitioners often took “culture” as a closed system and gave unwarranted classifications such as Dionysian and Apollonian, for example, which were themselves derived from conceptions of culture types familiar to the western tradition (Benedict 1934a). In other words, the rela- tivity was conceived ethnocentrically within the western intellectual terrain, and not beyond. Indeed, often cross-cultural comparison or classification of non-western cultures is done with the west as a covert and overt point of reference. This way, it ended up pigeonholing various cultures in the service of western self-understanding. Although the school had a premise that all cultures are equally open to change, in the actual research a mere classification of cultures seems to have been attained and how to account for changes was left unattended to. Unless one can account for the transformational aspect of culture, a mere cultural relativism of giving different names to different people would not go a step beyond a typology. Wartime investigators of Japanese culture were no exception.

Having said this, there really were not many Japan experts when the Pacific War broke out. There had been only one ethnographic study of Japan published in the US at that time, Suye Mura (1939) by John Embree. Embree was trained in Chicago under A. R. Radcliffe-Brown, one of the founding fathers of the structural-functionalism of British Social Anthropology. Embree’s Suye Mura, despite its being a conscientious and first-hand ethnographic study, somehow did not provide a starting point for wartime studies of the Japanese national character. Embree himself later criticized the wartime tendency that effectively neglected his Suye Mura for being a method to acquire “knowledge by definition” not “knowledge by observation” (Embree 1950a; and see p. 39 here), suggesting that many so-called Japan experts were armchair anthropologists who never had the experience of fieldwork in Japan and that their accounts were based on no concrete investigation of (say) real Japan, but on assumptions and preconceptions (see pp. 35–9 here).

What became disproportionately influential at that time, instead of Embree’s ethnography, were two articles, one by Geoffrey Gorer and the other by Weston La Barre, neither an expert on Japan. What made their articles influential was their content, which is fascinating yet clear in statement, completely acceptable to the wartime American frame of mind in assessing the Japanese character. There was an elective affinity in Weberian terms between what these studies produced and what the US military and general readership wanted to hear. It is important to start from these articles because they represent initial attempts to figure out Japanese character structure from within its culture. They also stand as antecedents in continuity with (and one of them at least is evidently a source of) The Chrysanthemum and the Sword by Ruth Benedict (1946), by far the most definitive and most influential text on Japan produced by US anthropology of the day, and which even today stirs up heated arguments among Japanologists – if not anthropologists as such – within and outside of Japan (see Chapter 2 in this volume).

Gorer and La Barre, along with Benedict, were what Richard Minear calls “the nouveau japonistes,” as opposed to “the old Japanists,” among whom Minear includes Embree (Minear 1980b). Gorer based his study on questionnaires, surveys, and interviews among Japanese Americans, and La Barre observed daily life for about a month or so among Japanese American inmates in the wartime relocation camp in Utah. ² Independently of each other, the two reached a set of similar conclusions about the Japanese national character and the mechanism that produced such a character.

Gorer’s study “Japanese Character Structure and Propaganda” (1942) was issued jointly by the Committee for National Morale and the Institute for Intercultural Studies, founded by a group of social scientists during the war, including Margaret Mead, a close associate of Benedict, and published from the Institute of Human Relations, Yale University (see Mead 1961). It was also published in a condensed form in Transactions of the New York Academy of Sciences under the title “Themes in Japanese Culture” (Gorer 1943). Gorer is not a Japan hand per se: he later published on English and American national characters (e.g. Gorer 1948, 1967) and he did not read or speak Japanese. In the study, Gorer emphasizes that Japan would seem to be “the most paradoxical culture of which we have any record” (1943: 106). How can, he asks, a nation with such a calm and elegant ritual as the tea ceremony indulge in the “almost unbelievable savagery, lust and destruction of the rape of Nanking?” (1943: 106).³ Gorer puts forward his study as motivated by the desire to explain such a paradox.

Embarking on his discussion of Japanese character structure, he outlines his basic postulates, divided into twelve points, which I reproduce here in shortened form:

1 Human behavior is understandable.

2 Human behavior is learned.

3 Individuals of similar age, sex, and status in a given society show a relative uniformity in behavior.

4 All societies have an ideal adult character.

5 Habits are established as behavior by reward and punishment.

6 The experiences of early childhood form subsequent adult character.

7 Learning in early childhood consists of modifications of the innate drives of hunger, optimum-temperature seeking, pain-avoidance, sex and excretion, and the drives of fear and anger (anxiety and aggression).

8 The child’s attitude to his parents will become the prototype of his attitudes to other people.

9 Adult behavior is motivated by learned drives.

10 Adult desires are unverbalized, since they have been structured as the unconscious during childhood.

11 When adult desires are shared by the majority of the population, some social institutions will evolve to gratify them.

12 In a homogeneous culture the patterns of superordination and subordination, of defense and arrogance, will show a certain consistency in all spheres from family to religious and political organizations.

On the basis of these points, Gorer created detailed questionnaires on childhood training to be circulated among his informants, the precise number of whom he does not clarify. His informants included missionaries, “women whose children had been raised by Japanese servants,” second-generation Japanese Americans, psychiatrists, anthropologists, and writers with experiences of having visited Japan (1942: 2). From this we may note that we cannot tell how many of his informants were actually qualified to be called “Japanese,” and in what sense.

Despite the diverse selection of informants, Gorer proceeds to generalize the character structure of the “moderately well-off [Japanese] male of the common people living in a city,” who in his view constitutes the average Japanese. Women are not included, since according to him Japanese women are severely subordinate to men and hence Japan has a “male culture.” Also, since the soldiers are male, the character of this group is “desirable to understand in the present situation” (1942: 4).

The generalization Gorer drew on the basis of this material can be summarized into the following sentence: “It is the thesis of this memorandum that early and severe toilet training is the most important single influence in the formation of the adult Japanese character” (1942: 9). Gorer thus connects the aggression and brutality the Japanese soldiers displayed with the toilet training that they had received as children. The influence of the culture and personality school is evident here, with an additional blend of psychoanalysis.

What Gorer means by toilet training is a practice in which, according to him, Japanese parents hold the infant of four months or older out over the balcony or road at frequent intervals. If the child fails to indicate the need in advance, he is punished by mother’s angry scolding. According to all of Gorer’s informants, states Gorer, this training is extremely efficient and almost all babies achieve the goal (1942: 9). This training has physiological and psychological ramifications that Japanese carry through to their maturity, according to Gorer. For example, the Japanese eat very quickly, because eating is directly associated with its end-result, defecation. The very idea of it is already repulsive for Japanese and hence minimum time is spent on eating, the instigator of it. Also, excreta-like substances, such as mud, are universally hated in Japan. Gorer emphasizes that, in contrast to the Japanese obsession with excretion, sex is not their passion. In fact, according to Gorer, the toilet is more erotic than sex, or, more precisely, sex cannot be thought of in isolation from the toilet (1942: 6).

It is obvious that Gorer is concluding that in the language of psychoanalysis Japanese personality remains in the anal stage of inner drive and has not yet reached or is not interested in the genital stage. According to Erich Fromm, in anal eroticism, which follows oral eroticism, the bodily discharge is associated with pleasure and further development of this stage would be a) cleanliness and stinginess, and b) love for possessions (Fromm 1970: 171).

These largely correspond with what Gorer draws on to the Japanese character under the label “compulsive.” Gorer states:

In contemporary psychology an individual preoccupied with ritual, with tidiness and order, is technically known as a “compulsive neurotic”; these characters with us are statistically unusual and it is consequently justifiable to speak of them as neurotics. The Japanese character described in these last pages is statistically common, and therefore it would be unjustifiable to speak of the Japanese character as neurotic, unless one were appealing to some unformulated and absolute ideal; they do show however in the mass most of the character traits which in individuals would be called “compulsive.”

(Gorer 1942: 13)

The difficulty in following this, beside the fact that Gorer’s data never attain clear qualification or quantification, is that in Freudian psychoanalysis it is the infant’s sexual trauma, not anal eroticism, that often plays an important role in neuroses (e.g. Freud 1963). Gorer has no data about Japanese infant sexuality. He does not appear to know how masturbation is dealt with or how the taboo subject of incest is institutionalized, for example (see Freud 1950). This is not to say that had he covered all this he would have obtained a correct picture of the Japanese national character. This is, however, to point out that, despite his scientific language, he does not appear to have a clear idea as to what it is that he is dealing with.

Let us go back to his twelve postulates. One can, from the list, infer that his questions stood on the toilet training or its comparable equivalent as a hidden premise. Postulates 5, 7, 8, 10, and 11 allude to such a possibility. In those, the assumptions are that childhood training determines the adult character and, conversely, that society’s ideal adult character dictates each family’s child training. These assumptions are themselves tautologous, and they are also ahistorical, as if a given society has a well-defined ideal adult type that never changes. The seemingly cause-and-effect connection conceived by Gorer between toilet training and Japanese culture is in fact not a causal explanation but a circular argument: the totality called Japanese culture includes the instruction of toilet training (if any) in the first place.

Empirically, his point about severe toilet training among the Japanese was refuted only five years after his publication by Mildred Sikkema, a social worker working among Japanese Americans in Hawaii, who reported that what westerners saw as toilet training did not exist as a concept among ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Full Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Notes for the reader
• Introduction
• 1 Anthropology and the war
• 2 Benedictian myth
• 3 Occupation anthropology
• 4 Locating Japanese kinship
• 5 The emergence of national anthropology
• 6 The Japanese self
• Afterword
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index