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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 07 May 2025
I first found Ruth Benedict's The Chrysanthemum and the Sword in the Charles Tuttle Bookstore in Okinawa in 1960. I had just decided to spend some time living in Japan (little suspecting that “some time” would turn out to be a big part of the rest of my life) and I was delighted to discover that Benedict, whose Patterns of Culture I greatly admired, had written this book too. I read it avidly, and for some years was corrupted by the myth of (as Malinowski called it) the “ethnographer's magic”. I walked around Japan like a miniature Benedict, seeing “patterns” everywhere, and thinking it was wonderfully clever to be able to “analyze” the behavior of the people around me, including even invitations to dialogue and expressions of friendship. I claim no monopoly to this kind of attitude; in those days it was rampant within the community of Westerners in Japan, and especially among the Americans, so many of whom saw themselves not only as miniature Benedicts, but also as miniature MacArthurs (some still do today). After some time I realized that I would never be able to live in a decent relationship with the people of that country unless I could drive this book, and its politely arrogant world view, out of my head. The method I chose was to begin the research that led to the following essay.
(1) This is a revised and abbreviated version of part two of Douglas Lummis, Uchinaru Gaikoku (Tokyo: Jiji Tsushinsha, l981), the English version of which was published as C. Douglas Lummis, A New Look at the Chrysanthemum and the Sword (Tokyo: Shohakusha, 1982); See for example, Tsurumi Kazuko, “Kiku to Katana: Amerikajin no Mita Nihonteki Dotokukan [The Chrysanthemum and the Sword: Japanese Morals as Seen by an American], Shiso April 1947, 221-224; Tokushu: Rusu Bendikuto Kiku to Katana No Ataerumono, Minzokugaku Kenkyu [Japanese Journal of Ethnology] 14:4, 1949 [Special Issue: Proposals from Ruth Benedict's The Chrysanthemum and the Sword] especially the critiques by Watsuji Tetsuro and Yanagita Kunio; for the latter in English, see C. Douglas Lummis, tr. ”Yanagita Kunio's Critique of The Chrysanthemum and the Sword,“ Kokusai Kankei Kenkyu (Tsuda College) 24:3, 1998, 125-140; J. W. Bennett & M. Nagai, ”The Japanese Critique of Methodology of Benedict's Chrysanthemum and the Sword,“ American Anthropologist 55, 1953, 404-411; and Sakuta Keiichi, ”Haji no bunka saiko,“ [A Reconsideration of Shame Cultures] Shiso no kagaku 4, 1964.
(2) See Derek Freeman, Margaret Mead and Samoa: The Making and Unmaking of an Anthropological Myth (Cambridge and London: Harvard U. Press, 1983); Martin Orans, Not Even Wrong - Margaret Mead, Derek Freeman, and the Samoans (Novato, California: Chandler and Sharp, 1996); Ruth Benedict, Patterns of Culture (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1934); Clifford Geertz “Us/Not-Us: Benedict's Travels” in Geertz, Works and Lives: The Anthropologist as Author (Stanford: Stanford U. Press, 1988), 128.
(3) Ruth Benedict, The Chrysanthemum and the Sword - Patterns of Japanese Culture (Cambridge: Houghton Mifflin, 1946), 5.
(4) Ruth Benedict, “German Defeatism at the Beginning of the Fifth Winter of War”, (Office of War Information, 1943. Box 99, Folder 99.4, Ruth Fulton Benedict Papers, Vassar College [hereafter RFB/Vassar], 1,6; Benedict, The Chrysanthemum and the Sword, 315.
(5) Ibid., 299-30 (emphasis added).
(6) Chapter II, “The Beauty of the World of Death”, New Look at the Chrysanthemum and the Sword, 11-28; Ruth Benedict, “Anthropology and the Humanities” in Margaret Mead, An Anthropologist at Work - Writing of Ruth Benedict (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1959), 460; Margaret Mead, “A New Preface” to the 1959 edition of op. cit. Patterns of Culture, ix.
(7) Op. cit., An Anthropologist at Work, 301; Ruth Benedict, “The Story of My Life”, Mead, An Anthropologist at Work, 100.
(8) Benedict, “The Story of My Life”, 98, 99.
(9) “Resurgam”, Mead, An Anthropologist at Work, 194.
(10) ibid., xviii. Benedict, Patterns of Culture, 21-22.
(11) Mead., An Anthropologist at Work, 5.
(12) Ibid., p. 202, 206
(13) Ibid., p. 207, 292, 301, 302. Concerning the informant they called Nick, or sometimes Nick Zuni, there is a story that needs to be told. In 1925 Jaime de Angulo, the Spanish-born enfant terrible of American anthropology, wrote to Benedict,
“As for helping you to get an informant, and the way you describe it ‘if I took him with me to a safely American place’ … ‘an informant who would be willing to give me tales and ceremonials’ …oh God! Ruth, you have no idea how much that has hurt me. I don't know how I am going to be able to talk to you about it, because I have a sincere affection for you. But do you realize that it is just that sort of thing that kills the Indians? I mean it seriously. It kills them spiritually first, and as in their life the spiritual and the physical element are much more interdependent than in our own stage of culture, they soon die of it physically. They just lie down and die.” (Jaime de Angulo to Ruth Benedict, Berkeley, California, 19 May, 1925, Box 28, Folder 28.1, Ruth Fulton Benedict Papers, Vassar College Libraries Special Collections). In her biography of Benedict, Judith Schachter Modell quotes from this letter only to make light fun of it, and to assure the reader that de Angulo's “horror” (her quotation marks) was unfounded. (Judith Schachter Modell, Ruth Benedict: Patterns of a Life [Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1983], 177). But the rest of the story is told in a footnote to a rather obscure field report written by Ruth Bunzel. In the main text she wrote, “And since there is an ill-defined feeling that in teaching prayers, ‘giving them away,’ as the Zunis say, the teacher loses some of the power over them, men are ‘stingy’ with their religion.” The note to this reads,
“This was made painfully evident to the writer in the death of one of her best informants who, among other things, told her many prayers in text. During his last illness he related a dream which he believed portended death and remarked, ‘Yes, now I must die. I have given you all my religion and I have no way to protect myself.‘ He died two days later. He was suspected of sorcery and his death was a source of general satisfaction. Another friend of the writer, who had always withheld esoteric information, remarked, ”Now your friend is dead. He gave away his religion as if it were of no value, and now he is dead.“ He was voicing public opinion.” (Ruth Bunzel, “Introduction to Zuni Ceremonialism,” Forty-Seventh Annual Report of the Bureau of American Ethnology to the Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, 1929-1930, [Washington, United States Government Printing Office, 1932], 494 and 494n.).
From the description it seems certain that this was Nick.
(14) Ibid., 293.
(15) Ibid., 136.
(16) Ruth Benedict, “Love that is Water”, Mead, An Anthropologist at Work, 474.
(17) Ruth Benedict, “Countermand”, Ibid., 476.
(18) Ruth Benedict, “Preference”, Ibid., 177, 8.
(19) Mead, An Anthropologist at Work, 144.
(20) Benedict, The Chrysanthemum and the Sword, p. 294. As op. cit. Yanagita pointed out, Benedict achieved this transference by ignoring the rich vocabulary the Japanese language has for expressing guilt.
(21) Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger, eds., The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge, New York, Melbourne: Cambridge U. Press, 1983); see Lummis, A New Look at The Chrysanthemum and the Sword, Ch. 4.
(22) Benedict, The Chrysanthemum and the Sword, 12.
(23) Lummis, “Yanagida Kunio's Critique,” 131.
(24) Soeda Yoshiya, Nihonbunka Shiron: Benekikuto Kiku to Katana wo Yomu [Essays on Japanese Culture: Reading Benedict's The Chrysanthemum and the Sword], (Tokyo: Shinyosha, 1993) 98-99.
(25) Benedict, The Chrysanthemum and the Sword, 16.
(26) RFB/Vassar Box 104, Folders 4-9.
(27) Douglas Lummis, Robert Hashima interview, 16 October, 1996.
(28) Ibid.
(29) Ibid.
(30) RFB/Vassar, Box 104, Folder 4
(31) Robert Hashima interview, 16 October, 1996.
(32) Ibid.
(33) Douglas Lummis, Robert Hashima Interview, 14 January, 1997.
(34) Ibid.
(35) Benedict, The Chrysanthemum and the Sword, 296, 295.
(36) Ibid., 294-95. Benedict's attempt to render the word “democracy” into the Japanese phonetic system is an embarrassing reminder of her ignorance of the basics of that language.
(37) Ibid., 299-300.
(38) Actually this work has already been written. See John W. Dower, Embracing Defeat (New York: W.W. Norton, 1999).
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