Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Notes on the Contributors
- Preface: Japan as Front Line in the Cultural Psychology Wars
- Introduction: Japanese Cultural Psychology and Empathic Understanding: Implications for Academic and Cultural Psychology
- PART ONE MORAL SCRIPTS AND REASONING
- PART TWO MOTHER AND CHILD AT HOME
- PART THREE GROUP LIFE: THE YOUNG CHILD IN PRESCHOOL AND SCHOOL
- PART FOUR ADOLESCENT EXPERIENCE
- PART FIVE REFLECTIONS
- Index
Preface: Japan as Front Line in the Cultural Psychology Wars
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 23 July 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Notes on the Contributors
- Preface: Japan as Front Line in the Cultural Psychology Wars
- Introduction: Japanese Cultural Psychology and Empathic Understanding: Implications for Academic and Cultural Psychology
- PART ONE MORAL SCRIPTS AND REASONING
- PART TWO MOTHER AND CHILD AT HOME
- PART THREE GROUP LIFE: THE YOUNG CHILD IN PRESCHOOL AND SCHOOL
- PART FOUR ADOLESCENT EXPERIENCE
- PART FIVE REFLECTIONS
- Index
Summary
The specter of Japan haunts Western psychology, posing the threat that presumed universals of human nature will be shrunk to local findings by disconfirming evidence from Asia. Margaret Lock's (1993) demonstration that Japanese women rarely experience the symptoms of menopause most often reported in North America is only the latest in a long series of indications over the last fifty years that something may be radically different about Japanese experience of the life cycle. Is Japan the mirror into which the titan of universal psychology looks and finds himself reduced to a dwarf – one local psychology among many in a world of unpredicted variations? This is the nightmare of cultural relativity from which European and American psychologists awaken to reassure themselves that their instruments have passed the tests of reliability and validity, and their findings have been replicated not only in Madison and Melbourne but even in Bogotá and Bombay (if only among university students). But psychology's “Japanese problem” – a particular case of the questions raised by all cultural variations in human behavior and development – is not so easily solved, and it needs to be confronted directly, as this volume does in provocative and illuminating detail.
Anthropologists waged intermittent guerrilla warfare against psychological universalism during much of the twentieth century. From the days of Malinowski (1927) and Mead (1928) onward, field data from non-Western societies have been used to attack and revise generalizations issued by Western psychologists and psychoanalysts.
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- Chapter
- Information
- Japanese Frames of MindCultural Perspectives on Human Development, pp. xi - xxiiPublisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2002
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