September 11: Ruth Benedict and 'Feel-Good Narratives'

The first reference to Ruth Benedict that I had ever come across was within John Dower's excellent book on World War II propaganda, War without Mercy. Ruth Benedict is mentioned as part of the American academic effort to study and understand their wartime antagonist. Dower identifies Benedict as a moderate voice, whose 1943 pamphlet Races of Mankind, was attacked by the US Army as 'Communist Propaganda' due to its questioning of discrimination against African-Americansⁱ. Considering this context, The Chrysanthemum and the Sword was, in all likelihood, meant as a progressive rather than racist text. This does not, however, prevent several elements from being extremely striking to the modern reader.

 

Perhaps the most interesting part of Benedict's work is not her analysis of the Japanese (of which this reader has very little ability to critique) but rather her brief, confident statements about American values. For instance, in contrast to the Japanese focus on hierarchy, Benedict writes that “Equality is the highest, most moral American basis for hopes of a better world... we fight hierarchy with a righteous indignation”ⁱⁱ. Such sentiments might have formed the basis for Benedict's personal values, but much less so for her country as a whole; the African-American population of the 1940's would heartily disagree that they lived in a country based on 'equality'.

 

Elsewhere, Benedict critiques Japanese wartime strategy. She announces that the Japanese went to war on a fundamentally different basis than their western counterparts, fighting to establish a preferred international hierarchy where Japan was destined to rule Asiaⁱⁱⁱ. Such a statement ignores America's own fixation with 'Manifest Destiny'. Benedict correctly points to atrocities carried out by Japanese soldiers against Allied Prisoners-of-War and Japanese military's contempt for surrender without realizing that – as shown by Dower five decades hence – that there were incidences of her countrymen showing a similar disdain for enemy prisoners^iv.

 

In The Chrysanthemum and the Sword, Benedict seeks to understand the Japanese, “the most alien enemy the United States had ever fought”^v. In framing the comparison between two utterly dissimilar cultures, Benedict implicitly makes a statement about her own country. By comparing it with a totally alien other, a particular vision of the United States can be manufactured, one that is secular, rational and moral through-and-through. Yet the Japanese do not suffer from the comparison either. Benedict, as mentioned, was not a virulent racist and as related in the Ryang paper, seemed to sympathize with post-war Japan. The Japan described by the book is made to appear strange to the western eye, but it is not weak; the Japanese are shown to be obedient, fanatical and seemingly incapable of internal dissent. If Japan was America's most 'alien' enemy, then it was also – perhaps by that virtue – also it's most worthy opponent.

 

It is the possibilities for positive interpretations of Japanese 'uniqueness' that Ryang points to while evaluating Benedict's continuing relevance in Japan itself. Benedict's narrative plays into the hands of the Japanese right, Ryang argues, by emphasizing the Japanese as a uniform whole, glossing over separate ethnicities and the imperialist oppression of other nationalities. Ryang complains that there is no place in Benedict's book for the conquered people of the Japanese Empire; one might add that there is little discussion of economic disparity or class antagonism. It is this reduction to homogeneity that secures Benedict's fame; by establishing America and Japan as diametrically opposed, uniform entities, each embodying a set of cultural and moral values, the partisans of both nations are satisfied^vi.

 

It is important to keep in mind Benedict's historical context, as well as the research difficulties that she faced in wartime, before one levels any judgements. There is no malice in Benedict's writing, but The Chrysanthemum and the Sword is definitely an orientalist narrative, one that produces a sort of 'feel-good narrative' which reinforces the preconceptions of difference held by both American and Japanese readers.

 

iJohn Dower, War Without Mercy: Race & Power in the Pacific War (New York, Pantheon Books: 1993) 119-20

iiRuth Benedict, The Chrysanthemum and the Sword (Cambridge, Riverside Press: 1946) 45

iiiBenedict, 20-21

ivDower, 63-68

vBenedict, 1

viLie, John. "Ruth Benedict's Legacy of Shame: Orientalism and Occidentalism in the Study of Japan." Asian Journal Of Social Science 29, no. 2 (July 2001): 249. SocINDEX with Full Text, EBSCOhost (accessed September 11, 2013). 257