The Chrysanthemum and the Sword: Patterns of Japanese Culture

by Ruth Benedict

A nation’s assumptions about government are of much more general and permanent importance than figures of party strength.

The basic assumptions which any nation makes about living, the solutions it has sanctioned, can be studied with as much attention and as much detail as we give to finding out what proportion of a population will vote yes and no in an election.

IN EVERY cultural tradition there are orthodoxies of war and certain of these are shared in all Western nations, no matter what the specific differences. There are certain clarion calls to all-out war effort, certain forms of reassurance in case of local defeats, certain regularities in the proportion of fatalities to surrenders, and certain rules of behavior for prisoners of war which are predictable in wars between Western nations just because they have a great shared cultural tradition which covers even warfare.

Americans gear all their living to a constantly challenging world—and are prepared to accept the challenge. Japanese reassurances are based rather on a way of life that is planned and charted beforehand and where the greatest threat comes from the unforeseen.

Every man’s immediate loyalty was due to his lord, the daimyo, and, beyond that, to the military Generalissimo, the Shogun. Fealty to the Emperor was hardly an issue.

Those who had lived in Japan well knew that nothing stung the Japanese people to bitterness and whipped up their morale like any depredatory word against the Emperor or any outright attack on him.

The Emperor was to them, however, inseparable from Japan. ‘A Japan without the Emperor is not Japan.’ ‘Japan without the Emperor cannot be imagined.’ ‘The Japanese Emperor is the symbol of the Japanese people, the center of their religious lives. He is a super-religious object.’

Americans thrill to all rescue, all aid to those pressed to the wall. A valiant deed is all the more a hero’s act if it saves the ‘damaged.’ Japanese valor repudiates such salvaging. Even the safety devices installed in our B-29’s and fighter planes raised their cry of ‘Cowardice.’ The press and the radio returned to the theme over and over again. There was virtue only in accepting life and death risks; precautions were unworthy.

Japanese scorn of materialism played a part in it; her soldiers were taught that death itself was a victory of the spirit and our kind of care of the sick was an interference with heroism—like safety devices in bombing planes.

If this attitude of the Japanese toward damaged goods was fundamental in their treatment of their own countrymen, it was equally important in their treatment of American prisoners of war.

Honor was bound up with fighting to the death. In a hopeless situation a Japanese soldier should kill himself with his last hand grenade or charge weaponless against the enemy in a mass suicide attack. But he should not surrender. Even if he were taken prisoner when he was wounded and unconscious, he ‘could not hold up his head in Japan’ again; he was disgraced; he was ‘dead’ to his former life.

To the Japanese therefore Americans who had become prisoners of war were disgraced by the mere fact of surrender. They were ‘damaged goods’ even when wounds or malaria or dysentery had not also put them outside the category of ‘complete men.’

The shame of surrender was burned deeply into the consciousness of the Japanese. They accepted as a matter of course a behavior which was alien to our conventions of warfare.

ANY ATTEMPT to understand the Japanese must begin with their version of what it means to ‘take one’s proper station.’ Their reliance upon order and hierarchy and our faith in freedom and equality are poles apart and it is hard for us to give hierarchy its just due as a possible social mechanism. Japan’s confidence in hierarchy is basic in her whole notion of man’s relation to his fellow man and of man’s relation to the State and it is only by describing some of their national institutions like the family, the State, religious and economic life that it is possible for us to understand their view of life.

Submission to the will of the family is demanded in the name of a supreme value in which, however onerous its requirements, all of them have a stake. It is demanded in the name of a common loyalty.

Every Japanese learns the habit of hierarchy first in the bosom of his family and what he learns there he applies in wider fields of economic life and of government. He learns that a person gives all deference to those who outrank him in assigned ‘proper place,’ no matter whether or not they are the really dominant persons in the group.

The hierarchal arrangements of Japanese life have been as drastic in relations between the classes as they have been in the family.

The Emperor, even when he was politically impotent and ‘a sort of State prisoner to the Captain-general,’ filled, according to Japanese definitions, a ‘proper station’ in the hierarchy.

When feudalism broke down in Europe it was due to the pressure of a growing and increasingly powerful middle class and this class dominated the modern industrial period. In Japan no such strong middle class arose.

If the Japanese loved and trusted their meticulously explicit map of behavior, they had a certain justification. It guaranteed security so long as one followed the rules; it allowed protests against unauthorized aggressions and it could be manipulated to one’s own advantage. It required the fulfillment of reciprocal obligations.

The cry that went up from Japan, however, was Isshin—to dig back into the past, to restore. It was the opposite of revolutionary. It was not even progressive. Joined with the cry ‘Restore the Emperor’ was the equally popular cry ‘Expel the Barbarians.’

There was, of course, strong rule from above which did not have to follow the lead of public opinion. This government was administered by a top hierarchy and this could never include elected persons. At this level the people could have no voice.

The differences between different countries all concern matters of how far up democratic accountability reaches, how many or few its responsibilities are and whether local leadership remains responsive to the whole community or is preempted by local magnates to the disadvantage of the people.

Modern civil government in Japan officially recognizes local administration of cities, towns and villages.

The city, town, and village therefore has considerable responsibility. It is a community responsibility. Even in the nineteen-twenties, when Japan had national political parties, which in any country means an alternation of tenure between ‘ins’ and ‘outs,’ local administration generally remained untouched by this development and was directed by elders acting for the whole community.

The State regulates every detail of the schools, and, as in France, every school in the country is studying on the same day the same lesson from the same textbook.

The Japanese government at all points thus greatly differs from the American, where elected persons carry the highest executive and legislative responsibility and local control is exercised through local direction of police and police-courts.

The true difference between the Japanese form of government and such cases in Western Europe lies not in form but in functioning. The Japanese rely on old habits of deference set up in their past experience and formalized in their ethical system and in their etiquette. The State can depend upon it that, when their Excellencies function in their ‘proper place,’ their prerogatives will be respected, not because the policy is approved but because it is wrong in Japan to override boundaries between prerogatives. At the topmost level of policy ‘popular opinion’ is out of place. The government asks only ‘popular support.’ When the State stakes out its own official field in the area of local concern, also, its jurisdiction is accepted with deference. The State, in all its domestic functions, is not a necessary evil as it is so generally felt to be in the United States. The State comes nearer, in Japanese eyes, to being the supreme good.

The State took as its realm a worship that specifically upholds the symbols of national unity and superiority, and in all the rest it left freedom of worship to the individual.

Since it was concerned with proper respect to national symbols, as saluting the flag is in the United States, State Shinto was, they said, ‘no religion.’ Japan therefore could require it of all citizens without violating the Occidental dogma of religious freedom any more than the United States violates it in requiring a salute to the Stars and Stripes. It was a mere sign of allegiance.

Because of Japan’s official position on the subject one cannot speak of State Shinto as a vast Established Church, but one can at least call it a vast Establishment.

Priests of State Shinto—since it was no religion—were forbidden by law to teach any dogma and there could be no church services as Westerners understand them.

Meiji statesmen, therefore, carefully marked out the area of State functioning in government and of State Shinto in the field of religion. They left other areas to the people but they ensured to themselves as top officials of the new hierarchy dominance

in matters which in their eyes directly concerned the State.

This meant not only that local ties were conserved but that every man who went through Army training spent two years during which the relationship between officers and men, between second-year men and first-year men, superseded that between samurai and farmers or between rich and poor.

Whereas the Army in most other nations is depended upon as the strong arm to defend the status quo, in Japan the Army’s sympathy with the small peasant has lined it up in repeated protests against the great financiers and industrialists.

They not only planned, they built and financed on government money the industries they decided they needed.

Her statesmen judged that industrial development was too important to Japan to be entrusted to laws of supply and demand or to free enterprise.

This duality of Japanese industry is quite as important in Japanese ways of life as duality in the field of government or religion. It is as if, when Japanese statesmen decided that they needed an aristocracy of finance to match their hierarchies in other fields, they built up for them the strategic industries, selected the politically favored merchant houses and affiliated them in their ‘proper stations’ with the other hierarchies.

The narikin is believed to have obtained his wealth by defrauding or exploiting others and the bitterness directed toward him is as far as possible from the attitude in the United States toward the ‘home boy who makes good.’

Japan provided a place in her hierarchy for great wealth and kept an alliance with it; when wealth is achieved in the field outside, Japanese public opinion is bitter against it.

The Japanese, therefore, order their world with constant reference to hierarchy. In the family and in personal relations, age, generation, sex, and class dictate proper behavior. In government, religion, the Army, and industry, areas are carefully separated into hierarchies where neith...

IN THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE we used to talk about being ‘heirs of the ages.’ Two wars and a vast economic crisis have diminished somewhat the self-confidence it used to bespeak but this shift has certainly not increased our sense of indebtedness to the past.

Much of what Westerners name ancestor worship is not truly worship and not wholly directed toward ancestors: it is a ritual avowal of man’s great indebtedness to all that has gone before. Moreover, he is indebted not only to the past; every day-by-day contact with other people increases his indebtedness in the present.

Righteousness in Japan depends upon recognition of one’s place in the great network of mutual indebtedness that embraces both one’s forebears and one’s contemporaries.

To be a debtor can make a man extremely quick to take offense and the Japanese prove it. It also puts upon him great responsibilities.

The word for ‘obligations’ which covers a person’s indebtedness from greatest to least is on. In Japanese usage it is translated into English by a whole series of words from ‘obligations’ and ‘loyalty’ to ‘kindness’ and ‘love,’ but these words distort its meaning. If it really meant love or even obligation the Japanese would certainly be able to speak of on to their children, but that is an impossible usage of the word. Nor does it mean loyalty, which is expressed by other Japanese words, which are in no way synonymous with on. On

A man receives on from a superior and the act of accepting an on from any man not definitely one’s superior or at least one’s equal gives one an uncomfortable sense of inferiority. When they say, ‘I wear an on to him’ they are saying, ‘I carry a load of obligations to him,’ and they call this creditor, this benefactor, their ‘on man.’

A son who cares deeply for his mother can speak of not forgetting the on he has received from his mother and mean that he has for her Hachi’s single-minded devotion to his master. The term, however, refers specifically not to his love, but to all that his mother did for him as a baby, her sacrifices when he was a boy, all that she has done to further his interests as a man, all that he owes her from the mere fact that she exists. It implies a return upon this indebtedness and therefore it means love.

On is always used in this sense of limitless devotion when it is used of one’s first and greatest indebtedness, one’s ‘Imperial on.’ This is one’s debt to the Emperor, which one should receive with unfathomable gratitude. It would be impossible, they feel, to be glad of one’s country, of one’s life, of one’s great and small concerns without thinking also of receiving these benefits.