The Chrysanthemum And The Sword Analysis

In The Chrysanthemum and the Sword, Ruth Benedict paints a vivid picture of the Japanese thought process and their pattern of behavior. At a time when the United States was grappling with the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, the author was commissioned by the war department to conduct a study on the Japanese society and culture so as to familiarize the military with its enemy. However, unable to carry out her ethnography project using field work, Benedict uses “culture at a distance”, a sort of comparative technique to identify patterns of behavior and clear misconceptions existing in American society about the Japanese people. The author describes order and hierarchy as instinctive to Japanese society and goes to great lengths to justify Japan’s …show more content…
Each person should know the precise degree and angle to which one must bow or kneel and even a slight degree of error is considered highly inappropriate and often taken as an insult. These acts of gestures implies not just the class differences that prevails in Japanese society but also between the sexes and age differences. Sometimes it is also done to express gratitude, a debt that one might incur. These forms of etiquette and formalities are practiced more so in the family where the child, the mother, the younger as well as the elders have to abide by these rules. This is highly unlikely in the west where formalities are shed when one is among family members. All these acts of venerations help build the hierarchy that ultimately governs Japanese society and probably even created larger class differences. Although these might seem authoritative to westerners, it is important to note that it was not anything like a dictatorship but instead people did have certain flexibility and even the outcastes had certain rights and could protest when exploited, although it could be