consigliatissimo agli amanti della cultura giapponese e imprescindibile per gli amanti del cinema e della letteratura sia classici che contemporanei The Japanese people today are much more diverse in their ways of thinking and values than in the era depicted in “The Chrysanthemum and the Sword”. Especially now, with the spread of social networking services, people are clashing in the internet with each other in a variety of opinions and arguments without worrying about the world. Sometimes it is easy to live by the rules usually determined but sometimes it is hard. In Japan, relationships with other people, the world and the community are important. Japanese manners and model rules of behavior do not apply in other countries. It is told of Count Katsu who died in 1899 that when he was a boy his testicles were torn by a dog. He was of samurai family but his family had been reduced to beggary. While the doctor operated upon him, his father held a sword to his nose. 'If you utter one cry,' he told him, 'you will die in a way that at least will not be shameful.'"

c) the country being analyzed was, in many years of its history, closed to the outside world (Was it James Michener who claimed that Japan had put up one of the most effective iron curtains in the history of mankind?)? More than 2.3 million copies of the book have been sold in Japan since it first appeared in translation there. [4] Still...this one gets a good rating from me. I rate it not for its objectivity, but for its relative accuracy. Benedict wrote with what materials she had and could obtain, and the result was not so bad. She did claim in the first chapter that Japan is a country of contradictions - "different". That claim alone gives the reader fair warning that she could be wrong in some of her interpretations (and that she could also be right). And this tone resonates in the whole book. She keeps repeating the word "different" that Japan appears quite exotic, even alien, in some parts (just try to grasp "giri"...getting out of Shinjuku Station when you get lost in it seems an easier task). d) the author didn't speak the language of the said country. (I did see the movie Lost in Translation. And a lot can get lost in translation sometimes. I should know. Over two decades here in Japan and I still get lost in Shinjuku Station, never mind the biggest hospital in my neighborhood.) She was born in New York City, attended Vassar College and graduated in 1909. She entered graduate studies at Columbia University in 1919, where she studied under Franz Boas. She received her Ph.D and joined the faculty in 1923. Margaret Mead, with whom she may have shared a romantic relationship, and Marvin Opler were among her students and colleagues.i concetti portati alla luce e spiegati nel dettaglio non sarebbero mai stati assimilabili con una semplice osservazione sul campo, troppe sono le consuetudini radicate nei secoli di chiusura verso l'esterno e troppo diverse dal pensiero occidentale le motivazioni e le scelte esistenziali, motivo per cui si rese necessario ai tempi approfondire lo studio con un grado di accuratezza estremo al fine di evitare una catastrofe umanitaria senza precedenti A classic of Japanese cultural studies . . . With considerable sensitivity, she managed both to stress the differences in Japanese society of which American policy makers needed to be aware and to debunk the stereotype of the Japanese as hopelessly rigid and incapable of change.”— The New York Times

The principal issue that she identified was that Japanese live within a network of obligations and duties, analogous to owing money to many different and competing creditors, one may temporarily satisfy some to a certain extent, but only at the cost of not satisfying others, perhaps by this point I had already become more crazy than ever because this seemed to me entirely natural, the debt to ones parents for life and upbringing, to kin for occasional indulgences, to the bastard bank for the mortgage, duties of citizenship and humanity. This network of obligations she notices provides for really satisfying unhappy endings in Japanese fiction, and she suspects this means that happinesses, like that lovely warm bath, tend to be postponed or avoided in favour of meeting some obligation or other (such as to the family, or benefactor and the Emperor). Shame is felt so extremely, that ideas of revenge against people who insult you is taken extremely seriously - here I did wonder if she had read too many novels featuring samurai in the course of her research but then again it perhaps is a fair point about the culture of early twentieth century Japan and its search for international prestige through colonialism. For a brief instance while reading I did feel deeply that her discussion of all these circles of duty made sense of the Olympus scandal, but then I thought that all businesses take their reputation and image extremely seriously and generally seem to prefer to cover up, evade, or lie rather than to come clean about mistakes - and in that sense perhaps corporations are people after all.Within the reign of the present Emperor, a man who had inadvertently named his son Hirohito – the given name of the Emperor was never spoken in Japan – killed himself and his child." Japanese social critic and philosopher Tamotsu Aoki said that the translated book "helped invent a new tradition for postwar Japan." It helped to create a growing interest in "ethnic nationalism" in the country, shown in the publication of hundreds of ethnocentric nihonjinron (treatises on 'Japaneseness') published over the next four decades. Although Benedict was criticized for not discriminating among historical developments in the country in her study, "Japanese cultural critics were especially interested in her attempts to portray the whole or total structure ('zentai kōzō') of Japanese Culture," as Helen Hardacre put it. [9] C. Douglas Lummis has said the entire "nihonjinron" genre stems ultimately from Benedict's book. [10] The same characteristic of Japanese society was also written in “Kuki no nyumon”. It says that Japanese people read the situation around them and speak or act in a way that does not disrupt the situation. Pay attention to your surroundings. Shannon, Christopher. "A World Made Safe for Differences: Ruth Benedict's The Chrysanthemum and the Sword", American Quarterly 47 (1995): 659-680. doi: 10.2307/2713370. JSTOR 2713370.