译者前言

本书的作者鲁思·本尼迪克特（Ruth Benedict, 1887~1948年）是美国著名的人类学者。她最擅长以心理学、文化人类学的方法研究原始宗教、神话和传说，写了不少颇有影响的著作。本书是她晚年（一九四六年）的一部杰作。

在本书中，作者以极其丰富的资料生动地叙述了日本社会特殊的等级组织和等级观念，日本人的“恩”与“报恩”、“义理”、“名誉”、“人情”思想，他们的道德观念以及他们如何教育孩子等许多方面，细致入微地刻画出日本人在精神生活和文化生活中的整体形象。并且，作者把着力点集中于探讨日本人许多行为和思维方式的相互内在联系上，把种种行为和思维方式作为一个整体结构的链条或环节来把握，从而深刻揭示出日本人内在的文化心理结构。

一九四八年，长谷川治教授将此书译为日文，介绍给了日本读者，在日本大为轰动，而且几十年来一直受到日本读者的欢迎。日本著名学者川岛武宜教授评论说：“读过本书的许多日本学者，至少我所知道的，都交口称赞它的资料丰富。”“本书具有至今那么多（外国人写的有关日本的）书都没有的新鲜感受和深刻尖锐的分析。我希望所有的日本人都要读这本书。”（《评价与批评》，最初发表于一九四八年五月号《民族学研究》，一九七二年附入本书的日文修订版。）

毋庸置疑，《菊与刀》一书早已成为全世界研究日本文化的重要参考著作，可谓经典。在国内，此书也有众多中译本出版。然而，经典之所以谓之经典，就在于它的长盛不衰。故此，为飨中国读者，我们找来本尼迪克特于一九四六年出版之英文原版，并参考其日译本，将此书译出。书中注释，以英文版中作者原注为主，间或补以译者注。

由于译者水平有限，译文难免有未尽之处，敬请指正，不胜感激。

Foreword to the Mariner Books Edition

by Ian Buruma

TO UNDERSTAND another culture is hard at the best of times. You need, as Ruth Benedict says, the tough-mindedness to recognize differences, even when they are disturbing. The world is not one sentimental brotherhood in which we are all really the same under the surface. Individuals have different perspectives, formed by particular interests, histories, experiences. If this is true of individuals, it would be odd if something similar did not apply to nations. More important, though, for a student of other cultures is what Benedict calls “a certain generosity”—the generosity, that is, to see that other perspectives, even if they go against our own views, can have a validity of their own. A zealot cannot be a good cultural anthropologist.

To understand one’s enemy in the midst of a brutal conflict requires an unusual amount of that generosity. But it is more necessary than ever, for only an objective assessment of the enemy’s strengths and weaknesses can be of any possible use. When Ruth Benedict was commissioned by the U.S. government to write a cultural analysis of the Japanese in June 1944, it would have been easy, and totally worthless, to confirm American prejudices about that still remote and largely unknown people.

Such prejudices were adequately catered to already in wartime propaganda. The “Japs” were born fanatics, treacherous, and uncivilized. They were monkey men, savages, rats, mad dogs, or crazed samurai, as ready to kill themselves as others. To tame this brutal race, it was necessary, as the Sydney Daily Telegraph opined in 1945, “to lift across 2000 years of backwardness . . . a mind which, below its surface understanding of the technical knowledge our civilisation has produced, is as barbaric as the savage who fights with a club and believes thunder is the voice of his God.”

Benedict had to cut through all that nonsense to come up with an account that would allow the Allied leaders to predict with some degree of accuracy how the Japanese would behave; whether they would surrender or fight to the last man, woman, and child; what it would take to end the war; how to deal with the Emperor; what to expect in a Japan under Allied occupation, and so on. Writing such an account in 1944 would have been difficult enough for an expert who had lived in Japan for many years. Benedict, as she herself explains, was not an expert, had never been to Japan, and had to rely on written material—anything from academic books to Japanese novels in translation—as well as movies and interviews with Japanese Americans.

To be an expert is not necessarily an advantage, however. Experts sometimes have rather inflexible views and are disinclined to let new developments or ideas disturb the comfort of their expertise. Joseph Grew, for example, an old Japan hand who had served as U.S. ambassador in Tokyo before the Pacific war, was convinced that the Japanese were essentially an irrational people and could never adapt to democratic government. One of the great merits of Ruth Benedict was her staunch resistance to racial and cultural prejudices. She came to her study with an open mind.

One might disagree, of course, with the premise of classical cultural anthropology, which is that such a thing as “national character” exists. It is not a fashionable notion these days. Pseudoscientific theories of race and nation have tainted any idea of “essentializing” collective characteristics. Theorists now prefer to stress “hybridity” or the multicultural aspects of nations rather than think in terms of monocultural identities. Yet at the same time we are obsessed with our identities. Indeed, perhaps because of the uncertainties of living in multicultural societies plugged into a global economy, we cannot get enough of ourselves. Books on national heroes, national “values,” and national histories are selling briskly everywhere.

National navel-gazing was precisely the opposite of what Ruth Benedict was doing. Such narcissism would have made her enterprise impossible. She was truly interested in the Other. The question is whether the contours and characteristics of that Other were as clear as she made them out to be.

I have had my doubts about cultural interpretations of political affairs and expressed skepticism in the past about the distinction, made famous by Ruth Benedict, between shame cultures and guilt cultures. The risk of cultural analysis is that it assumes a world that is both too static and too uniform. Benedict was well aware of this danger. But while acknowledging the many changes that affect a nation or culture over time, she did believe in the tenaciousness of certain patterns. As she says about the English, it was just because they “were so much themselves that different standards and different moods could assert themselves in different generations.”

So what about the Japanese “self”? On reading Benedict’s great book again, I was struck by the subtlety of her approach. Even when she talks about the differences between guilt and shame, she is not implying absolute standards, only particular emphases. Japanese individuals know both guilt and shame, but Japanese society lays less stress than Western societies do on moral absolutes, and relies more on “external sanctions for good behavior.” The Japanese, she argues, are unusually sensitive to the opinion of others. Shame comes from not living up to social obligations. You can feel guilty about a crime that goes unnoticed. Shame depends on the observation of others.

Some of Benedict’s descriptions of Japanese behavior under stress—the dutiful son who ignores the needs of a beloved wife out of deference to his mother; the female student in America who is distressed by the kindness of her fellow pupils because she doesn’t know how to repay her debt to them—are so vivid that it is as if she had observed such cases herself.

Her task was made more difficult by the nature of her assignment. Observation and analysis of the Japanese national character was not sufficient; Benedict had to help the U.S. government predict how the Japanese would behave in the future. Since the Americans planned to rebuild the Japanese state along more liberal democratic lines, they needed to know how the Japanese would react to their defeat, to the changing role of the Emperor, and to the political tutelage of their American occupiers. One thing that baffled the Allies was the swiftness with which a sworn enemy who had vowed to fight to the death turned docile, even friendly.

Benedict explains this by the deep sense of obligation felt by the Japanese toward their Emperor—the ultimate source of what it means to be Japanese. People were ready to die for him, but when he told them in his quivering, barely intelligible voice to “bear the unbearable,” surrender, and build a new, peaceful Japan, they immediately complied. The divinity of the Japanese Emperor is often misunderstood in the West. The common assumption is that the Japanese believed he was God. Benedict points out, quite rightly, that the Japanese did not see a huge gulf between the human and the divine; all kinds of things could be invested with a sacred aura: rocks, mountains, and rivers, as well as human beings after they die. The Emperor, as the pinnacle of a national hierarchy, represented a religious idea of the state. You didn’t have to believe that he was literally a god to adhere to this idea. You owed him absolute obedience because you were Japanese.

This was the case for most Japanese in 1945. It is no longer. Benedict could not have foreseen how quickly popular attitudes would change. She saw loyalty (chu) to the Emperor as one of the chief characteristics of the Japanese people and writes as though this were unlikely to change. There are other instances, however, where she underestimated the Japanese willingness to stick to a given course. Pacifism, for example.

One of Benedict’s main claims about the Japanese is the conditionality of their outlook on life. Without the moral absolutes of a monotheistic religion, everything from ethics to life goals is situational, hence the ease with which a warlike people could transform itself into a nation of pacifists. War had been a failure. Instead of being respected as a great military power, Japan had been humiliated in a catastrophic defeat. Now it would have to earn back its respect in the community of nations by being uniquely peaceful; hence the appeal of a constitution, drawn up by American jurists, that outlawed the use of war.

Benedict believed that this, too, was entirely situational. As long as the world around Japan was peaceful, the Japanese would remain committed to pacifism, but if the great powers were to gear themselves up for war again, Japan would soon revert to its old militarism. This didn’t happen. Despite the Korean War, from which the Japanese economy benefited greatly, despite the Vietnam War, despite tensions with the Soviet Union and China, and despite constant U.S. pressure on Japan to rearm and play a military role again, the majority of Japanese have stuck to their pacifistic ideals. This might change in time, but not nearly as quickly as Benedict had predicted.

This is not a criticism, for an anthropologist is not a fortuneteller. She could not have known what would happen many decades after writing her book. Much has changed in Japan since 1945. Young Japanese today might have a hard time recognizing some aspects of the “national character” described in Benedict’s book. Loyalty to the Emperor, duty to one’s parents, terror of not repaying one’s moral debts, these have faded in an age of technology-driven self-absorption. But the fact that one can still read The Chrysanthemum and the Sword with pleasure and profit is what makes it a classic book.

It is a classic book because of its intellectual and stylistic lucidity. Benedict was a superb writer who explained complicated ideas without resorting to ugly jargon. Style, some would say, is a reflection of character. Benedict was a writer of great humanity and generosity of spirit. A description of a mortal foe, prepared in wartime, this book, when read today, could not possibly offend a Japanese reader, even if he or she disagreed with some of Benedict’s conclusions. Finally, despite the many changes that have transformed Japan and the Japanese over the past half century, there is much in the book that still rings true.

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