Blackwell Reference Online

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Thirty-five years ago, John Bennett (1970) remarked that social research on Japan “has not yet made significant contributions to social and cultural theory.” Although Bennett's remark remains relevant, it is not quite accurate. The wartime ethnographies by Japan anthropology ancestors John Embree and Ruth Benedict entered the mainstream of (American) anthropology where “Japan” became a proving ground for debates about the pros and cons of National Character Studies and of the Culture and Personality school (Benedict 1946; Embree 1945). Actually, Embree's earlier monograph, Suye Mura: A Japanese Village (1939), the progenitor of ethnographies of Japan, was part of a global series of comparative field studies on literate communities or villages – and the first on types of East Asian societies – orchestrated by social anthropologists (affiliated with Harvard University and the University of Chicago) Fay-Cooper Cole, A. R. Radcliffe-Brown, Robert Redfield, and Lloyd Warner (Embree 1939:ix-x, xvi-xvii).Thus, as I have argued elsewhere, it was in the 1940s that “Japan” entered mainstream (Anglophone) anthropological debates (Robertson 1998). And, Japan – often paired with Turkey – was also very much part of the anthropological discourse of modernization theory in the 1950s and early 1960s (Bellah 1957; Ward and Rustow 1964). Since the 1960s, and in keeping with Bennett's observation, ... log in or subscribe to read full text