Criticism
C. Douglas Lummis has written: "After some time I realized that I would never be able to live in a decent relationship with the people of that country unless I could drive this book, and its politely arrogant world view, out of my head."
Lummis, who went to the Vassar College archives to review Benedict’s notes, wrote that he found some of her more important points were developed from interviews with Robert Hashima, a Japanese-American native of the United States who was taken to Japan as a child, educated there, then returned to the U.S. before World War II began. According to Lummis, who interviewed Hashima, these circumstances helped introduce a certain bias into Benedict's research: "For him, coming to Japan for the first time as a teenager smack in the middle of the militaristic period and having no memory of the country before then, what he was taught in school was not 'an ideology', it was Japan itself." Lummis thinks Benedict relied too much on Hashima, who he said was deeply alienated by his experiences in Japan. "t seems that he became a kind of touchstone, the authority against which she would test information from other sources."
Read more about this topic: The Chrysanthemum And The Sword
Famous quotes containing the word criticism:
“In criticism I will be bold, and as sternly, absolutely just with friend and foe. From this purpose nothing shall turn me.”
—Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1845)
“People try so hard to believe in leaders now, pitifully hard. But we no sooner get a popular reformer or politician or soldier or writer or philosopher—a Roosevelt, a Tolstoy, a Wood, a Shaw, a Nietzsche, than the cross-currents of criticism wash him away. My Lord, no man can stand prominence these days. It’s the surest path to obscurity. People get sick of hearing the same name over and over.”
—F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940)
“... criticism ... makes very little dent upon me, unless I think there is some real justification and something should be done.”
—Eleanor Roosevelt (1884–1962)