The Chrysanthemum and The Sword - Later Reception in Japan

Later Reception in Japan

More than two million copies of the book have been sold in Japan since it first appeared in translation there.

John W. Bennett and Michio Nagai, two scholars on Japan, pointed out in 1953, that the translated book "has appeared in Japan during a period of intense national self-examination — a period during which Japanese intellectuals and writers have been studying the sources and meaning of Japanese history and character, in one of their perennial attempts to determine the most desirable course of Japanese development."

The Japanese social critic and philosopher Tamotsu Aoki said the translated book "helped invent a new tradition for postwar Japan". The book helped increase the momentum of 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. C. Douglas Lummis has said the entire "nihonjinron" literature stems ultimately from Benedict's book.

Her book began a discussion among Japanese scholars about "shame culture" vs. "guilt culture" which spread beyond academia, and the two terms are now established as ordinary expressions in that country.

Soon after the translation was published, Japanese scholars, including Kazuko Tsurumi, Tetsuro Watsuji, and Kunio Yanagita criticized the book as inaccurate and having methodological errors. American scholar C. Douglas Lummis has written that criticisms of Benedict's book 'now very well known in Japanese scholarly circles' include that it represented the ideology of a class for that of the entire culture, 'a state of acute social dislocation for a normal condition, and an extraordinary moment in a nation's history as an unvarying norm of social behavior'.

Japanese ambassador to Pakistan Sadaaki Numata said the book was a "must reading for many students of Japanese studies".

According to Margaret Mead (the author's former student and a fellow anthropologist), other Japanese who have read this work found it on the whole accurate but somewhat "moralistic". Sections of the book were mentioned in Takeo Doi's book, The Anatomy of Dependence, though he is highly critical of her analysis of Japan and the West as respectively shame, and guilt, cultures.

In a 2002 symposium at The Library of Congress in the United States, Shinji Yamashita of the department of anthropology at the University of Tokyo, added that there has been so much change in post-World War II Japan that Benedict would not recognize the nation she described in 1946.