Franz Boas, her teacher and mentor, has been called the father of American anthropology and his teachings and point of view are clearly evident in Benedict's work. Ruth Benedict was affected by the passionate humanism of Boas, her mentor, and continued it in her research and writing. Because her book is Yum, Yum, absolute Yum. It is a complete guilty pleasure. Reading this book I felt like a dog rolling around in something absolutely disgusting. But I just couldn't stop. Ruth's milkshake brings all the Japonophiles to the yard. Ruth Fulton Benedict (June 5, 1887 – September 17, 1948) was an American anthropologist and folklorist. Japanese people are carefully observing the suggestions of others’ behavior and at the same time being judged by their surroundings.

Storia ragionata delle origini della coesistenza pacifica degli opposti insita nel pensiero giapponese If you're looking for a book about Japanese culture from a nonbiased perspective, this isn't going to work for you. It's a book filled with anecdotal evidence and secondhand accounts, and while Ruth Benedict is a renowned anthropologist of the time who earned her high reputation...this is definitely a book of its time and of its origin. It is an American researcher piecing together what she and others have gleaned from Japanese culture, and it says just as much (if not more) of Westerners and how they view other foreign cultures as it does about Japanese culture of that period.

Open Access This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License ( http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits any noncommercial use, sharing, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if you modified the licensed material. You do not have permission under this license to share adapted material derived from this chapter or parts of it. 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?)?

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. 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 Bullying in school is an example of this as I saw in “kuki no kenkyu”. And the old value system of being happy to get a good school education and work at a big company may also be one of behavioral norms. 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 since World War II in Japan that Benedict would not recognize the nation she described in 1946. [13]

The first half of the book was not very interesting because of the difficult expressions, so I summarized my impressions of the second half. 義理(giri): Fulfill your duty.