Japanese Culture and Behavior: Selected Readings PDF
Preview Japanese Culture and Behavior: Selected Readings
Page iii Japanese Culture and Behavior Selected Readings REVISED EDITION Edited by Takie Sugiyama Lebra and William P. Lebra Page iv Copyright does not apply to chapters coauthored by William Caudill, who was an employee of the United States government. © 1974, 1986 University of Hawaii Press All Rights Reserved Printed in the United States of America 04 03 02 01 00 99 10 9 8 7 6 Library of Congress CataloginginPublication Data Japanese culture and behavior. Bibliography: p. Includes index. 1. National characteristics, Japanese. I. Lebra, Takie Sugiyama, 1930 II. Lebra, William P. DS821.J343 1986 306'.089956 86–4367 ISBN 0824810554 University of Hawai'i Press books are printed on acidfree paper and meet the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Council on Library Resources. Page v On New Year's Day of 1986, William P. Lebra, coeditor of this book, suddenly passed away, not knowing that this would be his last work. It is hoped that this volume reflects some of his accomplishment as a medical/psychological anthropologist and scholar. Page vii CONTENTS Acknowledgments x Introduction xi Part One: Moral Values and Sentiments Editorial Note 3 1. Human Nature in the Japanese Myths 7 John C. Pelzel 2. The Monkey Memorial Service of Japanese Primatologists 29 Pamela J. Asquith 3. A Culture of Love and Hate 33 Eiichiro * Ishida 4. Compensative Justice and Moral Investment among Japanese, Chinese, and 43 Koreans Takie Sugiyama Lebra 5. Individual, Group and Seishin: Japan's Internal Cultural Debate 62 Brian Moeran 6. The Relation of Guilt toward Parents to Achievement and Arranged Marriage 80 among the Japanese George De Vos Part Two: Interaction, Communication, and Grouping Editorial Note 105 7. An Ethnography of Dinner Entertainment in Japan 108 Harumi Befu 8. Amae: A Key Concept for Understanding Japanese Personality Structure 121 L. Takeo Doi Page viii 9. "Male Chauvinism" As a Manifestation of Love in Marriage 130 Sonya Salamon 10. Language and Behavior in Japan: The Conceptualization of Personal 142 Relations Takao Suzuki 11. GiftGiving in a Modernizing Japan 158 Harumi Befu 12. Criteria of Group Formation 171 Chie Nakane 13. Skiing CrossCulturally 188 Vincent S. R. Brandt Part Three: Development and Socialization Editorial Note 197 14. Maternal Care and Infant Behavior in Japan and America 201 William Caudill and Helen Weinstein 15. Who Sleeps by Whom? ParentChild Involvement in Urban Japanese 247 Families William Caudill and David W. Plath 16. Ethics and Moral Precepts Taught in Schools of Japan and the United 280 States Betty B. Lanham 17. Violence in the Home: Conflict between Two Principles—Maternal and 297 Paternal Hayao Kawai 18. "Spiritual Education" in a Japanese Bank 307 Thomas P. Rohlen Part Four: Cultural Stress, Psychotherapies, and Resocialization Editorial Note 339 19. Nonmedical Healing in Contemporary Japan: A Psychiatric Study 344 Yuji Sasaki 20. SelfReconstruction in Japanese Religious Psychotherapy 354 Takie Sugiyama Lebra 21. Japanese Attitudes toward Mental Health and Mental Health Care 369 Tsunetsugu Munakata Page ix 22. Fear of EyetoEye Confrontation among Neurotic Patients in Japan 379 Yomishi Kasahara 23. Naikan Therapy 388 Takao Murase References 399 Contributors 419 Index 421 Page x ACKNOWLEDGMENTS The editors wish to express our appreciation of the many who helped to make this volume possible. We are grateful, first, to the contributors, whose scholarly activities made the contents worthwhile. To the various publishers and professional associations who freely gave (or required silver for) permission to use their publications, we offer our thanks. Special recognition should be accorded to Frances Yuasa, who helped to compile and standardize the references. Both of us were able to use portions of sabbatical leave time, granted by the University of Hawaii, for this effort. And the Social Science Research Institute (UH) provided support in typing and photocopying. For these benefits and others, thank you! Page xi INTRODUCTION In preparing this revised edition of Japanese Culture and Behavior: Selected Readings, we considered three problems or issues encountered since the publication of the first edition in 1974. One relates to responses to the original publication, received in a number of reviews published in scholarly journals and conveyed in personal correspondence. Most of these were kindly favorable and encouraging—encouraging enough to prompt us to do a second edition. We benefited from criticism as well as support. Following the comments of some reviewers, we decided to insert more editorial commentary so that the assortment of papers would exhibit greater coherence and integration. This new edition, therefore, begins with this enlarged introduction, where rationales are spelled out. Further, each of the four parts is prefaced by an editorial commentary on each of the chapters contained in that section. In order to conserve space and to provide greater uniformity in the style of reference citation, all references have been placed at the end of the text in alphabetical order, and text citations have been standardized. A muchneeded index has been added as well. We have taken the liberty of deleting most acknowledgments (unless the context prohibits such deletions) and, where contextually appropriate, some of the notes. However, the original texts (save for obvious typos and inconsistencies) have been preserved intact. For complete papers, the reader is urged to refer to the originals, which are cited at the outset of each chapter. Second, among Japan specialists across disciplines we have witnessed in the last decade what might be called a protest movement against the allegedly established, popularized image of Japan that strongly emphasizes group solidarity, as exemplified by the celebrated phrase "Japan, Inc." Established scholars have been charged with circulating their biased models for Japanese studies, which are variously designated "group model," "consensus model," "holistic model,'' or simply "stereotype." New models, by implication, should stress the individualistic, egoistic, conflictridden, and dissensionprone aspects of the Japanese. Page xii This kind of debate could be seen as a dialectic step toward a new synthesis, or less narrowly construed, as a welcome development for greater enrichment of the field. It is up to the reader to decide how this controversy is to be appraised and whether it can be understood, as tacitly implied by Moeran (chap. 5), as a tempest in a teapot. Undoubtedly many models, not just one or two, are desirable to understand a complex society and culture like Japan's, but whether one model is really incompatible with another is a question that requires careful and serious study. Our position is that one might let something essentially Japanese slip away by counterposing the individual to the group, dissension to consensus, conflict to harmony, equality to hierarchy, egoism to altruism. It is more fruitful, we believe, to see the two opposites as both sides of a single coin, or to discern one as it is embedded in the other. If the facetoface smile in neighborhood interaction is a mandatory ritual, the backtoback grimace will be a likely accompaniment. If selfless dedication is always demanded, it will be balanced off by a strategic manipulation of the double standard of omote (front) and ura (back), or of tatemae (the publicly enunciated principle) and honne (the privately held feeling), whereby selfindulgence is made permissible. Underlying this generalization may be a functional model of the human actor. Intimately linked with the above argument is the issue of deviance. Again, it seems to make more sense to see deviance as an integral part of the normative pattern, to account for anomaly in terms of normalcy. The neurosis called taijinkyofu * (the phobia of interpersonal exposure) described by Kasahara (chap. 21), for instance, would be more understandable if connected with the rigid protocol adhered to by Japanese in normative social interaction than if taken as a distinctly pathological category contradictory of normal sociability. Consider also such problems as the school phobia and school violence that is plaguing today's Japan. It goes without saying that these problems are inseparable from, not opposed to, the nationwide obsession with educational achievement validated by passage of entrance examinations for selected high schools and universities. Such educational problems are further interlaced with a child's home life. We are told by clinical specialists that a "normal," "good," and ''smart" child is suddenly transformed into a monster who cruelly abuses his or her parents to the total disbelief of the latter. The suddenness of this turnabout, paradoxically, seems to indicate a continuity, not a discontinuity, between the normal and aberrant, or at least to suggest how slight the demarcation line is between the two realms. It is from this pespective that we have included Kawai's chapter on "Violence in the Home" (chap. 17). There remains another point to be made with regard to the second
The list of books you might like
