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菊と刀 – The Chrysanthemum and the Sword (タトルクラシックス )
ルース ベネディクト、 Ruth Benedict
戦時中から研究をしまとめ上げた本書は、「日本国民の心理」を分析している。第一章にあるように、戦争の為に書かれた本書は基本的に日本人批判である。ただその分析はするどく、欧米諸国には理解出来ない「恩」や「義理」「徳」などを、本質がでる戦時の行動から読み取っている。戦後間もなく発刊された本書。未だに批判を受け容れる精神的寛容さが未熟な「日本人」だが、寛容な倫理的態度と自己責任という共通感覚の習得は日本人なら可能だと著者は最後に結んでおり、より良く生きる為のマニュアルでもある。
Reprinted over fifty years, The Chrysanthemum and the Sword remains a classic of cultural anthropology and a brilliant study of Japan during World War 2. In 1944, when field work in Japan was impossible, Ruth Benedict was assigned by the US Office of War Information to “use all techniques [she] could as a cultural anthropologist to spell out what the Japanese were like.” Benedict’s piquant observations on the Japanese family, its hierarchical society, the customs of marriage and child rearing, concepts like self-discipline and filial piety, and other notable attributes of the Japanese remain relevant today. Benedict was puzzled about the paradoxes she observed, by a people so ready to die by the sword and yet so concerned with the beauty of the chrysanthemum. By examining isolated bits of behavior and fitting them into a coherent pattern, she succeeds in sketching the main outlines of a society very unlike those found in the West. The result is a completely fascinating, incisive, and informative book on the mysteries of the Japanese character.
Benedict is known not only for her earlier Patterns of Culture but also for her later book The Chrysanthemum and the Sword, the study of the society and culture of Japan that she published in 1946, incorporating results of her war-time research.