h industries of great import on the international scene today and into the future. Japan is also a nation with a lower crime rate than that of the United States. Many in the U.S. have an excessively rosy picture of Japanese society, ignoring the problems while elevating the successes, but it is clear that the sort of comparison made by Ruth Benedict would be seen as valuable specifically for the way the author contrasts the two societies.
Benedict wrote her book in 1946, and at the time she was working for the Office of war Information to gather the data used in the book. Her analysis necessarily must be seen as a snapshot of Japanese society in defeat at the end of the war, though it is also interesting to consider the underlying nature of Japanese society as she saw it and to compare than with more contemporary accounts, such as that of Nakane. Benedict writes at a time of crisis and change. She started her research in 1944 while the war was still under way, and this mad field work impossible. Social scientists were concerned that this approach, what they called "culture at a distance," but in truth this method was not that different from the usual procedure of the historian--making the most creative and imaginative use of written documents. Benedict also managed to add another feature--interviewing:
Benedict benefited from all the analysis of Japan then conducted by the U.S. government. . . But her one great research weapon was interviewing Japanese immigrants to America (Vogel, 1989, x).
The book that emerged was for a long time the introduction to the Japanese personality and Japanese character, standing as the only worthwhile work on the subject. The situation today is different, as Ezra F. Vogel notes, for there are now hundreds of studies of the subject. He places Benedict's ethnography in historical perspective, calling it "a brilliant study of Japan during World War II" (Vogel, 1989, x), meaning a book that...