showed why the Japanese were willing to keep fighting even when it was evident they were losing.
Benedict herself noted the particular difficulties she had in writing this volume given not only that we were at war with the Japanese so she could not go there and conduct her study, but also the fact that Japan had long been largely closed to the West until 75 years before the start of the war. Even after that time, the Japanese were simply the most alien enemy the U.S. had ever faced, a people less like the U.S. than any other with whom the nation had dealt. Her study was thus conducted under the impetus of some urgency, given that it was vital for the U.S. to understand the enemy it was fighting. She states that she was given the assignment of using all the techniques she possessed as a cultural anthropologist to discover what the japanese were like:
My assignment was difficult. America and Japan were at war and it is easy in wartime to condemn wholesale, but far harder to try to see how your enemy looks at life through his own eyes. Yet it had
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