Viewed Sideways. Donald Richie
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of doing them naturally, after the manner of her country-people.”
If we see others as upside down then, perforce, we see ourselves as right side up. The ascribed abnormality of others serves to reinforce the idea of our own normality. As Ian Littlewood has reminded us, “Without East there is no West, without natives there are no sahibs.” This could, of course, cut two ways. Mark Twain could be affirmed in his assumptions and Chamberlain’s Tokyo lady could be affirmed in hers.
Further dualistic anomalies were sought for and found. Japan was shortly discovered to be paradoxical, a country which was a contradiction in terms. The people were quaint, childlike, and polite on one hand, but militaristic, cruel, and treacherous on the other; they were artistic but they were also the yellow peril.
Sir Rutherford Alcock, an early diplomat and theorizer, could summarize his account with “Japan is essentially a country of paradoxes and anomalies. There all—even familiar things—put on new faces and are curiously reversed.”
Fifty years later this early attempt at interpretation was still around. Ruth Benedict in her 1946 Chrysanthemum and the Sword (a dualistic title) says that “The Japanese are, to the highest degree, both aggressive and unaggressive, both militaristic and aesthetic, both insolent and polite.” One hears echoes even later. Peter Tasker in 1987 was writing, “They are the hardest-working hedonists, the lewdest prudes, the most courteous and cruelest and kindest of people.”
The success of this particular model was that it was based upon an unquestioned assumption: the duality of all reality, the necessity of “either/or” above “both.” This is how most Westerners structure their lives and it is therefore often the paradigm of choice whether it actually fits its subject or not.
That it does not became apparent as later generations of foreign observers looked more closely. Or rather, it fits us all too well. We are, every one of us, creatures of paradox and it is only wishful thinking that finds us consistent. And so, just as Japan was not really to be fully described in presuming to find it upside down, so it was eventually seen as something more than an illustration of rampant paradox.
Yet one paradigm does not succeed another. All the earlier models continue to exist and the new is simply added to the pile. Ruth Benedict offers a sample of this strata, and even an attempt as structurally sophisticated as Roland Barthe’s Empire of Signs held that contrary to Japan with its elegant suimono, “for us in France, clear soup is poor soup.”
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A further refinement came with the next model—one we might place as encountered during the first half of the twentieth century. This retained duality but the emphasis was different. Japan was now Land of Contrasts, a place that naturally, even intentionally, found room for paradox. Old Japan and New Japan were thus harmonized. As I myself described it elsewhere: Old Shinto shrines on the top of new high-rises, white-robed acolytes on motorbikes, and ancient zaibatsu executives reclined in their new steel-and-glass headquarters.
Unlike the primitive topsy-turvy paradigm, this one was initially convincing since each part of it was apparent. There really were towering skyscrapers, there actually were cherry-blossomed temples. Further, it was somewhat more benign in intent than had been the insulting topsy-turvy construct. Japan had commanded world respect by winning its war with Russia. This was reflected in admitting difference and refusing to consign blame. However, by focusing our attention solely on these extremes (New and Old), this model left out what was in between, which is most of Japan.
It also taught us to look only for stereotypes. Through these it could then suggest that Japan was a hybrid—interesting perhaps and certainly good at winning wars but not sensible, solid-all-the-way-through, like, say, England or the United States. That there is something dodgy about hybrids is a common Western assumption, be it mixed blood or mixed cultures. They seem to threaten our invented boundaries and hence our definition of ourselves.
One is familiar with this way of thinking, particularly in regards to Asia. It is our aged friend, Orientalism. Edward Said has noted that this construction insists that in order for the West to see itself as rational, humane, superior, it is necessary to create an East that is irrational, undeveloped, inferior. If this cannot be made to entirely apply (as it cannot in the case of Japan), then this part of the East is seen in terms of being upside down, reversed, bifurcated, or shaped in other forms of opposition.
To define by difference rather than similarity is common to us all. For us to become truly human in our own eyes we must have an alien against whom to measure ourselves. A late and notorious attempt to define self through the creation of just such an alien species was that of the then–French prime minister, Edith Cresson, who in 1991, comparing the Japanese to ants, went on to say that “we cannot live like that . . . we want to live like human beings, as we have always lived.”
The Japanese are thus not human beings. This indeed is one of the burdens of these various paradigms, though one not usually stated with such clarity. More subtly the proposition of Japan as a land of contrasts provides the same context—though in truth we are all lands of contrast in that none of us maintain the solid-all-the-way-through existence we think we want.
The simplicity of this paradigm and its consequent popularity soon, however, exposed its limited nature. Things were not as simple as a collage-like juxtaposition of old and new suggested. Something else was occurring. A new model had to account for this.
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Hence the fairly recent concept of continuity within change, an organic model: Japan as a place where the new and old could live equitably together; under all the modern veneer lives on this ageless core. Its appearance cannot be dated but it sounds post–WWII. Japan’s talent at winning wars had been exhibited and found wanting. One could explain away the binary model (peaceful/warlike) by situating them in temporal sequence—something the same but different.
This became for a time the standard model, let us say from 1945 until the fall of the Theory of Japan’s Uniqueness at the end of the century. It was often wheeled out, inspected, and approved. Also, it was a favorite of that group of writers now somewhat unkindly called the Chrysanthemum Club. It offered an organic recipe that made differences somehow more “natural,” a suggestion found in many volumes. One of the qualities of paradigms is that they reassure—until they reveal themselves as inadequate.
By now—let us generalize and say circa 1975—so many models had accumulated that a name for them became necessary. This the Japanese willingly provided—Nihonjin-ron, studies of the uniqueness of being Japanese. Americans wrote them, Englishmen wrote them, everyone wrote them, including of course the Japanese themselves, who had, after all, just as much interest in defining themselves through boundaries as did everyone else.
Some of these were very strange. Japan was somehow feminine, while the West somehow masculine; the Japanese had different brains, or longer intestines; the Westerner is an inventor, the Japanese merely an adapter. One still hears this latter. As Ian Littlewood says, “In our models of culture exchange, the West figures as virile originator, Japan as wily imitator.” As though such “imitation” is not general, as though this is not the way that ideas move around the world, as though it is not otherwise known as progress.
Some authors excluded almost as much as they included. Geoffrey Gorer is said to have believed that the most important and most consistent element in being Japanese was an early emphasis upon sphincter control and that this “drastic toilet training” solely lay at the bottom of the value system of Japan. Thus, he gathered, there is no concept of right and wrong, only the concept of doing the right thing at the right time.
Others followed. One (Weston La Barre) found the Japanese “the most compulsive people in the world’s ethnological museum.” Another (H. M. Spitzer) discovered that Japanese culture as a whole indicates the symptoms of obsessive/compulsive neurosis. Still another (James Clark Moloney) thought that Japanese society was “a potential incubator of paranoid schizophrenia.”
Of these and other examples scholar Hiroshi Wagatsuma has cautioned that “Most of what has been and still often is discussed as Japanese psychology or mentality, and frequently as ‘national character,’ is largely the product of impressionist