Editing Ruth Benedict (section)

===''The Chrysanthemum and the Sword''===
{{Main|The Chrysanthemum and the Sword}}
{{See also|Guilt-Shame-Fear spectrum of cultures}}
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 wartime research.

This book is an instance of ''anthropology at a distance''. The study of a culture through its [[literature]], newspaper clippings, films and recordings, etc. was necessary when anthropologists aided the United States and its [[Allies of World War II|allies]] during World War II. Unable to visit [[Nazi Germany]] or Japan under [[Hirohito]], anthropologists used the cultural materials to produce studies at a distance. They attempted to understand the cultural patterns that might be driving their aggression and hoped to find possible weaknesses or means of [[persuasion]] that had been missed.

Benedict's war work included a major study, largely completed in 1944, aimed at understanding [[Japanese culture]], which had matters that Americans found themselves unable to comprehend. For instance, Americans considered it quite natural for American [[prisoners-of-war]] to want their families to know they were alive and to keep quiet when asked for information about troop movements, etc. However, Japanese prisoners-of-war apparently gave information freely and did not try to contact their families. Why was that? Why, too, did Asian peoples neither treat the Japanese as their liberators from Western [[colonialism]] nor accept their own supposedly-just place in a hierarchy that had Japanese at the top?

Benedict played a major role in grasping the place of the [[Emperor of Japan]] in [[Japanese popular culture]], and formulating the recommendation to US President [[Franklin Roosevelt]] that permitting continuation of the Emperor's reign had to be part of the eventual surrender offer.

Japanese who read this work, according to Margaret Mead, found it on the whole accurate but somewhat "moralistic." Sections of the book were mentioned in [[Takeo Doi]]'s book, ''[[The Anatomy of Dependence]]'', but Doi is highly critical of Benedict's concept that Japan has a [[Guilt-Shame-Fear spectrum of cultures|"shame" culture]], whose emphasis is on how one's moral conduct appears to outsiders in contradistinction to the Christian American "guilt" culture in which the emphasis is on the individual's internal conscience. Doi considered that claim to imply clearly that the former value system is inferior to the latter one.