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The Japanese Way of Thinking - Reviews - Japanese Frames of Mind: Cultural Perspectives on Human Development - Book Review
Contemporary Review, Nov, 2002 by Raymond Lamont-Brown
Japanese Frames of Mind: Cultural Perspectives on Human Development. Hidetada Shimizu and Robert A. LeVine, editors. Cambridge University Press. [pounds sterling]45.00 (US $65.00). 277 pages. ISBN 0-521-78159-0.
Following the attack on Pearl Harbor, 7 December 1941, the United States' armed forces encountered an enemy that was totally alien to any against which Uncle Sam had ever taken up cudgels. American Intelligence had never been called upon, in a major conflict, to come to terms with a foe with such different habits of thought and emotion. Thus, for instance, when Vice-Admiral Charles R. Brown, USN, witnessed and reported on the 'terrible spectacle' of the kamikaze suicide pilots he publicly expressed the universal American bewilderment at such grotesque idealism. Even by the end of the war the Americans had failed to come to terms with how the Japanese mind works.
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Because Japan was to be so important in the US post-war plans for South East Asia, efforts were made to understand how the Japanese thought. Some, such as the late cultural anthropologist, Dr Ruth Benedict, who had served in the Bureau of Overseas Intelligence in WWII, produced her book, The Chrysanthemum and the Sword (1940), for a mass readership, to help unravel the 'baffling' Japanese mindset.
Since WWII, in particular, the Japanese government has not made it easy to exchange research on the development of modem Japan. It is true that information of all kinds flows into Japan; but the reverse is not true. Japan operates an intellectual closed shop. Yet while the West and Japan seek to sort out power relationships and roles in post Cold-War Asia, and while Japan still aspires to a permanent seat in the UN Security Council, it is timely to look afresh at what makes the Japanese tick.
Hidetada Shimizu, Assistant Professor of Education Psychology at North Illinois University, and Robert A. LeVine, Professor of Education Emeritus and Professor of Anthropology Emeritus at Harvard University, set about the task by editing eight academic contributors' papers (as well as their own), to discuss two problems. Does evidence from Japan challenge basic premises of current psychological theories? Secondly, are the universals of human nature claimed by academic psychology more accurately seen as Western or Euroamerican patterns?
General readers should not be put off by these somewhat academically impenetrable study aims, for, absorbed in small doses, the general reader obtains a useful insight into the Japanese mind. It is as well to remember though, that to try to understand the mind of Japan, one must discard the exotic and enigmatic qualities in Japanese culture. Such an approach to the Japanese has long bereft Westerners of their sense of realism.
This book helps put aside what the late Prof. Takaaki Aikawa described as the 'somniferous romanticism' with which the Westerner approaches Japanese studies. The authors begin with an overview of Japanese psychological trends, introducing such concepts as makoto (sincerity), ninjo (compassion) and amae (indulgence), as well as Japanese psychological customs such as ozendate, wherein a host takes great care in reception preparations for his guests to suit their characters. Thereafter the bulk of the book is divided into five parts, exploring such themes as 'Moral Reasoning among Adults', 'The Maternal Role in Japan', and 'Learning to Become Part of a Group'. A particularly interesting section is on the kikokushijo, returnees to Japan who have lived in the USA and the changes wrought on them by a double 'culture shock'.
Overall the book supplies a useful introduction to how the Japanese are socially developing in the twenty-first century. For herein are clues as to how the Japanese will handle future problems posed by a 'shrinking globe' which pushes them relentlessly into the international scene.
COPYRIGHT 2002 Contemporary Review Company Ltd.
COPYRIGHT 2002 Gale Group
