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99 of 104 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Exploring tolerance and understanding, May 6, 2004
This review is from: The Japanese Mind: Understanding Contemporary Japanese Culture (Paperback)
I stumbled upon this thoroughly enlightening book at the end of my third year of living in a small bucolic town in the mountains of rural Japan. While it is intended as an overview and introduction to various things that can make the Japanese seem different and enigmatic to outsiders, many of the topics are discussed from their historical evolution, which helps to construct them in a much fuller and as a more complete figure. Moreover, the subjects covered are often unobservable to the casual visitor and neophytic foreign transplant, yet are central to understanding the Japanese character. Where I had just simply witnessed and pondered over many baffling and seemingly contradictory actions of the people whom I was residing amongst at first, after reading this book I came to understand them in a much clearer and tolerant way. Another result, incidentally, was it also helped ease me through an extremely delayed case of culture shock. We should note that problems arise not through stereotyping (which, despite our fanatical political correctness at times does tend to be accurate more often than not), but when we use these generalizations to assert a cultural superiority, or inferiority as the case may be, and to define differences as being anything other than such. This wonderful little book is clearly written by Japanese college students, and edited by the professors who guided them, in a style that makes even opaque concepts accessible. Ritualistic behavior is deconstructed in plain and precise language, in a conciseness that is also equally typical of the Japanese. It is organized into twenty-eight mostly interconnected chapters, though you can read them in any order you prefer. Some are perhaps too brief and would require explorations elsewhere for those serious inquisitors, still, like pieces to a puzzle, if you accurately connect them, they do render a thorough image in their totality. The editors, however, are careful to remind us that many of these topics continue to be debated and controversial even within Japanese society today. Nevertheless, the keen observer should, for example, be able to meld chapters like Uchi to Soto (literally translated as inside and outside), Honne to Tatemae (actual intentions and superficial words/actions, in a chapter I wished was more developed), Haragei (the implicit way of communication), Aimai (ambiguity), and Nemawashi (laying the groundwork) to better understand the Japanese "ways" in intercultural dealings and discern why they have often been regarded as remaining isolated inside their own country and outside of the responsibilities in world affairs that many would like to attribute to one of the world's strongest economic powers. This book is filled with informative and insightful essays and should be mandatory reading for anyone interested in the Japanese mentality, for those who study the language, and for even those Japanese who have a good enough command of English and wish to understand and communicate more about their culture than the trite aspects that are so often regurgitated in films and popular pulp. At the end of each chapter there are discussion activities that not only probe further into the respective topic and often attempt to relate it to contemporary Japan, but should also help facilitate one of the main purposes of this project, intercultural dialogue leading to mutual understanding. Even if you are lucky enough to engage in these conversations with some Japanese be forewarned, like the many Americans who have a hard time explaining our traditions of Halloween or saying "(God) bless you" after a sneeze for instance, much in this book is so entrenched in and forms the undercurrent of normal everyday life in Japan that many Japanese have trouble recognizing and explaining it themselves. Kudos to both the Ehime University students and teachers for producing such a well-written, thought provoking, and helpful analysis--its value far exceeds its cost.
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52 of 54 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
A useful introduction, November 1, 2002
This review is from: The Japanese Mind: Understanding Contemporary Japanese Culture (Paperback)
I picked this enjoyable booklet up at Narita Airport on my way home from yet another visit to this interesting country. By the time I landed in Frankfurt I had read it from cover to cover. The book is conceived as a primer. Contributions are organised in brief chapters, each one focusing on one important aspect of Japanese culture. One learns about rituals, aesthethic categories, myths, principles of social organisation, role models, etc. Each chapter concludes with a series of assignments for discussion activities in classes. With short chapters, a glossary and a fairly extensive bibliography, the book is obviously conceived as a broad brush introduction to Japanese culture and a stepping stone towards further study. For those unitiated to this complex and sometimes baffling culture, the modest price of this book is money well spent. But for an in depth treatment one definitely needs to look elsewhere.
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25 of 29 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
Weak analysis, poorly written, repetitious, not beneficial to read, November 2, 2010
This review is from: The Japanese Mind: Understanding Contemporary Japanese Culture (Paperback)
[This was originally written for the JALT (The Japan Association of Language Teachers) Journal's Book Reviews Section]
At 270 pages, this is a slim collection of essays on "key concepts in Japanese culture" (p. 1). Intended as a text, each of the 28 essays is followed by discussion questions which are separated into two groups: one for Japanese students of EFL and the other for foreign students of Japanese Studies. Furthermore, the co-editors intended that through clarity, well-documented research, and demonstrated field-testing, the text would also appeal to the general reader.
Unfortunately, this text fails on almost all accounts. Written by Japanese undergraduate seniors, the explanations are simplistic, superficial, and inconsistent. The first essay on the purportedly unique-to-Japan chinmoku (silence) is an illustration. It is used during times of thoughtfulness, hesitation, restraint, conflict avoidance, defiance. and indifference, in public and in private (pp. 53-55). This "unique" Japanese cultural trait has been defined so broadly as to become meaningless, since it covers almost every moment of silence one could experience anywhere.
The superficiality of the research is reflected in the use of E. Reischauer's (1990) comments originally made in 1977 on the contemporary status of marriage in Japan: "Japanese women are often said to have difficulty in socializing freely... However, women seem willing to play their own roles in maintaining the household as good wives and mothers" (p. 67). One wonders how "freely" socializing women or "good wives and mothers" who are unhappy with their roles and divorce their husbands fit into these nearly thirty-year-old arguments. There is also the incorrect statement that White Day is only found in Japan (p. 98). It is also found in South Korea. Furthermore, there is an inconsistent level of analysis. Honne and tatemae (private versus public persona) receive only two pages of text, but soshiki (funerals) receives 14 pages, even though the latter is high on detail and low on analysis.
However, this text's greatest weakness lies in the editing, for, as the editors admit, the essays are patchworks of many papers on the same or similar topics, which is why no single essay is credited to any one author. The results are frequent jumps in argumentation and awkward or altogether puzzling insertions within the essays, as well as much overlap and repetition among the essays. For example, the concept of amae is defined twice and explained multiple times (pp. 17-19, 67, 103-104). The concept of vertical society is defined three times (pp. 10-11, 144, 187-188). Both honne and tatemae (pp. 104-105, 115-116, 195) as well as ie (pp. 61-62, 119-124, 217-218) are defined three times. Many other concepts are similarly over-defined. There are also basic grammatical and sentence structure errors, including run-on sentences, capitalization, and verb-agreement problems. It is surprising that this book was edited by two professors and has gone through Tuttle's editing process.
The book's basic premise is to explain and create discussion on contemporary Japanese culture. However, it is centered on a historical Japan that not only has changed, but also is changing in many of the areas covered. Not to be found are discussions on contemporary Japanese cultural traits exemplified by enjokosai (teenage prostitution), furiita (young, part-time workers with little hope or belief in the future), or tomodachi-oyako (an unhealthy parent-child friendship deficient in minimal socialising functions that are usually derived from parental hierarchy). From these (admittedly negative) contemporary Japanese cultural traits there is much to be mined, such as the fixation on youth, with the inherent fetishising of school girls and pressure on older women and mothers to be young and girlish, and the effects of 10 years of economic decline on a disenfranchised youth.
This text presents concepts that fit in with the tea garden and mossy stone view of Japan, while in reality, Japanese culture is a vibrant and dense culture in flux, equally as modern as any other. Unfortunately, poor research, writing, and editing misrepresent traditional cultural traits while neglecting contemporary ones. For sociological analyses of Japan, the reader should stick to monographs put out by trained sociologists. Perhaps the flip side of that is linguists should tread carefully in areas that are not their expertise.
References
Reischauer, E. (1990). The Japanese today: Change and continuity. (M. Fukushima, trans.). Tokyo: Bungei Shunju. (Original work published 1977.)
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