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 to be done. The question was how the Japanese would behave, not how we would behave if we were in their place.
At least I did not have to forego the anthropologist's great reliance upon face-to-face contact with the people he is studying.
They were amazingly frank. Of course they did not present the whole picture. No people does. A Japanese who writes about Japan passes over really crucial things which are as familiar to him and as invisible as the air he breathes. So do Americans when they write about America.
As a cultural anthropologist also I started from the premise that the most isolated bits of behavior have some systematic relation to each other.
If we did, we might discover that a course of action is not necessarily vicious because it is not the one we know.
The lenses through which any nation looks at life are not the ones another nation uses. It is hard to be conscious of the eyes through which one looks.
The tough-minded are content that differences should exist. They respect differences. Their goal is a world made safe for differences, where the United States may be American to the hilt without threatening the peace of the world, and France may be France, and Japan may be Japan on the same conditions.
Encouraging cultural differences would not mean a static world.
THE CHRYSANTHEMUM AND THE SWORD chapter 1
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