Rosie Reviews<\/p>\n
Christopher Benfey\u2019s THE GREAT WAVE<\/strong><\/p>\n Reviewed by Rosemary de Fr\u00e9mery<\/em><\/p>\n (Spring 2004 Issue of the JETAA NY Newsletter)<\/span><\/p>\n 2004:\u00a0 Has this year witnessed increased American interest in traditional Japanese culture and values?\u00a0 At a first glance, it would appear so with the success of The Last Samurai<\/em> and the Academy Award nomination of Twilight Samurai<\/em> for Best Foreign Language Film.\u00a0 As most readers of this newsletter probably know, 2004 marks the 150th anniversary of U.S.-Japan relations.\u00a0 It has been a long, complicated journey from the initial arrival of what author Ian Buruma<\/strong> calls \u201cthe universal Yankee nation\u201d to our own more recent arrivals as JETs in Japan.\u00a0 While observing this anniversary, it\u2019s worth reflecting on the importance of U.S.-Japan engagement from the Meiji era to the present as well as the ways in which Americans and Japanese continue to build upon this existing relationship and draw inspiration from one another\u2019s cultures.<\/p>\n New Western commentary has emerged to provide varying assessments of where we are today in this regard.\u00a0 Mount Holyoke College professor Christopher Benfey\u2019s<\/strong> The Great Wave<\/em> offers a fresh and insightful commentary on the continuing American fascination for Japan and vice versa.\u00a0 He focuses on what types of Americans and Japanese have, finding no suitable outlets for their personal sensibilities in the countries of their birth, discovered cultural and spiritual homes abroad.<\/p>\n Ian Buruma, whose insightful writings on Japan have graced the pages of The New York Times<\/em> and Salon<\/em>, has also recently produced a concise guide to the rise of Modern Japan with Inventing Japan:\u00a0 1853-1964<\/em>.\u00a0 Much of the details presented for our consideration in Inventing Japan<\/em> will be familiar to even casual students of Japanese history.\u00a0 This account spans the period between Commodore Perry\u2019s dramatic 1853 arrival in Japan to the civil unrest of the 1960s, even escorting us into the new millennium with a short epilogue documenting the rise and continued dominance of the Liberal Democratic Party.<\/p>\n This roughly parallels the time period that was covered in the Japanese history courses I took in college and, as a result, helped me to recall names and dates I\u2019d long forgotten.\u00a0 That being said, upon finishing Inventing Japan I realized that what I really wanted was an analysis of these events, not simply a linear recounting of them.\u00a0 Given the wealth of experience in cultural and political transactions that has been recorded up until this point, it is time to dedicate some attention to another tier of US-Japan relations.\u00a0 Assuming that more Americans are absorbing Japanese concepts and viewpoints at a deeper level than was possible during their initial encounters with the Pacific nation in the nineteenth century, we would benefit from a look beyond economic and political developments into more subjective and ambiguous realms where Americans and Japanese make contact with and influence one another.<\/p>\n For an example of the type of analysis to which I\u2019m referring, here is an excerpt from a December 2003 op-ed piece Christopher Benfey contributed to the New York Times to accompany the release of The Last Samurai<\/em>:<\/p>\n The truth is, though, that Perry didn’t really open Japan. He did the easy part: showing off American firepower to the gaping samurai on shore, and forcing a trade agreement on the emperor. But there was a second, slower, more significant opening, which required actual understanding \u2014 of Buddhism, for example, and the traditional arts of judo and the tea ceremony \u2026 This sort of opening is as much an internal process as an external one. People talk about the Japanese influence on America; you might call this the “particle theory” of cultural exchange. But what we see in the 150 years of Japanese-American interaction is something more complicated and harder to name. Maybe we need a “wave theory” of cultural exchange, to explain the constant oscillation between East and West.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n JET alumni know well how encounters with Japanese culture can continue to impact their lives in ways both subtle and obvious for years after the official close of their tenures as ALTs or CIRs.\u00a0 What happens below the radar, as it were, is often more meaningful yet confoundingly difficult to accurately describe or to name, as Benfey says.\u00a0 Challenging though it may be to express in words the process of cultural grafting which occurs when an American spends a considerable amount of time living in a Japanese context \u2013 to Compared to Benfey, Buruma shares few observations on these interactions in Inventing Japan.\u00a0 He follows a more traditional route instead, tracking with facts Japan\u2019s metamorphosis from a feudal state into the world power it is today.\u00a0 Indeed, Buruma\u2019s editorializing is scant except for the deliberately ironic use of the word sincere in describing fanatical right-wing assassins and for the occasional mention of the regrettable instances in which genuine pro-democracy forces were neutralized by self-described nationalist elements within Japan.\u00a0 Buruma glosses over even this important aspect of Japanese politics more than one might like. One must be fair here:\u00a0 Benfey allows himself a generous 332 pages to wax poetic on the shifting tides of US-Japan relations while Buruma rations himself to a lean 177 pages, which inevitably leads to the bare-bones treatment the reader finds in Inventing Japan.\u00a0 For that reason I would consider Inventing Japan a fine introduction to modern Japanese history for people, including perhaps some 2004 JET Programme participants, who wish to familiarize themselves with the subject without having to wade through long-winded, overly dense tomes of facts and dates.\u00a0 For those inclined to foray into the deeper meaning of what has transpired between our two countries within the past 150 years, however, The Great Wave<\/em> will more likely satisfy their intellectual curiosity even as it raises new and intriguing questions for them to ponder.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Rosie Reviews Christopher Benfey\u2019s THE GREAT WAVE Reviewed by Rosemary de Fr\u00e9mery (Spring 2004 Issue of the JETAA NY Newsletter) 2004:\u00a0 Has this year witnessed increased American interest in traditional Japanese culture and values?\u00a0 At a first glance, it would appear so with the success of The Last Samurai and the Academy Award nomination of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"parent":59,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","template":"","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-419","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/PkZ7m-6L","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jetwit.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/419","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jetwit.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jetwit.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jetwit.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jetwit.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=419"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/jetwit.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/419\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":422,"href":"https:\/\/jetwit.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/419\/revisions\/422"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jetwit.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/59"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jetwit.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=419"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\nthe point at which on some level certain aspects of Japanese culture may even begin to feel inherently compatible or natural to a degree never anticipated \u2013 should be of particular interest to those who have experienced and continue to experience such a deeply personal phenomenon.<\/p>\n
\nFortunately, more in-depth histories of the Japanese Left and other movements are available including a study of the Japanese women\u2019s movement, Reflections on The Way to The Gallows<\/em>, which covers almost the same time period as Inventing Japan.\u00a0 That book may not appear in Buruma\u2019s bibliography, but those titles that are mentioned form a solid reading list for anyone desiring to more carefully examine the history of Japan and the United States.<\/p>\n