Grinnell Cleaver. Japanese and Americans: Cultural Parallels and Paradoxes

University of Minnesota Press, 1976. — 313 р. — ISBN 0-8166-0761-3This began innocently enough as an essay in American Studies. I have suspected my craft of suffering from a weak comparative base, and I wished to strengthen it. We have said this or that about the culture of the United States, but we have seldom asked, compared with what?
Rapidly deteriorating relations between Japan and the United States, however, have urged me to hurry up about it: political considerations now crowd in on the academic ones.
My credentials are none too good. I am properly accredited in American Studies, and 1 trust that my training and practice in interdis-ciplinary study in this field will be helpful here. I have visited Japan on five occasions, from 1945 to 1972, as soldier, Fulbright lecturer, and grantee. Here's the rub, though: I read and write no Japanese, and my conversation with Japanese people is perfectly satisfactory to me only if they are under the age of five. My dependence on translators in Japan and in my study of Japan at home reduces part of this study, then, to the status of the semipro. But I have collaborated with my good friend Professor Shibata Tokue, formerly a commissioner with the Tokyo metropolitan government, now director of the Tokyo Met-ropolitan Research Institute for Environmental Protection, on a long essay on Japan. We had hoped to join forces on this study, but helping govern Tokyo is an arduous business.
A comprehensive comparison of the two cultures is obviously out ofthe question, so I have chosen the method of the prospector after oil, drilling down here and there, where science or hunch suggests that there might be a payoff.
It is my opinion that differences in the two cultures have been emphasized so much that similarities have been overlooked. Further, when differences have been discovered, a moral judgment has often been implied. I hope to maintain a decent cultural relativism, remem-bering that every culture must make its own kind of adaptations to dizzying change. Cultural relativism rejects one habit of mind which Westerners have found difficult to shake off, the supposition that "progress" is multilinear, and follows the path cleared by France, or Britain, or the United States, or the Soviet Union. If a people chooses to solve a new problem in their own way rather than in the way another people solved it, that of course is their business. When solutions involve racism or militarism, however, a writer may surely be par-doned for abandoning his academic objectivity.