A Companion to the Anthropology of Japan (review)

A Companion to the Anthropology of Japan differs from various other anthropological volumes published by Blackwell, which adopt what might be termed a "best hits" approach (mimicking the CD collections advertised on low-budget TV) in reprinting prominent journal articles or book chapters published elsewhere. This collection contains no reprints but only chapters written originally for the volume at hand. The advantage of this strategy is that the book thereby avoids being an assemblage of pieces never designed to fit within a single volume; it has a general unity that is admirable. The disadvantage of this strategy is that most of the book's chapters are broad summaries of different areas of Japanese life, bibliographic accounts rather than analyses of primary research. In my view, the advantages of this approach outweigh the disadvantages, but the reader should be aware in advance of what this book is and what it is not. It is a primer and review (particularly of the Japanese literature) of fields and topics of interest to anthropologists of Japan; it is not, with just a few exceptions, analyses based on individual anthropological fieldwork. Some of the most prominent anthropologists of Japan today are absent as chapter-writers in the book, something unusual in many other books published by Blackwell, particularly in its Readers series, but reasonable given this book's approach.

Robertson's introduction sets forth in its initial pages a misleading pronouncement for understanding the book. She asks, "Where is 'Japan' in anthropological discourse today, and what are the 'significant contributions to social and cultural theory' that Japan anthropologists have made since 1970, and are making today?" (pp. 3–4). This is a very apt question but one that remains unaddressed by either Robertson's introduction or the book as a whole. In the 1970s, some anthropologists portrayed Japan as an alternative exemplar of modernity, proceeding down different paths than Western societies; in the late 1980s, some anthropologists portrayed Japan as a global exemplar of postmodernity; and in the 1990s through today, some anthropologists have portrayed Japan as a bastion against globalization, or as the engine of globalization in Asia. These discussions are essential for placing Japan within global theoretical discussions but do not much appear within this book's pages. Nonetheless, Robertson makes some valuable points in her introduction. She suggests that the earlier, largely homogenized portrait of Japan offered by Ruth Benedict is being replaced by the "multifaceted mode of a 100-headed Kannon" (p. 8), both within Japan through the voices of Koreans, Ainu, and other "others," and also beyond Japan, in the variegated portrayals of Japan provided by essays of this volume. She also comments that "the relative dearth and narrow scope of the Japanese-language materials utilized in a significant proportion of [English-language] ethnographies on Japan is dismaying" (p. 9), a dearth that the book at hand attempts to overcome. Perhaps the single greatest value of this book lies in its discussion of Japanese scholarship on a wide variety of anthropological topics, a contribution that could help end the dearth Robertson describes.

I cannot do justice to this book's 29 chapters by summing them up; but because diverse readers of this review with different interests will want to know what the book's chapters cover, I feel it is important in this review to briefly describe them all. Following the book's introduction, Part II of the book, by far its longest with ten chapters, explores "Cultures, Histories, and Identities." Katsumi Nakao considers in chapter 2 "The Imperial Past of Anthropology in Japan," arguing that understanding prewar ethnographic research entails a recognition of Japan's past that is now sorely lacking: "The emphasis, by postwar Japanese scholars including anthropologists, on Japan's disconnectedness from its former empire has encouraged an amnesia regarding the role that they and their predecessors played in Japan's colonial expansion and its aftermath" (p. 32). Chapter 3, by Walter Edwards, considers the history of archaeology...