Professor of Anthropology, University of Michigan, Jennifer Robertson, raised in Japan, is a pacesetter in the study of Japan's society and culture from the seventeenth century to the present, with many seminal works to her credit (e.g. Robertson, 1994, 2001, 2004). In her Introduction: Putting and Keeping Japan in Anthropology (pp. 3‐16) to this fifth volume in the erudite and prestigious Blackwell Companions to Anthropology series, Robertson critically explores the “ancestry” of Japan anthropology in English from its genesis with Benedict (1946) and Embree (1939) in the 1930s onward. For some 30 years Japan was acknowledged in the discipline as an important focus for anthropological research and theorising. Thereafter, until about 1970, Japan seems to have vanished from mainstream anthropology. Robertson contrasts Benedict and Embree:
… Benedict's intellectual project was one of selective incorporation and containment, and Embree's one of linear unfolding (p. 5).
For Robertson, both methods are “equally problematic”. Benedict's “bold bricolage” and Embree's “rather dry, methodical ethnography” contributed to the formation of misleading stereotypes, now stale. Robertson has marshalled a crew of 28 scholars of international standing – Japan specialists of note – to present, in accessible language, new perspectives on Japanese culture and society, past and present.
They range very widely, probing, illuminating and discussing contested issues, controversies, everyday practices. Among the topics analysed in depth – and, often, demystified – are the unacknowledged colonial roots of Japanese anthropology; legacies of nationalist research; eugenics and nation‐building; majority and minority cultures (such as Burakumin, Ainu, Okinawan, Nikkeijin, Korean); class and status; genders and sexualities; urban spectacle and rural “underdevelopment”; domestic, corporate, and educational ideologies and practices; the mass media, leisure, and “infotainment” industries; women's and men's sports; fashion and food cultures; ideas of nature, life, and death; new and folk religions; science and biotechnology. This heady mix of esoteric topics is deftly organized into five reasonably related parts. Cultures, Histories and Identities (ten essays) and Geographies and Boundaries (four essays) set the scene, from tradition to modernity. The myriad problems of globally linked Japan loom large in Socialization, Assimilation and Identification (five essays); Body, Blood, Self, and Nation (five essays) and Religion and Science, Beliefs and Bioethics (four essays).
All these intensely serious, supremely well informed essays contain a huge array of facts that are known to few in western societies. They will blow away our simplistic views and misapprehensions, to reveal a land, a society, and a culture of bewildering complexity, blending millennial traditions with ruthless global dynamism, contrasting inordinate wealth and conspicuous consumption with simple lives of quiet desperation. Academically and politically, this is an unprecedented collective study of major significance. Congratulations to Jennifer Robertson, for a hard job exceptionally well done. Each chapter has explanatory notes and substantial bibliographies. The index (pp. 501‐518) works well for major topics and most named individuals, but misses out on many vernacular terms and names of organizations.
Minor shortcomings apart, this groundbreaking symposium will serve scholars well as a reference volume. It is also designed to serve as a primary text for courses in anthropology and sociology, history, and Japan and East Asian Studies. Challenging yet accessible, this is essential stock for all academic libraries, and for reference libraries with any interest in the disciplines spanned or in Far Eastern Studies. Blackwell Companions are setting an admirable academic standard as they blaze new trails, while keeping well in mind readers perhaps more interested in Karaoke, Kabuki, Karate, and Kimonos than in Shintoism, Zen Buddhism, Aum Shinrikyo, or Meiji history.
