14
RICE UNIVERSITY STUDIES
ence, whether they are pursued by anthropologists or scholars of other
disciplines.
The recently-published volumes on the Bermuda conferences on modern
Japan provide an opportunity for checking mutual relationships among
the two broad categories of academics engaged in the study of Japanese
society. In the economics volume, The State and Economic Enterprise
(Lockwood, ed. 1965), two anthropologists and seven sociologists are cited.
All nine citations are to works on Japan. In the volume of studies on Political
Development (Ward, ed. 1968), twelve behavior scientists are cited. Of these,
five anthropologists and three sociologists specialize in the study of Japan;
the remaining three sociologists and one anthropologist are not Japan
specialists.
InAspectsof Social Change (Dore, ed. 1967), fifty-one historians, political
scientists, and economists are cited. (This count is conservative; at least ten
borderline cases were omitted.) Twenty-eight were authors of works on
Japan, and twenty-three wrote on topics other than Japan.
The considerable disparity between the behavior science volume and
the other two suggests that although economists, political scientists, and
historians can write meaningfully about Japan without detailed reference
to the work of behavior scientists, the converse is not true. It can be argued
that the difference may be due to the greater backlog in the former fields,
and to the relatively unspecialized nature of the behavior science effort as
a whole: it covers a much wider range of topics and therefore properly
engages in a more detailed search of the entire body Ofliterature on Japanese
society.
However, we may also observe that most of the fifty-one citations in the
Dore volume concerned studies of the nation or society as a whole. As a
body, these writings command respect and constitute an imposing, and
also embarrassing, standard for the behavior scientist working in the Japan
field. The microsocial focus of so much of the behavior science effort has
required that the work of the other scholars be brought in when statements
are made about the national entity.
Very few studies by anthropologists are based on historical documents.
Robert J. Smith’s reconstruction of “pre-industrial urbanism” (1960), R. P.
Dore’s study of Meiji agriculture (1960), and Harumi Befu’s study of village
autonomy (1968) are three outstanding examples. In all cases problems
deriving from anthropological frames are dealt with on the basis of historical
materials, thereby shedding considerable light on contemporary society.
However, these studies would have difficulty meeting the standards set by
economic historian Thomas C. Smith (1959) on the role of rural society in
recent Japanese history, or political historian John Hall’s work on the
castle town (1955 and 1968). Such studies by historians could benefit from
anthropology’s more analytical formulations of problems, but anthropolo-