ABSTRACT
T He word giri has become known to sociologists and anthropologists as a result of the prominence it received in Ruth Benedict's brave and percipient attempt to describe Japanese notions of moral obligations by means of an analysis of some of the key words used in talking about them. Her researches led her to the conclusion that giri is ‘one of the most curious … of all the strange categories of moral obligations which anthropologists find in the cultures of the world’ and that ‘it is specifically Japanese’. 223 methods of verbal analysis which she employs have, however, serious limitations. To take an English example, it would be difficult to draw any confident conclusions concerning English ideas of moral obligation from the fact that the Englishman (unlike the Japanese) uses the same word—’ought’—both in sentences of the type ‘If he left on the 2.30 he ought to be here by 4’, and in sentences of the type ‘If he married her he ought to support her’. The word giri has had many uses at different historical periods and in different sub-cultures in Japan. In Ruth Benedict's account, these various uses, embodied in phrases to be found in dictionaries, were all given equal weight as ‘common sayings’ and, these, together with the explanations of them by her Japanese informants, provided the raw material out of which she sought to create a unified ‘category’ of moral obligation. The method is a logical extension of her basic assumption—surely a mistaken one —that there is such an entity as a homogeneous ‘Japanese culture’ or ‘Japanese culture pattern’ which persists through time and pervades all regions and all social classes; as such, the result could not be other than ‘curious’. But giri loses most of its curiousness if one does not expect it to represent a moral category in the sense that it is used of, and used only of, a set of obligations which are conceived by the Japanese as all having the same compulsive nature and as all being enforced by the same sanctions.
