ABSTRACT
The rejection of the Tokugawa and modern pre-war versions of Japan’s homespun cultural theories as ideological was done routinely by non-Japanese in a facile and complacent manner, under the objectivist assumption that the truth lay elsewhere, undistorted and recoverable. This chapter suggests that the crisis of ‘Japanology’ has to do, among other things, with conceptions of culture whose re-examination is forced upon us by the extravagant ways in which cultural theory has been used the last fifteen years or so in what is being called ‘Nihonjinron.’ As a cultural theory about Japan’s distinctiveness, developed by the Japanese themselves, it has a long history and parallels in time the development of Western cultural theories about Japan. Religious and cultural ideas enjoy a double privilege of self-containment. The chapter considers the manner in which power was present in the religious ideas of the Japanese equivalent of the Protestant work ethic.
