ABSTRACT
“Culture” is a word that inevitably crops up in any discussion of Japan. It is a word so bound up with Japanese studies that any serious observer of Japan is well advised to come to terms with its uses and abuses. For many Japanese (as well as non-Japanese), this word refers to their “unique” tradition, a collection of customs and beliefs found nowhere else. For some non-Japanese scholars committed to conventional political scientific and economic research, culture is a charming but less important variable, or perhaps a catch-all category for matters that cannot be investigated “scientifically.” For other scholars, aware of the misuses of culture, it is a code word for cleverly disguising or justifying unfair practices and exploitation in Japan. And for yet other scholars, culture means something else; knowledge that is acquired, negotiated on a daily basis, and used to interpret and construct sociopolitical relations and realities. Here I will attempt to disentangle these many meanings of culture found in discussions of Japan and argue that unless they are all clearly understood, researchers and anyone else with a vested interest in Japan run the danger of ignoring the subtle and nuanced operations of power in Japan. There are many works in political science and political economics that mention “culture.” However, for the sake of space, I will focus on one recent work (Reed 1993) that explicitly tackles the issue of culture in Japanese studies and, in my estimation, is representative of common misconceptions about its anthropological meaning. 1
