Amy Borovoy began her lecture at Russell House Monday by asking the audience what cultural elements they associated with Japan. She received a few hesitant replies of “sushi,” “anime” and “Hello Kitty.”
“That’s exactly what I expected,” Borovoy said.
What concerns Borovoy, an assistant professor of East Asian Studies at Princeton University, has very little to do with the icons of modern Japanese pop culture. Instead, she spoke of using Japanese culture and values as a lens through which to understand American individualism.
“Japan became an object of comparison with the United States during the 1960s to 1980s, when the country was experiencing strong economic growth,” she said. “Japan was doing things differently from the U.S., but they were obviously doing something right.”
At Princeton, Borovoy specializes in U.S.-Japan relations and the historical and cultural differences between the two nations, an area of study she said drew increasing attention during and after World War II.
“Following the war and Japan’s unconditional surrender [to the U.S.], the country was ideally meant to be remade in our image, as a laboratory for proving to the rest of the world the universality of American values,” she said.
Borovoy said that it quickly became clear, however, that Japan was approaching capitalism in a very different way, promoting such ideas as meritocracy among corporation employees and violating some of the very fundamentals of laissez-faire economics.
Still, Japan not only had a hugely successful economy but was also able to avoid large labor disputes and other issues associated with industrialization, she said.
“Social scientists were attracted by the idea that the Japanese were not experiencing a rift between the good of the self and the good of society,” she said. “Japanese selfhood was seen as shaped by social institutions, setting and history, as opposed to just the inner goals of the individual, the way the self is typically portrayed in the U.S. By the late 1970s, Japanese studies appeared full-blown in American anthropological syllabi.”
Borovoy cited Ruth Benedict, an American anthropologist commissioned by the U.S. Office of War Information, for having written the first book that really allowed Americans to re-imagine the Japanese.
“Benedict cast a humanistic light on the view of the Japanese, not as indoctrinated en masse and blindly obedient to their emperor, but abiding by values of obligation and reciprocity stemming from the importance of filial piety,” Borovoy said.
Borovoy also focused on Japanese social scientists Watsuji Tetsuro PRE and Takeo Doi POST, whose works emphasized the idea of the family as a microcosm for the nation.
“Instead of trying to locate Japan in the realm of Western, primarily Freudian psychology, Doi especially reflected on a cultural dependency that he saw as uniquely Japanese, a desire within every individual to be passively loved the way a mother loves the infant at her breast,” she said.
However, Borovoy contested some studies that, to her, simplistically viewed Japan as a proxy for values that are non-American.
“There is the concept that Americans are mostly motivated by ego-focused emotions, like anger and pride, and the Japanese by outer-influenced emotions like indebtedness and respect for others,” she said. “This juxtaposition may present some interesting cultural ideas, but it flattens them into some cognitive system of the Japanese mind.”
This led Borovoy to her conclusion, asking whether putting cultures in absolute categories was necessary.
“Why couldn’t some cultures be viewed as socio-centric in a different way, instead of completely ego-centric?” she said. “We can hold up Japan as a way to consider other forms of the self, but it is less useful to suggest that Japan is simply not us.”
Students expressed mixed reactions about the fact that Borovoy spent so little time dealing with the modern pop culture icons she had introduced at the opening of her presentation.
Chikae Yamauchi ’09 said that she enjoyed the lecture but did not feel that Borovoy adequately addressed her question about the state of contemporary Japanese studies.
“I appreciate Borovoy’s objective assessment as a self-proclaimed ‘Japanologist,’ but I would have liked to hear more about the present cultural and psychological impacts of Japan on the U.S.,” Yamauchi said.
Not all attendees shared this view, however.
“I’m glad that Borovoy distanced herself from the pop culture stuff,” said Johanna Goetzel ’07. “Her discussion on identity was very interesting, she’s a great scholar and her topic is so applicable.”
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