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Originally Posted by Lilongyue
No "face" issues here. By the way, if you don't know what I mean by "face issues,"
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Saving face? Guilt vs. Shame? I believe so.
This person's post on another forum sums it up about perfectly.
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Original idea of “Guilt vs. Shame” comes from Benedicts's notorious dichotomy in her “ The Chrysanthemum and The Sword” : Americans feel guilty, Japanese, predominantly shame. The book was written at the beginning of WWII by someone who had never set foot in Japan and did not speak its language.
I sense in her writing an admiration for the Japanese as carriers of subversive values, which was accepted by many Japanese as a valid portrait of their people, although many of them also have strong dissent against her theory. To me, it reads like a rewrite of Nietzsche's dialogue of the aristocrat and the Christian ( rationalist ) in "The Genealogy of Morals," with the Japanese exemplifying the aristocratic sensibility of ancient regime vs. to Roosevelt’s democratic U.S.
In the first essay, section 11 of the book, Nietzsche said "strong, full natures" of the "knightly-aristocratic" or "barbarian" peoples, and celebrates "the Roman, Arabian, Germanic, Japanese nobility, the Homeric heroes, the Scandinavian Vikings," He contrasted the "nobility" he found among these healthy “barbarians” with, according to his claim, the sickly style of equality loving Europeans corrupted by Judeo-Christian "slave" values and then by science and rationalism.
My guess would be that Benedict got from Nietzsche the idea that aristocrats are only concerned with shame, democrats with guilt. Probably she represents the common belief of her circles in 30's and 40's that Americans were stricken with too much guilt!
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I haven't read all of your post yet. It's pretty long and I'll get around to it in a bit. But you seem to be trying to explain Japan on your experience in China. They may be both Asian countries. But like Abrahamic religion is considered western religion. That doesn't mean Christian women are the same as Muslim women or Jewish women. I should think Chinese culture could only give about a fourth of the picture. Chinese culture and Japanese culture are quite different.