The Chrysanthemum and the Sword is a seminal study of Japanese culture by Ruth Benedict who was commissioned by the US government to study Japanese culture in order to understand how to govern it after WWII. It turns out that she was a colleague of the infamous Margaret Mead, and like Mead I�m not sure her legacy is completely positive. She is most famous for her analysis of Japan as a culture of shame in relations to western cultures, which are cultures of guilt. However, many of her observations about the Japanese no longer hold true, since Japanese culture has changed so much since WWII. In particular the analysis of societal obligations is no longer valid in my opinion, although I think there are traces of this legacy even today, but not to the extent that Benedict writes about. I am assuming that this study also suffers from the fact that Benedict never had the opportunity to live among the Japanese to make observations on the culture firsthand, which seems to me to be a huge limitation. However, I did find her chapter on �The Meiji Reform� interesting and well written. I had been meaning to read this book for a long time, but was recently reminded of it by a colleague at a meeting where we were reviewing the English entrance examination questions. One of my Japanese colleagues felt that a particular question was reinforcing Japanese stereotypes and said, �That sentence looks like it was written by Ruth Benedict!� So I�m not sure how the book has been received by the Japanese themselves, but I have seen references to it by other Japanese anthropologists and observers. (Sawa Kurotani, who writes the Behind The Paper Screen column for The Daily Yomiuri, and Takeo Doi, author of Anatomy of Self)