Dear Ellis,

I am afraid I have great sympathy for Ron's perspective. With you I certainly believe that non-Japanese Japanologists work hard to avoid overly simple stereotypes of the people who make up the society they study. I'm sure you are correct; the term "the Japanese" is only "verbal shorthand." But verbal shorthand is precisely the problem, and a very dangerous one for social scientists.

As social scientists we are trained to find ways to divide the world elegantly into small numbers of broad categories. We love parsimonious formulations, forests over trees, what have you. When we political scientists talk to each other, we often use an ironic, snappy, shorthand way of talking--it's just a social custom that shows us as getting the "joke" of our discipline's desires. But I believe it is hard for mere humans to construct categories for their fellow men and women without bringing in a host of preexisting and unexamined prejudices. Even when we are just throwing out conversational generalizations that are always meant to be taken as provisional, half-joking, just-for-the-sake of argument, we have the tendency to choose some categories more easily than others. I suspect those tendencies are often soaked with the elements of power relationships we would wish to dismantle, if only we could see them.

When I went to Japan as a graduate student, I found myself beset daily by the assertions Japanese friends and neighbors made about "the Americans." I was perpetually confused because I simply did not recognize the people about whom they were talking. Many of these Japanese friends were well traveled; they had seen our big cities, been students in our fanciest universities.
They weren't unusually ethnocentric; they were talking about things they seemed to know. Yet, I felt myself to be a sort of authority on my own country, not just because I was American but because, by the time I went to Japan, I had already lived in New Hampshire, Georgia, Tennessee, Virginia, Montana, and Oklahoma. I had visited my mother who had moved to Baltimore and my uncle who lived in DC, traveled to my father's Cape Cod countless times, and knew the roads around my grandfather's home in western North Carolina like the back of my hand.

Toward the end of that first long stay in Japan, I made a trip to the US on a freelance writing assignment from the Mainichi newspaper. I conducted interviews in New York and LA, cities I had never seen. I remember the way those cities assaulted my senses, adjusted as they were to Tokyo life, and I remember thinking, "Oh, THIS is what my Japanese friends were talking about." But I also remember how alien those cities were from the perspective of my America of smallish, mostly Southern towns of white, middle class subdivisions, malls, and grocery stores, and the rounds of after school activities, amateur sports, and exercise classes that occupied the lives of mothers and children I knew, things for which I could easily find parallels in the Tokyo suburb where I lived. New York was - well -huge, complicated, loud, overwhelming New York, and LA, where I got dumped by a broken down public bus in a neighborhood where people were speaking many languages but no English, disoriented me. Even today, Tokyo is home to me in a way these other "American" cities can not be, and in many ways, Tokyoites seem more "like me"
than New Yorkers (including my Brooklyn sister and brother-in-law). So, in my experience neither "the Americans" or "the Japanese" are really shorthand for anything other than "what people generally believe to be so generally true about those people that it needs no specification or explication." And the shorthand for that sort of a shorthand is, I think, "stereotype."

Robin Le Blanc
Washington and Lee University
Lexington, Virginia