Sophia Junior College Faculty Journal
Vol. 30, 2010, 11-21

Toward an Ethnography of Reading:
Nakane Chie in the Japanese Intellectual Marketplace
Chris Oliver
Abstract:
This article offers a re-reading of the book that did much to establish social
anthropologist Nakane Chie as a well-known Japanese intellectual, her 1967
Tateshakai no ningen kankei (Human relations in a vertical society). Rather thanrevisiting the book in terms of its ideational content, which has already been muchdiscussed, however, the present article focuses on the specific type of text that thebook was and how it was accordingly packaged, stylistically, as a work belonging
to a peculiar textual genre in the Japanese intellectual marketplace. In so doing,
the article provides a fuller understanding of the context in which Tateshakai wasproduced and consumed, and lays the groundwork for a more ethnographically based
understanding of how such texts as Nakane’s Tateshakai are read and have lives insociety outside of the realm of“pure”academic discourse.

Introduction
Born in 1926, social anthropologist Nakane Chie first studied Oriental history as
an undergraduate at the University of Tokyo and, after a period of further study inanthropology at the London School of Economics, she went on to become–in

1970–Tôdai’s first-ever female professor.1 While this was no small accomplishment,
Nakane had in fact already become well known in Japan even before this thanks to
her 1967 book Tateshakai no ningen kankei (Human relations in a vertical society).
Published as a small paperback, the book revolves around the premise that Japan is avertical society: that is to say, unlike India or Western societies, with theircharacteristic horizontal stratifications such as caste and class, it is organized aroundvertical divisions that constitute barriers between one group and another and yield astrong group mentality that permeates Japanese society. The book attracted a wide
1 ．Sources of biographical information on Nakane include Kondô & Nakane (1958), Iizawa & Nakane (1970),
Amano (1978), and Kida et al. (1984).

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Chris Oliver

readership, and even a decade after its initial publication, it was still selling some

30,000 copies per year (see Yamazaki, 1978). The book’s standing as what is describedin Japanese publishing lingo as a“ long-seller ”helped give Nakane a degree ofextended public recognition matched by few, if any, other Japanese anthropologists.
In the years to follow, Tateshakai would come to be dismissed by criticallyminded academics–in Japan and abroad–as a representative work in the boom in socalled nihonjinron treatises on Japanese distinctiveness that reached its peak in the

1970s. Befu (1980) offered one of the earlier social-scientific criticisms of“the groupmodel of Japanese society,”and numerous other works followed suit in critiquing
nihonjinron on empirical, theoretical, and ideological grounds (e.g., Befu, 1987; Mouer& Sugimoto, 1986; Aoki, 1990). In this line of criticism, Nakane’s book was assailed
for, among other things, conveniently ignoring contradictory evidence in its effort topresent an overly neat view of Japanese society.
While much has thus already been written about Nakane’s Tateshakai and its
merits as a work worthy of serious academic consideration, in this paper I wish to
indulge in a re-reading of the book. But rather than reading Tateshakai in termsof the more common focus of analysis–namely, its denotational content–I wish to
examine a much less frequently discussed aspect of it: the type of text that it was, andhow it was packaged stylistically as part of a peculiar textual genre. My aim here is
not to consider the book in terms of how other academics have read it, but to take a
step toward a more ethnographic approach to understanding how non-academic,“lay”
Japanese might have engaged with the text.
Reading is by degrees and in varying ways social, involving not only different
types of texts, but also culturally shaped contexts of reading and categories of
persons involved in reading and being read to (see Boyarin, 1993; Rutherford, 2000;
Engelke, 2004). As well, all texts presuppose a certain relationship between author
and readers, and this is certainly true of texts authored by academics, with theirpresuppositions about the knowledge and expertise of the author vis-à-vis readers,and about how and for what purpose the author is to“speak”to them. In this article,
I look at Nakane’s Tateshakai as a complexly constructed cultural product or textartifact (Silverstein, 1996), written for and sold in a well-established marketplace forintellectual knowledge that exists outside of academia proper. It is hoped that thismore situated analysis (Mahon, 2000) will help shed some light on how texts writtenby academics can and do have lives in society that extend well beyond the restricted
realm of“pure”academic discourse.

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Toward an Ethnography of Reading: Nakane Chie in the Japanese Intellectual Marketplace

Japanese intellectuals and their audiences
Certainly most contemporary scholars of Japan are well aware that many
academics and other intellectuals in Japan not only publish scholarly books andjournal articles and contribute pieces to the more“highbrow”monthly journals,
but also have a highly visible presence in popular magazines and other such media.
Indeed, although Nakane was without doubt a successful academic, as indicated byher tenure at what is generally regarded as Japan’s top university, she was by nomeans a cloistered one. She was able to present herself to audiences in Japan that
extended well beyond narrow academic circles, through a variety of forums: lengthy
interviews and discussions in popular weekly magazines such as Shûkan yomiuri
and Shûkan gendai (e.g., Kondô & Nakane, 1958; Iizawa & Nakane, 1970; Kôbô
& Nakane, 1978), contributions to more highbrow journals like Shisô no kagaku
and Chûô kôron (e.g., Tsurumi & Nakane, 1969; Nakane, 1977), presentations at
corporations and“conversations”with business executives (e.g., Nakane, 1971), not tomention a string of paperback books on Japanese society published since 1967.
Yet, scholarly works dealing with the intellectual scene in Japan have drawn
overwhelmingly from texts of a more scholarly or highbrow nature rather thanpublications of the more popular variety. As an example, consider Masao Miyoshi’s
essay on the“conversationalism”that he finds so prevalent in the Japanese print
media. Speaking of the numerous interviews, one-to-one discussions (taidan), panel
discussions before an audience, and roundtable discussions (zadankai) involving
intellectuals that appear frequently in print, Miyoshi writes:
To open a magazine or scholarly periodical is to come across at least one ofthese conversational forms of exchange. (For example, the August 1990 issue of
Sekai, one of the few remaining journals of opinion, contains four zadankai, fourinterviews, and one taidan.) There is hardly any‘writer’who does not practicethis form of group talk-think. In fact, more and more books now being publishedin Japan are merely collections of transcribed conversations, usually packaged
under some imaginative or even provocative title. (1991, p. 218)
While this hints, at least, at the vast range of print material in which suchcommodified,“ purchased talk ”appears, Miyoshi ’ s critique of conversationalism
in“Japanese intellectual life”(1991, p. 219) draws its examples solely from more
highbrow intellectual publications like Sekai and Bungakkai. This academic
predilection is, of course, entirely understandable from a certain point of view, given─ 13 ─

Chris Oliverthat publications of this sort are more likely to contain discussions that–as Miyoshi
puts it–“we wish we could have joined”(1991, p. 223). And yet, one result of thisroutine privileging of certain types of texts over others has been to reveal far more
about the ways that Japanese intellectuals have communicated with each other, tothe neglect of how they address themselves to other audiences as well.

Shinsho in the middle-brow knowledge industry
This is an important point because the market for discoursing intellectuals inweekly magazines and other texts aimed at a wider audience is not merely incidental
to the more highbrow-intellectualist variety. Indeed, in Japan there is a wellestablished industry for producing works that are aimed not at academics and“serious”intellectuals–a group once identified with the label“Iwanami culture”(Iwanami bunka) because of its close association with texts produced by the Iwanami
publishing company2 – but at a broader audience of“lay”readers. Nakane was one ofcountless academics and intellectuals who produced texts of this type, which Katô
(1957) described as“chûkan bunka”or“middle-brow culture.”This broader context ofthe production and consumption of knowledge, developed in Japan after World War II
and wherein intellectual knowledge is mediated, through commodified forms, byacademic-intellectual figures like Nakane, can be thought of as a middle-browknowledge industry (cf. Horkheimer & Adorno, 1944).
What makes Tateshakai a revealing example here is neither its basic argument(which, according to some, was hardly original3) nor its substantial sale figures.
Rather, it is something much more ordinary about the book: namely, that it was
published as a shinsho. Shinsho are a kind of small, slim, affordably priced paperback
that are published in series that continually grow, year after year, as more and more
titles are added by different authors. They are a ubiquitous feature of bookstores inJapan; indeed, one can hardly go into even the smallest of bookstores without coming
across different series of shinsho on the shelves, each series with its own title andcover design, comprised of dozens or hundreds of volumes arranged sequentiallyaccording to the number printed on the spine of each book. By one accounting (Kawai,

2 ．On “Iwanami culture,” see Arase (1983), Kakegawa (1983), and Maruyama (1969, p. 63).
3 ．Kawamura (1980) suggests that Nakane’s main thesis in Tateshakai was strikingly similar to prewar
sociological work by Aruga Kizaemon. See also Mouer & Sugimoto (1986, pp. 43-44).

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Toward an Ethnography of Reading: Nakane Chie in the Japanese Intellectual Marketplace1985), in 1981 there were no fewer than 62 different shinsho series being produced by
34 different publishing companies, accounting for nearly 14% of all book sales.
The format was established in Japan in 1938 by the Iwanami publishing company,
with its“Iwanami Shinsho”series.4 Unlike the older Iwanami Bunkô (Iwanami Library)
series, which had been launched a little over a decade earlier and whose staple wasestablished classics in such fields as literature, philosophy, and religion (everything fromthe Bible to Rousseau to Fukuzawa Yukichi), the Iwanami Shinsho series made as its
centerpiece works that were“new,”written by intellectuals of the present era, on a wide
variety of topics thought to be of contemporary relevance. Titles published in the series
between 1938 and 1950 included, for instance, works such as Bêtoven (Beethoven, 1938),
Gendai Shina-ron (Theories of contemporary China, 1939 ), Tetsugaku nyûmon
(Introduction to philosophy, 1940), Uchû to hikari: chôningenteki shakudo (Space andlight: super-human measurement, 1942), Meiji ishin: gendai nihon no kigen (The Meiji
Restoration: the origin of modern Japan, 1946), Ningen no jiyû ni tsuite (On human
freedom, 1949), Sekai-seifu no shisô (The idea of world government, 1950). Hence, asestablished by Iwanami,“shinsho”(“new writings/books”) came to suggest a kind of
running inventory of contemporary knowledge.
Following the Second World War, the shinsho format as cultivated by Iwanami
was seized upon and replicated by numerous other publishing companies. Beginningin the mid-1950s, a growing number of companies launched their own shinsho orshinsho-like series which, while based largely upon the Iwanami model, have been
pitched to varyingly“lower”grades of intellectualism. The well-known Kappa Booksseries, for instance, was launched by Kôbunsha in 1954. Taking its name from the
kappa, or water imp, of Japanese folklore, which is depicted in a blurb in each bookas“a fiction born from the common people of Japan”and as“friends of our hearts,”
the series was created as a kind of“common people’s”counterpart to the Iwanami
prototype. A number of other series launched since the mid-1950s–Chûkô Shinsho,
Kôdansha Gendai Shinsho, and NHK Books are well-known and widely available
series today–were generally situated somewhere between the austerity of Iwanami
and the lower parameter of Kappa. The Kôdansha series, for instance, in which
Nakane’s Tateshakai was published and which is one of the most widely available
shinsho series today, is indicative. A one-page statement–included in every Kôdansha

4 ．For general information on shinsho and their history, see Kawai (1985), Arase (1968), and Arase (1983).

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Chris Oliver

Gendai Shinsho–about the vision supposedly behind the founding of the series,
explicitly makes an appeal to potential readers’sense of need or desire for their own“enlightenment”(keimô). It proclaims, in somewhat inﬂated rhetoric, that educatedrefinement (kyôyô) is“something that all people should cultivate and create,”and at
the same time it tries to distance itself from snobbish intellectualism by denouncing
what it calls“amakudari［‘descent from heaven’］from the lecture-platform.”Inidentifying its intellectualism thus, the Kôdansha series tries to convey a vision of akind of populist enlightenment, evoking Iwanami Shinsho and Kappa Books without
explicitly mentioning either one.
There are surely numerous factors that contributed to the proliferation of thistype of publication following the Second World War–the end of the U.S. Occupationin 1952 and the lifting of the censorship atmosphere, Japan’s famously high literacy
rate, the respect“traditionally”accorded to teachers and teacherly figures (as wellas learning itself), even the marketing choice of going with the small paperback
format.5 But one factor that cannot go overlooked is the rapidly growing number ofuniversity-educated Japanese after the war. This was made possible, of course, by thereorganization of the entire education system under the American Occupation: the oldsystem, whereby students who went beyond grade six were then channeled into
distinctly different educational“tracks”and only a tiny fraction could ever make it touniversity, was effectively dismantled; the new, American-style system, whose“single-track”approach made higher levels of the system more accessible, prompted adramatic expansion of higher education in Japan on the whole (see Passin, 1982;
Nagai, 1971 ). According to statistics compiled by the Japanese government, forinstance, the number of university students in Japan (excluding junior-college
students and graduate-school students) more than doubled between 1950 and 1955,
and increased more than six-fold between 1950 and 1970.6 This growing, highereducated middle class, it is reasonable to assume, has been the primary target of the
middle-brow knowledge industry that itself blossomed in the 1950s.

5 ．One might consider as well Nakane’s own characterization of Japanese intellectuals: “The intellectuals, who
are at once powerless and antipathetic to political authority, find their role largely limited to educating andenlightening the public, a role which satisfies their elite feelings” (Nakane, 1974, p. 204).

6 ．In 1950, the total number of university students (daigakusei) was 224,923 (or roughly 2.8% of all 19-23
year-olds), and in 1970 it was 1,406,521 (12.5% of all 19-23 year-olds). These were predominantly male: thepercentage of all university students who were female increased over these two decades from 7.7% to 18.0%;
the number of female junior-college students (tanki-daigakusei), over this same period, swelled from 5878 to
217,668 (Sôrifu Tôkeikyoku, 1975; Sômuchô Tôkeikyoku, 1995).

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Toward an Ethnography of Reading: Nakane Chie in the Japanese Intellectual Marketplace

Shinsho-style packaging of knowledge
An important–indeed, crucial–point to bear in mind about shinsho is that
although they are frequently written by university academics, they are not scholarly
texts. Instead, the majority of the texts which make up the various shinsho series
mentioned above belong to a genre known as“keimôsho,”a term glossed by Hata &Smith (1983) as“books for the enlightenment of the public.”Texts of this sort purport
to offer edification or“enlightenment”(keimô) in the knowledge they present, butthey are designed specifically so as to be accessible to a broader range of non-academic
readers.
As Katô (quoted in Yamazaki, 1978, p. 38)–himself the author of numerous
shinsho–once characterized this type of text, shinsho are“guerrilla-like”in approachin that they are problem-centered without getting bogged down in scholarship.
Typically around 200 pages in length, shinsho present knowledge in a highly
schematic fashion: numbered chapters are divided into numbered sections, which
are in turn broken into numerous sub-sections, so that readers need not laborthrough a long, visually dense text, but can instead proceed through the book one
small, bounded parcel at a time. In Nakane’s Tateshakai, for instance, the smaller
subsections appear every one or two pages, such that the next parcel–often comprisedof a single illustrative example or anecdote–is never far away. Moreover, texts of thissort are kept largely free of footnotes, references, bibliographies, and indexes, thepresence of which would give them a more cluttered, more“academic”feel.
This kind of stylistic packaging suggests, in part, a certain kind of mediation ofknowledge. In this regard we might consider the use to which one of the few footnotes
in Nakane’s Tateshakai is put: here, Nakane states that as Tateshakai was aimed at“general intellectuals”rather than being“pure scholastic research,”the book“merelyshows one part of the author’s expertise”(1967, p. 20). She then proceeds, still within
the same footnote, to refer readers to what she describes as a“more elaborate study ofJapanese society”: her own Kinship and economic organization in rural Japan (1967).
Clearly, this reference is not made with the expectation that readers will actuallyseek out and consult the book, since it was in English, for one thing, and probably not
at all easy to obtain in Japan anyway.7 In this manner, the text thus does not invite

7 ．Similarly, later printings of Tateshakai also include − in place of a bibliography − a formal, bibliographic-stylelisting of the English and French versions of Tateshakai.

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Chris Oliver

readers to engage with“pure”knowledge; it instead serves only to emphasize that
this knowledge has already been worked out, elsewhere, by the intellectual herself. As
Hata & Smith (1983) aptly point out, a text like Nakane’s Tateshakai does not set out
to prove its assertions about Japanese society in the manner of, say, a more scholarlysocial-scientific text; it instead seeks only to explain its conclusions in a concise
manner, to make them understandable to readers (see also Befu, 1987 ). It isconstructed, in this manner, so as to be authoritative yet accessible.
Although here I have focused my discussion on the example of shinsho, I believethat this type of text offers a revealing glimpse at the broader,“ middle-brow ”
context of knowledge production and consumption in Japan, and the place occupied
within it by academics and other intellectuals. That is to say, if there is a projectof“enlightenment”associated with the knowledge industry in Japan, it is one thatis presupposing of a certain division of intellectual labor: it presupposes that theknowledge which it offers, in commodified forms like shinsho, is knowledge that has
been worked out somewhere else, by someone else; readers are not invited to evenknow how this knowledge was arrived at, but merely to grasp it in a highly distilled,
reader-friendly form. The texts themselves thus do not represent the working-out ofknowledge, but instead its conveyance, its delivery, indeed its handing-down from afigure of intellectual authority.

Conclusion
The points outlined above could be taken to indicate a trajectory for the middlebrow knowledge industry in Japan not unlike that envisioned by Adorno (1982) forthe culture industry in United States. As Adorno would have it, the nature of popular
music–as a commodified product aimed at the masses–has the effect of producing a
regression in listening: increasingly atomized listening works against understanding
and hearing a work of music as a complex, contextually rooted whole, and the result,he argues, is a diminished capacity to listen carefully. For Adorno, the consequencesof the culture industry have to do with far more than a diminished capacity to listen
to music; at stake is a more profound diminishing of the critical capacity of theindividual overall. One might be tempted to read the middle-brow knowledge industry
in Japan in a similar light: namely, that even though texts like Nakane’s Tateshakai
purport to offer enlightenment, the peculiar manner in which knowledge is packaged
in forms like shinsho may in fact inhibit a careful or critical reading of the content of─ 18 ─

Toward an Ethnography of Reading: Nakane Chie in the Japanese Intellectual Marketplace

the texts themselves.
Of course, one key problem with Adorno’s view of the workings of the cultureindustry is that it rests too much on the premise that the social effects of texts (or ofmass culture in general) can be read from the texts themselves. This position expects
nothing of“the masses”and takes for granted that there is little to be gained frominquiring into how people, as differentially situated social actors, might receive,
understand, question, or otherwise engage with the ideational content of a given
text (cf. Ahmad, 1992, p. 172). This is precisely where an ethnographically oriented
approach to how texts are read–given an“ uptake ”in specific contexts of social
practice–has an important role to play. The present article by itself does not provide
an ethnographic account of Nakane’s Tateshakai in this sense, but by clarifying someof the key ways in which the book was constructed as a cultural product in the firstplace, it lays the groundwork for inquiring into how the text may have been read andrecontextualized in the years since it was first published.

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