He thinks that the US anthropology "Japan Specialists" are now so numerous that they can conduct academic dialogues about Japan among themselves and use their Japanese contacts as "informants" rather than seeing them as having intellectual opinions worth valuing.
Here's some of the article:
"What was interesting to my American students about Japan," mused anthropogist Takami Kuwayama in a recent interview, "was not interesting to me at all"
...Among the spices of Kuwayama's conversation - and of [his book] "Native Anthroplogy" - is his amiable disdain for the failure of American anthroplogists to transcend, or even perceive, their ingrained American prejudices regarding Japan.
...[Dorinne] Kondo, he argues, writes [in "Crafting Selves"] for Americans who take the rugged individualism of American culture as a natural human standard, anything deviating from which is seen as peculiar - and therefore suitable for anthropological study. But to a Japanese, the subordination of the individual is as natural as individualism is to an American.
"Indeed," Kuwayama notes, "'Crafting Selves' would make an ideal target for the persisitent Japanese criticism that foreigners' writings on Japan are boring because, to a Japanese, they are merely common sense."
Kuwayama's book is a good one. He is very aware that some pockets of Japanese anthropology are home to nationalists with an agenda but points out that this is true in many countries. France and Germany have their fair share of that strand of thought. He also has an analysis of US anthropology textbooks and highlights their hilariously inappropriate use of photographs and muses on the predominance of pics of girls in kimono. My favourite is the book that writes that blind people in Japan have an uniquely better route to literacy than sighted compatriots because they only have to learn Braille while everyone else struggles with kanji and kana.
The Trans Pacific Press has a good series of anthropology texts but, sadly, like most academic books, these are all around 5-6000 yen a throw even in paperback. Two other good ones are "Hegemony of Homogenity: An Anthropological Analysis of Nihonjinron" by Harumi Befu and "A Genealogy of 'Japanese' Self-Images" by Eiji Oguma.
If you really want to hit your wallet, try Ryang's "Japan and National Anthropology" for nearly 20,000 yen. Published by Routledge in hardback. That takes a look at why Japanese and US anthropologists are hopeless at working with each other.
