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In this paper we juxtapose two readings of immediate post-war Japan. The first, that of Ruth Benedict, is still famous because it adopts the original approach of studying a Japanese society she did not actually visit. The second, that of Jean Stoetzel, uses the method of statistical sociological inquiry, supported by very detailed fieldwork, particularly in relation to young people. This double reading of the same subject shows us that in social sciences, methods and inquiries are very often practiced “back to front”. The quantitative sociologist has shown, thanks to a genuinely ethnographic approach, a very complex reality. The anthropologist, bereft of field data, gives us an abstract and philosophical reflection on a Japan more dreamed than real, more idealized than present, and whose beauty takes us to the borders of an unexpected fiction.