The Journal of Japanese Studies

The Japanese Family writ singular and in upper case or the diverse and plural lower-case families of ordinary experience has been the object of story making and scrutiny by observers, policymakers, and scholars of Japan. The discussion of the Japanese family as a “state apparatus,” the state’s desires for it governing its shape and functions, has formed one side of the story line of postwar Japan for some decades. But family is also the rockbed home of a person’s social and emotional identity, the place where a child learns some of the most valuable lessons of relationships and the ways of negotiating membership in institutions beyond the family’s walls, as well as a site of hardship and heartbreak.

The good worker in postwar reconstruction was said to be supported by the good family, the place of solace and preparation for the hard work expected of workers to restore Japan’s economy and create a new robust place for Japan in the world’s esteem. In the economic decline of the 1990s, the family began to be seen instead as one source of Japan’s failure, breeding selfish, undisciplined, “only” children who would further destabilize the nation. And those “only” children reflected a supposed lack of commitment to family and by extension to the state among women who willfully abstained from reproduction. Other issues, the “absent father,” the mother who disdained involvement in her children’s education, and the single parent of choice or divorce, began to rear their ugly heads.

The present volume indirectly demonstrates the discussion of Family versus family and shows how powerful the first can be as an image of correct performance (of self, of relationships, household, community, and state) in policy and as a device of social engineering. In the first chapter by the volume’s editors, Richard Ronald and Allison Alexy, the hegemony of the ideological ideal ie (household, both as steward of a lineage and as the actual [End Page 121] inhabitants of a home) is shown to be in transformation—as it has always been, in spite of its apparent codification as a “traditional” entity. Encoding the ie was nation-state-making work in the Meiji era, and later images of the good family became props for education and corporate people management after the war. The essays in this volume illuminate points of concord and discord, maintenance and resistance in family life and in the relationship between family and other social institutions, as received ideas of family are scuttled in favor of describing the diversity and disorder of real lives.

In this reader’s view, the best chapters are those containing rich ethnographic contexts, or those with concrete environments in which to view policies or economic data, such as Nishizawa Akihiko’s chapter on how the koseki (family register) system laid the ground for homelessness—a story line that is very compelling if one accepts the principles of social exclusion underlying the principles of social order. One of the most interesting is Richard Ronald’s discussion of the meaning of homes as dwelling spaces tying practices of family and community to the structures of housing. Hidaka Tomoko’s discussion of masculinity and the ie system is captivating—under the more obvious story lines are telling details about the roles and experiences of men in families. This essay’s treatment of the burden on men as “daikokubashira” or “the central pillar” holding up the family (and state) is revealing. The essay is marred by some stylistic problems and a fair amount of typographical errors, but nonetheless it is a good read.

Another theme, home ownership, discussed by Hirayama Yosuke, gets to the heart of the premises (literally and figuratively) of family life. This chapter shows families over several cohorts and eras, as they diverge in their strategies and fall-back positions over household formation. Fewer younger families now are...