The Japan’s domestic arrangement, ie, comprises five
characteristics that together identify it.
1) The ie is typically stem rather than joint, forming a
household with only one married couple in each generation.
Unmarried daughters and second sons can be found in them
historically, but never married brothers.
2) The ie is an extended family typically reaching three
generations, rather than nuclear.
We cannot, however, expect to
see three living generations or two or necessarily even one in
every ie when we look at a snapshot in time of any ie over the
course of the domestic cycle of reproduction.
An ie may even
subsist for at least a brief interval with no living members, to
be saved from the brink of extirpation, revived and repopulated
by the living.
3) Ie are typically patrilocal, the new bride joining her
husband and his parents at his home.
In this matter, however,
ie are flexible to a substantial degree.
We can find
historically and at present household headed by women over the
generations, prominently among household of geisha, and commonly
among households making a living in the hospitality industry
centering on inns and bars known as mizu shobai (the water
trades).
These ie are matrilocal, not matrilineal.
The
fascinating pattern of postmarital residence found in the
mountains above Gifu in Shirakawa Village, demonstrates how
great the distance between local understanding and a snapshot in
time can be.
Now a UNESCO international culture site
characterized by its unusual domestic architecture known as
gasshozukuri, named for the shape houses of three and even four
floors of A-frame construction designed externally to shed the
heavy snowfall of the region, and so thought to resemble hands
pressed in prayer.
Internally these structures accommodate the
raising of silkworms, for which this region was formerly famous.
Women tend silkworms, which only eat freshly picked mulberry
leaves, and handle their cocoons.
Consequently, households are
reluctant to release their highly skilled and trained daughters
to their husband’s homes.
A snapshot, then, of the kinship
relations in such a home shows a pattern indistinguishable from
matrilocal residence, brothers and sisters and sisters’ children
under one roof.
The ideology of these homes, however, is no
different from any other ie, but simply a matter of the
extremely slow release of brides to live with their husbands.
The emic view on extended family living offers a piece of advice
on this point, that the junior and senior generations should
live far enough apart that when the daughter-in-law brings her
husband’s parents soup, it will be neither too hot to drink
immediately, nor too cold to drink at all.
What a snapshot
shows, then, depends on the prosperity of households, among
other things.
In one example from my own experience, three
houses were standing on one property.
The oldest was over 100
years old, and when the owner built himself a new house
immediately adjacent, he left the old one standing to rent out
(at one point in the house’s history, to me).
And when it
eventuated that he and his wife would not have a son as well as
a daughter, they built a third house on the property for their
daughter and her husband, whom they adopted, who gave them a
grandson and a granddaughter, living with their parents in the
newest house.
A standard census would reveal at least two
nuclear families living on this property.
My landlord and wife,
and their daughter and son-in-law understood themselves to be
living as one three generation ie.
4)
Ie are corporate.
features.
This concept combines a pair of related
First, the ie has property which serves as the basis
for its members living.
This property belongs to the ie and is
administered by the household head.
The property of the ie is
not the personal property of the household head, and may be both
intellectual and material.
This results in a stock phrase in
English translation, which requires two words, “heir and
successor,” to cover the Japanese case in which one person only
is always identified as atotsugi.
Kenkyusha’s J-E Dictionary
translates the Japanese “Ano hito ni wa, atotsugi ga nai” as “He
has no heir to succeed him,”
although English culture typically
associates inheritance with property and succession with office.
The office of household head and the estate the household head
administers are both components of the ie.
This leads to the second feature of the ie’s corporate nature,
its perpetuity, that each generation will pass the property of
the ie to the next generation that each successor will pass his
office and the ie’s property – material and intellectual -his own heir and successor.
to
The ie’s most characteristic
intellectual property is access to its no longer living members,
its senzo, ancestors, as they are called in English.
(1964 Where the family of God is the family.
Plath
AA 66:300-317.)
clarifies for us that these no longer living members are not all
ancestors, but simply dead.
And since the early 17th century,
the dead of the ie have been attended and their suffering
diminished through Buddhist rites, which gradually transform the
recently dead into the Buddha.
This intellectual property is
materialized in the home by a cupboard in which are memorialized
the names of deceased members of the ie.
Only ie with deceased
members have these cupboards, butsudan.
Families of persons who
are not atotsugi do not have butsudan until someone in that
household dies.
That a household formed by a second son does
not contain a butsudan does not mean that he is not a devout
Buddhist (Reader, Ian (1995). Japanese Religions: Past and
Present. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press) any more than the
fact that only he, his wife and two children co-reside, makes
them a nuclear family rather than an ie.
5)
The kinship relations of the ie are bilateral (Brown in AA),
not patrilineal; they have not been and are not becoming
matrilineal.
Japanese kinship has always been bilateral, at
least as far as we can infer from linguistic data (Smith in Self
book).
Japanese kinship terminology is Eskimo, which fact
created some substantial difficulty when adopting the Chinese
system of writing in the 7th century.
As might be expected, the
Chinese wrote about, and so created characters for, the
relationships that formed their family lives.
These relations
centered on patrilineal descent, which corresponding linguistic
usage characteristically distinguishes, e.g.,
between Father’s
Brother and Mother’s Brother, Father’s Sister and Mother’s
Sister, which Eskimo, Japanese, English and so many other
languages of societies in which kinship is bilateral and
distinguish Ego’s Parents from Ego’s Parents’ Siblings on both
sides.
(find Robert Smith on this – in his Self book)
It is
important to distinguish the nature of Japanese kinship from the
overwhelmingly common practice in Japan of naming a male as heir
and successor.
Again, the heir and successor in geisha houses,
for example, is female.
But in all ie in Japan, kinship is
bilateral, children are equally related by descent to all four
grandparents.