日本家族の現代的変動

Abstract

The present paper was prepared originally as the special lecture to commemorate the establishment of Japan Society of Family Sociology on July 21, 1991. It attempts to present a hypothetical overview of the trend of change in Japanese families during the past nearly half a century since the end of World War II.Ideally speaking, families in contemporary Japan have changed from the prewar stem family system called “ie” to the postwar conjugal nuclear family system. I propose to discriminate between two stages in this general trend.The first stage of change covers the first three decades of the postwar period. It is characterized by the decay of the stem family system and the concomitant growth of a Japanese variety of conjugal family, prompted by the breaking of the father-son succession line under the impact of the conjugal family ideology of the revised Civil Code, and facilitated by rapid economic develoment.The second stage of change covers the period after the middle of 1970s, it is characterized by changing husband-wife relationship in contrast to the father-son in the first stage. The change does not suggest a trend toward an anomic family as reported in Western countries but represents wives' protests against male dominance in the nuclear family structure. It has occurred because of the increasing number of working wives, their growing capacity to earn a livelihood, to utilize relevant information, and under the impact of feminist movements.