On Living with Your past: Style and Structure among Contemporary Japanese Merchant Families

Abstract

Western journalists writing on Japan seldom fail to note with fascination the juxtaposition of the new and the old, the Eastern and the Western. Japanese, too, take pleasure in examining some of these exotic blends and upon occasion refer to them as champon, which is to say, chop suey. Such a condition, of course, is not unique to Japan, as Linton so delightfully showed in his article, One Hundred Percent American.' But because the Japanese, and perhaps ourselves as well, have clear ideas as to what is Japanese and what is not, these contrasts seem all the more stark and curious. Nonetheless, aesthetic tastes and ideas which channel particular cultural elements into contemporary Japanese life styles are neither random nor new. Smith has shown how present-day urban life styles are still to a surprising degree shaped by aesthetic canons of taste which originated within the multiple traditions of Japan's preindustrial past.2 In this paper I wish to raise the question of the continuation of these into the future. Two frequently discussed contemporary urban styles are those of the white-collar worker (sarariman) and the downtown merchant.3 Downtown merchants are heirs to the colorful and culturally rich tradition of the chonin (townsman) social class of preindustrial Japan. Many whitecollar workers, on the other hand, participate in a samurai tradition replete with appropriate bureaucratic ideals-urban samurai at the close of the Tokugawa period (mid-nineteenth century) were well accustomed to bureaucratic procedures, and their transformation into a white-collar social class is hardly surprising. Japanese commonly distinguish between these two life styles by referring to one as Yamanote, the name of a