What Is a Family? Answers from Early Modern Japan. Edited by Mary Elizabeth Berry and Marcia Yonemoto (Berkeley, University of California Press, 2019) 290 pp. $34.95

Abstract

The ie or “stem family” has long been a central unit of analysis for historians, anthropologists, and sociologists working on early modern and modern Japan. This collection explores the formation and function of the stem family from the late sixteenth through the early nineteenth century, shedding new light on the stem family’s implications for a variety of status groups, from samurai to outcasts, and practices such as adoption, inheritance, and ancestor worship. Divided into two sections, one focusing on “norms” and the other on “case studies,” the chapters adopt a variety of methodologies to explore, among other things, the evolution of the stem family, as well as the social and economic tensions that shaped it.All the chapters are well researched, argued, and written, but some are particularly noteworthy for those interested in interdisciplinary history. Fabian Drixler’s contribution on the spread of ancestor worship, a ritual practice that solidified stem-family identification, makes use of quantitative methods and mapping to analyze a diverse set of sources, including family registers, tombstones, and necrologies. Drixler convincingly demonstrates that the stem family arose “jaggedly” and gradually over the course of the early modern period, not becoming normative until the late eighteenth century (93).Equally interesting and innovative are the two chapters that focus on material culture. Morgan Pitelka examines how the circulation of objects functioned in both elite warrior families and commercial families to demonstrate linear succession and the generational passage of authority from one family head to another. Amy Stanley uses clothing, an important asset for ordinary families, to broaden the point. Kimonos were not only passed down from one generation to another; they could also be pawned to raise needed cash. Stanley exposes the tensions of one stem family by focusing on the struggle between a wayward daughter and her family over her wardrobe. Although the daughter regarded her clothes as personal property, her family treated them as household assets. As a result, the daughter ran away.Like Stanley, Luke Roberts adopts a microhistorical approach, this time to investigate the sexual and gendered tensions that threatened warrior families, whose income and status were dependent on the preservation of patriarchal authority. At the center of his chapter is Shō, the wife of a samurai family who killed a foot soldier and former household servant for treating her “rudely.” Roberts’ account of this incident, which is attentive to intimate details within the family home where the drama unfolded, discovers that Shō’s husband and other family members attempted to preserve the family by concealing Shō’s affair with the man that she killed. Their deception, however, violated the patriarchal values sanctioned by the shogunate.Other chapters are more conventional in their approach, but they too are important contributions to the historiography of Japan. The editors and authors are to be applauded for the depth, scope, and thematic and methodological range of this volume.