Rural entrepreneurs occupied an anomolous position in premodern Japanese society. They appeared late in the Tokugawa period (1600-1868), a product and producer of the economic changes that complicated the social and political system of their time. Their address in the countryside suggested peasant origins, but they appeared only where the spread of farm by-employments and access to transportation networks permitted a mixed bag of agriculturai and commercial enterprises including money lending, cloth jobbing, and shipping. They played a crucial role in developing and disseminating technological advances in farming and handicraft industries ? improved designs for specialized tools and more reliable methods for raising silkworms being among their achievements. Without them, it is doubtful that Japan would have become transformed into an industrialized society in the nineteenth century.1 Rural entrepreneurs also dominated local politics and practiced the tea ceremony, poetry writing, painting, and the martial arts. In some areas, they supported samurai dissidents whose assassinations and rebellions preceded the centralization of government under the Meiji emperor in 1868.2 Despite their importance, however, their definition as a class remains amorphous. One approach to the problem of how to define the rural entrepreneurs is to analyze how they defined themselves. This they did in early nineteenth-century family histories and diaries created deliberately, I argue, to establish a style (Jca/u), comprising the household history, its culture, and occupation.3 The term kafu also includes a specific and conscious effort to impose certain sets of values and standards of behavior on family members. It therefore carries ideologi? cal overtones. In this study, the emphasis is not on the ideological hegemony of the ruling class, but on the ideological hegemony created within the household itself. As this process went on, the system of representations inspired by the interests of the family head was given a totalizing comprehensiveness and applicability to all other family members not its originators. Nevertheless, the set of values stemming from the life experiences of disadvantaged members, espe? cially the women, permeated this ideology sufficiently to offer them benefits, material and emotional, to weigh against its constraints on action and position.4 The notion ofkafu had a definite class bias, and it was also bounded by time. No family histories or diaries for rural entrepreneurs were created or preserved before the latter part of the Tokugawa period. As Martine Segalen has pointed out for French peasant families, only families with a hereditary claim to land and position had the wherewithal to become the bearers ofa family ideology,5 and in Tokugawa Japan, few but the wealthy had the means and inclination to define the character of their house and expect it to endure over time.