What Is a Family?: Answers from Early Modern Japan

Open Access Published by University of California Press 2019

What Is a Family?

Answers from Early Modern Japan

Edited by: Mary Elizabeth Berry and Marcia Yonemoto

https://doi.org/10.1515/9780520974135

Overview
Contents

About this book

A free open access ebook is available upon publication. Learn more at www.luminosoa.org.

What Is a Family? explores the histories of diverse households during the Tokugawa period in Japan (1603–1868). The households studied here differ in locale and in status—from samurai to outcaste, peasant to merchant—but what unites them is life within the social order of the Tokugawa shogunate. The circumstances and choices that made one household unlike another were framed, then as now, by prevailing laws, norms, and controls on resources. These factors led the majority to form stem families, which are a focus of this volume. The essays in this book draw on rich sources—population registers, legal documents, personal archives, and popular literature—to combine accounts of collective practices (such as the adoption of heirs) with intimate portraits of individual actors (such as a murderous wife). They highlight the variety and adaptability of households that, while shaped by a shared social order, do not conform to any stereotypical version of a Japanese family.

Author / Editor information

Berry Mary Elizabeth :

Mary Elizabeth Berry is Professor of History Emerita at the University of California, Berkeley. Her books include Japan in Print: Information and Nation in the Early Modern Period.

Marcia Yonemoto is Professor of History at the University of Colorado Boulder. Her books include The Problem of Women in Early Modern Japan.

Topics

Frontmatter Publicly Available Download PDF	i
Contents Publicly Available Download PDF	v
Lists of Illustrations and Tables Publicly Available Download PDF	vii
A Note to Readers Publicly Available Download PDF	ix
Introduction Mary Elizabeth Berry and Marcia Yonemoto Open Access Download PDF	1
PART ONE. NORMS: STEM STRUCTURES AND PRACTICES
1. The Language and Contours of Familial Obligation in Fifteenth- and Sixteenth-Century Japan David Spafford Open Access Download PDF	23
2. Adoption and the Maintenance of the Early Modern Elite: Japan in the East Asian Context Marcia Yonemoto Open Access Download PDF	47
3. Imagined Communities of the Living and the Dead: The Spread of the Ancestor-Venerating Stem Family in Tokugawa Japan Fabian Drixler Open Access Download PDF	68
4. Name and Fame: Material Objects as Authority, Security, and Legacy Morgan Pitelka Open Access Download PDF	109
5. Outcastes and Ie : The Case of Two Beggar Boss Associations Maren Ehlers Open Access Download PDF	126
PART TWO. CASE STUDIES: STEM ADAPTATIONS AND THREATS
6. Governing the Samurai Family in the Late Edo Period Luke Roberts Open Access Download PDF	149
7. Fashioning the Family: A Temple, a Daughter, and a Wardrobe Amy Stanley Open Access Download PDF	174
8. Social Norms versus Individual Desire: Conventions and Unconventionality in the History of Hirata Atsutane’s Family Anne Walthall Open Access Download PDF	195
9. Family Trouble: Views from the Stage and a Merchant Archive Mary Elizabeth Berry Open Access Download PDF	217
10. Ideal Families in Crisis: Official and Fictional Archetypes at the Turn of the Nineteenth Century David Atherton Open Access Download PDF	239
Appendix Suggestions for Further Reading Open Access Download PDF	261
Contributors Open Access Download PDF	267
Index Open Access Download PDF	269

Language: English
Publisher: University of California Press
Pages
- Main content: 290

eBook

Published: September 17, 2019
ISBN: 9780520974135