CONTEMPORARY JAPAN: THE JAPANESE FAMILY The Traditional Family: Ie |
| Although Japanese family roles have changed considerably in the 20th century, aspects of the traditional ie, or “continuing family,” still remain. The Japanese have a saying that even if an extended family does not live together, parents and grandparents should live near enough to carry over a bowl of hot soup. In this video series, Harvard University professors Theodore Bestor and Helen Hardacre describe the enduring importance of traditional family values in Japan. |
Theodore Bestor :: The traditional Japanese family, known in Japanese as ie, is a very complex kinship unit, a very complex kind of a family system. It’s multigenerational; it’s an extended family. That is to say that there may be three, four, and conceivably even five generations of a family living together, so great-grandparents, grandparents, parents, children, and then perhaps even the children of children. And it has a variety of characteristics that are perhaps unfamiliar to most Americans because they’re outside of our experience. First of all it is very clearly a patrilineal system in which all of the property, all of the social standing, all of the rights and duties and obligations are expected to go from father to son, father to son, father to son, which has a number of implications. One of them is that, in this particular system, only one child inherits. All of the other children in any generation are expected eventually to leave the family and go establish themselves in some other family or some other social institution. So, in anthropological terms, we call this primogeniture, where the eldest child, and usually the eldest son, inherits the family, everything to do with the family, and the rest of the children have to find their own way in the world. |
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