ABSTRACT

A Ll societies have a family system, but few are as consciously aware of their family system as the Japanese. The average Englishman would appreciate that the ways his fellow-countrymen get married, live together and have children follow certain fairly consistent patterns, but he would be likely to consider these simply as patterns of natural, normal behaviour. He would think it odd to hear this called the ‘English family system’ with all the suggestion of arbitrariness and uniqueness which such words imply. In Japan, however, the ‘Japanese family system’ is a widely used term. Those Japanese who were at school before 1945 have read about ‘the family system of our country’ in their school text-books; they have learned to recite the Imperial Rescript on Education which enumerates the values and obligations of that family system as virtues peculiar to Japan. Before 1945 they heard politicians, school-masters, the local mayor, the local battalion commander and countless publicists of press and radio stress the importance of ‘the family system of our country’ as the embodiment of all that was fine and noble in the national tradition, the only suitable training ground for patriotic and loyal citizens, the secret of the moral fibre of the Japanese people the core (foundation, pillar, bulwark) of the national polity. Since the war they have heard somewhat less assured voices (sometimes from the same politicians and the same publicists) denounce ‘the Japanese family system’ (it is in approving contexts that ‘the family system of our country’ predominates) as a hindrance to democracy, the last and strongest rampart of feudalism, symbol of a morality which ignores human rights, inhibits individual enterprise and responsibility, enforces the eternal subjection of women, and fosters the attitudes which facilitate the organization of a totalitarian state.