ABSTRACT
The basic unit of social organization in Japan is the household. The village is usually conceived by the inhabitants as a group of households, and the size of the community is often given in number of households rather than by number of individuals. The household is integrated into the community through several institutions; kinship groups, localized groups, occupational groups, and religious associations. Despite this, there are tendencies that the fishermen are increasingly isolated from the rest of the population in Shingū, but in order to understand this process it is necessary to analyse the framework in which the household operates.
