ABSTRACT
The face of the landscape itself has changed. Where once rural Japan was crisscrossed with tiny, fragmented parcels of land, entire rice plains evoke the rectangular symmetry of the checkerboard. Traditional rural Japanese culture, which for the last hundred years seemed impervious to modernizing influences, has not merely changed; in many—though not all—ways it shows signs of disappearing. The rural Japanese woman’s second major function is farming. “Housewife farming” has been facilitated by revolutionary changes in the technology of Japanese agriculture. Customs guiding the social life of farming communities, in particular those relating to sexual segregation, seem more resistant to change than any other aspect of rural Japanese life. It is the generation of rural Japanese in their early forties for whom this problem is most pressing. They are the first members of their family to be educated in high school under the new democratic curriculum.
