ABSTRACT
Having looked at the ideological position of the family in Japanese society in general, we shall now focus on the very heart of the home to look at the world that is first presented to a Japanese child. Socialisation is the means by which an essentially biological being is converted into a social one, able to communicate with other members of the particular society to which it belongs. A child learns to perceive the world through language, spoken and unspoken, through ritual enacted and through the total symbolic system that structures and constrains that world. Through socialisation a child learns to classify the world in which it lives, and to impose a system of values upon it.
