ABSTRACT
The chief aim of this book is to give an idea of what it is like to be a Japanese living in Shitayama-cho, a neighbourhood of some three hundred households not far from the centre of Tokyo. It is concerned with what people do—how they earn a living and run a home, how they marry, how they amuse themselves, how they treat their relatives, their neighbours, and their gods—and with what people think and feel, in so far as this can be inferred from what they do and say. The account is based in part on direct observation of life as it is lived, in part on the information gained in the more artificial situation of the formal interview.
