Debates over the Ie and the Stem Family: Orientalism East and West

Abstract

The theme of this essay is the invisibility of Japan in European social sciences and neglect of certain aspects of Europe in Japanese social sciences. Japanese social sciences have regarded the ie, the Japanese traditional family, as the pro totype of Japanese social organizations. Japanese management theory, which once became fashionable not only in Asia but also in Europe and North America, saw the characteristics of the ie in Japanese companies. However, most European social scientists who are not Japan specialists know little about the Japanese family. They might have abstract notions such as patriarchy or groupism, but very few of them can answer what the Japanese family is like. Conversely, Japanese scholars know almost nothing about the debates sur rounding the stem family in Europe. The stem family is, as discussed in detail later, a type of family system that has the residential rule that only one married child remains at the parental house. Trans-generational continuity of the household through vertical inheritance is another characteristic of the stem family that often arises from the first rule. In spite of the fact that these char acteristics closely resemble those of the ie, Japanese researchers on the family have not paid much attention to European stem families. European scholars, for their part, knowing almost nothing about the ie, believe that the stem fam ily is distinctively European. The purpose of this paper is to ascertain the reasons for this mutual neglect by reviewing the debates on the ie in Japan and the stem family in Europe over the course of a century. In the last section, I examine the most recent discus sions to place the ie in global context, which should be understood as an example of various attempts seeking the meaning of Japan in global context.

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