The Ie Family System
The Ie Family System
For more than 1,000 years, central to Japanese family and kinship ties was the Japanese version of the patrilineal extended family called ie. Ie is a patrilineal extended family system in which the oldest son, and perhaps the next one or two sons in succession, stays as adults at home and run the farm or other enterprise, while other sons born after them move off to form branches of the main family. Women leave their own family of birth and become official ie members of their husbands.
The traditional Japanese ie family includes the oldest living members of a single family, at least one grown son, his wife, all young children, and the oldest male children even after marriage. An overriding characteristic of the extended family system is an exaggerated gap in gender roles. Men and women are treated almost like separate species, with women relegated to almost complete concentration on the domestic details of raising children and running the household. Women are only accepted as real members by having children, especially male children.
In most versions of the extended family, emotional ties between husband and wife are not usually very strong, being far outweighed by ties between a husband and his own parents. Marriages bind one extended family to another and so is a matter for the family heads to consider carefully.
The Family Law in 1898 formally established a stem family system that stipulated primogeniture, the passage of family headship succession and allocation of rights of inheritance of the entire estate from eldest son to eldest son. Thus, the Meiji state established the central regulation of the family, and arranged marriages spread thereafter in the late 19th century. The state also enforced laws to make married couples use the same surname, and intensified the domestication of women, and the gendered division of labor.
This form of patriarchal regime empowered the male head of households, and disempowered female family
For more than 1,000 years, central to Japanese family and kinship ties was the Japanese version of the patrilineal extended family called ie. Ie is a patrilineal extended family system in which the oldest son, and perhaps the next one or two sons in succession, stays as adults at home and run the farm or other enterprise, while other sons born after them move off to form branches of the main family. Women leave their own family of birth and become official ie members of their husbands.
The traditional Japanese ie family includes the oldest living members of a single family, at least one grown son, his wife, all young children, and the oldest male children even after marriage. An overriding characteristic of the extended family system is an exaggerated gap in gender roles. Men and women are treated almost like separate species, with women relegated to almost complete concentration on the domestic details of raising children and running the household. Women are only accepted as real members by having children, especially male children.
In most versions of the extended family, emotional ties between husband and wife are not usually very strong, being far outweighed by ties between a husband and his own parents. Marriages bind one extended family to another and so is a matter for the family heads to consider carefully.
The Family Law in 1898 formally established a stem family system that stipulated primogeniture, the passage of family headship succession and allocation of rights of inheritance of the entire estate from eldest son to eldest son. Thus, the Meiji state established the central regulation of the family, and arranged marriages spread thereafter in the late 19th century. The state also enforced laws to make married couples use the same surname, and intensified the domestication of women, and the gendered division of labor.
This form of patriarchal regime empowered the male head of households, and disempowered female family