Marriage, family labour and the stem family household: traditional Japan in a comparative perspective

Abstract

John Hajnal's classic essay published in 1965 on European marriage patterns contrasted western with eastern Europe in terms of age at marriage and proportion never-married. In a more recent article, ‘Two kinds of pre-industrial household formation system’, which is indeed a development from his 1965 essay, the life-cycle is taken into explicit consideration by use of the concept of household formation. In addition, he makes some geographical alterations to his previous argument: the ‘West’ is narrowly defined to cover ‘north-west’ European countries, whereas the ‘East’ now extends beyond the eastern European boundaries to Asian countries such as China and India.

To this formulation there can be two kinds of response from scholars specializing in the Far East, especially traditional Japan. One is concerned with the lack of full discussion of a stem family system in Hajnal's article. He suggests that while some versions of this system are ‘compatible with the general north-west European household formation rules’ and some others are not, ‘[n]o kind of stem family system can be classified as a joint household system’; but unfortunately, no detailed stem family household formation rules are specified, nor is there any discussion of Japan's family system, which has been regarded as a typical example of the stem type.