Crested Kimono: Power and Love in the Japanese Business Family

by Matthews Masayuki Hamabata

Matthews Hamabata got off to an unpromising start when he first arrived in Japan to study influential business families. An unmarried, third-generation Japanese-American graduate student, he was there to learn about business executives in their roles as male principals and heads of households. Some Japanese were less than hospitable and often downright rude to him, and the souvenirs bearing the Harvard University emblem that he had brought along for gifts proved to be inappropriate within the highly ritualized system of Japanese gift-giving. In this engaging and personal narrative, we watch Hamabata in the first disappointing six months of his fieldwork as he attempts to map the boundaries of culture, class, and sexuality. "I became my own biggest fieldwork problem," he writes. "Was I inside or out? When I thought I was in, I was actually out, but when I acknowledged the fact that I was out, I was let in." He soon recognized the importance of marital and filial relations in transmitting power in the business world, and he began to direct his study to examining the social and emotional lives of all members of the Japanese ie (household) and the way they affect business activity and ownership. He takes us behind the scenes of the family enterprise to see how the multiple "layers of reality"―biological, social, religious, emotional, and symbolic―relate and cause dilemmas for ie members. (Names, locations, and other details have been altered for the sake of anonymity.) We meet the Moriuchis, the Itoos, the Okimotos―people who must constantly balance their own personal desires against the good of the ie . Many telling vignettes illustrate a central tension in their lives―their need for love, power, and emotional expression versus the constraints of traditional attitudes toward their ancestors, public honor, the economic enterprise, and the obligation to continue the ie over time. A grandfather stubbornly refuses to hand over the reins of succession to the next generation, creating an impossible situation that eventually tears apart an economic empire, as well as the fabric of various interrelated families. Economic, familial, and religious factors figure in a clash for succession between the person who possesses the ancestral tablets and the head of the enterprise. A daughter must reconcile personal love with arranged marriage. Ambitions for the son in line for succession war with the realization that this spoiled, incompetent young man may well ruin the ie . A fascinating portrait of everyday life told with vibrant sensitivity as well as humor, this book is full of the vitality of common life choices, love and commitment, confrontations with death. It is about very real people trying to make sense of their lives―trying to reconcile the roles and duties dictated by custom and tradition with rapidly changing expectations in the international milieu of contemporary Japan.

Genres: Japan, Anthropology, Nonfiction

204 pages, Paperback

First published May 1, 1990

Reviews

[Bob Newman · Rating 4 out of 5]

All in the Family

An interesting study of family patterns and strategies among Japanese business families, Hamabata's book alternates between two poles. On one hand you have extremely complex descriptions of family authority structures and how families develop combined with a lot of Japanese terminology. He takes the theories of a number of writers and tests them out in practice. On the other hand, there is a lot of very interesting descriptive material which not only elucidates the more complex material, but reveals a lot of the research process and the personal tribulations (and even mistakes) of the American author. It's a very honest book from which you can learn the difficulties of anthropological research as well as anything about Japanese society.

There are some contrasts in Japanese society which have been written about many times. Hamabata connects them very skillfully with high-level Japanese business families. One is the contrast between 'ie' and 'uchi', perhaps succinctly explained as between household and home. In the former, continuity and organization are paramount, obligations ('giri') are more important than human feelings ('ninjô'). In the far more flexible 'uchi', it's the reverse. My explanation is simplified, for the details, read the book. Hamabata himself writes, "..the 'ie' looks less like a family and more like a corporate group with a variety of options available to it..." While admiring the author's work and not wishing to detract from it---I felt that few readers would be able to follow everything that he writes about the 'ie', the Japanese household or "family".

On the contrary, the descriptive material is extremely clearly-written. The author was lucky, thanks to certain contacts, to be able to penetrate into the private worlds of several Japanese business families. He socialized more with the wives and talked with the young adult children, rather less with the men at the head of the families because he chose to be "an immature graduate student" rather than a serious scholar who should have been married if he wanted to be taken seriously. Love vs. duty, marriage arrangements, death, authority and a lot about rituals, expectations of life and family behavior are discussed in the various chapters. While CRESTED KIMONO may not be the last word on Japanese society, and the research was done over 30 years ago, it certainly reveals a lot that is generally closed to outsiders, especially non-Japanese. If you were compiling a short list of useful books for an introduction to Japanese society, I would still put this one on it, despite my comments above.

[Ahmed · Rating 5 out of 5]

The alienness of Japanese culture is often remarked upon, in a low-brow sort of way, but what made this book especially appealing to me is that it brings in another group whose alienness, while not as often discussed, is just as significant: the rich.

Hamabata, a second-or-third-generation Japanese-American, visited Japan in the late 70s and embedded himself into three or four of the richest, most influential and high-born families of Japan. The families, the Itoos, the Moruichis, the Okimotos ("names have been changed to protect the innocent"), all own and operate giant corporations. The ie, or household, is the overarching theme: the personal sentiments that we associate with family inextricably intertwined with the politics of control and successorship we associate with large businesses, which through the 70s and 80s were so rocking the economic world. His explorations in this crust of society, informed by and navigated with these families' matriarchs and the scions and daughters, form (1) a personal memoir, (2) an ethnographic analysis, and (3) an academic treatise. The first two more than make up for the quoting-of-nonsensical-citations that Hamabata is obligated to include in order to qualify for the third.

What results is truly fascinating. I learned, in great detail, about how households groomed sons to be successors: what to do with the second and third sons; what happens when the choonan (eldest) lacks the qualities to become the new head of the household; how daughters can be asked to take on a masculine role, sacrificing their feminine aspirations of becoming an oyome-san (bride in her husband's household) by bringing in a muko-yooshi husband from another household into her's, for the household; how the life of an oyome-san isn't all its cracked up to be either but how such a one rises from the lowest member of the household upon first marrying her husband to eventually becoming the matriarch; how omiai (traditional matchmaking) works and how it can go awry; how main and branch families jockey for the power, influence, and wealth that operating different aspects of the business can bring; how the birth of grandchildren and the death of grandparents can lead to a complete reshuffling of the balance of power between sub-units of the household if the succession hasn't been rendered crystal-clear; how the daily papers print diagrams of shinseki networks of matrimonial influence between business (and imperial) families when high-ranking engagements are announced.

This list is meant to be eye-popping and mind-bogglingly interesting. These are things that I, having picked up this book four or more years ago (and finishing tonight), didn't know remotely enough to begin to ask about yet are detailed. Surprising twists are picked apart. Avenues of information are pursued.

The author seems as much an alien in this world as I would be (except with eventually-perfect Japanese, plus an already-perfect Japanese face). His narrative has a strong temporal element, tied as it is to his unearthing of different aspects of this intricate society. The first chapter is in fact about his very difficult teething troubles in getting embedded---I expect that for every Hamabata, there are a dozen other Japanese-Americans who failed this experiment. He has to take himself out of the marriage market by employing the first-person personal pronoun boku, requiring others to treat him as an immature (sexually unavailable) student. He has to learn the intricacies of gift-exchange brought on by his performing services for these families (tutoring, making educational arrangements at Yale summer school, etc.). He learns how to allow interlocutors to let him be American and Japanese, common and high-class, when it suits them (the honne/tatemae dichotomy).

The reader to whom I am most qualified (embarrassingly enough) to recommend this book to is the Japanophile: there is a lot here about Japanese culture, but I had to keep reminding myself that the rich are weird no matter where you go. As for general recommendations, as a lay reader interested in Japanese culture and language, as well as broader themes in Asian affairs, ethnography, and economics, this little book was a fascinating, invigorating, and frightening look at an upper crust of Japanese society. And I'd like to conclude with a brief caveat (instead of peppering it throughout the above): I really have no way of knowing how accurate and realistic this portrayal is. I look forward to the rest of my life, validating or discarding the many ideas Hamabata presents.

[bookreader]

A confessional, sui generis work of cultural anthropology in which the "fieldwork" consists of "villages" of wealthy family businesses (douzoku gaisha) in Tokyo. The author goes well beyond the honne/tatemae divide to reveal a treasure trove of detailed information about Japanese business & cultural practices (many of which were new to me, but also including some rare gems that I've discovered in my travels to Japan, but had never seen mentioned in print before).