A Pattern of Japanese Society: Ie Society or Acknowledgment of Interdependence?

In his magisterial reanalysis of all of Japanese history, Murakami has presented us with an argument so complex that it will be some time before all its implications will emerge clearly. I shall leave the task of applying his insights to those more familiar than I with the historical materials he so skillfully weaves into a seamless developmental progression from proto-uji through modern uses of the ie principle. Rather I shall focus on that portion of his article dealing with the modern state (pp. 339-63) and more particularly with his intriguing argument that the ie or mura-type practice was revived for the hard times of the 1930s and the World War II years (pp. 357-58). The argument, I take it, is that following a hiatus of some decades after the Meiji Restoration, the ie (household) or mura (village) has reemerged as a fundamental organizing principle of postwar Japanese society. As a point of departure, let us consider the following passage from a book intended for a general audience that takes a similar position vis-a-vis contemporary Japan, using a somewhat different vocabulary. Urging the reader to see that in Japan industrialization has proceeded in ways quite different from the path it took in the West, Collick writes: