This book draws on historical demography to elucidate the regional diversity of the Japanese family and its convergence toward an integrated national family model that heralded the modern era, providing a new image of the family in pre-industrial Japan. The volume challenges the idea of early modern (1600-1870) Japan as a monolithic nation based on the ie, – the stem-family household so often mentioned as the fundamental form of Japanese social organization and enshrined in the Meiji Civil Code – which, in fact, came into being at various locales, at various speeds in the latter half of the 18th and the earlier half of the 19th centuries. In addition, there are several chapters which examine the role of women, either centrally or tangentially. With contributions by Mary Louise NAGATA, YAMAMOTO Jun, Hiroko COSTANTINI, Stephen ROBERTSON, MIZOGUCHI Tsunetoshi, NAKAJIMA Mitsuhiro, TSUBOUCHI Yoshihiro and MORIMOTO Kazuhiko.

Winner of the 2014 Choice Outstanding Academic Title Award This book comprises contributions from a distinguished group of international researchers who examine the historical development of "new women" and "good wife, wise mother," women's roles in socialist and transitional modernity and the transnational migration of both domestic and sex workers as well as wives.

This book's strongest appeal lies in its theoretical orientation, seeking to define frameworks that are most relevant to the Asian reality. These frameworks include compressed and semi-compressed modernity, familialism, familialization policy, unsustainable society, second demographic dividend, care diamond, and transnational public sphere. Such concepts are seen as essential in any discussion concerning the intimate and public spheres of contemporary Asia.

Is the Asian stem family different from its European counterpart? This question is a central issue in this collection of essays assembled by two historians of the family in Eurasian perspective. The stem family is characterized by the residential rule that only one married child remains with the parents. This rule has a direct effect upon household structure. In short, the stem family is a domestic unit of production and reproduction that persists over generations, handing down the patrimony through non-egalitarian inheritance. In spite of its ambiguous status in current family typology as something lurking in the valley between the nuclear family and the joint family, the stem family was an important family form in pre-industrial Western Europe and has been a focus of the European family history since Frederic Le Play and more recently Peter Laslett. However, the encounter with Asian family history has revealed that many areas in Asia also had and still have a considerable proportion of households with a stem-family structure. The stem family debate has entered a new stage. In this book, some studies that benefited from recently created large databases present micro-level analyses of dynamic aspects of family systems, while others discuss more broadly the rise and fall of family systems, past and present. A main concern of this book is whether the family type in a society is ethno-culturally determined and resistant to changes or created by socio-economic conditions. Such a comparison that includes Asian countries activates a new phase of the discussion on the stem family and family systems in a global perspective.

This book comprises contributions from a distinguished group of international researchers who examine the historical development of "new women and "good wife, wise mother," women's roles in socialist and transitional modernity and the transnational migration of both domestic and sex workers as well as wives.