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(★)(須恵村)(As the first detailed anthropological study of Japanese life, ´Suye Mura : A Japanese Village´ had the distinction of igniting strong interest in modern Japan among anthropologists. To be sure, not only anthropologists but all Americans became unforgettably aware of Japan only a couple of years later, when the Second World War enmeshed the United States in a no-quarter struggle with this little-known nation. In the general dearth of information on Japan, John F. Embree´s lone monograph was closely studied during the war as a desperately rare and important source of insight into ordinary Japanese life. When peace again settled over the Pacific and anthropologists in considerable numbers resumed study of Japanese life and institutions, they found Japan greatly transformed, first by the Occupation´s program of massive reform and second by her own remarkable feats of economic recovery and development. Now Embree´s work gained new importance as a prewar point against which to measure the impact of subsequent events on rural Japan. Thus history conspired to give this unpretentious but valuable monograph its landmark status that thoroughly justifies its reprinting less than a generation after its first publication.／ ´Suye Mura´, however, has merits of its own. This account of farm life in a remote mountain village in southern Japan stands out for its sensitivity and its gracefully cadenced style of writing. It is a meticulous and unsentimental scientific report. But it is far from dull. Thanks perhaps to his early experience in creative writing, John Embree conveyed his insights and findings with rare warmth, sympathy, and quiet elegance, whether dealing with the details of household organization or with a more dramatic subject such as the village response to the death of a member.／ Few people in this rapidly changing world have had their lives so shaken up as the Japanese in less than one generation. The school children of Suye Mura who trooped down the village roads on the heels of the foreign anthropologist in 1935 are still young parents with mere toddlers of their own. When John Embree visited them, Suye was a rather old-fashioned, folkish village. Homemade clothing, equipment, and food --especially the sweet-potato liquor, ´shochu´-- were familiar to everyone. Imported bourgeois morality had not yet sterilized the bawdy peasant humor characterizing adult parties. The villagers still whole-heartedly shared their work, ceremony, and social or financial obligations collectively, each hamlet behaving as a corporate unit, as Embree clearly noted. Yet we can now see, aided by the hindsight of three decades, how close this tardy village was to the brink of a new era.／ For all its remoteness in the mountains of Kyushu, Suye was about as well prepared for change as more advanced villages of the time nearer the urban centers and routes of commerce. As Embree noted, Suye villagers had access to national markets and could buy factory goods. They were no strangers to telephones and radios, to busses and trains, albeit they did not use these communications abundantly. The school children studied a modern curriculum cut to the same pattern all over the nation, and the boys among them who served as army conscripts reinforced their textbook learning with personal experience in the eye-opening outside world. Thus, when the war and postwar events struck hammer blows at the traditional system, the Suye people were ready to make the most of opportunities for transformation.／ Postwar visitors have noted substantial changes. Most people now have both newspapers and radio ; television sets also now grace many homes. Closer linkage to the outside world comes also through a variety of organizations for improvement of farm life or for recreation, in addition to a greatly altered agricultural co-operative association. Young people move more freely to wage or salary employment inside or outside the village, and an increasing number who go outside to work never return. Conversely, less time is spared for the old-time drinking and singing parties, now that people have electronic entertainment, and certain collective activities have become less imperative and matter of course. Collective housebuilding and money-raising have all but disappeared. Living standards have risen remarkably under national policies that have brought new prosperity to Suye along with farm villages everywhere. Whereas Suye´s prewar average annual household income was about $220 (at prewar values), the average in 1962 was closer to the national farm average, which had risen to an equivalent of over $1,200 (in postwar dollars) --three or four times higher in real buying power.／ As momentous as any change is the remolding of authority patterns within the village, for which Embree´s account unfortunately gives inadequate basis for comparison. Embree´s Chicago training failed him in working out the nuances of class structure. It did not prepare him to seek historical data which would have shown him, with force too great to ignore, how much carry-over of class feelings from the Tokugawa period still governed affairs in his time. What he perceived as a straightforward system of six class level, peculiarly identical to the six classes defined in Chicago-inspired studies in the United States, obscured rather than revealed a deep-reaching, hierarchical structure of power based on landholding, wealth, and inherited family status. He understood well the reciprocity and collective sentiment that bound the villagers together as equals ; but he was almost blind to the cross-cutting pattern of hierarchical inequality that split the village into two main divisions : the mass of ordinary farmers and tenant cultivators at the base and, above them, an upper stratum of families with power and influence. Compulsory redistribution of land --the Land Reform of 1947-- was the key factor that broke the absolute social and political dominance of the few privileged families and encouraged former tenants to improve their land, welcome new methods, and experiment --often successfully-- with new crops. Postwar village prosperity is due in no small degree to the opportunities opened up by the weakening of the local structure of hierarchical dominance and subordination.／ All the changes noted here by no means put Embree´s ethnography of Suye Mura out of date. Undoubtedly, remarkable transformation has affected material aspects of life ; social adjustments, also, have been far-reaching, especially with regard to the class structure for which Japanese scholars have most seriously faulted Embree. But perhaps the most remarkable characteristic of rural Japanese is their faculty for maintaining the integrity of their way of life, of reconstructing by drawing on tradition. The basic crops a generation ago remain basic today, at considerably higher yields. Television and running water have appeared in farm homes without disturbing the basic structure of the house and its setting. New occupational, educational, and recreational patterns have altered lives without eradicating basic and pervasive acceptance of collective responsibility among fellow villagers. The children of 1935 are the adults of today, and, while theirs is a much deeper knowledge of the world at large than their parents enjoyed, they still live by a great many of the values and customs that guided the generation before them, and older generations still farther back. One may still read ´Suye Mura´ and learn a great deal about the fundamentals of Japanese farm life today.／ [Richard K. Beardsley, University of Michigan, from ´FOREWORD to the 1964 impression´]) |
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