Industrialization & Urbanization in Japan

AND ITS EFFECT ON

JAPAN'S INDIVIDUALISM

In premodern society, the family was the most important factor to its members. The members depended on others within the family for support in everything they did. In other words, "individual" was not a good word to describe a single person, because that person was just one part of the entire peasant household. Claims have been made by sociologists such as Georg Simmel and Peter Berger that single persons develop individuality as a result of the breakup of the peasant household economy brought about by industrialization and urbanization. This paper will attempt to show that this is not the case for Japanese society.

Simmel's argument asserted that people began to develop individual ideas with the start of industrialization, the division of labor, and urbanization. They began to develop their own skills and therefore were able to go out and earn a living. This allowed a person to meet and get involved with other groups of people outside of the household; thus, the great dependence on the family that at one time was very strong, dissolved. If someone stays within the household only, and does not come into contact with any other group, that person is unable to form his or her own ideas and opinions. On the other hand, someone involved with many people is able to become a very unique and individual person because the more gr

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their deceased ancestors. In this system the eldest son and his wife are expected to live with his parents and grandparents to take care of them and also to assume the responsibility of taking care of family property and the family business. His brothers, when they marry, move away and form their own new ie and become a "branch family" of their former ie (Fukutake, 1982, p. 25). The eldest son inherits the family's property. Fukutake tells us more about the inheritance process: Younger sons might receive portions of the family property when they establish branch families, and so might daughters when they went out of the family to marry, but they did not have any right to demand such a portion . . . (Fukutake, 1982, p. 26). According to the claim that individualism is brought about by industrialism, the inheritance process of the ie system should have dissolved with the Meiji period. To the contrary, the process remained and actually aided industrialization. Fukutake states, ". . . if Japan, like China and India, had been a country which gave equal inheritance shares to younger sons, it might not have been able to ensure the steady supply of labor necessary for industr
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Some common words found in the essay are:
Peter Berger, Restoration Japan, Premodern Japan, Society Nakane, Japan Taking, Meiji Restoration, JAPAN'S INDIVIDUALISM, War II, fukutake 1982, China India, References Dore, industrialization urbanization, peasant household, peasant society, 1982 pp, fukutake 1982 pp, eldest son, japanese society, macfarlane 1979, ie system, marriages arranged, fukutake 1982, process ie system, world war ii, brought industrialization urbanization,
Approximate Word count = 1868
Approximate Pages = 7 (250 words per page)

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