Above the Clouds: Status Culture of the Modern Japanese Nobility

4. Successors: Immortalizing the Ancestors

FOUR Successors Immortalizing the Ancestors ncestor worshippers in Japan mention as a major reason for their devotion the debt they owe their forebears for their very existence. Certainly they would not have come to life without their ancestors, but neither would the ancestors have continued to exist without descendants. Essential to the ancestor cult is the interdependence of ascending and descending generations. (Ancestor worship, then, implies the worship of descendants as well.) Devotion to ancestors is demonstrated by perpetuating their legacies through a continuous line of generations of descendants. For reasons to be spelled out below, the perpetuation of ancestors is conceived as "succession," and descendants foremost as "successors." This chapter looks at kazoku families in terms of succession: what is involved, who the successors—or descendants—were, how they related to the predecessors, and what contemporary successors did and do to keep their ancestors alive. Inevitably, too, our discussion will lead us to explore more fully the structure of the ie (stem-family household), a central element of Japanese social organization. This and the previous chapter should be taken as two sides of the ancestor cult. The present chapter consists of two parts. Part one is concerned with succession itself, which again calls up the central issues of this book: opposition and collusion between structure and practice, or culture and nature. As defined in chapter 1, hereditary status, like any other status, is a cultural construction, and yet "heredity" is attributed to some version of nature, such as genes, blood, and birth. I focus on how the "cultural" status was sustained by replenishing the blood bank, so to speak—that is, by expanding the population of blood donors. Here we reencounter the ie, which serves as the main vehicle of hereditary status. Part two 106 A turns to rituals and symbols that memorialize and celebrate ancestors, thus perpetuating them. My perspective here extends to the post-Meiji state of religion, especially the relationship of Shinto and Buddhism, to show how that history affected the ancestor rites for the kazoku more than for commoners. ADOPTION FOR SUCCESSION Genealogies usually follow a patrilineal descent model as if to substantiate the assumption of blood continuity for succession. Remarkably, however, when I set out to ascertain the identities of successors of the latest generations , I discovered a high frequency of adoptions to recruitsuccessors. Indeed, few interviews did not reveal instances involving either the informant or primary kin as a party to adoption, and in some cases it turned out that adoption had taken place over three generations in a row. For example, I spoke with a son of a daimyo viscount who was adopted by a kuge count. His deceased adoptive father had been also adopted from another kuge-count house, and his (my informant's) successor son was adopted, too, from a daimyo viscount. Occupying the middle position in this three-generation adoption series, the informant said: "In our [kazokuj circle there is no resistanceto being adopted as there is in the world outside, since almost everybody here becomes adopted. My [natal] house has continued fourteen generations, but more than half of those generations were headed by adopted sons." To put the Japanese practice of adoption in a broader perspective,we must digress briefly. Among East Asian societies, Japan is known for its indiscriminatory practice of adoption compared with China and Korea, for example, where more stringent rules and prohibitions arc imposed. Even in the Tokugawa period, when law and order reached unprecedented heights, a Confucian scholar, Dazai Shundai (1680-1747), deplored Japan's lawlessness,and singled out adoption as a major example of chaos. While exalting Confucian China and ancient Japan for their alleged adherence to the "pure" family line, Dazai denounced his contemporaries for their "barbarous" custom of promiscuous adoption (Kirby 1908). In the late nineteenth century, the historian Shigeno An'eki (1827-1910) discussed the "evils" of adoption, along with those of imperial abdication (Shigeno 1887). Despite these strongly worded critiques and governmental attempts to enjoin restrictions, Japanese apparently persisted in this "barbarous" and "evil" custom. In fact, the new (1898) civil code of Meiji Japan relaxed some of the old restrictions, probably in part to come to terms with the actual situation. Unlikecritics of adoption, Hozumi Nobushige endorsed flexibility in connection with Successors 107 ancestor worship: "From what I have stated, it may, I think, be laid down as a general rule that adoption had its...