Isami's House: Three Centuries of a Japanese Family (review)

A secret history of American research in Japan could be written around relationships between American academics and what might be called—somewhat contentiously—"native intellectuals." In a highly literate society like Japan, where even farmers often turn out also to be poets, the native intellectual role in these special relationships has been played by many people outside the university. What serious study of Japan done by an Anglophone scholar since World War II does not owe a debt to some wise and patient Japanese person who aided the author as mentor, translator, archival sherpa, informant, interlocutor, social facilitator, home-stay host, surrogate parent, or several of these together? Naturally enough, ethnography and oral history show this debt the most. It is the exceptional gift of historian Gail Bernstein, whose recent work falls somewhere between these two fields, to be able not only to derive scholarly insights from her personal relationships in Japan but to present the indi-viduals and relationships themselves in honest and unaffected prose that immediately draws the reader to her subjects. Her classic Haruko's World (Stanford University Press, 1983) appears on numerous college course syllabi because it manages simultaneously to teach a lot in a small space about the social history of rural Japan in the second half of the twentieth century and to portray her protagonist so convincingly that we feel by the end that we know Haruko as if we had lived with her too. In Isami's House, Bernstein has applied the same skills to a much broader historical canvas. As in Ha-ruko's World, Bernstein gauges her text to be accessible to readers without background knowledge about Japan.

Bernstein had originally planned to coauthor the book with Ishikawa Toyo, second daughter of Matsuura Isami. Toyo's death in 1993 made this impossible. Shifting gears, she coauthored it—albeit in a less literal sense—with Toyo's father. In the final years of his life, Isami had written a short history of the Matsuura house since its founding. This work provides the basic material for the early part of Bernstein's account. Through Isami's writing and through interviews with other family members, Isami appears as the dominant force shaping the Matsuura family fortunes through much of the rest of the book.

Born in 1879, Matsuura Isami was scion of one of the largest landowning houses in Fukushima Prefecture. He subsequently inherited the position of headman that his family had held in the village of Yamashiraishi since the seventeenth century. Isami's House therefore presents a portrait not of "typ-ical farmers" but of a rural elite. Isami himself is a classic example of the Meiji-born "local notable" (chiiki meibōka), promoting education, launching agricultural modernization schemes for the village, and campaigning to bring a rail line to the area. Isami and his wife Kō produced 15 children. To trace the intertwined lives of this large cast of characters and to tie them to the larger history of modern Japan, Bernstein draws additionally on the memoirs of three other successful males in the family. Relying on privately published memoirs and family chronicles as scholarly sources inevitably carries the risk of producing a whitewashed history. Nowhere, for example, do we hear the subaltern voices of Fukushima tenants and farmhands or, in the modern period, when several Matsuura descendants contributed to the project of empire, of Japanese colonial subjects. Yet Bernstein manages to counter the possible biases of the Matsuura men's self-history with common sense and a spare but judicious selection of secondary sources that set these men's accounts in broader perspective. Most of all, Isami's House is saved from hagiography by stories of personalities and family relations from the Matsuura women: Toyo and her sisters.

Part 1 deals chiefly with events in the Matsuura house and the village prior to Isami's headship. Following Isami's own account, Bernstein introduces the ancestral...