Images of the Family on Stage in Early Modern Japan

要旨

What images does popular theater show us of family life in early Japan? In this paper I define early as the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries. My data sources are the popular plays largely written during the eigh teenth and nineteenth centuries. Plays written during the twentieth century are known as modern Kabuki within the Japanese tradition and so do not fit the early paradigm (Mizuochi 1993, p224). Popular culture as seen in popular plays, novels, poetry and songs can be good sources for understanding the attitudes, values and norms of a society E. P. Thompson used popular culture for his classic study The Making of the English Working Class (1963). Lawrence Stone also used the most popular plays of the period he studied as part of his data sources to understand changes in family val ues and sexual behavior (1977). Popular literature has also frequently been used as a data source for scholars of Japanese history and the issues addressed can be quite varied. Nishimura Hiroko (1993), for example, uses an anthology of tales compiled in the early twelfth cen tury to study marriage during the ancient period of Japanese history Anne Walthall (1991) uses popular literature for her study of peasant protest and Kazuko Honda (1988) uses plays among her sources for her study of the folklore of child abandonment in Japan. Although there are some problems, plays and the related narrative tra

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