[Review of] Joy Hendry, Marriage in Changing Japan: Community and Society

Joy Hendry uses a social anthropological examination of one community, the village of Kurotsuchi on southerly Kyushu Island, to illuminate the pivotal role of marriage in Japanese society. Marriage from pre-Meiji times to the present, she points out, has been crucial to the continuation of the ie, that union of the genealogical family and household/property. Marriage establishes the house head as an integral member of the village associations for governance, tax collection, care of the shrines, road building, and mutual aid. Moreover, it brings together Shintoism and Buddhism in a harmonious blending of rituals concerning birth and death