1. Matchiotsukuru and the rural dream. The contextual character of household-town relations

‘What do you think of Kamikatsu and its traditions?’ Hiraoka San asked me in English during a casual talk about making the town. ‘It is difficult to say, really, I find that every village is quite different from the others’, I answered. Hiraoka San nodded his head and added, ‘so desu ne (I see), there are a lot of traditions in Kamikatsu, every family is different, as you go to visit their houses you will see... they have their ways of cooking and doing things, very different in each family. There is also the tradition of festivals (matsuri) in the town. Kamikatsu is rich in many traditions.’

This fragment of a conversation with Hiraoka San, a respected officer of yakuba, encapsulates the two main themes through which most villagers define themselves: as immersed in singular household traditions, and as belonging to the ‘town’. This dual form of affiliation encompasses a preoccupation with the household that is new in anthropological accounts. In the recent literature on rural towns, it is the village and its opposition to and integration into the town system that emerge as the main object of interest. However, during my fieldwork, villagers emphasised that the ie no dento (the household tradition) was much more central. One could argue that it is no coincidence that the emergence of discourses about the household appears in the consolidation stages of town making. Thus I speculate that the household tradition has gained centrality in people’s sense of identification in the process of removing ‘village exclusivity’. Ethnographic evidence exists that the discourse about the household revolves around the concern with the serialisation and textualisation of knowledge. Household traditions are being constructed as different from each other and ‘appropriated’ to add to the pool of traditions in the town. They are another source of tradition that the town appropriates in order to define its internal and external image. In this section I describe some of the villagers’ ideas about the relationship between households and the town in order to provide a context for my discussion of wrapping and commodities. Taking machitsukuri as a starting point is useful if the links, as well as the conflicts, between town and household are acknowledged. My premise is that the household is best understood as made up of multiple aspects and relationships, rather than as unitary. Despite the household’s being a unit whose members refer to it as an encompassing group, its relations with the village and town coexist at different levels and points of reference (see Chapter 5). My perspective contrasts with earlier ethnographies which have tended to privilege the unity of the household, and thus of any group, as the key organising principle of Japanese society. The villagers of Kamikatsu, in their exchange of gifts, emphasise in different ways the multiple facets of the household in its relations with the town. These views coexist with those that underlie the significance of the continuity and emotional attachment to the ie as a model of relations. In what follows, I look at how the process of making the town and the appropriation of traditions has resulted in a gradual reorganisation of the relations among households and with the town administration, as well as among household members.