Isami's House: Three Centuries of a Japanese Family [Paperback]

Gail Lee Bernstein (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0520246977 | ISBN-13: 978-0520246973 | Publication Date: October 7, 2005 | Edition: 1

In this powerful and evocative narrative, Gail Lee Bernstein vividly re-creates the past three centuries of Japanese history by following the fortunes of a prominent Japanese family over fourteen generations. The first of its kind in English, this book focuses on Isami, the eleventh generation patriarch and hereditary village head. Weaving back and forth between Isami's time in the first half of the twentieth century and his ancestors' lives in the Tokugawa and Meiji eras, Bernstein uses family history to convey a broad panoply of social life in Japan since the late 1600s. As the story unfolds, she provides remarkable details and absorbing anecdotes about food, famines, peasant uprisings, agrarian values, marriage customs, child-rearing practices, divorces, and social networks. Isami's House describes the role of rural elites, the architecture of Japanese homes, the grooming of children for middle-class life in Tokyo, the experiences of the Japanese in Japan's wartime empire and on the homefront, the aftermath of the country's defeat, and, finally, the efforts of family members to rebuild their lives after the Occupation. The author's forty-year friendship with members of the family lends a unique intimacy to her portrayal of their history. Readers come away with an inside view of Japanese family life, a vivid picture of early modern and modern times, and a profound understanding of how villagers were transformed into urbanites and what was gained, and lost, in the process.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"The remarkable history of twelve generations of a single Japanese family."--Jrnl of Asian History

From the Inside Flap

"There simply is no other book like this. No other family history presents such a range of insights into the ways in which individuals, women as well as men, have had to cope with changes wrought by the social modernization of Japanese family culture."--James L. McClain, author of Japan: A Modern History

"Isami's House is the chronicle of a remarkable family, neither aristocratic nor famous, whose rise and decline seem to parallel Japan's. It makes absorbing reading, affording a panoramic view of a rural family's rise to local prominence at the dawn of the modern Japanese nation state, the expansion of its presence to Tokyo and then the empire, its experience in war and defeat, and finally its postwar reconfiguration as a dispersed urban family."--Norma Field, author of In the Realm of a Dying Emperor: A Portrait of Japan at Century's End

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Product Details

• Paperback: 314 pages
• Publisher: University of California Press; 1 edition (October 7, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0520246977
• ISBN-13: 978-0520246973
• Product Dimensions: 8.9 x 6 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 15.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #273,483 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #75 in Books > Biographies & Memoirs > Ethnic & National > Japanese

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Interesting concept, poor execution, March 25, 2008

By 

Daniel Evensen (Provo, UT, USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Isami's House: Three Centuries of a Japanese Family (Paperback)

Isami's House is a fascinating book that provides a view of general Japanese history through the history of one family. As the back cover tease promises, this is an entirely new approach to history, one that presents the drama of modern Japanese history through the gripping ordeal of a single family. In this sense, Isami's House is a fascinating, gripping and original approach to Japanese history.

Nevertheless, I found myself put off greatly by Bernstein's uneven writing style and odd organization. Bernstein's paragraphs are haphazardly organized, and her sentences are riddled with clause after clause. Often, it is difficult to tell exactly where the story is going, and sentences are so dominated by detail that the point behind each story is nearly impossible to decipher.

Take, for example, this selection from page 60: "A ten-day spree of rioting by three thousand farmers in the Asakawa area in January 1798 - nine years after the French Revolution - brought a crowd to the Matsuura family's door on the morning of January 26. The fifth-generation patriarch, also called Yuemon (though his name was not written with the same characters as his deceased father's), had left with his wife and mother several days before; only family servants and a "young couple" remained at home. Rampaging peasants spilled out large amounts of the sake manufactured on the grounds of the family's compound and damaged other property as well." Did the ten-day spree of rioting begin on the 26th, or end then? Why does it matter that this happened 9 years after the French Revolution? Each sentence has a different subject, and little is done to link each separate idea together. Overall, this flaw in Bernstein's style leads to very bad, almost unreadable, prose.

Bernstein's organization is also rather odd. The first half of the book seems to be organized topic by topic, and parallels are directly made between the family's exploits around the Meiji years and earlier family experiences. The second half, however, deals exclusively with the family's experiences during and after World War II. This leads to discontinuity: the first half seems to contain no narrative, and the second half seems to completely abandon the lessons learned in the first. I would have been much happier had Bernstein stuck with one style throughout.

Nevertheless, it is a noble concept, and still a good book to read.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A Japanese Family's History, with a Touch of Gossip for Seasoning, June 2, 2008

By 

Samuel Leiter (Howard Beach, NY USA) - See all my reviews
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Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Isami's House: Three Centuries of a Japanese Family (Paperback)

Contrary to the first reviewer on this site, I found Isami's House eminently readable, from first to last. The book's concept is, indeed, highly original and should serve well as a resource for understanding the evolution of family life in modern Japan.

Essentially, this is the story of fourteen generations of the Matsuura family, who, until the postwar years, served as headmen of a village in northeastern Japan called Yamashiraishi. A substantial amount of information is provided about the family during Tokugawa and Meiji times, but the heart of the book concerns the family's triumphs and travails in the twentieth century. Many people in the family are discussed, including numerous in-laws, and several stand out prominently. The hero of the story, essentially, is Matsuura Isami, who lived from 1879 into the early 1960s. His wife, Ko, is also given considerable attention, as is the daughter named Toyo. It was Toyo who served as the host for Gail Lee Bernstein, the author, during her first stay in Japan, in 1963, when she was there as a graduate student of Japanese history. Since 1963 was when I, as a graduate student, also first visited Japan, I feel a personal connection to her experiences.

Bernstein hit a mother lode in becoming close to Toyo's remarkable family, as Toyo was one of fourteen siblings (seven sisters and seven brothers); a fifteenth died young. This rich field of close relatives provides the author with a wealth of material for recounting the ups and downs of modern family life in Japan, taking us through the prewar years, the war years (Toyo's family was in Hiroshima when it was atom-bombed), the Occupation, and after, when Japanese values changed so rapidly in the midst of unparalleled economic development. Although there are so many characters that one occasionally has trouble keeping track of who is who, Bernstein does her best to keep the narrative clear, and we get to celebrate the various characters' achievements while also sympathizing with their catastrophes. The Confucian values Isami assiduously cultivated in his children bring rewards to some, but by the century's end they no longer have much relevance to the younger generation, and the strong familial rope Isami wove comes close to breaking. Japan, too, the author suggests, has suffered such a breakdown, and the family's often heartbreaking history comes to be seen as a microcosm of the nation's journey.

Although extensively researched and documented, Isami's House is not a standard sociological tract for use in college classes; in fact, it often--especially the final chapters--reads like gossip, since Bernstein has maintained her ties to the family until quite recently, despite the eventual loss of the principal players. She is, to a degree, like a family member herself; still, her detailed recounting of the less savory deeds of some family members are unlikely to have been exposed to the world at large by the family members themselves. Thus we are given the kinds of insights into Isami's family that only someone with Bernstein's privileged position could provide. Perhaps one could raise ethical questions about the appropriateness of such revelations; on the other hand, the information--apart from the appeal it will have for most readers--has great historical, cultural, and sociological value for outsiders interested in the dynamics of modern Japanese family life.

It should be noted that although Bernstein herself, mainly in the final chapters, becomes increasingly present as a family participant (albeit at one step removed), she never reveals much about who she is. She discusses arranged marriages, love marriages, divorce, childbearing problems, childraising problems, religion, work, etc., but never tells us whether she herself is married, has children, or has shared in any experiences akin to those she so closely chronicles. Her name suggests that she is Jewish. If true, what did this mean to a family that followed Buddhist and Shinto practices but which saw a good many of its members convert to Christianity? I, for one, would have found such personal information useful in understanding her position vis a vis some of the subjects she addresses. She injects herself into the narrative as a way of explaining how the family treated her; I believe we are just as entitled to ask, who is Gail Lee Bernstein?

0 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Courtesy of Books Love Jessica Marie, July 16, 2009

By 

Jessica Gallagher "Books Love Jessica Marie" (OH, USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Isami's House: Three Centuries of a Japanese Family (Paperback)

This book tended to be a little dry at times and definitely a little confusing due to all of the family members that you have to keep track of. Just to prove how difficult keeping track can be Gail Lee Bernstein has added a time line, two family trees and a list of central persons to the beginning of the book. The fact that there are so many different characters represented throughout the novel makes it very hard to become attached to any specific one. However, Gail Lee Bernstein does an amazing job transitioning between all of the characters and different generation of families. Even with all of its downfalls, Isami's House is an excellent description of how life and values changed in Japan since the Meji Restoration. I also really enjoy the pictures of the family throughout the book because when it comes to memoirs I love being able to put a face to a name.

I would probably only recommend this novel to people who are truly interested in the history of Japan or its culture. Having a grasp on Japanese history would be helpful for the reader to posses, but it is not necessary.