This will be, I hope, the start of a new series. One of the things I planned to do more of this year was to read in Japanese, and I had the perfect opportunity when I was given a stack of books for the World of Genji project. It was pretty hard to decide what to read first, but Family and Sex in the Middle Ages (Japanese middle ages, just so we’re clear) seemed like a good introduction to the rest of the books.

This isn’t a book review – rather, in this series of posts I’ll be summarising what I’ve learnt from this book. This is for me to make sure I understand the material and to introduce you to it. One reason why we got the books in Japanese was because there wasn’t much information in English.

Without further ado, let’s start. Just bear in mind that while I’ll be providing summaries, I won’t be including every little detail. I’ll give enough for everything to make sense (I hope) but it wouldn’t be fair for me to do a word by word translation.

The book opens with the tale of Kitajyo Masako (北条政子). The catch is: none of her family would have known her by that name. Her first name, Masako, came from her dad’s name (Masa + Ko). Why was this necessary? Because unlike boys, who had a childhood and adult name, girls tended to be called by their birth order instead of being given a name. If you look at Edo-era books, Masako was given names like “二位殿” and it was only later that she got her first name, and even later that she got her family name.

The first chapter introduces two key concepts: 氏 and 家. In 氏, the head of the household was one that included blood and non-blood related relatives, served at the imperial court, and were given kabane (title given to show political and social status) by the emperor. But gradually, the foundation for society shifted from 氏 to 家, with 家 being the aggregate of couples living and running their small homes, linked together on the paternal side.

But although society shifted from 氏 to 家, it didn’t mean that society completely forgot about the old ways. During certain ceremonies, the diaries of nobility indicate that they would go back to the 氏-base of classifying people.

After introducing the basic concepts of 氏 and 家, the book moves into the second section, where it discusses marriage and cohabitation. From contemporary records, it seems that after marriage, the woman would move to her husband’s house, although that didn’t mean that she lived with her in-laws. But in poor economic times, notably after the 南北長時代 (1336-1392), it became harder for people to maintain multiple homes, so when there was a new marriage, they would just build a new house on their premises for the newlyweds. However, kitchens tended to be kept separate and the young couple might eventually move away, so even though they were living with the husband’s parents, it didn’t mean they were living in the same house with them.

This section also introduces the concept of diaries (日記), although these diaries are passed down. By chronicling their career and their activities, they could give their descendants a reference point and hence a head start in their careers. Diaries also included information on songs, kemari (蹴鞠, a type of game), and other artistic information that would be useful to a court noble. This reminded me of The Tale of Genji – there was a perfume competition and they mentioned some family scents, which I’m now guessing came from family diaries.

After discussing marriage, the third chapter moves on to discuss inheritance and continuity. The discussion on the family diaries (家記) continues, with the book pointing out that although the family diary and 「家」line were tied together, it didn’t mean that the illegitimate children were automatically excluded. Sometimes, the illegitimate child（庶子・しょし） would be able to get copies of the family diaries, for example by gaining an official position.

As for inheritance, it used to be split (even among the bushi) as part of the split inheritance system (分割相続制). But if you do that too long, your family fortunes will eventually dwindle because it’s so spread out, so this practice was gradually shifted to that of the legitimate child inheriting everything (嫡子単独相続制).

In terms of the inheritance of the family diaries, it used to be that maternal grandsons and other people could inherit them through the daughters of that family, but as the diaries increasingly became associated with 「家」 and the family line, daughters became excluded from inheriting the diaries.

In the fourth section, gender within the family, the book shifts to a lot of discussion of various families and what we can learn through contemporary accounts and pictures. The one thing I found most interesting was how burials were treated. Until the Insei period (院政期), people were buried according to the 氏 of their birth. What that means that if you have two people from two different 氏 getting married, they would end up being buried separately when they passed on. But in the twelfth century, more couples started sharing 党 and building them on the same plot of land, which in turn led to couples being buried together after they passed.

The last section of the book is さまざまな性 or “Various sex/genders” and it was extremely interesting. First we looked at children and I found out that you can’t really tell the gender of a child in a painting just by their clothes and hairstyles. You have to look at what they’re doing or holding to make a guess. But we can see that as children grow older (especially once the boys became adult men), the differences in their presentation becomes more apparent.

The second thing I learnt is that bisexuality was common in the middle ages and that, the author says, led to a unisex ideal of beauty. According to Takeda Sachiko (武田佐知子), stories like The Tale of Genji and Torikaebaya Monogatari shows that the ideal of men and women were “ボーダーレス (borderless)” with the attractiveness of men being evaluated in terms of how much woman-like beauty they had (女のように美しい).

The book also talks about sex outside of marriage, saying that affairs are common and that children between nobility and 遊女 (courtesans) happen. One of the courtesans mentioned was apparently born to a noble family but due to family circumstances, became a courtesan. Apart from that, we don’t get much information about courtesans in Japan.

So these are the main things that I’ve learnt from the book. It’s probably the shortest book of the stack, but there’s still a lot I didn’t cover and would like to revisit after I read the others. As I read, I might start comparing the books to one another, so stay tuned for more!