A 'Parallel and Contrast' Study of English and Japanese Village Histories: Features of Family Continuity

This paper aims to understand thie generational continuity and kinship patterns in Willingham, Cambs.(England) and in Kami-shiojiri, Ueda, Nagano (Japan) in early modern period.In Willingham few families continued to survive in a given locality for more than a couple of generations in the male line.Yet at the same time local testators left bequests to a wide range of kin in their wills, indicating that despite the mobility of the population, kinship ties remained important and were acknowledged.For Kami-shiojiri, the almost continuous series of Suman Aratme-Cho (Religious Faith) registers reveal a gradual change towards smaller and simpler household structures (Ie).In addition, occasional abrupt increases in the numbers of households and in the number of messuages (dwelling units) imply that the community as a whole and/or the local overlord did sometimes intervene to reconstruct sections of the village economy and the use of household labour.Households in Kami-shiojiri were larger and more complex than those in England and the population much more stable, with the mobility rate about half that reported for England.The extent of variation in inheritance patterns within both populations is also discussed showing that some families persisted for several generations in Willingham and that in Kami-shiojiri more than a third of cases where there was a change of headship of the household, involved a successor who was not the eldest son of the previous head.