In his magisterial reanalysis of all of Japanese history, Murakami has presented us with an argument so complex that it will be some time before all its implications will emerge clearly. I shall leave the task of applying his insights to those more familiar than I with the historical materials he so skillfully weaves into a seamless developmental progression from proto-uji through modern uses of the ie principle. Rather I shall focus on that portion of his article dealing with the modern state (pp. 339-63) and more particularly with his intriguing argument that the ie or mura-type practice was revived for the hard times of the 1930s and the World War II years (pp. 357-58). The argument, I take it, is that following a hiatus of some decades after the Meiji Restoration, the ie (household) or mura (village) has reemerged as a fundamental organizing principle of postwar Japanese society. As a point of departure, let us consider the following passage from a book intended for a general audience that takes a similar position vis-a-vis contemporary Japan, using a somewhat different vocabulary. Urging the reader to see that in Japan industrialization has proceeded in ways quite different from the path it took in the West, Collick writes:
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Robert J. Smith (1985) studied this question.