Gender and family: classical ageof paired chieftains—brother and sister, husband and wife, nephew and aunt—survived even
when the gender hierarchy was gradually negating female claims to rule.^24 These new studies
contradict the modern stereotype of male- dominated monarchies in East Asia, by documenting
the existence of female rulers in the Japanese archipelago from the third to the eighth centuries.
Family under the ritsuryo ̄ state
The smallest administrative unit created by the ritsuryō state was a unit called the “ko” (household,
or residential unit). In the Ko ryō (“Laws on Residential Units”), the state prescribed ways to
organize and control residential units, to maintain order within families, and to regulate mar-
riage.^25 Parts of household registers (koseki) and provincial population registers, which were based
on the Ko ryō, have survived and have been archived in the Shōsōin at Tōdaiji in Nara.^26
Historians disagree over the nature of eighth- century families and their relationship to the
“households” recorded in the registers. For example, Tōma Seita, Ishimoda Shō and others have
argued—on the premise that the registers mirrored real historical conditions—that eighth-
century society was based on paternal joint families, in which collateral members of a patrilineal
descent group resided together with their spouses and offspring under the authority of a single
male household head.^27 In opposition to this so- called “real condition theory” (jittai- setsu), other
historians, including Kishi Toshio, argue instead for a “legal fiction” theory (“gisei- setsu”), which
contends that the early eighth- century family was lineal rather than collateral, but that district
chieftains manipulated information included in the household registers, resulting in a gap between
reality and the recorded data.^28 Araki Moriaki further proposed a “strategic register making
theory” (henko- setsu), which argues that the government purposefully organized families into
artificial residential units, in order to use them as a foundation for administering the realm.^29
Sekiguchi Hiroko has analyzed not only the household registers but also other primary texts
such as Manyōshū to investigate classical Japanese families. She argues that although the terms
“heir,” “non- heirs,” “wife,” and “concubine,” appear in the residence unit registers, such distinc-
tions did not exist in the reality of classical Japan. Rather, she maintains, these terms were bor-
rowed solely from the Tang codes for administrative purposes. According to Sekiguchi, the
customs of monogamy and patrilineal succession from a father to his heir had not yet been estab-
lished. Furthermore, contemporary patterns of possession and control over lands and people
accrued to clans or individuals, but were never seen as family- based. Abe Takehiko showed that
collateral succession to clan headship was still practiced during the Nara period, and Inoue
Mitsusada reinforced Abe’s perspective by analyzing the historical genealogy of Kamo no
Agatanushi. By revealing that distant relatives, including a second cousin of a Shimogamo Shrine
priest, could be chosen as the latter’s clan head, Inoue pointed out that such positions were not
transferred patrilineally. These studies show that the patriarchal family as an entity capable of pos-
session or ownership of lands or people had not yet been established during the eighth century.^30
Newer scholarship has also questioned an earlier view that classical Japanese families were
both patrilineal groups and units of economic production. Specifically, Yoshida Takashi chal-
lenged this view by differentiating the “ie” (a family as a group of people) from the “yake” (the
management base including land and buildings such as storehouses). He claims that ie of com-
moners, which were still in flux and unstable, had not been established as social units. Also,
Akashi Kazunori proved that society in classical Japan was fundamentally bilateral, noting that
primary sources show no distinction between patrilineal and matrilineal kinship terms.^31
According to Yoshie Akiko, the smallest unit signifying a familial tie was “a mother and her
children.” That is, although husbands could be included, they were not an essential part of the
basic family unit.^32