Suye mura, a Japanese village,

by John F. Embree

Book Overview

No Synopsis Available.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: B0006AOR4O
• Release Date: January 1939
• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Length: 354 Pages
• Weight: 0.25 lbs.

Customer Reviews

Shochu, Sex and Everyday Life in Central Kyushu

Suye Mura occupies a unique position in the social science literature about Japan. Published in 1939, it is the first ethnographic study of a Japanese village, indeed one of the first work of anthropology which did not take as its object a tribal society or an isolated island community. As such, it served as a reference for generations of students, who first tried to compensate the dearth of scholarly material in English about Japanese society, then used the book as a benchmark to assess social change in the post-war period. Suye Mura even created its sequel industry, with a book on The Women of Suye Mura based on the research notes of John Embree's widow, and several essays by a Japanese ethnographer documenting the changes in the village in the five decades after Embree's study. Suyemura has now been merged with five other localities to form Asagiri Town in Kumamoto Prefecture, and thus no longer exists as an administrative unit. On a first approach, the reader could confuse this small village community in Southwestern Japan with a primitive society on a remote island or a tribal group in the heart of Africa. The ethnographic method, borrowed from Radcliffe-Brown who directed Embree's studies at Chicago and wrote the book's Introduction, reinforces the isolation of the local community from the national context and depicts village life as largely static, with little change in social structure and lifestyles from past centuries. Rural life in Suye Mura appears today as the reflection of a distant past, with alien mores and customs. The photo pages includes a picture of small children hunting lice in each other's head, or another of an elderly woman with bare breasts, depicted as a "farmer's wife in hot-weather working attire". Practical pranks include serving soup with live frogs which jump out as each guest lifts the cover of her soup bowl. People use shochu mixed with snake skin to cure venereal disease. When the firstborn child in a family is a daughter, people will say politely, "That is fortunate--now, when the son is born, there will be a nursemaid to carry him about." For good measure, the villagers see distant foreigners as uncouth and dirty: they explain the depression in silk prices by the laziness of American girls, who "did not care to wash their silk stockings and now bought only cheap rayon hose which could be thrown away as soon as they became soiled". As Embree notes, peasants the world over are notorious for their broad and earthy humor, and the Japanese peasant is no exception. Any ceremony, however minor, always winds up with some drinking and singing. A social gathering usually begins with stiff formality and ends with orgiastic abandon. Farmers' wives drink and smoke in abundance, and they exchange lewd jokes about each other's sex life. Obscene songs and dances are typical of rural festivities, and traditional songs include references to men's penises or women's genitals. While the actual sex act is very private, jokes a