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ubiquitous in the language of Japanese domestic reform. The term denoted
the pleasure of family members gathering together, along with the moral
and educational value that these occasions entailed. 4
Thus conceived, the ideology of domesticity centred on the conjugal
unit, as opposed to the lineal extended family that had prevailed in
Japan, and the middle-class household was the chief site at which the ideal
was targeted. At first, model families that embraced the concept of katei
belonged to the new class of professionals – company directors, elite
bureaucrats, university professors and military officers. After World War
One, this select group was extended to include civil servants, educators,
office workers and others who could classify as ‘white-collar’ professionals,
and were labelled sarariiman (‘salary men’, male salaried workers).
They formed the ‘new middle class’ that emerged at the time in Japanese
cities and clearly distinguished themselves from the bourgeois elite of the
previous generation – for example shopkeepers and craftsmen, who
remained a significant presence in urban and rural areas. By 1920 such
households constituted merely 5–8 per cent of the entire population in
Japan, but in Tokyo the share reached 21.4 per cent. 5
The chief source of this new class were second and third sons who,
according to custom, did not inherit family property. Propelled by the
new opportunities for upward mobility provided by the Meiji reforms,
they moved away from their extended families to the rapidly expanding
urban centres, where they found employment in the newly emerging banks,
schools and offices. These young men and their wives started their married
life in completely new circumstances, as nuclear families without houses of
belongings, and modelled themselves increasingly on the new ideology of
domesticity. They assigned to themselves, as David Ambaras observes, the
mission of ‘ensuring the well-being and progress of the nation’:
As part of their ideological engagement, members of this group
implicitly posited their difference from and superiority to other
classes in terms of values, everyday practices, and technical
expertise. And to implement the reforms and techniques they
deemed essential to achieving the twin objectives of national
progress and self-empowerment, new groups of experts worked
to capture key sections of public opinion to cement alliances
with state agencies. 6
Secondary education and a white-collar profession for the household head
were the two indispensable factors for a family to be recognized as belonging
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