Richard Ronald and Allison Alexy (Eds.) Home and Family in Japan. Continuity and Transformation. New York: Routledge, 2011. The essays in this collection are composed by a range of contributors who combine their anthropological and sociological expertise to explore various aspects of Japanese home and family life. They address such issues as the threat to the support of the elderly; an alarming increase in childless couples and unmarried adults; changes in the provision of housing as a result of an unfavorable economic climate and neoliberal policies; the gender imbalance in qualifying for benefits; and alternative living arrangements, among other issues. The essays demonstrate how the Japanese family structure is being transformed, contested, and reimagined while continuing to reflect the traditional ie norms 1 , although those are being transformed as well. Chapter One foreshadows the remainder of the essays by providing background information. Richard Ronald and Allison Alexy discuss the “Japanese concept,” which denotes a wide range of issues, including not only actual houses and the families that inhabit them but also conceptual notions such as loyalty to one’s place of employment and to the nation at-large. The authors discuss the fact that the Meiji Code (1898) and the Family Registry System (1871) established uniformity and the adoption of particular practices. Specifically, the Family Registry System required all family members to be registered in order to benefit from any legal rights. These two regulatory systems established the system of taxation and land ownership and indirectly continued promulgating patriarchal authority in law. The authors underscore socio- political pressures on the state as “a provider of welfare and care” (12). Despite the current increase of nuclear families that deviate radically from ie norms, the authors predict that “normative family relationships will persist, albeit in terms of far greater diversity and in forms we may not yet recognize” (18). Brice White, in “Reassembling Familial Intimacy,” writes that the Japanese bureaucracy has always had a tendency to manage familial relationships by blaming them for a wide range of society’s ills, including youth delinquency, problems with the treatment of the elderly, and the inadequate number of newborns as potential contributors to the society’s welfare, etc. According to White, there is a “mismatch between the state construction of Family and the realities of families” (26). He discusses four alternative visions of the Japanese family. White’s four examples aim to “illustrate the lack or loss of familial intimacy and simultaneously propose solutions for its reassembly” (41). By and large, these examples illustrate, whether intentionally or not, certain nostalgia for things lost, though creatively reimagined and projected into the future. In “Reforming Families in Japan,” Takeda Hiroko addresses the structural reform of the Koizumi and post-Koizumi governments in relation to contemporary family life. Hiroko provides a critique of neoliberal policies that ignore the actual structure of the modern families and impose normative expectations. Karl Jacob Krogness in “The Ideal, the Deficient, and The Illogical Family,” focuses on koseki seido, the Japanese administrative household registration system, which often defines family units differently than these units perceive themselves with respect to their actual living arrangements. Krogness employs various examples to depict the 1 The ie is a Japanese term which translates directly to “household.” It can mean either a physical home or refer to a family’s lineage. It is popularly used to refer to the “traditional” family structure. The symbolic definition of ie includes the cultural notion of the physical processes of kinship, such as those relating to mating and procreation.