The Japanese Family in Transition

This book is likely to become a standard reference—even a classic—among scholars and students of postwar Japanese social and cultural life. Written toward the end of the author's long and distinguished career as a Harvard psychotherapist and student of Japan (in close alliance with her former husband, the highly regarded Harvard professor Ezra Vogel), her book displays compassion, deep analysis, sensitivity, and humane wisdom not only about Japanese families, but also about Americans interacting with Japanese. The book is organized around three case studies, each with a quite different story to tell in contrast to the others, with very close family and anecdotal details that lead the reader to think of them not as subjects of case studies so much as personal acquaintances. The Vogel's son Steven, a distinguished scholar of Japanese studies at Berkeley, helped his mother with the editing and preparation for an English-language edition. The writing is clear—often even charming—and accessible to readers without much background in Japanese language and culture, although the book will work best for those with some familiarity with the Japanese language and culture in the past sixty years.