Upper Upper to Lower Lower

SUYE MURA: A JAPANESE VILLAGE --John F. Embree--University of Chicago ($3).

There has been plenty of political and picturesque U. S. journalism about Japan, but not many solid accounts of Japanese daily living. Suye Mura is such an account: some 300 pages of factual statement. With his wife, who speaks Japanese fluently, John Embree, a University of Hawaii anthropologist, lived a year in Suye Mura, a Japanese rice-farming village, population 1,663. His book tells more about modern Japanese farmers than any volume so far.

The Japanese peasant is rigidly controlled by 1) rural custom, 2) government edict. Embree gives the intricate design of that control, suggests its points of stress. Suye Mura, like thousands of Japanese farming villages, is largely sustained by work exchange and other forms of communal cooperation. Farmers cooperate with their neighbors in rice growing, financing the needy (a credit pool is often a form of lottery that continues for years), bridge building, house building, roof repairing, funeral arrangements, and frequent drinking parties celebrating the completion of farming jobs or such vital events as birth, marriage, or the sending of a conscripted son to the army. Strong is the incentive to cooperation: he who gives none gets none. Through agricultural associations the Government teaches the best farming methods; through the village school it teaches obedient jingoism.

The increase of shopkeepers in recent years has increased the use of money, instead of rice, as a medium of exchange. More moneyed farmers may now hire labor instead of exchanging it. In this rural microcosm of Japan, Embree distinguishes six classes: upper upper, lower upper, upper middle, lower middle, upper lower, lower lower. Some 27% of households have at least one servant, 26% include someone educated beyond the village school, 12% subscribe to newspapers. Suye Mura has one motorcycle, no automobiles, 160 bicycles, four sewing machines, five radios, 20 phonographs, and one telephone (in the village office).

Anthropologist Embree does not speculate on the future of Suye Mura or the Empire in general. But his book offers good evidence that it will take many a long year to Westernize the Japanese peasant.

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