Marriage and Politics in Mid Heian Japan

We know from reliable sources that during the mid Heian period, Japanese husbands would often live with their wife’s family. This practice, called matrilocality, enabled the husbands to rely on their fathers-in-law for political support. In addition to this, the study of marriage allows us to understand Heian society more fully.

Throughout most societies in world history, husbands and wives would either normally strike out on their own or live with the husband’s family (especially in Asian cultures). Since the systems that combine patrilineal descent with matrilocality are rare and often considered by anthropologists as transitional, the question why couples would live with the wife’s family is one that is often asked.

There are two theories for this according to one scholar; either that “mid-Heian kinship could be seen as an amalgam of incompatible components that had yet to give way to a more viable arrangement. Alternatively, the matrilateral features of Heian kinship could be accorded more significance and be deemed to constitute some kind of genuine matrilineal descent. In that case we would be better advised to speak, not of a patrilineal system with some odd features, but rather of a relatively stable, bilineal regime-that is, one that was in some respects patrilineal, while in others matrilineal”.

For society in mid-Heian, marriage among the elite classes was of many different factors. Sentiment may have been one of these, but political and socio-economic aspects would have dominated. Despite the fact that heritage was passed down patrilineally, marriage was never virilocal (the couple after marriage never lived with the groom's family).

Clan names and surnames were passed down patrilineally but Heian nobles were often referred to by where they lived. However, uxorilocal marriage (matrilineal marriages) and interrelated inheritance traditions tended to “result in houses (and the accompanying residential name) being passed down from mother to daughter, with the husband assuming the wife's residential name upon marriage”. This meant that sons would rarely share residential names with their fathers (who might share them with their father-in-laws). For example, from Fuyutsugu, 775-826 CE, to Yorinaga, 1120- 1156 CE, none of eighteen foremost members of the central line of the Fujiwara clan held the same residential name as his father.

Understanding the reasons behind marriage and politics in mid-Heian Japan can be somewhat tricky and confusing. However, it seems clear that the practice of matrilocality reflected an ideology according to which power was extrinsic and dangerous to society and therefore had to be mediated and neutralized by its opposite.

Bibliography:

Nickerson, Peter (1993) The Meaning of Matrilocality. Kinship, Property, and Politics in Mid-Heian, Monumenta Nipponica, Sophia University.