INTRODUCTION

Markets shape families. The real estate market shapes the way people pass property across generations. The capital market affects the investments parents make in their children. The marriage market influences the jobs children take and the promises they make prospective spouses. The labor market limits the extent parents control their children (Chapter 4).

The law shapes markets. Japanese law shaped the markets for water and land by defining the property rights involved (Chapter 2). In the process, it promoted agriculture. It shaped the labor market by enforcing (at least by the late nineteenth century) a worker's property right to his or her own labor (Chapters 6, 7). In the process, it enabled people to negotiate contracts that mitigated informational asymmetries and promoted their private best interests.

And the law also shapes directly the families that operate within these markets. In Japan, claim scholars, the law imposed on families a rigidly “exploitative” regulatory scheme. According to most observers, through the Civil Code it made the eldest male in each generation head of the family. To him, it gave all the property and the power to determine how the other family members lived. Children, sisters, younger brothers, and his widowed mother all did as he said. In effect, any independence the Tokugawa labor market gave children and siblings (detailed in Chapter 4) the imperial Civil Code undid.

Scholars also argue that the law gave a husband (and his natal family) nearly autocratic control over his wife.