[Article] Mothers and Children in Ancient Household Registers : Families and Organization of Households in the Year 702 as Indicated in Hanyuri Koseki

Ancient Japanese households (ko) may look like patrilineal family units but rather comprise a chain of parent-child units: mother and father + children, father + children, or mother + children. The specific process remains unexplained as to how the nation organized these multiple parent?child units into patrilineal households. Therefore, this paper attempts to examine the household system (henko) by focusing on how entries on women were recorded in the household register (koseki), specifically the Minonokuni Hanyuri Koseki in 702. A detailed examination of this household register reveals that only some of the married women were registered as a “wife” (tsuma), indicating that in principle, the word “wife” was only used when registering the spouses of the eldest man in the family (usually also the head of the household) and of the two or three next eldest men. Thus, the word “wife” in the household register is not only a term of kinship but also a designation of status given to the spouses of male elders in a village. Meanwhile, when a girl was born, she would be registered with her mother at the time of birth, rather than with her father; as the father's age increased and the mother became designated as a “wife,” the daughter would be transferred into the father's household with her mother. In other words, in principle, women were designated in the household register with the mother as the fixed point, and it only became possible to integrate mothers and children into the patrilineal system when a woman was given the status designation of “wife” through the household register. This same designation as a “wife” was also an indispensable aspect of creating a household by means of the patrilineal system. In that era, inheriting the status of the head of the household started with a system of patrilineal “intra-generational succession,” i.e., the succession of collateral relatives (brothers, cousins) within the same generation of the eldest head of the household, which was followed by the succession of “legitimate sons” (chakushi) in the children's generation. In this manner, the state attempted to facilitate smooth patrilineal inheritance within households by first registering the spouses of the head of the household and their brothers and cousins as “wives,” and then considering multiple firstborn “legitimate sons” of this generation as candidates for the next generation of household heads, simultaneously positioning the “wives” as the guardians of the young generation of legitimate heirs. Groups of relatives more distant than cousins created by the system of intra-generational succession were described using the term “kikou”; they were assigned to households where there was a shortage of adult men who were eligible to pay tax or a shortage of candidates for inheritance. “kikou”, who were recorded in the household register as having both a “wife” and a “legitimate son,” were viewed as potential successors to the head of household, and there was no difference in status between the “kikou” and members of the household.