Marriage Relationships Among Households in the mid 19th Century Tama, Japan

Abstract

This paper studies the formation of marriage relationships between two households in 19th century, Tama, Japan. Previous studies on marriage market or partner selection in the Japanese past tended to rely either on information from a single village in case of statistical analysis, or on collection of oral histories. By using the information from a household register that covers 35 villages, and applying the method of social network analysis, this paper goes beyond the limitation of previous studies. Our empirical results show that there was a tendency for socio-economic homogamy and endogamy (within kinship and within village) among peasants in the mid 19th century Tama, Japan.