we call them clans, tribes, or hordes. With the
advent of a settled civilization, the greater groups
necessarily divided and subdivided; but the smallest
subdivision still retained its primal organization.
Even the modern Japanese family partly retains that
organization. It does not mean only a household:
it means rather what the Greek or Roman family became
after the dissolution of the gens. With ourselves
the family has been disintegrated: when we talk
of a man’s family, we mean his wife and children.
But the Japanese family is still a large group.
As marriages take place early, it may consist, even
as a household, of great-grandparents, grandparents,
parents, and children—sons and daughters
of several generations; but it commonly extends much
beyond the limits of one household. In early
times it might constitute the entire population of
a village or town; and there are still in Japan large
communities of persons all bearing the same family
name. In some districts it was formerly the custom
to keep all the children, as far as possible, within
the original family group—husbands being
adopted for all the daughters. The group might
thus consist of sixty or more persons, dwelling under
the same roof; and the houses were of course constructed,
by successive extension, so as to meet the requirement.
(I am mentioning these curious facts [62] only by way
of illustration.) But the greater uji, after the race
had settled down, rapidly multiplied; and although
there are said to be house-communities still in some
remote districts of the country, the primal patriarchal
groups must have been broken up almost everywhere
at some very early period. Thereafter the main
cult of the uji did not cease to be the cult also
of its sub-divisions: all members of the original
gens continued to worship the common ancestor, or
uji-no-kami, “the god of the uji.”
By degrees the ghost-house of the uji-no-kami became
transformed into the modern Shinto parish-temple;
and the ancestral spirit became the local tutelar god,
whose modern appellation, ujigami, is but a shortened
form of his ancient title, uji-no-kami. Meanwhile,
after the general establishment of the domestic cult,
each separate household maintained the special cult
of its own dead, in addition to the communal cult.
This religious condition still continues. The
family may include several households; but each household
maintains the cult of its dead. And the family-group,
whether large or small, preserves its ancient constitution
and character; it is still a religious society, exacting
obedience, on the part of all its members, to traditional
custom.
