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The Satō family has an additional concern about family continuity, being a rural family, and that is the ancestral farmland that has been inherited from generation to generation. Though their average size farm generates only about ten percent of their annual household income, the feeling is strong that they cannot sell this land that they have received from the ancestors. Moving to Tokyo or some other area where jobs may pay more would have a high social and emotional cost for them. They have obligations to the ancestors and deep relationships with neighbors cultivated over generations that are not easily replaced.
The Satō family is not a survivor of past ages, but is a modern expression of some very basic, fundamental aspects of Japanese culture. There are six automobiles owned by the Satō family. Great-grandpa and great-grandma both have retired from their outside jobs and no longer drive. Their 55 year old son, however, has a family sedan that he uses to commute to his job in town. His 51 year old wife, the organizer and coordinator of family activities who makes the whole system work, has a station wagon that she uses for her own commute to a food services job in town and to chauffeur the children and great-grandpa and great-grandma to doctor's appointments, shopping trips, or festivals and other events in town. She is the Japanese equivalent of a soccer mom. The young couple each has their own car to get to their jobs in town, with the young wife/mother having the smallest/cheapest car in the family, a Honda Civic type hatchback. The 23 year old younger brother of the successor in the family will be leaving soon, once he has a stable job and gets married. He is not needed for the continuity of the family line. As could be expected with his independent, free-wheeling life style, he has a very hot muscle car. In addition to all these commuting cars, there is a small pickup for the farm work.
This car-driving life style is more like what can be found in the rural plains of mid-America than in traffic congested Tokyo, except for the fact that four generations and nine people in the Satō family live together in the same ancestral home. The family members are busy. They scatter during the day and evening, each with their own work and play schedules, with an independence made possible because all the working adults have their own individual cars. They rarely eat together, though the 51 year old grandmother works hard to have meals ready for whenever someone comes home. There are seven television sets in the house to satisfy the different generational tastes in such things, just as the 51 year old grandmother cooks foods that will be palatable to each generation in the family. Great-grandpa does not eat the meat dishes that the young people have nearly every day. The 51 year old grandma, essentially in-between the generations, eats anything, like her anthropologist friend.
It is not useful to think of the Satō family as being either traditional or modern, or transitional between traditional and modern. They are fully modern. They also are fully Japanese, with a value and belief system that derives from basic and fundamental aspects of Japanese culture. That they are rural means that they have the space in their large house for all nine family members, and they have the space around the house to park their six cars. The apartments and condos so pervasive in the Tokyo housing scene are not conducive to such large households. Furthermore, the metropolitan regulations prohibiting buying a car if it cannot be demonstrated that there is a private place to park it do not allow for six cars in most metropolitan households. Nevertheless, the concept of a Japanese family continuing from one generation to the next, with a consciousness of the responsibilities of the living for those ancestors, is shared by rural and urban Japanese alike, no matter what the living arrangements. For many the ideal is to live close, but not with, the parents/grandparents or children/grandchildren.
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