The social and political importance of families and family continuity transcended the Tokugawa-Meiji divide. This talk focuses on a common strategy for preserving a family line: the adoption of heirs, especially the adoption of sons-in-law. While the practice of son-in-law adoption remained frequent, the legal, ideological, and sociocultural context in which it occurred shifted significantly from Tokugawa to Meiji, resulting in new and sobering—even alarming—public images of adopted heirs and family disintegration by the turn of the twentieth century.

Marcia Yonemoto is Professor of History and Director of the Graduate Teacher Program at the University of Colorado Boulder. She received her Ph.D. in Japanese history from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1995. Her research interests are in the cultural history of Japan’s early modern period (c. 1590-1868). Her current research project is a history of adoption in Japan from 1600 to the present.