What Was Lost Was Not Horizontal Connection: What We Gave Up in Homes Without a Kamidana

01Sacred treasures became things you could buy

In the first installment, I showed that Japan's shift to the nuclear family was not "the tide of the times" but the resultant of three forces: the 1947 revision of the Civil Code that shrank the family unit from the "ie" to the couple, the 51C floor plan adopted for fiscal 1951 that supplied the nation with boxes sized for a couple and their children, and an economy that grew as households divided. I ended by writing that what was lost was not horizontal connection but the vertical axis. This installment asks what that vertical axis was, and whether it can be recovered.

I begin with the question I left open. What did it mean that black-and-white televisions, electric washing machines and electric refrigerators were called the "Three Sacred Treasures"?

The original Sanshu no Jingi, the mirror, the sword and the jewel, were sacred objects outside the home that no one was permitted to see or touch. They were not possessions; their meaning lay in the fact of having been handed down through generations. The appliance "treasures," by contrast, could be bought on installment, placed in the living room, and replaced when they grew old after ten years.

Japan has long held that words carry a divine power: kotodama. What a society names things reflects what it holds sacred, and not only reflects it but works upon the heart. The sacred moved from something inherited to something purchased, from the untouchable to the within-reach. This turn took place in the very same dozen years in which the shape of the home was being rearranged. I do not regard that as coincidence.

02It was not the grandparents who vanished from the home

Recall the 51C plan once more: two bedrooms and an eat-in kitchen. In the first installment I noted that there was no room for grandparents. But what truly matters is that there was no place for a kamidana or a butsudan either.

What did the kamidana and butsudan do in the traditional Japanese home? They were not decoration. They were seats for those who are no longer in this world. In the morning the head of the household changed the water and joined his hands. Children grew up watching that back every day. For a child it became an everyday fact: in our house there are people who cannot be seen but are certainly here. If grandparents lived in the home, there were stories of generations further back. The home, in other words, was not only where the living family slept and rose; it was a place where dozens of generations of time held a seat the size of one tatami mat.

That seat vanished from the floor plan. It was not the grandparents who disappeared from the home. The grandparents' grandparents disappeared too.

And here is the crucial point: those who moved into the danchi did not protest. Hardly anyone went to the authorities to complain that there was nowhere to put a kamidana. The new life was bright, convenient and modern. One lets go without even the awareness of letting go. When a culture is lost, that is usually how it happens. A generation later, the children raised in homes without a seat become parents. For them a home without a kamidana is not a "lost home" but simply a "normal home."

03The strength of the child who knows grandfather's story

This is not a sentimental argument. In recent years Western psychology has entered this territory and produced striking results.

Marshall Duke and Robyn Fivush, psychologists at Emory University, developed a 20-item measure called the "Do You Know?" scale to gauge how much children know about their own family history. Do you know where your grandparents grew up? Do you know where your parents met? Do you know of an illness or something terrible that happened in your family?¹

In the summer of 2001 they put these questions to about four dozen families and compared the children's answers with the results of psychological tests. The more children knew about their family's history, the stronger their sense of control over their lives, the higher their self-esteem and the better they believed their families functioned. The scale was reported to be the best single predictor of children's emotional well-being². The authors also reported the finding in a journal as a clinically useful index¹.

Two months after the survey came the September 11 attacks. The researchers are reported to have reassessed the same children and found that those who knew more of their family history proved more resilient².

A further point deserves attention. Duke describes three shapes of family narrative: the ascending story of rising from nothing, the descending story of former wealth lost, and the healthiest of all, the "oscillating" narrative that moves between ups and downs². Not a glorious family tree, but "your grandfather suffered this, and still came this far," is what becomes a child's foundation.

Duke explains that the most confident children have a strong "intergenerational self." They know they belong to something bigger than themselves².

04Part of something larger than oneself

Japan has long had a word for the sense of being part of something larger: wakemitama. Strictly it refers to dividing the spirit of a kami enshrined at a shrine so that it may be worshipped elsewhere, but I take it as applying to human life as well.

I did not come into being from nothing by chance; I exist here as a portion divided from a great, unbroken life. I have a father and a mother, each of whom had a father and a mother. Ten generations back there are 1,024 people; twenty generations back, more than a million, connected without a single one missing, and so I am here now.

Self-esteem built on one's own achievements collapses with every failure. But if one's very existence is the outcome of a million people, it stands unshaken from the start, independent of achievement. And Japan had a device for recalling this sense every day: the kamidana, the butsudan and the habit of praying to one's ancestors.

One more old word: nakaima. It names this present moment as the exact midpoint between past and future. The past is not something finished and left behind. It flows into the here and now, passes through me and heads toward the future. Seen this way, praying to one's ancestors is no longer nostalgia for what has gone. It becomes the act of turning one's attention back to the source of the power moving one now.

What Duke and his colleagues urge, telling the family story, our ancestors practiced for thousands of years in the form of prayer. That is how I understand it.

05The vertical axis can be restored without living together

Let me be clear. I am not saying abandon the nuclear family and return to three generations under one roof. That is neither realistic nor necessary. What was lost was not cohabitation but the vertical axis, and the vertical axis can be restored in a 2DK or a single apartment room.

First, make a seat in the home. A kamidana, a butsudan, or a shelf with a single photograph will do. What matters is that the family knows it is a place for those who are not here.

Second, tell names and stories. This is exactly what Duke and Fivush's research showed. Your grandfather's name, what he did, where he stumbled, how he recovered. It need not be a smooth tale. Stories of hardship and recovery give a child the most strength.

Third, pray regularly. In a form I inherited from my father, I offer prayers to four streams: my father's father's line, my father's mother's line, my mother's father's line and my mother's mother's line. I divide them in four because no single line alone made me. I do not claim this is the only right form. But I find real meaning in confirming that none of the lines is missing.

My young eldest son comes to my side when I join my hands in the morning and copies me, pressing his small hands together. He surely does not yet understand the meaning. That is fine. What he will remember is the sight of a father who bowed each morning to someone unseen.

What was erased from the 1951 blueprint, we can draw back in with our own hands. The blueprint was given to us; what we do within it is not. Postwar Japan provided homes with astonishing speed to a people who had lost theirs. That work deserves praise. But what it provided were boxes for the living to sleep and rise in. There is no need to blame anyone for the absence of a seat for the dead; at the time there was no room to think that far.

We, however, no longer lack a place to live. So let us add now, ourselves, the one tatami mat's worth that the blueprint left out. Make a seat for those who are not here. Call their names. Tell their stories. Bow. With that alone, the severed vertical axis begins to reconnect.