There was one thing in the Households reading that I found particularly interesting: the fact that women do not want to bring in their husbands to their families because they would have to deal with the ridicule from having a husband that's willing to leave his family. I would have thought it would be an "honor" to have a husband clever enough to bypass genetic heirs. Instead, it's seen as a burden and an obstacle to being a true woman. After reading the article, I can better understand why a woman might feel this way. Since the Japanese household is so structured with certain roles to fill, a woman might feel that her goal is not to just be married, but to fill the traditional role of joining another family and thereby completing her part of the ie family system. Since the roles in the system are so rigid, a woman grows up knowing what her ideal role should be in her husband's family and she even looks forward to this because in a sense, she's doing her duty to keep the ie system alive. While it might seem odd to others, the Japanese woman's plight and dreaded role of staying in her own family and becoming the household wife stems from the way the ie system works, and I think it's really interesting....
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