Filial Piety in Japan and China: Borrowing, Variation and Significance

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Abstract
Filial piety has been central to Chinese social fabric since ancient times and thoroughly adopted and propagated by the Japanese since the sixth century A.D. However, it was an impediment to the industrial, military and political development of China but not to that of Japan. Our hypothesis is that dissimilarities in kinship structure, and hence in secondary groupings, between the two societies led the content of filial piety to build human relationships differently in the two societies. Support for this hypothesis is found in the difference between tsu or clan in China and dozoku (prevailing in rural areas) and iemoto (prevailing in urban areas) in Japan. Membership and advancement in the Chinese secondary group are restricted to males born and females married into it. Membership and advancement in the Japanese secondary groups are not so confined. Yet the content of filial piety permeates all three. The dozoku, but especially the iemoto, provided the Japanese a larger and firmer infrastructure of human grouping on which to build their modern enterprises whether they be religious, educational, economic, political or military.

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