The Setting:
Mamachi

The people of Mamachi think of their neighborhood as shizuka (quiet and peaceful), separated from the bustle of Tokyo where most of the husbands work.^[9] Until about thirty or forty years ago Mamachi was sparsely settled. Although many new houses have gone up in the last generation, the neighborhood with its narrow paths, large trees, and small gardens still retains an aura of suburban calm.

Virtually all homes in Mamachi are privately-owned, single-storied, unpainted wooden dwellings surrounded by ingenious small gardens, separated from the outside world by high fences. One or two sides of the house, generally facing the sun, have sliding glass doors which can be opened to let in the sun and to air out the house during the day. At night, the sliding wooden doors outside the glass doors will be closed to keep out rain, cold, insects, and prowlers. Construction is generally simple and plain, with thin walls, peaked roofs, small windows, no basement. The homes average perhaps three or four rooms in size, the rooms being separated by sliding paper doors. Many homes have one "Western style" room used for a sitting room or for entertaining guests; it has chairs, a couch and a chest of drawers, and is often decorated in a fashion not too different from American style of a few decades ago. Two or three "Japanese style" rooms covered with soft tatami mats can be used for sitting in the day time and for sleeping at night. In the day time, cushions are brought out to sit on, and a table is set up for meals or for entertaining guests. At night the tables and cushions are put away and bedding is taken out of the large closets and placed over the tatami mats. Other furnishings generally are few and simple: a few chests and bureaus, a television set, a radio, a few pictures, decorations, and perhaps a children's desk and a piano. The kitchen is old fashioned by American standards. A few people now can afford a mechanized American style kitchen or at least a

[9] Our field-work procedure is described in the Appendix.

refrigerator, but most families in Mamachi still have only one or two gas burners and a small wooden ice box which they fill with a piece of ice every few days. The kitchen usually is not furnished very attractively and guests are not invited in. One small room contains a small but high Japanese wooden bath tub where the family spends many an evening taking turns relaxing in very hot water. They have cold running water which is safe to drink, and a few families have a little heater to heat water as it comes out of the tap.

The climate of Tokyo is slightly warmer than that of Washington, D.C. with about one snowfall a year and only a few days in winter when the temperature goes below freezing. Because of the style of housing and the high cost of fuel, there is no central heating. In the middle of one of the tatami rooms is a localized heating device known as the kotatsu . A portion of the floor is cut out in the shape of a square, and one sits on the floor next to the opening resting his feet on a ledge which goes around all four sides of the opening about eighteen inches below floor level. A few inches below the foot ledge is a place to burn charcoal or install an electric heater. A small table stretches over the opening, and a quilt may be placed over the table and stretched out over people's laps to prevent the heat from escaping. The family eats and spends most of its winter evenings near the kotatsu in order to keep warm. The rest of the house is unheated, although many families have a gas or electric stove which they can use when guests come to visit.

Mamachi homes in their simple functional design are pleasant and attractive. In the day time when the sliding doors are opened one can see the choice view of the garden, with its neatly trimmed shrubbery and flowers, carefully swept ground, and, perhaps, some rocks or a very small pond. Although the gardens are small, one has the feeling of being completely away from the rush and pressure of life outside the gates.

Within convenient walking distance from any place in Mamachi are rows of highly specialized small shops which open on to the more heavily traveled streets. There is the dry-goods store, the spice store, the bakery, the sweets store, the canned-goods store, and fruit and vegetable store, the dairy store, the butcher shop, the fish market, the poultry store, the rice store, the tea store, the stationery

store, the shoe store, the electrical-appliance store, the store for pots and pans, the Western-clothing store, the store for bedding supplies, the furniture store, the store for medicine and drugs, and perhaps a few more. Intermingled within a short distance are a number of craftsmen's shops such as that of the maker of tatami mats for the floor, the door maker, the bath maker, the repairman for bicycles and motor bikes, the gardener, the kimono maker, and the tailor.

These small shops usually are run by a single family of parents and children with perhaps a live-in hired helper or two who are likely to be treated almost like family members. The family lives behind the wooden floored shop in a small room or two of tatami mats. While most Mamachi families occasionally shop in Tokyo at the large department stores, they do most of their daily shopping at these small shops where they are steady customers. Some shops, like the canned-goods store or the fruit and vegetable store, send errand boys to take daily orders and deliver them a few hours later. More commonly, the housewife goes out daily, basket under arm and perhaps child on back, to select the things she needs. Relations between housewife and shopkeepers or craftsmen are usually pleasant and cordial. However, they are not intimate, for a wide social gap separates the new middle class from the small shopkeepers of the old middle class who have less desirable housing and physical facilities, less money, less security, and less education.

Since Mamachi is not the center of the suburb, it has relatively few public buildings. There is a large two-storied wooden grade school with more than two thousand children, and a somewhat smaller junior high school, both with large gravel-covered playgrounds. Several police sub-stations, with two or three policemen each, keep track of the residents, make sure that everything is peaceful in the neighborhood and give directions to visitors, an important task because of the irregular numbering of houses. Small branch offices of the post office and fire department service the area. A few small shrines and one temple are tucked away among some of the residences. Local buses run down several of the main streets (ending up at the Mamachi train stop), which provides the residents with a rapid and inexpensive route to downtown Tokyo. Most of the men leave early in the morning, brief case and magazine or newspaper in

hand, and catch a train to work in Tokyo. Wives occasionally go to Tokyo for shopping and many children of junior-high-school and high-school age attend school in Tokyo.

It was our purpose while living in Mamachi to try to live as other residents did, to try to understand their way of living and their way of looking at the world. While there we took copious notes of our observations and of our talks with the residents of Mamachi. In analyzing the notes after returning to the United States my primary purpose has been to see the world of the residents in the perspective of the social setting in which they live.