This video is the first of a trilogy of documentaries done by John Nathan, a former Japanese literature professor at Princeton who resigned his position there to turn to fulltime film making (and has now returned to a university professorship in California). Here, he offers a revealing portrait of an urban family business, a common version of the small firms that form part of the continuum of the Japanese economy. In one sense, it is a "traditional" small business, but it found a profitable and stable niche in the contemporary post-World War II economy. The Sugiura shop is in Yanaka, an old section of the merchant downtown (shitamachi) of Tokyo that escaped the American incendiary bombing in 1945. The Sugiuras run a catering business that specializes in providing Buddhist temples with box lunches for their many services, especially memorial rites. The shop's wholesale source for the fish that is the staple of their boxed meals is Tokyo's massive Tsukiji Fish Market, the highest-volume fish market in the world, and the elder Mr. Sugiura's position in the market's cooperative management links them to the largest fish distribution nexus in the world. One implicit point of interest to us is the multiple linkages of family and business, both in terms of social relations and of ideology. How, for example, are idioms of family used to describe relations within the firm? To what extent, and with what success, are relations presented and felt as personal/familial obligations and rights?
The Sugiura box lunch business is a stark contrast to the workplaces of the Fuji Film Corporation, which was profiled in "Being Japanese," and you should think about these differences and to what they may be attributed. In another way, the Sugiura business is like the Tamahimeden Wedding Hall (in "The Japanese Version"). Both are part of the general commercialization of ritual that characterizes the present moment. The Buddhist rituals that the Sugiuras cater, by the way, are seldom the funerals themselves but rather memorial services that are held periodically at fixed intervals after someone has died. Thus, an individual may be memorialized several times over the years after his/her death. [For a very different and satirical view of contemporary funerals, I strongly recommend "The Funeral," a film by one of Japan's best directors, Junzô Itani.]
Finally, "Full Moon Lunch" is also revealing of all three aspects of family life that we will consider: the form of the family (nuclear vs. extended), the basis of getting marriage (romance vs. arrangement), and the nature of role relations within the household (egalitarian vs. hierarchical). The older Mr. and Mrs. Sugiura are yet another pair from Japan's "Shôwa single-digit" generation, while their two sons are of the same post-World War II baby-boom generation as Akiko and Kazuo and two sets of siblings I profiled in "Finding a Place." The older son, Keizo, and his wife, Yoshiko, are both twenty-nine (at the time of filming); she is from a Kyoto area restaurant family, and they met when Keizo was sent for there for an apprenticeship. They have one baby son. The younger son, Takashi (age twenty-seven), went to college, which he didn't like, and tried the life of a sarariiman but ended up back in family business. They live in an apartment across the street from the shop, and he complains that his parents are nosy. He likes to stay out late and get up late, but the parents can see across to the apartment and monitor their hours. The younger couples got married in a joint ceremony and took their honeymoons together in Honolulu, which they recall in the documentary. Other shop personnel include a head chef and two apprentices. Isseiji, the head chef, who has been there for fourteen years, is seen showing apprentices and Keizo how to cut fish. Gansan, the twenty-nine-year-old apprentice, was a classmate of Keizo, and was taken on when his father died. He lives with his mother, wants to open his own shop, and hopes to get married, although given the discussion of marriage prospects with his mother in the video, we might wonder about those hopes. Finally, in stark contrast to Gansan, the other apprentice, nineteen-year-old Nobuo, lives alone in total (and blissful?) disarray in a one-room apartment.
Additional note: The Tsukiji Central Fish Market is itself a fascinating site and the subject of an important book by the anthropologist Theodore C. Bestor of the Department of Anthropology at Harvard University (Tsukiji: The Fish Market at the Center of the World, University of California Press, 2004). His most recent project ison North Atlantic yellow fin tuna trade and its international fishing and marketing networks (that are dominated by Japanese companies). He has a fascinating article about this, and the Tsukiji connection, in a recent Foreign Affairs article, that is available on-line at http://www.foreignpolicy.com/issue_novdec_2000/essay-bestor.html