Kizaemon Aruga’s Lecture Notes on “Family System and Japanese Society”（1）

Abstract

　　　This paper is a document of the lecture on 'Family System and Japanese Society' delivered at the University of Tokyo by one of the most famous sociologists, Kizaemon Aruga in 1954. These lecture notes were written down by Akiyoshi Takahashi who was a university student and attended Aruga's lecture at that time. It was a time just before Aruga was beginning to actively publish many articles after a long silence following WW Ⅱ . It was also a time just after a criticism by Seiichi Kitano had been offered which called into question on Aruga's understanding about the essence of the cognate relationship, which is a Japanese proper relationship among the stem family （honke in Japanese） and branch families （bunke in Japanese）. We can observe the real voice of Aruga with a feeling of tension based on his polemical statements in this lecture, which we cannot understand from his written articles. These lecture notes not only contain a documentary value on this dispute but also introduce us a deeper understanding about Aruga's theory.