Pre-modern Japan was patriarchal without being obsessed with getting the bloodline straight. Thomas C. Smith writes in _Native Sources of Japanese Industrialization, 1750-1920_ (Berkeley: U of California P, 1988): "It has always been possible in Japan to adopt a male heir, even of adult age, as a husband for a daughter or outright so long as there is property to inherit....[H]e is in every sense but sentimentally, and perhaps not always with that exception -- legally, socially, religiously, even genealogically -- the exact equal of a natural heir; and he has the bonus advantage that if he works out badly, he can be disinherited and replaced" (p. 36). Women had the right to inherit property as well, though primogeniture came into practice for samurai families beginning in the late feudal period (for other classes, nuptial regimes continued to be plural, depending upon local customs, family preferences, etc.). Most importantly, property transmission was linked to *the family name*, which was *not* necessarily linked to the bloodline at all (be it matrilineally or patrilineally). Smith points out: "In popular registers -- the basic documents of administrative and legal control -- individuals were always entered by family membership, never autonomously, although sometimes of necessity they were listed as one-person families. The rights to sit in the village assembly, to draw water from the irrigation system, to participate in the management of the shrine, even to reside in the community: all were lodged in families, never in individuals. *If all living members of a family died, the family's name and rights (_kabu_) in the village would continue to exist if there were property to inherit; relatives or the village itself would then appoint an heir, whether kin or not, to inherit the family name, house, ancestors, and tax burdens.*" (emphasis added, p. 217). In other words, the family in pre-modern Japan was corporate & nominalist.
Yoshie