of course, this accounts for 1750 and doesn't address anthropological evidence regarding practices in the same time frame that had been under discussion.
>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