Professor Chie Nakane

Professor Nakane graduated in 1950 from the Department of Oriental History in the Faculty of Literature in the University of Tokyo, and was professor of Social Anthropology in the Institute of Oriental Culture in her alma mater from 1979-87, the first woman to become a professor at Todai. She was also Director of the Institute, 1980-82, and is now Professor Emeritus. She has also been a visiting professor at the University of Chicago and the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, and a Professor-at-Large in Cornell University. 

In addition she is an honorary member of the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland. 

From her wide experience in the field, studying both Asian and Western societies, she evolved a new theory about the vertical structure of Japanese society which, after various revisions, was published as Japanese Society, London and Berkeley, 1970. Another of her works published in London in 1967 is Kinship and Economic Organization in Rural Japan. She also extended her studies to the social systems of India and Tibet, and some of the results can be seen in Social Anthropology -- a Comparative Study of Asian Societies, Tokyo 1987, and "Recent Trends in Mongolian, Tibetan and Vietnamese Studies" (ed.), Acta Asiatica 76, Tokyo, 1999. 

More than thirty years have now passed since the publication of Japanese Society, and Prof. Nakane says that she has often been asked to write another book, in view of the considerable changes that Japanese society has gone through during the last three decades. Certainly there have been tremendous changes, especially in the outwardly visible aspects, but one has to ask if they have really affected the basic core structure of Japanese society, a fundamental theoretical exposition of which is contained in her book. In her talk to the Society she would like to interpret the contemporary changes in society, identifying the elements of continuity incorporated in them.