You Are Your House: The Construction and Continuity of Family and Identity Using Yagō in a Japanese Suburban Farming Community

This paper examines the persistent use of yagō, or house names, in one small agricultural township in northeastern Japan. In Tōwa-chō, yagō help differentiate local households by facilitating for families a distinctive identity and a historical continuity that helps them address change. One might have expected modernization to have rendered yagō obsolete. But to the contrary, ethnographic observation in Tōwa-chō reveals that yogō serve a myriad functions that are making their use more popular than ever. By analysing the history, development and contemporary use of yogō in this suburban Iwate prefecture farm community, this paper explains how house names help local residents to contest the anomie and social fragmentation that has become a part of their post-modern lifestyle.