Merry Isaacs White is Professor of Anthropology at Boston University. She is the author of The Japanese Educational Challenge: A Commitment to Children (1987), The Japanese Overseas: Can They Go Home Again? (1986), and The Material Child: Coming of Age in Japan and America (California, 1993) and coeditor of Comparing Cultures: Readings for Writers on Contemporary America and Japan (1996).

• List of Figures Acknowledgments Introduction PART ONE: MAKING FAMILY--A NATION BEGINS AT HOME 1. Why Families Are a National Security Issue 2. Family Under Construction: One Hundred Years at Home 3. Families in Postwar Japan: Democracy and Reconstruction PART TWO: CONTAINING ELEMENTS 4. Elemental Families: Starting with Children 5. Life Choices for Men and Women: The Bounded Realities of Reproduction 6. Twenty-First-Century Blues: Aging in Families PART THREE: CONSUMING AS SURVIVAL 7. Marketing the Bite-Size Family: Consuming Images, Supporting Realities Conclusion: Exceptions Are the Rule--Families as Exemplars of Diversity Notes Bibliography Index

"Japanese politicians have pronounced the declining birthrate a national crisis. White gives us an enlightening bolt of reality, showing how Japanese families are really coping with the enormous changes surrounding them." - Ezra Vogel, Henry Ford II Research Professor at Harvard and author of Is Japan Still Number One?