If the portrait of the Japanese presented in this book is quite different from the more familiar ones described in other works on the Japanese and their civilization, it is due primarily to the fact that this book is written from the perspective of the ordinary Japanese. It is also different because of its emphasis on the symbolic dimensions of Japanese daily life. Rather than examining formalized public rituals, events, or institutions themselves, I examined the perspectives and involvement of people in them, together with the management of daily hygiene and general body and health maintenance.

The urban Japanese as seen in this book are people who have maintained well-delineated symbolic categories of thought, or to use a more fashionable term, a structure of “consciousness.” Although couched today in the language of biomedical germ theory, Japanese concepts of hygiene are deeply embedded in symbolic categories of thought (Chapter 2). Their thought patterns also include physiomorphism, often attributed to magical thoughts, and their urban life is full of magical rites (Chapters 4, 6, and 7). Nervously attempting to expel pollution from their universe, they nevertheless live in a dualistic universe in which death and evil coexist with life and good, although the former are always placed in ritual contexts (Chapter 3). The urban Japanese notion of the self is not that of the “individual,” isolated and free from other members of the society (Chapters 8, 9, and 10).