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To begin with one should note that any study of change in the Japanese family must go back over three periods-the pre-Meiji period, the Meiji and post-Meiji period and the post-second world war period. And, in fact, recent sociological studies in Japanese family cover not only the latter stage but the others as well. It would hardly be possible to attempt a complete survey of the trends of these studies in this paper, since considerable background knowledge is needed of the peculiar characteristics of the Japanese family system and of the special concepts employed. Nevertheless, some of the more important aspects can be discussed here. As is well known, the family and the village are the two fields of Japanese sociology in which sociological research had already made a great deal of progress, even before the war. These two fields overlap to a large extent. With the possible exception of the first family sociologist, T. Toda, family sociologists who have made the most important contributions, such as K. Ariga and K. Kitano, are also the rural sociologists. Their studies of the Japanese family have been carried out in relation to the village, and particularly in relation to the "ie," or traditional family system, and the dozoku, which is a sort of special institutional group composed of several it.