Chie Nakane

Chie Nakane (1926-2021) was a Japanese social anthropologist whose bestselling Japanese Society (1970), translated into thirteen languages, argued that Japanese social relations are organized fundamentally around vertical hierarchies within a shared "place" or frame, such as a company or institution, rather than around the horizontal ties of shared attribute, qualification or class common in many Western societies. Her comparative fieldwork extended to kinship and economic organization in rural Japan and to social structure in India and Tibet, and she became the first woman to hold a full professorship at the University of Tokyo, where her structural model of Japanese organizational culture influenced both academic anthropology and popular understanding of Japanese business and social life.