Books: Upper Upper to Lower Lower

SUYE MURA: A JAPANESE VILLAGE —John F. Embree—University of Chicago ($3).

There has been plenty of political and picturesque U. S. journalism about Japan, but not many solid accounts of Japanese daily living. Suye Mura is such an account: some 300 pages of factual statement. With his wife, who speaks Japanese fluently, John Embree, a University of Hawaii anthropologist, lived a year in Suye Mura, a Japanese rice-farming village, population 1,663. His book tells more about modern Japanese farmers than any volume so far.

The Japanese peasant is rigidly controlled by 1) rural custom,...