).
             Marriage in traditional Japan meant that a couple became permanent members of
             an extended household and were expected to fulfill familial obligations. They were
             providing a vital link to ancestors by bringing infants into the world and taking care of
             elders soon to leave the world. Because of these important cultural mandates, it made
             sense that parents, rather than sons and daughters, would select marriage partners.
             Recent studies done in India and Bangladesh listed a number of functions that
             arranged marriages serve. According to the studies, arranged marriages helped to
             maintain social stratification, to affirm and strengthen parental power over children, to
             keep family traditions and value system intact, to consolidate and extend family property,
             to enhance the value of the kinship group, to maintain the tradition of endogamy (a
             societal expectation that individuals should marry partners very much like themselves in
             terms of race, ethnicity, and class), and to aid young people in finding mates. (B.
             Goswami, J.Sarkar, and D. Danda, pg.156)
             In looking at China's modern-day society, it is possible to see how the communist
             government attempted to eradicate such aspects of traditional society by declaring
             arranged marriages to be invalid in the 1950s. Individuals in China were encouraged to
             select their own mates without parental consent, thus greater loyalty to the state than to
             the family. However, China's policy was not accepted by many of the older generation.
             They maintained control over their children&apos
             ...