primogenitoral

Such a family unit may include as many generations as are alive, but there can be only one married couple in each generation. While succession is ideally primogenitoral, a great variety of options can be exercised to secure the succession to the headship of the family.

1975-1978, Robert John Smith, Kurusu: the Price of Progress in a Japanese Village, 1951-1975, Stanford University Press, →ISBN, page 45

It is not difficult to see how the family system in Japan, through its flexibility, made the emergence of the modern industrial economy possible. Some specific links, which also apply in the English case, have been suggested in the Japanese context. For instance, Robert Smith has suggested several features of the family system that have encouraged industrial and economic development: ‘it was the genius of the civil code that it required impartible inheritance and recommended primogenitoral succession to the headship of the house. All other children were thus spun off from the family into the factories or the military, and swelled the population of the cities.

1993, 1992 Lectures and Memoirs, British Academy by Oxford University Press, →ISBN, page 196