Eve Sedgwick writes that "in any male-dominated society, there is a special relationship between male homosocial desire and the structures for maintaining and transmitting patriarchal power: a relationship founded on an inherent and potentially active structural congruence." Generally true of the social economies of Heian and Kamakura Period Japan, this point is well illustrated by the way in which cultural economies develop in the late-12th and 13th Centuries, a time during which an almost all-male pool of contestants took part in an agonistic process to possess cultural knowledge. Those recognized as validly in possession of such knowledge could allow or deny access to it. Some male social relationships all-but-guaranteed transmission: that between father and son, or between the powerful and those beholden to them. However, access to cultural knowledge also hinged on less determined bonds between men: between the lonely and the attentive, between the bored and the entertaining, between the arrogant and the adulatory, as well as between those of like inclination. The structures of male-male society are then the structures by which cultural transmission - at this time in Japan a form of patriarchal power - is achieved.
The seven century-long success of the Asukai House as a cultural institution is in many respects founded on the ability of two foundational members - Asukai Masatsune and Asukai Masaari - to exploit opportunities afforded by homosocial structures and insinuate themselves into lines of cultural transmission. It was their appeal as potential participants in male society, as much as their lineage, status or ability, that gained them entrée into circles of elite cultural production. The long success of their house is thus founded on something virtually invisible in conventional historiography: their likability.