"Mabiki shows how reproductive choices are embedded in dynamic cultural, social, and economic contexts. Marshaling evidence as diverse as religious artifacts and computer simulations, Fabian Drixler offers a compelling account of changes in the culture of infanticide over three centuries of Japanese history."—George Alter, Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research, University of Michigan

"International work in Japanese studies is intellectually vibrant and booming in a way that most outsiders to the field probably don't realize. Among this excellent work, Drixler's Mabiki is one of the most important books to appear in any field of Japanese studies in many years. It is also a book that will disturb many readers and certainly be widely read, discussed and debated."—Mark Metzler, University of Texas at Austin

"This book removes any question that infanticide was a widespread practice in eastern Japan, as well as a handful of other regions -- not only throughout the Edo period but well into the twentieth century. Drixler's analysis will force future scholars who are thinking about demography, family, gender, social policy, ethnography, and other topics to include infanticide in their analyses. The implications are broad, especially for discussions regarding the forces that slowed Edo-period population growth." —William Johnston, Wesleyan University

Fabian Drixler teaches Japanese history at Yale University.

Mabiki

Infanticide and Population Growth in Eastern Japan, 1660–1950

By Fabian Drixler

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS

Copyright © 2013 The Regents of the University of California
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-520-27243-9

Contents

List of Illustrations, x,
Acknowledgments, xiii,
A Note on Conventions, xvii,
1. Introduction: Contested Worldviews and a Demographic Revolution, 1,
PART I. THE CULTURE OF LOW FERTILITY, CA. 1660–1790,
2. Three Cultures of Family Planning, 25,
3. Humans, Animals, and Newborn Children, 47,
4. Infanticide and Immortality: The Logic of the Stem Household, 61,
5. The Material and Moral Economy of Infanticide, 69,
6. The Logic of Infant Selection, 91,
7. The Ghosts of Missing Children: Four Approaches to Estimating the Rate of Infanticide, 109,
PART II. REDEFINING REPRODUCTION: THE LONG RETREAT OF INFANTICIDE, CA. 1790–1950,
8. Infanticide and Extinction, 129,
9. "Inferior Even to Animals": Moral Suasion and the Boundaries of Humanity, 138,
10. Subsidies and Surveillance, 158,
11. Even a Strong Castle Cannot Be Defended without Soldiers: Infanticide and National Security, 183,
12. Infanticide and the Geography of Civilization, 194,
13. Epilogue: Infanticide in the Shadows of the Modern State, 208,
14. Conclusion, 232,
Appendix 1. The Own-Children Method and Its Mortality Assumptions, 245,
Appendix 2. Sampling Biases, Sources of Error, and the Characteristics of the Ten Provinces Dataset, 253,
Appendix 3. The Villages of the Ten Provinces Dataset, 261,
Appendix 4. Total Fertility Rates in the Districts of the Ten Provinces, 276,
Appendix 5. Regional Infanticide Reputations, 281,
Appendix 6. Scrolls and Votive Tablets with Infanticide Scenes, 285,
Appendix 7. Childrearing Subsidies and Pregnancy Surveillance by Domain, 287,
Notes, 289,
Bibliography, 353,
Index, 397,

CHAPTER 1

Introduction

Contested Worldviews and a Demographic Revolution

Deep in the mountains of Gunma, a chapel stands amid cedars and forest flowers. Under its eaves, a wooden tablet has slowly surrendered its paint to two hundred years of wind and rain. Yet when the light falls from the right angle, the eroded image still calls out its warning to travelers: It is early spring. The branches of a plum tree are still bare. In an open pavilion, a woman has just given birth. Next to her, a midwife kneels—and strangles the newborn. While the infant soul soars toward a bodhisattva, floating above on curled clouds, the midwife is destined for a darker place. On the right side of the panel, flames lick her face, and two devils break her body.

The tablet is a relic of a hundred-year war of images and words over the cultural place of infanticide and abortion in Japan. Especially from the 1790s to the 1870s, and especially in Eastern Japan, infanticide was a central topic of the public conversation, with abortion often mentioned in the same breath. The traces of this conversation are lopsided. While opponents of infanticide produced a steady stream of policy proposals and pamphlets with haunting illustrations, acceptance expressed itself less in writing than in killing one's own babies and speaking ill of neighbors with too many children. Proponents of infanticide also articulated their logic in a number of widely shared metaphors. The most famous of these, mabiki or "thinning," likened infants to rice plants, some of which needed to be uprooted as seedlings to give their siblings the space and light to thrive. The metaphor encapsulates two of the fundamental assumptions of the act it described: that newborn children were not fully formed humans, and as such were disposable; and that to do right by their chosen children, responsible parents might need to destroy some infants at birth.

Beyond the question of its moral status, infanticide permitted a range of interpretations. Administrators worried about dwindling populations and falling revenues, and often thought that it was a love of luxury that prompted people to kill their children. Villagers complained that poverty left them no other resort, and sometimes helpfully suggested that lower taxes would do wonders for the safety of their newborns. Men of learning often believed that moral education could convince villagers to give up infanticide, but some thinkers argued that it would take a fundamental reform of the political system to achieve that goal. Men of substance who were content to work within the established order, meanwhile, reinvented themselves as moral leaders of their communities and wrote to their governments with offers to finance the eradication of infanticide. Most domains in Eastern Japan built expensive systems of welfare and surveillance. By 1850, the majority of women north and east of Edo were obliged to report their pregnancies to the authorities, and the majority of the poor could apply for subsidies to rear their children.

Over the same years, a demographic revolution was set in motion. In the eighteenth century, the consensus of many villages in Eastern Japan was that parents could, and under many circumstances should, kill some of their newborns. Perhaps every third life ended in an infanticide, and the people of Eastern Japan brought up so few children that each generation was smaller than the one that went before it. By 1850, in contrast, a typical couple in the same region raised four or five children, and a long period of population growth began. By the 1920s, the average woman brought six children into the world, and in Eastern Japan, as elsewhere in the nation, overpopulation at home became an argument for expansion abroad. Eastern Japan, in other words, had experienced a reverse fertility transition.

While infanticide became less frequent, it nonetheless persisted. With the overthrow of the Tokugawa order in 1868, the elaborate countermeasures vanished together with the old regimes that had devised them. Around 1870, the first generation of governors of the new Meiji state announced ambitious eradication schemes, but their programs were short-lived. After about 1880, infanticide does not seem to have attracted much public notice, even though it continued to claim many newborn lives. At the beginning of the twentieth century, entire prefectures reported stillbirth rates so absurdly high as to suggest that in some of them up to one child in five died in an infanticide or a late-term abortion. Although these numbers decreased rapidly after about 1910, the traces of infanticides are visible even in the statistics of the 1930s. In 1949, finally, the legalization of abortion brought Eastern Japan's long story of habitual infanticide to a close.

In Eastern Japan, developments usually associated with modernity—expanding state capacity, growing literacy, regional integration—coincided with a steady increase in the number of children parents raised. This fact poses a challenge to prevailing theories of demographic change, which dichotomize history into a prolific and perilous pre-transition world on the one hand, and a modern world characterized by few births and long lives on the other. Expectations of the demographic future derive from such historical narratives of unidirectional change. For example, the United Nations demographers who periodically publish population projections state their underlying view of demographic history as follows: "There has been a general consensus that the evolution of fertility includes three...