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Mabiki
Infanticide and Population Growth in Eastern Japan, 1660â?"1950
By Fabian Drixler UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS
Copyright © 2013 The Regents of the University of California
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-520-95361-1
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 broad phases: (i) a high-fertility pre-transition phase, (ii) the fertility transition itself and (iii) a low-fertility post-transition phase during which fertility will probably fluctuate around and remain close to replacement level." Even in the "high-fertility variant" of their latest projection, they therefore assume that fertility will continue to decline in those countries where it is above replacement level. The high-fertility variant projects a world population of 16 billion for 2100; when the same model holds fertility constant, that number rises to 27 billion people. The retreat of rigorous family planning in nineteenth-century Eastern Japan confounds the assumption that fertility only changes from high to low. It suggests that the demographic history of the world may have been much more varied, contingent, and interesting than the "general consensus" posits, and that the demographic future may yet hold many surprises.
EASTERN JAPAN
Within Japan, the easternmost third of Honshu was the largest contiguous area in which infanticides were so frequent as to shrink villages and motivate expensive countermeasures. Stretching from the old course of the Tonegawa in the south to the northern reaches of Sendai domain, this is the area I call Eastern Japan. While all chapters in this book feature men and women, governments, and ideas from beyond its borders, and four (Chapters 2, 11, 12, and 13) take an altogether archipelagic view, Eastern Japan furnishes much of the micro-level demographic data that undergirds this study, and is the setting for its central storyline: that after a century of very low fertility, a hard-fought rearrangement of mental categories and worldviews brought about a reverse fertility transition. While there are signs that Eastern Japan's narrative may have played out in full or in part in other parts of the country, the demographic records of western provinces such as Mimasaka deserve their own analyses, and their stories call for a separate telling.
Around 1800, Eastern Japan was home to perhaps 4.5 million people. Although the region began on the doorstep of the shogun's capital, then bustling with a million inhabitants, most towns in Eastern Japan were small. Castletowns, markets, and a few manufacturing centers dotted a landscape of paddies, dry fields, forests, and thatch-roofed villages. Though often portrayed as backward and poor, Eastern Japan in 1800 had higher wages and lower food prices than many other parts of the island realm. The economy of Eastern Japan was internally diverse. Parts of Mito domain specialized in paper and tobacco, while Kozuke (present Gunma) and Shindatsu (in present Fukushima) ranked among Japan's leading silk producers. Rice paddies covered the coastal plains of Sendai and Shonai, while the mountain basins of Aizu and Yonezawa were famed for their lacquer trees. All inhabitants of Eastern Japan acknowledged the suzerainty of the shogun in Edo and the emperor in Kyoto, but local administration was fragmented into shogunal territories, bannermen possessions, and scores of domain states, which generally enjoyed autonomy in their domestic policies. Within Eastern Japan, the domains tended to be small and scattered in the south and large and contiguous in the north (see Map 3 in the frontmatter). While Sendai, the region's largest such state, had about half a million vassals and subjects in 1800, the dominion of some lords in the North Kant fell short of ten thousand people.
For all its diversity of livelihoods and rule, Eastern Japan had a distinct demographic culture, at least during the eighteenth century. It probably shared key elements of that culture—above all a preference for raising only a few children—with parts of Japan's southwestern periphery. Contemporary observers thought that infanticide was commonplace in parts of Shikoku, western Honshu, and Kyushu. The few village studies that historical demographers have undertaken in those areas suggest that this reputation was deserved. In the late nineteenth century, the traces of infanticide in the Southwest were still visible in skewed sex ratios and implausibly frequent stillbirths in district-level statistics. Nonetheless, Eastern Japan accounts for a commanding proportion of the analyses, pamphlets, votive tablets, and policy regimes that the opponents of infanticide fashioned.
Despite its distinct demography and shared conversation about infanticide, Eastern Japan does not have a name that is both elegant and precise. Many contemporaries simply called it Azuma ("the East") or Tgoku, which can be rendered as "the Eastern provinces," "the East of the country," or "the country in the East." The usual definition of Eastern Japan includes the southern Kant as well as parts of central Honshu. Infanticides were probably fairly common in those areas, but not to the extent that they caused general depopulation, produced a reputation for rampant child-killing, or provoked the flurry of private efforts and public policies we see to their north and east. Eastern Japan, as defined in this book, comprises the North and East Kant and the south of a region then called Ou and now known as Thoku, the Northeast (see Map 1 in the frontmatter).
A thousand villages furnish the micro-demographic data for this book up to 1872 (Map 4). I call them the Ten Provinces dataset, which contains five distinct populations: (1) Eastern Japan, which for our purposes can be subdivided into areas whose rulers actively combated infanticide and areas that experienced neither pregnancy surveillance nor childrearing subsidies before 1872. It was above all in these latter regions, which included much of the provinces of Kazusa and Shimosa, that infanticide remained widespread even after the mid–nineteenth century. These two unequal halves of Eastern Japan form the core of this book, and I refer to their village sample as the Togoku dataset. (2) The districts of Katsushika and Chiba in western Shimosa, where the traces of infanticide are too inconsistent to merit inclusion in this book's definition of Eastern Japan. (3) Tsugaru in the north, where people multiplied in good times and died in terrible numbers when the harvest failed. (4) Nanbu in the far Northeast, where infanticide was not challenged until the Meiji period. (5) Echigo, a large and populous province on the Japan Sea coast famous for abhorring infanticide and sending its surplus sons and daughters across the mountain passes to Eastern Japan.
UNLOCKING FERTILITY HISTORIES
Although this book makes extensive use of the statistical tables of the Imperial period (1868–1945), most of its demographic claims about the Edo period (1600–1868) derive from a sample of population registers. Depending on their time and place, they bear a dozen different names, including variations on shumon aratamecho ("registers of religious scrutiny"), which began as a tool for the suppression of Christianity, and ninbetsu aratemecho ("person-by-person registers"), which originated in musters of a lord's strength. The different formats vary in whether they record the sectarian affiliations or the landholdings of each household, but all state each individual inhabitant's age as well as his or her role within the household.
There is a hypnotic quality to these booklets. In neat columns, the adults and children of a vanished world file past the reader's eye, assembling themselves into households, mutual responsibility groups, entire village societies. Though the surviving registers represent only a fraction of those ever compiled, their sheer bulk begs the question why so much paper and time was devoted to creating such lists of villagers and townspeople. This question deserves a more detailed answer than I can give here. It is nonetheless important to this book because the purpose of the registers has a direct bearing on their reliability as sources of demographic information. In regimes that compiled population registers to conscript men for labor duty, people often found ways to hide from census takers, and thereby also elude the grasp of historical demographers. Where registers were merely meant to satisfy official curiosity about the number of a lord's subjects, they were sometimes indifferently kept or even falsified to serve local economic interests or flatter the demographic goals of the regime. It is therefore reassuring to the historical demographer that in the Edo period, population registers served the single greatest concern of the Tokugawa system: to control its subjects and maintain a stable, harmonious order. The registers typically played no role in conscripting labor, and although they served as the basis of headcounts, they were not maintained with the primary goal of furnishing rulers with demographic information.
In general, warriors were either omitted from the population registers or listed in separate documents that have apparently survived less well than the village records. As a result, samurai bestride the pages of this book as commentators and policymakers, but are not a part of the database that underlies most of my demographic statements.
For commoners, Tokugawa-period population registers survive in gratifying numbers. In some villages, series of these booklets run unbroken for more than a century. Most of the great achievements of historical demography in Japan over the past forty years have relied on such series, detecting births, deaths, and other events as changes between every two of these booklets. This study owes much to such earlier longitudinal analyses, but takes a different approach to generate demographic knowledge beyond the relatively rare villages whose registers have come down to us in continuous series.
That approach is the Own-Children Method (OCM) of Fertility Estimation, a reverse-survival technique that is based on the simple insight that in closed populations, the distribution of ages and kinship ties within each household are the result of past fertility and mortality. When combined with information about mortality, the snapshots of population structure preserved in the registers therefore hold the key to reconstructing fertility rates for the years immediately preceding the creation of each register. I invite readers who are curious about the details of this technique to consult Appendices 1 and 2, where I discuss the sources of my mortality assumptions, sampling issues, and possible biases.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Mabiki by Fabian Drixler. Copyright © 2013 The Regents of the University of California. Excerpted by permission of UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS.
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