Session 146: The Social Construction of Child and Parent in Japan (1880–1930)

Organizer: Tanya Sue Maus, University of Chicago

Chair: Sally A. Hastings, Purdue University

Discussant: Anne Walthall, University of California, Irvine

Keywords: child welfare, parental rights, late 19th- and early-20th-century Japan.

The symbolic construction of the child as a social repository of productive potential, national identity, and cultural values took on dramatic proportions beginning in the mid-Meiji period (1880~). Scholars have noted that compulsory education and conscription most strikingly demarcated boundaries of child and youth; thus creating new social, economic, and political obligations for children, youth, and their parents. Moreover, from the 1880s, social activists and philanthropists began to actively experiment with orphanages and juvenile homes, further delineating the parameters of childhood, its universal sanctity, and its increasing confinement within the bounds of state legislation.

Susan Burns’ presentation examines legal documents outlining the construction of the categories of parent and child, as the child takes on new political and social currency within the Meiji state. Through court cases, she examines contestations over these definitions, and the shifting connection between gender and parental rights in the 1890s. David Ambaras addresses the tensions between reproduction and class with the government’s intervention into parenting and child welfare in the 1920s, as he illustrates the Japanese state’s attempts to control reproductive rights of the poor through legal regulations and government-supported facilities. Finally, Tanya Maus utilizes memoirs and diaries to detail the historical experiences of orphaned and abandoned children who are forced to negotiate the devastating economic fluctuations of the early industrial period and the ensuing disruption of social relationships. Together these three presentations provide new insights into definitions of child, parent, and political subject during late-19th- and early-20th-century Japan.

Children, Parents, and the Japanese State: Contesting "Parental Rights" in Meiji Courts

Susan L. Burns, University of Chicago

As has long been recognized, the 1898 Japanese civil code (Meyi minpô) legitimated a patriarchal household structure and gave fathers broad rights over their children, including the right to profit from their labor, to confine them against their will, and to regulate their choice of reproductive partners. However, this delineation of the father-child relationship was achieved only after a prolonged debate that referenced Western law, indigenous customs, and emergent conceptions of maternity and child welfare. Indeed, the 1892 civil code (Kyûminpô) had articulated a different conception of the parent-child relationship (for example, giving far more authority to widowed and divorced mothers) and had precipitated a storm of criticism. In this paper, I will explore the Meiji discourse on "parental rights" (shinken), focusing in particular on the conception of the social value and meaning of the "child" that took form within it. Departing from earlier studies that have focused on the writings of legal officials and scholars, my work will utilize the records of contested cases involving "parental rights" that were heard in local courts in the 1890s. In these cases, we find mothers suing fathers, and fathers suing grandparents over the right to parent children. The testimony in such cases and the judgments rendered will offer a new perspective on evolving conceptions of "parent" and "child" and on the social and political meaning attached to these roles.

Child Murders in the Village of Devils: Controlling the Traffic in Unwanted Children in Prewar Japan

David R. Ambaras, North Carolina State University

In April 1930, the death of Ogawa Kikujirô, a month-old infant, at the hands of his foster mother, led to a police investigation that revealed the widespread abuse of foundlings who had been taken in, for a fee, by the residents of Iwanosaka, a slum village on the outskirts of Tokyo. In all, authorities estimated that several hundred infants had passed through Iwanosaka during the 1920s, and that many of them had either died of neglect, been deliberately murdered, or, if they survived into childhood, been put out to beg.

The Iwanosaka case was one of several involving multiple foundling murders in interwar Tokyo, and part of a longer history of such crimes in Japan. This paper uses these cases to shed new light on the choices faced by parents, often mothers, of illegitimate children or children they could otherwise not raise; on the networks that developed to handle them; and on the state’s efforts to intervene in this reproductive economy by more closely regulating midwives and foster parenting, promoting new foundling homes, and implementing laws for the prevention of cruelty to children and the protection of mothers and infants. I emphasize that the problem, and the state’s response, were structured by laws that simultaneously restricted women’s ability to control their own reproductivity while discriminating against illegitimate offspring and their mothers, and by economic conditions that both burdened single mothers and turned foundlings into an attractive commodity for brokers and receivers.

Poverty, Childhood, and Historical Memory in Early Industrial Japan

Tanya Sue Maus, University of Chicago

This presentation explores the disjuncture between institutional conceptions of child poverty and the subjective perceptions of economically disadvantaged, abandoned, and orphaned children during the early industrial period of mid- to late Meiji Japan (~1888 to 1912). I examine the memoirs, poems, and diaries of children who entered the Okayama Orphanage as well as corresponding institutional records of their care. While the focus of the presentation will be on the remembered experiences of these children as they relate to qualitative shifts in poverty and institutional experimentation into social welfare, an investigation of the primary source materials will necessarily speak to methodological problems of historical memory and of the way in which newly formed institutions, such as orphanages, contributed to redefinitions of childhood and life cycle in Japan.

The Okayama Orphanage was founded in Okayama City in 1888 by Ishii Juji from Miyazaki prefecture. By the early 1890s it had expanded into a small compound, taking in several hundreds of orphaned and abandoned children. In the late 1890s Ishii began to move the facility child-by-child, building-by-building to Miyazaki prefecture, aspiring to create an ideal community based upon agricultural production and small industry. The orphanage maintained extensive documentation of the children’s care and retained records of their personal histories, often in the form of letters from village headmen, relatives, and private individuals who intervened to send children to the facility. Moreover, adults who had lived the early part of their lives at the Okayama Orphanage donated memoirs, diaries, and poems to its archive.