How Was the Baby From Tokyo Bathed in Babies
Infanticide in Japan: Sign of the Times?
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December 8, 1973
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TOKYO—The torso of the newborn baby was found in a money locker at the Ueno railway station hither. It was wrapped in a bath towel and stuffed into a paper bag. A notation attached to the parcel read: "Gomen nasai, honto ni gomen nasau" ("I'm lamentable, I actually am sad.").
A few days later, another decomposed body of a newborn baby was discovered in the Osaka railway station.
In 1970, there were simply two such "money locker incidents," equally they have come up to be known, three the post-obit year and eight in 1972. But this year the number has increased drastically—an average of once every 10 days. Moreover, they are only one part of a much larger wave of killing babies or abandoning children in this country.
In all, more than than 100 babies have been killed this year. In improver, in Tokyo alone there were 119 cases of children being deserted last twelvemonth. The rate has continued this twelvemonth.
Daughters Spared
In Japan, the killing of babies has a history of more than 1,000 years. It became prevalent during the feudal Edo era (1603‐1868) as a means of population control. Farmers killed their 2nd or third sons upon nascency in what was called "mabiki," an agricultural term that originally meant "thinning out."
Usually, the daughters were spared because they could be married off, sold every bit servants or prostitutes, or sent off to go geisha, or professional person entertainers. But in northern Nippon lone, betwixt 60,000 and seventy,000 cases of mabiki were recorded each twelvemonth.
When Japan began to modernize in the latter tertiary of the 19th century, mabiki was prohibited by law. Moreover, Nippon's leaders encouraged population growth as both industry and the armed forces expanded.
But subsequently the devastation of World State of war Two, infanticide reappeared, hitting a peak in 1948, when 399 cases were recorded, and so decreasing to its lowest point in 1958, when 114 cases were recorded. Information technology then began to rise and has leveled off at about 175 cases a year.
Though Infanticide is not increasing at the moment, the patterns, motives and pregnant accept changed signiticantly. Japan's liberal ballgame laws and widespread use of contraceptives (Except the pill, which is illegal here) brand population control no longer the cause of infanticide.
Many experts attribute contemporary infanticide and kid desertions In Japan to rapid urbanization and a resultant drastic shift from the traditional extended family to the nuclear family. A recent government survey shows that 65 per cent of the families in Japan today are nuclear families, and a report on infanticide published this yr by the Criminal Sience Society of Chuo University here indicates that eight out of ten infanticides today occur in nuclear families.
Hidemi Kamata, who did the main research in the Chuo report, said that "contrary to the widespread notion that babies are killed either by promiscuous married women or cruel stepmothers, they are in many cases victims of their real mothers in nuclear families."
Dr. Takemitsu Henmi of Tokyo Academy'due south mental health section said that "every bit the size of a family unit gets smaller, there appear many immature mothers who lose conviction in their ability to raise children." His colleague, Eiko Kurisu, explained that a survey of mothers in Tokyo with children from ane to 3 years sometime showed that virtually of them were "overly concerned about comparing their own children with others."
The Chuo University study also concluded that infanticide is likely to occur in a closed family," where the mother has to spend a lot of fourth dimension with her baby—without the presence of a third person who might prevent the tragedy.
More than one-half the deaths were attributed to the mother's lack of mental maturity —or, as Dr. Takeo Doi, a psychiatrist at Tokyo University, put it, "the increment in the number of kittenish parents."
Dr. Doi, who has had clinical experience in both Japan and the Us, is the author of "The Anatomy of Dependence," an incisive report of personal relations among Japanese. He said the relationship between mother and child in Japan is traditionally very symbiotic.
"She (the mother) regards her kid as her possession instead of an contained personality, so she feels free to determine the fate of her ain child," he explained in noting that in Japan the infants are more apt to exist killed or deserted whereas, in the United States he said parental abuse is more likely.
A joint study last year past psychologists in Waseda University in Tokyo and Cornell University in Ithaca, North.Y. takes a like view.
Women in Tokyo are "far less often involved in assault cases" than women in New York, the study constitute, only are "twice every bit many times involved in homicides." Many of their victims, the study added, were their ain infants.
How Was the Baby From Tokyo Bathed in Babies
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/1973/12/08/archives/infanticide-in-japan-sign-of-the-times-daughters-spared.html
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