The Logic of the Stem Household
T H E L AWS O F D I S I N H E R I TA N C E
In the years around 1680, a population explosion caused consternation in many parts of Japan.1 Some governments encouraged emigration to rid their lands of unwanted mouths, and others closed their borders to laborers from elsewhere.2
Th
roughout the archipelago, village assemblies and rulers issued laws restricting marriages and partible inheritance. One of these laws was the 1677 decree of Sendai domain that we have encountered in the previous chapter. “As we observe from the recent population registration,” it explained, “the number of people is increasing greatly, and we estimate that within ten or fi ft een years, there will be grain shortages.
If people multiply wantonly like the brood of birds and beasts, there will be mass starvation. Even if adults can be saved, infanticide will be impossible to avoid.”3 To forestall such a future, Sendai prohibited the marriages of younger sons before their thirtieth year unless they owned a large amount of land. Already in 1673, the domain had forbidden subjects to marry people from outside its borders.4 In the same year, both Sendai and the shogunate banned the subdivision of all but the largest plots. By 1695, most inhabitants of the Japanese archipelago lived under bans on partible inheritance or on the marriage of landless sons.5 Some, such as the people of Tosa, required special permission to marry under the age of thirty if they were men, and twenty if they were women.6 Although many commoners married and divided their plots in breach of the laws, the authorities typically attempted to enforce the restrictions.7 In 1713, the shogunate rebuked “lazy offi
cials” who condoned the illegal estab-
lishment of branch households, an example of negligence that caused the “number of people and houses to increase to a level unsuitable ( sōō sezaru) for the village.”8
61
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62 The Culture of Low Fertility
Men outside government were inclined to agree that partible inheritance was a bad idea. One of Japan’s earliest agricultural manuals, the *Hōnen zeisho * of 1685, warned wealthy parents that they must not give in to their sympathy ( fubin) with their children, which would ultimately turn into harm ( ada). Rather, they should disinherit most children, lest they affl
ict all their descendants with poverty and
ultimate ruin.9 * Hōnen zeisho* insinuated a small household norm in other ways. Its model budget for a household, for instance, assumed that it would consist of only a couple, one child, and two servants.
Little could the rulers who urged primogeniture on a fast-growing population have known that less than a century later many of their great-grandsons would struggle with the reproductive restraint of their subjects. How did depopulation come to replace “wanton multiplication” as the chief demographic worry of rulers and writers in Eastern Japan? Empirically, population growth halted as people postponed marriage and raised fewer children. Th
is chapter argues that they did
so as, in the last quarter of the seventeenth century, the stem family became the normative unit of commoners’ existence in both this life and the next.
I M AG I N E D C O M M U N I T I E S O F T H E D E A D, T H E L I V I N G , A N D T H E U N B O R N
In the late 1600s, a religious innovation heightened the concern that people generally feel for the well-being of their descendants. By this time, Japanese Buddhism off ered three paths toward breaking the cycle of suff ering, death, and rebirth.
While personal achievement of enlightenment and nirvana as a theoretical possibility was accepted by some and doubted by others, all agreed that it was in practice a very rare achievement. Far more people could escape the karmic cycle by having an enlightened being, typically the Amida Buddha, invite them to his Pure Land, not in recompense for their own eff orts but out of compassion. In the course of the seventeenth century, a third path captured the popular imagination. In a system that modern scholars like to call Funerary Buddhism, priests promised that their ritual technology, when combined with the devotion and fi nancial support of dutiful descendants, could transform a dead soul into a divine ancestral spirit serenely beyond the cycle of rebirth and suff ering.10 A single economically sound line of descendants suffi
ced for this process.
Th
e household arrangement that off ered the best chance of perpetuating a single line and its property was the stem family. Nuclear families dissolve when the children leave the home. Compound families, in which all sons remain part of the family, become so large in the course of several generations that they turn into lineages whose members no longer consider one another members of the same family. Th
e stem family, by contrast, conventionally defi ned by one and only one married child remaining in the parental household, can replicate itself indefi nitely.
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Infanticide and Immortality 63
Unlike a joint family, which accommodates multiple married couples of the same generation, the stem family requires that all but one child leave the household upon marriage. In Japanese stem families, even unmarried adult brothers and sisters of the designated heir could hope for little more than grudging toleration.
Population registers occasionally list them as *yakkai, * or “burdens.”11
Although the stem family became the dominant household form in Eastern Japan during the very decades in which Funerary Buddhism permeated the population at large, the question of causality is complex. It is possible that Funerary Buddhism owed part of its success to its resonance with preexisting attitudes that stressed the importance of a single line of descendants. More than a century before the fl owering of Funerary Buddhism, a Jesuit missionary noted that people considered one or two children enough to maintain their line and therefore killed all others.12
While the stem family was a common living arrangement in many agricultural societies, two aspects distinguish the Japanese ie from stem families elsewhere: its associational nature and the strength of its religious underpinnings. Th e *ie * did not
depend on blood ties. Adoption was frequent and straightforward, as were disinheritance and divorce. While a stem family ie typically consisted of a married couple, their son, and his wife and children, it could equally be constituted by a married couple, an adopted daughter, and her husband. One advantage of this arrangement was that if a man saw little promise in his son, he could bring a more capable successor into the household. Among commoners at least, the bonds of marriage, adoption, and even parentage could be dissolved with relative ease, and trial periods were common for new household members.13
Despite the readiness to reshuffl
e its membership with little regard to blood
ties, the Japanese stem household was more than a mutually convenient unit of production and consumption. It united the dead, the living, and the unborn into a community of fate. Th
e alliance of the living with the dead promised phenomenal rewards to both. Th
rough the veneration of their lineal descendants, the deceased would become ancestral deities, escapees from the cycle of rebirth and suff ering.
For their part, the living would be able not only to look forward to the same pleasant prospect, but also to live their lives under the protection of their deifi ed ancestors. In this sense, the stem family did not simply consist of a couple, one child with his or her spouse, and their children; rather, it comprised all past married couples in the stem line as well as all future heirs to the household.
Ōkuwa Hitoshi, a specialist on Tokugawa Buddhism, makes a useful distinction between ancestor worship ( sosen sūhai) and rites for ancestors ( senzo matsuri).
Ancestor worship presupposes that the dead become ancestral spirits without any eff ort on the part of the living. In Tokugawa Japan, however, a soul otherwise destined for judgment, atonement, and reincarnation could only become an ancestral deity through rites performed by its descendants.14 Necrologies ( kakochō) elevated the dead by giving them posthumous ordination names ( kaimyō) and
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64 The Culture of Low Fertility
helping priests schedule memorial services in the precise intervals required by the liturgy.15 Seven rituals had to be performed during the forty-nine-day period following death, when the spirit of the deceased was believed to progress through stages leading to ancestral deifi cation. Th
ereaft er, six more main rituals were
required with longer intervals until, on a precise anniversary—the thirty-third or the fi ft ieth in many traditions—the spirit completed its transformation from a dead soul ( shiryō) into an ancestral deity ( sorei).16
Th
is ritual technology promised the democratization of deifi cation. Th e notion
that veneration could divinize the dead had existed in Japan for centuries, but applied only to an exalted few—rulers, heroes, and the exclusive main lineage of a clan.17 Th
e generation of warlords that participated in Japan’s unifi cation drama showed particular interest in the upward mobility of their souls. Toyotomi Hideyoshi’s will included instructions to build a shrine where he would be venerated as Toyokuni Daimyōjin. Th
e cult became so popular that Tokugawa Ieyasu
saw it as a threat to his regime; in 1615, he destroyed Hideyoshi’s shrines along with Hideyoshi’s son and heir. When Ieyasu himself died a year later, his successors styled him Tōshō Daigongen, the “Great Avatar Shining in the East,” and made his shrines central sites of state ritual. Lesser lords of the same period, too, were deifi ed upon death; according to the historian Luke Roberts, their number came to at least fi ft een.18 Th
e diff usion of Funerary Buddhism in the seventeenth century invited the population at large to see divine serenity as their own personal future, if only they could secure a line of dutiful descendants to perform the necessary rites.
Ironically, the rites for the deceased centered on two ideas whose integration into Buddhist cosmology required a considerable tolerance of paradox. First, karma, the law of individual responsibility, became a tradable commodity.19 By performing memorial services, the living could transfer positive karma to the deceased, shortening their stay in the Ten Hells and improving their prospects for rebirth. Second, the correct rites could remove a soul from the cycle of rebirth altogether, elevating it into an ancestral deity beyond the rule of karma.
G R A N D PA R E N T S A N D T H E D E C I S I O N
T O R A I S E O R R E T U R N
Despite the shared destiny that Funerary Buddhism promised each household, its individual members of course frequently disagreed on what course of action was best for the household or themselves. Contemporary analyses and pamphlets add up to the impression that the parents of the newborn discussed its fate and tried to reach a consensus while the child’s grandparents weighed in with their own opinions. Some elders were more powerful than others. One inscription, paid for by an entire village and therefore likely to express a widely held view, claims that “if a
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Infanticide and Immortality 65
virtuous woman knows the evil of infanticide and does not desire to perform the act, her parents-in-law, relatives, and neighbors will force her to commit this act of violence.”20 Th
e fact that the inscription mentioned the coercive power of parents-in-law without distinguishing it from that of relatives or neighbors suggests that the infl uence of grandparents fell short of absolute authority. Th e statement could
even be read as suggesting that only a full coalition of grandparents, relatives, and neighbors could overturn the plans of a child’s mother and father. Other accounts describe old women making snide comments to particularly fertile daughters-in-law, or muttering to themselves that “more than one or two grandchildren are quite useless.”21 Th
is was not the behavior of gray matriarchs who could decide a grandchild’s fate as they pleased.22
Nor did grandfathers hold any greater sway. Th
is is memorably illustrated by a
well-known infanticide scene, the earliest dated version of which is the 1826 scroll that appears on the cover of this book and was owned by Kyūdenji, a temple in Ishinomaki, until the tsunami of 2011. A young woman with a strip of cloth wrapped around her forehead has just given birth. Looking into the distance, she crushes the newborn under her knees, its small fi sts raised in futile protest. From behind, the grandfather tries to restrain her; as he pulls the nape of her kimono, her breast spills out at the front, but she does not even turn to acknowledge the interruption. It helps that she has two allies; the grandmother, wrinkled and white-haired, clutches the old man’s cheeks in a gesture that is half plea, half stranglehold, and forces his gaze away from the dying infant. Th
e child’s father, towering over
the entire scene, already has a shovel ready to dispose of the little corpse. With his other hand, he thwarts his father’s attempt to save the child’s life. Eight paintings with this theme survive, scattered over an arc of temples and chapels from the coast of Sendai to the mountain basin of Yamagata.23 One of these bears the name of fully fi ft een donors.24 While it is easy to imagine old men dedicating such a tablet to exorcise their own regrets about infanticides they may or may not have tried to avert, the scene must have had a basic plausibility to convince donors that they could put their name on such a public display without risking ridicule.
*M A B I K I * A S F I L IA L P I E T Y
Irrespective of the power relations within the stem household, its perpetuation did not require numerous progeny. As adoption was easy and biological kinship unim-portant to the theory of household continuity, there was no need to seek security in a large brood. Far from guaranteeing the continuity of the line, an excessive number of children would sap strength from the stem into the side branches.
In the words of one memorial to the lord of Mito, people of substance feared
“the expenses of [having many] descendants” ( *suezue, * a word written with a character that could also mean the tips of twigs), which would “weaken the main
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66 The Culture of Low Fertility
house” ( *honke, * literally “root house”).25 In twentieth-century Yamagata, locals remembered that people once called younger sons that had been killed at birth *dame oji, * “useless uncles.”26
Children other than the heir burdened the stem line in a number of ways. Before they were old enough to earn their keep, their basic needs thinned meager household budgets further. Among the affl
uent, the greater expenses of childrearing—
appropriate clothes, costly ceremonies, perhaps schooling—made additional children an equally heavy burden. Nor was the stem household free of the claims of younger children once they reached adulthood. If they married, their household’s social standing demanded increasingly elaborate dowries and wedding ceremonies.27 Even aft er the seventeenth-century bans on partible inheritance, younger children oft en received parcels of land, suggesting that they continued to have a moral or at least emotional claim on their parents’ property.28 Parental control over the labor of adult children, in contrast, seems to have weakened; aft er about 1700, long indenture contracts became rare in Eastern Japan.
In this economic context, the heightened spiritual importance of perpetuating the household favored the investment of emotions and resources into a few carefully selected children at the expense of others who would be destroyed at birth.
Parents’ preference for having both sons and daughters among their chosen children (discussed in more detail in Chapter 6) was part of this planning for perpetuity. If the designated heir turned out to be a disappointment, a more promising successor could be brought into the household as the daughter’s husband. Especially households of considerable assets and ambition favored this strategy.29 Yet the ease of uxorilocal marriage and adoption did not diminish the care parents took in determining which of their own newborn children they should raise. Sex divination and horoscope charts, auspicious zodiac signs and ominous life years, the best days for conceiving children and the optimal “fetal education” ( taikyō) all received due attention as parents tried to make sure that they invested only in the best risks.
Th
e most famous euphemism for infanticide, *mabiki, * illustrates the link between the logic of the stem household and infanticide. A 1603 Portuguese-Japanese dictionary lists *mabiqi * only as an agricultural term for pruning or thinning out dense plantings of vegetables.30 By the early 1690s, however, a time when a majority of commoners in Eastern Japan had recently begun to imagine themselves as members of a stem household, the term had gained currency as a euphemism for infanticide in Edo and the North Kantō.31 Before long, it was the metaphor of choice throughout much of Japan.32 By likening children to budding branches or new sprouts that had to be removed for the benefi t of neighboring plants or the stem, the term mabiki stated three important ideas. First, it implied a quantity-quality trade-off with children, the idea that a newborn could be raised only at the expense of existing children and of the larger organism of the household. Second, it portrayed parents as managing the growth of their children with
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Infanticide and Immortality 67
the same calculating concern a farmer showed for his crops. Parents, in other words, did not simply live in the present when raising their children, but watched over them as careful investments for the future. Finally, *mabiki * may be read as a larger metaphor for the nature of the household, a metaphor reinforced by the lament of a 1719 analysis of the motives of infanticide that “people fear the lush growth of the branches and leaves of their descendants.”33 Opponents of infanticide acknowledged the power of the botanical metaphor by adopting it for their own purposes. For example, one pamphlet warned that “if a great tree sheds its leaves and twigs, even the stem withers.”34 Alternatively, mabiki might liken the newborn to a separate plant, such as a rice seedling that needed to be moved or removed so as not to smother its neighbors. Th
e strength of the metaphor lay in its
multivalence, and there is no reason why the people who used it could not have thought of a tree at one time and rice plants at another.35
If *mabiki * speaks volumes about the imagined nature of the household, *kaesu, * or
“to return” a child, illustrates the relationship of the household with the souls of unborn descendants.36 While mabiki arguably dehumanized the newborn, kaesu implied that infant souls could move easily across the boundaries of this and other worlds. To return was not the same as to reject. Born again at a more opportune time, the infant soul may yet become a descendant. If a household transcends time, the precise timing of when an unborn descendant goes through the shortest of the three phases of household membership—physical life—matters less.
Once the supernumerary newborn was identifi ed as a threat to his parents’
ancestors, the culture of pruning found additional ethical backup in the key Confucian virtue of fi lial piety.37 Filial piety subordinated the welfare of descendants to that of ancestors to the point of turning infanticide into an act of virtue.
Th
is was illustrated memorably by a story from Th
- e Twenty-four Paragons of Filial *
*Piety, * a thirteenth-century Chinese text that went through at least forty editions in Tokugawa Japan and was a favorite motif for paintings.38 One of the twenty-four paragons was Guo Ju, a subject of the Han dynasty, who was so poor that his family oft en went hungry. His mother took it upon herself to share her food with her grandson. Despairing of his mother’s declining health, Guo Ju resolved to kill his son. Choking tears, his wife concurred that the comfort of the mother’s old age must be their priority; they could have other sons later. Heaven looked upon this act of fi lial piety with such favor that, as Guo Ju dug the grave of his son, whom he had not yet killed, his hoe hit something hard. It was a pot of gold with the inscription “Heaven grants this to the fi lial son, Guo Ju.”
Although Guo Ju’s son was a toddler rather than a newborn and survived his parents’ grim resolve, it is possible to read the story of Guo Ju as a parable about infanticide and economic success. It was so well known that opponents of infanticide felt compelled to address it frontally, arguing for example that “Guo Ju has been condemned for his inhumanity already in antiquity.”39 Nonetheless, his
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68 The Culture of Low Fertility
conduct was widely admired in the Edo period. Guo Ju appeared side by side with the other twenty-three paragons on gilded screens and in printed primers. His willingness to sacrifi ce a child evidently resonated with many infanticidal parents.
Tokubei, a retired merchant in Shimōsa who petitioned his intendant to increase childrearing subsidies, thought that the poor killed their newborns out of fi lial piety. ** **In Tosa, Hashizume Bin was equally sympathetic and pitied “people with bedridden parents or in-laws,” for whom raising another child confl icted with fi lial piety. In Sendai, Satō Kōzui conceded that the people whom he hoped to dissuade from committing infanticides were following the example of Guo Ju.40 Satō
Nobuhiro, the self-styled policy consultant with many ideas about how to save infant lives, claims to have told a senior retainer of Akita: “I have observed conditions in Akita thoroughly; as in your lands, the poor struggle to nourish their parents, they kill their newborn child in tears, because . . . a child cannot replace a father or a mother.”41 Even educated men evidently thought that fi lial piety was a good reason to kill a child. Th
e rural physician Murata Ryūmin, whose *Discourse *
*of the Louse * we * * encountered in Chapter 2, responded to denunciations of reluctant parents as being beneath animals by asking: “Is Guo Ju also ‘inferior even to beasts and birds’?”42
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