T H E D E P O P U L AT I O N C R I S I S O F T H E
L AT E E I G H T E E N T H C E N T U RY
In the 1820s, the villagers of Aoki in Hitachi’s Makabe district chiseled the names of extinct households onto a large rock. In this village of 39 remaining households, their number came to 59.1 For more than a century, the logic of Funerary Buddhism and the stem family had held out the promise of achieving immortality with a little help from infanticide (see Chapter 4). Th
e extinction of so many family
lines all over Eastern Japan now challenged that logic.
Eastern Japan’s population reached its high-water mark around 1700. By the early 1780s, most domains and provinces of Eastern Japan had lost a fi ft h or a quarter of their peak populations; some areas, such as Sōma, had shriveled to just half their former size. Th
en the great Tenmei famine turned a downward slope into
a precipice. At the border of Shinano and Kōzuke, Mount Asama spewed ash and rocks over a large part of the North Kantō in early 1783. In June of that year, there followed a series of even greater volcanic eruptions in Iceland. Under the northern hemisphere’s darkened skies, temperatures dropped, disrupting farming systems from Iceland to India. In Northeastern Japan, unseasonable frost and hail led to near complete crop losses. In the Kantō, fl ood damage was severe. As rice prices soared, people went hungry in many parts of Japan.2
Th
e calamity brought down particularly terrible suff ering on the people of northern Honshu. In the Morioka village of Herai, the headman noted “died in the year of the dragon” (1784) next to the names of 156 of his 461 people, and recorded the fl ight of ten more villagers.3 Priests in the Northeastern domains of Hirosaki, 129
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130 Redefining Reproduction
Hachinohe, Morioka, Sendai, and Sōma entered three to ten times as many names in their ledgers of dead parishioners in 1784 as they did in a normal year. In the same domains, hundreds of thousands starved to death.4 Although there was no comparable mass dying in the Kantō, people went hungry and occasionally vandalized the houses of the rich. Many left their barren fi elds and moved to Edo. By the late 1780s, many parts of Eastern Japan had lost about a third of their 1700
population.5 Even the more fortunate parts of the region were reduced to about 80 percent of their peak values.6
For rulers, such depopulation meant a devastating loss of productive capacity.
For villagers obliged to pay the taxes of their vanished neighbors, it brought greater economic burdens. It also became an ever-present psychological fact. In the worst-hit parts of the Northeast, the survivors lived between the empty houses of the dead. In the North Kantō, there were far fewer starvation deaths, but the drain of the population to Edo combined with the eff ects of aggressive family planning to produce the same vistas of shrinking villages and fallow fi elds. In Shimotsuke, entire villages had absconded, so that “only foundations or wells remained,” and
“where once women and children must have lived, only grasses and creepers grew, an abode of foxes and badgers.”7
Population registers oft en recorded defunct households, a constant reminder of the threat of extinction. For example, the 1788 population register for the Sendai village of Ashitate in Shibata district listed 107 defunct landholding households alongside only 64 extant households.8 Newly inscribed stelae commemorated the uncared-for dead who had collapsed by a distant roadside or perished together with their heirs. In the village of Ōta in Hitachi’s Niihari district, the headman went through the population registers in his family storehouse and found that Ōta had declined from 400 people and 41 horses in 1740 to 204 people and 18 horses in 1799. In a petition he complained that deer, boar, and monkeys had multiplied to the point that for the past fi ft een years the village had been forced to employ a man to keep wild animals from ravaging the remaining fi elds. Now, the villagers could no longer aff ord his wages and worried that their newly planted seedlings would become the lunch of some forest creature.9 Th
e headman of Ōta blamed frost,
famine, and disease for the dwindling of his village. A few miles farther west, however, the headman of Onuki in Shimotsuke instead saw the appetite of boar, deer, and birds as payback for infanticide.10 Th
e spirits of pruned infants were returning
feathered and furred to eat the grain that their parents had begrudged them in their human form.
T H I N K I N G B E YO N D A N H E I R A N D A S PA R E
In many parts of Eastern Japan, the Tenmei famine of the 1780s marked the end of the age of largely uncontested infanticide. In its immediate aft ermath, dozens of
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Infanticide and Extinction 131
men began to distribute pamphlets that urged readers not to kill their children.
More governments bestirred themselves to off er childrearing subsidies and to monitor pregnancies. But the desolation also shook the culture of infanticide directly by casting doubt on whether infanticide was really eff ective as a means of perpetuating families and achieving immortality as ancestral spirits. It is far from certain whether family lines failed more oft en in the late eighteenth century than in the seventeenth.11 Yet with the contraction of society, the traces of extinction—
empty houses, shorter registers, defunct names on standing stones—became much more prominent than they had been in an age of population growth.
Th
e famine also seemed to substantiate claims that Heaven punished human transgressions.12 Opponents of infanticide took up this theme with eagerness. Few of their pamphlets mentioned the great famine directly, but they did dwell at length on the punishments that Heaven, the buddhas, and the gods had in store for parents who killed their children. Frequently, they illustrated this point with a deity shedding tears or taking notes above an infanticide scene. Numerous children, the same texts argued, were a blessing for one’s posterity. Far from securing the continuity of one’s line, the killing of infants imperiled it.
Other opponents of infanticide emphasized the unpredictability of life. Th is
was the argument that the learned small-town merchant, Suzuki Sekkyō, made in a 1791 essay written in classical Chinese:
A certain couple raises two sons and one daughter, but when the wife becomes pregnant again, husband and wife say to each other: “We are already bringing up three children, and need not worry that we will have no posterity. Let us therefore abort this fetus.” Th
ey do this about four times. But then their eldest son catches a disease and dies, the daughter runs off with the neighbor’s son, and the year aft er, their other son falls to his death from a horse. Th
e couple does not know what to do.
Th
ey cannot get pregnant anymore, and their line ultimately fails.
Seven children, Suzuki Sekkyō suggested, were more likely to secure the continuity of the household. In an essay quoted in Chapter 5 he wrote: Another couple has four sons and three daughters. Left no choice by days of poverty, they indenture ( zei) their eldest son, and place their second and third sons as bondservants ( nu). . . . Th
e eldest daughter becomes somebody’s concubine, and
the two younger ones turn into village prostitutes. Now only their youngest son is left in the family. In conversations, the other villagers blame [the parents]: “Th ey
cannot provide for their children and abandon them as menials ( nuhi). Bringing up children in this manner, what is the point of having many?” In tears, husband and wife respond: “We considered it a shameful sin not to raise our children, but we are not ashamed to sell them out of poverty.” Later, the youngest son loses his parents, and his poverty grows even worse. He pawns all clothes, land, and house, and is later slain by a robber. So their house seems to be headed for extinction.
However, the eldest son acquires some wealth at his place of indenture. Th e two
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132 Redefining Reproduction
younger daughters are each able to make a proper marriage and escape their former status [as village prostitutes]. Th
e three siblings come together and put up a hundred ryō
in silver. Th
ey buy back their elder sister and brothers, as well as the house and fi elds, and have the second son continue the house. . . . Later, the second son dies, and so the third continues the line. If aft er the death of the youngest son there had been no fi rst son, it would have been impossible to redeem the other two sons from bondage. Without the second son, there would have been nobody to succeed the youngest.13
While Suzuki Sekkyō made no reference to supernatural retribution, many pamphlets threatened that evil karma, divine punishment, and the revenge of wronged infant spirits would drive infanticidal households into extinction. Th e
tract that achieved the greatest number of print runs advertised this argument in its very title: Manual for a Prospering Posterity. * As we saw in Chapter 4, one of the favorite metaphors for infanticide, * mabiki or “pruning,” implied that killing some children would enhance the vigor of the household as a whole. First published in 1793, the Manual countered with its own horticultural observation. “If you plant a potato, no matter how many child-potatoes sprout from the parent-potato, it is not troubled by the child-potatoes. Indeed, the more child-potatoes, the fatter the parent-potato. If you break off the child-potatoes saying that they are keeping the parent-potato small, the wound will start to rot.” To counter another popular euphemism, that of “returning” a child to a world safely separate from that of the living ( *kogaeshi * and its many variants), the Manual warned that “if you return a child, your house will suff er many calamities and the parents’ station will worsen due to the child’s wrath.”14
Other pamphlets further illustrated the idea that infant souls could not simply be sent back to an innocuous spirit world. “Even if you bury the body you have killed, your hands cannot bury the soul, that jewel bestowed by Heaven and Earth,”
warns a sheet printed in 1793. Far from meekly returning to another world, * * infant souls would “fl oat between Heaven and Earth,” transmogrify into vengeful spirits, and haunt their parents and siblings, nephews and grandnephews, until the household that refused to raise them was destroyed. “Man lives a mere fi ft y or seventy years; to be misled by your trifl ing pleasures and selfi sh desires and eternally affl ict
your descendants with calamities is a matter too terrible to contemplate.” Even if infanticide allows you “to avoid a present unpleasantness, it becomes the seed of future disaster, leaves [your] descendants many impediments, and leads to the extinction” of your line.15
A N E W F L OW E R I N G O F B R A N C H E S
Amid these threats and exhortations, there were signs of a rebalancing of the household ideal. A century aft er several domains banned the marriage of younger
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Infanticide and Extinction 133
sons on demographic grounds, their great-grandsons worried that too few younger sons were marrying. From the 1790s to the 1810s, local magistrates in Sendai complained that marriages had become so costly to contract that younger sons were no longer able to establish their branch households ( bunke).16 In Sendai as elsewhere in eighteenth-century Eastern Japan, a quarter of men and a sharply rising proportion of women had no evidence of prior marriage at the age of fi ft y (Figure 15).
Many governments began to experiment with ways of encouraging their subjects to wed. Yonezawa sent offi
cials into the countryside to urge villagers to marry
their daughters between their fourteenth and seventeenth calendar year and their sons between their seventeenth and twentieth. Adding incentive to exhortation, the domain gave newlyweds free building materials, title to abandoned land, and a three-year tax exemption.17 Th
e stated goal of this program was to make “the birth-
ing cries of babies ring from all directions.”18 In other domains of the 1790s, villagers were able to take advantage of loans to allow them to get married.19 Yet money was not the only obstacle to marriage. Since newborn girls suff ered a greater risk of infanticide, many young men could not fi nd nubile women in their villages. Again, many governments took it upon themselves to solve this problem. Matsudaira Sadanobu invited brides from his possessions in Echigo to redress the imbalance of men and women in the lands around his Northeastern castle at Shirakawa.20 Th e
lord of Sōma dispatched a traveling monk to advertise its charms to the women of Hokuriku. ** **With offi
cial encouragement, a local headman from the same domain also traveled to Echigo and purchased brides for bachelors in his village.21
Th
e encouragement of marriage echoes ancient Chinese models. In the years around 1800, policymakers in Japan were steeped in the classics of Chinese statecraft . When they began to worry about depopulation, they could draw on over two millennia of Chinese opinions on how to stimulate population growth. As every serious student of the classics knew, two of the most celebrated examples of rulers who strengthened their states—Duke Huan of Qi (d. 643 bce) and King Goujian of Yue (r. 496–465 bce)—had done so by ordering parents to marry their sons by their twentieth year and daughters by their fi ft eenth and seventeenth, respectively.
Goujian even made the failure to do so a crime.22
Branch households, which had been the object of bans and restrictions in the late seventeenth century, now received the active encouragement of lords worried about progressive depopulation. As part of its 1809 package of population policies, the small Hitachi domain of Kasama announced help for younger sons either founding branch households or reviving a defunct line.23 In 1822, Maebashi domain in Kōzuke established a fund it called *eizokukin, * or “perpetuity money.”
Th
is endowment consisted of 802 ryō from the domain, 300 ryō from offi cials, and
2,028 ryō of private donations. Th
e 10 percent interest it yielded every year subsi-
dized the births of the poor, but was also meant to fi nance nonrepayable grants to
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30%
0
25%
5
of
age
d the n
20%
age arourri
r mao
pri
15%
of
ence
t evidu
itho
10%
roportion wp
5%
0%
1650
1675
1700
1725
1750
1775
1800
1825
1850
1875
Men
Women
figure 15. Men and women around the age of fi ft y with no evidence of prior marriage in Eastern Japan’s population registers, 1650–1872. (Evidence of prior marriage is defi ned as living children or a relationship term such as wife, widow, or son-in-law.
source: Tōgoku dataset.)
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Infanticide and Extinction 135
assist poor commoners in the establishment of branch households. In addition, the fund off ered interest-free loans for immigrants from other domains as well as for the construction or rethatching of houses.24 Annaka, also in Kōzuke, organized a lottery for the resurrection of households. It collected a fund of 400 ryō, which it loaned out to local entrepreneurs at 10 percent interest, and decided by annual lottery which four villages would receive 10 ryō each for the resurrection of one household in each village.25 In nearby Numata, people who were hoping to return a defunct household to life or to bring in a bride or a son-in-law, or whose household was going through a crisis due to the illness of a family member, could borrow up to 3 ryō per household member at the preferential interest rate of 5 percent per annum.
In Mito, the paper merchant and philanthropist Sekizawa Masahide proposed in 1798 to “reward with stipends” of 5 ryō even people of substance who had two or three sons and wanted to establish them in branch households.26 One generation later, Jihei, a headman for several Mito villages, presented the same idea to the domain. He lamented that the increasing inequality in village society left many families so impoverished that they could not establish branch households for their younger children. As a result, many were forced to turn their backs on Mito and seek their fortune in “distant provinces.”27 Th
e idea of supporting the establish-
ment of branch households gestated for a while. In the early 1830s, it was taken up by Mito’s lord, Tokugawa Nariaki. Villages were to provide loans to households with seven children or more to allow them to found their own *bunke. * Th e domain
itself supported the program. One local document shows an application for a loan of 10 ryō, or two to three years’ wages for an unskilled laborer.28 In a grant letter to another applicant, the offi
cial author praised Nariaki’s generosity in postponing
necessary repairs to his Edo residence to permit such largesse to the younger sons among his subjects.29 Th
e program apparently paid about 5,000 ryō to 640 new
households, but was soon discontinued amid a fi scal crisis.30 Th e symbolic power
of such loans and subsidies may have extended beyond their immediate material eff ects. It recognized as socially desirable the establishment of branch households, a practice that infl uential writings of the late seventeenth century had portrayed as the indulgence of imprudent parents. Th
e designers of the program, who were well
aware that it could not be sustained for long, were counting on the eff ect the grants would have on popular attitudes: “If we can establish 500 branch households within the fi rst year, well-off people will naturally become envious and one by one set up their own.”31
A N E W V I S I O N O F FA M I LY L I F E
Th
e new outlook on the question of branch families also appears in anti-infanticide pamphlets, which not only detailed the dire consequences of infanticide, but also
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136 Redefining Reproduction
painted lively images of the alternative path to virtue and prosperity.32 One such pamphlet concludes with the image of parents playing with their children before a backdrop of a pile of rice bales.33 Another ends with the illustration of a large family celebrating the New Year. Either this is a family reunion of several households or an actual joint family with grandparents, two married couples of apparently equal age, and a goodly number of grandchildren. Behind the patriarch, the heavy door of a storehouse stands open, admitting a tantalizing glance at the riches piled within.34
In his 1831 *Key Techniques for Commoner Houses *( Minka yōjutsu), Miyaoi Sadao took his readers on a journey to the aft erlife. One illustration shows a “virtuous couple” transformed into “gods of good fortune.” A caption states, “Th anks to the
sacrifi ces of our fi lial children, we have plenty to eat.” Th is is contrasted with an
image of a “couple that thinned out their children” and therefore became “devils of poverty.” Th
ey have rather more to say than the contented paragons of virtue. Th e
husband expresses dismay that the experts ( monoshiri) failed to tell them that killing one’s children would reduce them to, quite literally, “poor devils.” “When we are born again,” he suggests, “let us raise many children and become kami of good fortune!” Th
e wife responds gloomily, “Because of the sins of our former life, we will be crushed at birth as victims of mabiki!” Says the husband, “Not to worry.
Th
anks to a chap named Miyaoi Sadao and his book *Key Techniques, * people will stop committing infanticide.” Miyaoi himself left instructions on how he wanted to be worshipped by his descendants, and made it clear that he expected all of them—
not just the heir of his stem line—to venerate him as an ancestor. To remind them of their duties, he gave each of them a scroll with a portrait of their father.
A valorization of branch households is also evident in a particularly elaborate comparison of the paths of prolifi c virtue and infanticidal vice, A Mirror of the Hearts of All People ( Banmin kokoro no kagami). Th is exquisitely illustrated two-volume work, written in 1854 by the Aizu domain physician Ishida Ryūgen, tells the story of two families with two very diff erent trajectories. In a village near Kyoto, Zensuke (“good fellow”) leads a life of fi lial piety, hard work, and aff ectionate parenting. In a remote mountain hamlet, the brothers Itarō, Ijirō, and Isaburō
(“swine numbers one, two, and three”) wallow in vice. While Zensuke never asks his neighbors for anything in his early years of poverty and distributes rice and money in his later years of wealth, Itarō et al. impose on their fellow villagers without hesitation. Zensuke rises early, toils in the fi elds, and aft er dark braids straw sandals until late at night. His innocent pleasures consist of pleasing his parents and enjoying the occasional family picnic under spring blossoms or autumn leaves. A particularly striking image shows Zensuke carry his lame father to a blossom-viewing spot, while his wife guides her mother-in-law and a son carries their bentō boxes. Itarō and his fellow caricatures of depravity detest farm work, rise late, and then spend the remainder of their day in gambling and drink. Lazy and querulous, they fi nance this lifestyle by pawning their clothes and prostituting
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Infanticide and Extinction 137
their wives. Zensuke and his wife only take up their chopsticks once their parents and children have eaten their fi ll of grains and vegetables, fi sh and fowl. While Zensuke’s sons fetch fi rewood in the mountains, Itarō goes there to kill hares, foxes, badgers, and other furry animals “that have done him no harm” and eats them as a side dish with his saké. Zensuke and his wife, who consider even the very mention of infanticide and abortion a defi lement of their ears, raise twelve children. Itarō et al.’s laziness and love of killing predetermine their reaction when one of the wives becomes pregnant, probably from one of her paying guests. Th e
three wives decide to call an abortionist from a neighboring village. His name, Yabuno Dokuan, mimics the erudite style of doctors and intellectuals, but actually translates into something like “Pavilion-of-Poison the Quack, MD.” True to his name, Dokuan gives Itarō’s wife a toxin that fl ushes out her fetus, but leaves her writhing with pain. Only now do the six, who have never as much as folded their hands in prayer, remember the gods and buddhas, but of course their pleas fall on deaf ears. Th
e sick woman’s life is only saved by an elderly neighbor, who generously gives her an amulet from a pilgrimage to Western Japan. Aft er this experience, the wives of the swine-brothers turn to the services of a local midwife, who makes her living by killing newborns. Picking up her technique, Itarō et al. begin to commit infanticide with their own hands. Ultimately, they all die of starvation and face a gruesome list of torments in hell. Zensuke, in contrast, receives his lord’s recognition as an exemplar of fi lial piety, achieves great wealth through his hard work, and eventually divides his property among all his twelve children and their spouses. Th
e story of vice concludes with a sequence of hell scenes; the fi nal image of the tale of virtue is an alcove with a scroll painting of Zensuke stripped to the waist and a hoe in his hands, an inspiration to his many descendants.
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