11 National security

Even a Strong Castle Cannot Be Defended without Soldiers

Infanticide and National Security

In the culture of infanticide, reproductive restraint was a mark of responsibility toward others. As we have seen, it was considered the prudent alternative to

“affl

icting six children with hunger and cold” or to “selling them in the spring of their sixth or seventh year.”1 Th

inning out children was an act of fi lial piety for

those who “struggled to nourish their parents.”2 Even where a fourth or fi ft h child would not empty the rice bowls of its aging grandparents, it imperiled their aft erlife by threatening to disperse the patrimony of the household on whose vigor the ancestors depended for their status as serene deities. Infanticide could even be justifi ed as an act of consideration to stepchildren and adopted sons, who should not need to worry that the new child might usurp their place; or to daughters-in-law, whose childrearing the grandmother should assist without the distraction of an infant of her own.3 Infanticide was also understood as an act of responsibility beyond the individual household, since people who did not know their station and bred without restraint threatened to impose on the charity of their neighbors. In its 1673 ban on the marriage of younger sons, Sendai even implied that “breeding recklessly like birds and beasts” would plunge the whole domain into famine, a logic that was easily transposed from marital forbearance to infanticide.

is positive view of the reproductive restraint seems to have informed the practice as long as it continued. Beginning in the late eighteenth century, however, it was challenged by new understandings of demography, community, and the needs of the realm. In the 1790s, a small but growing number of thinkers began to deplore Japan’s domestic crisis and international peril, and to connect both with infanticide and population decline. When the neo-Shinto enthusiasts of the Nativist school took up this theme beginning in the 1820s, the charge that infanticide 183

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184 Redefining Reproduction

undermined the newly imagined national community reached far wider circles.

Some of the most infl uential Nativists were fascinated with production, seed, and procreation. Where an implicit belief in the limits of growth had once prevailed, they argued that more people meant more production and more prosperity.

Infanticide, in their eyes, became a form of social sabotage, an act of unpatriotic selfi shness that starved Japan of much-needed manpower.

R E A R I N G C H I L D R E N F O R T H E R E A L M

In 1791, such notions were still alien to most villagers. Especially in Mito domain, the air was thick with pronouncements about infanticide, but if we can trust one document that tried to capture the popular reactions to all the talk and legislation, many villagers thought that the only interests that were threatened by infanticide were those of their lord, which they considered quite separate from their own.

In his mercy, His Lordship has repeatedly issued childrearing decrees, but it appears that about this fact, benighted people spread the devious notion that because the population has decreased and fi elds are left fallow, His Lordship monitors their childrearing for reasons of profi t. I am concerned that as long as they do so, they will be tempted to conceal and lie about [their infanticides]. I think that the laws might be taken to heart with gratitude if the following was announced: Th e old practice

of mabiki is inhumane and violates the Mandate of Heaven. Even if people can for the time being avoid the costs and burdens of childrearing, they will receive their retribution in later days, as disasters will conversely be more frequent. His Lordship is paying attention to this matter because he would be saddened [by the future suf-fering of his people].4

Mito had one village, however, whose people were famous for raising all their children. A stela inscribed there by Fujita Yūkoku, an eighteen-year-old intellectual fi rebrand who was beginning to make a name for himself among the scholars of Mito, told its story as follows:

In the beginning, there were people among the poor of the East who were suff ering from [insuffi

cient] food and clothes and did not bring up their newborn children.

ereaft er people came to follow this habit uncritically as an ancient custom, and it reached the point where some people dressed warmly and ate their fi ll but shied away from the troubles of childrearing. In the end, this became a great sorrow for the shepherds of men. All alone, the village elder of Hiraiso spoke in admonition:

“To give birth to a child and not raise it is an act that our god greatly detests. It is not simply banned by the state.” Because of this, there is none even among the poor who does not bring up his children.5

e god to whom the (possibly mythical) village elder appealed was the deity of the Sakatsura Isozaki Shrine, which overlooked the Pacifi c from a wooded bluff a

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Even a Strong Castle 185

little up the coast from where the houses of Hiraiso huddled. In 1790, the Mito lord visited this sacred site, admired the scenery, and then made a point of visiting the nearby paragon of a village and presenting its assembled children with some of the money he carried with him. Fujita thought this gesture important enough to be chiseled into the stela that was soon raised in the sacred precinct.6

Lords in other parts of Japan recognized children and prolifi c parents with similar favors. Th

e lord of Taira, who ruled a mountainous domain along what is now the coast of Fukushima prefecture, handed out sweets to the children he encountered during his inspections of villages and mingled sympathy (“having many children is hard work”) with encouragement (“once they are grown, they will in turn make your life easier”). When he honored the parents of particularly large broods by addressing them directly, the other villagers allegedly came to envy them.7 Th

e same approach did its discursive work at the other end of Japan, where on his village tours the lord of Obi in Kyushu handed out sweets and gave fi rst-row places to people with many children.8

As I have argued in the previous chapter, the daily operation of pregnancy surveillance in dozens of domains made a strong statement that whether to raise or kill a child was no longer a private decision. Childrearing subsidies embodied the charity of the rich and the benevolence of rulers, but they also underlined the idea that children were a valuable contribution to the community as well as to the state.

In the Minamiyama Okurairiryō of southern Aizu, a list of contributions to a child welfare fund actually opened with the words “childrearing is the foundation of the prosperity of the state.”9 Some domains gave prolifi c parents systematic recognition, a policy that not only was cheap but also slyly addressed a key context for reproductive restraint: the pursuit of social status. Shinjō domain called parents who raised fi ve or more children *kitoku, * or “people of an exceptional spirit of generosity.”10 Aizu allowed commoners of similar accomplishments to wear clothes that signifi ed rank, such as *haori, wakizashi, * and *kamishimo. * 11 Miharu even granted the right to use a surname to parents of six children.12 Such honors were otherwise reserved for warriors, who at least in theory devoted their lives to the state, and to selected commoners whose charity had raised them to the same loft y station.

Some moral suasion texts appealed to the duties of subjects as well. “It has already reached His Lordship’s ears that [some] babies are not brought up, and his noble feelings are deeply hurt by this fact,” reported one of these. “To kill a baby is therefore to turn one’s back on the bonds of ruler and subject and to go against Heaven.”13 Such rulers could be domain lords, but sometimes the highest authorities of Japan featured in texts that urged subjects to do their reproductive duty.

In an infanticide ban, the lord of Numata made the following argument to deny parents the right to dispose of their children: “Our domain belongs to the realm ( gokōgi), therefore the people of our domain are the people of the realm ( kō).

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186 Redefining Reproduction

If that be so, one must not think of a newborn child as the private property ( watakushi no mono) of its parents, but should consider it a person of the realm.”14

ese lines, proclaimed by offi

cials in every village square of Numata in the

spring of 1818, were a statement of duties rather than of needs. Th at the realm

needed children, however, was the contention of thinkers who over the previous generation had begun to connect infanticide and population growth with the very survival of Japan.

JA PA N I N P E R I L

In the late eighteenth century, Japan’s vulnerability to foreign attack emerged as a policy concern. British ships were making regular visits to Japanese waters, and Russian trappers and traders appeared in the islands that rose from the seas north of Honshu. In a twist that would seem contrived in a work of fi ction, it was the mischievous lie of a Hungarian nobleman that planted the fear of Russia in the minds of many Japanese thinkers. On his escape from exile in Kamchatka, the fugitive count loaded provisions in Japan in 1771 and sent a letter to the Dutch in Nagasaki to warn that Russia was preparing to invade the northern islands the following year.15

e invasion fl eet was freely invented, and the warning took years to become known to even a small circle of intellectuals in Japan. Still, the shogunate dispatched a fact-fi nding mission to the North in the mid-1780s. Its failure to discover evidence for an imminent Russian invasion did not discourage the new breed of men who worried about Japan’s place in a changing world. One of them, Hayashi Shihei, was so gravely concerned about the obsolescence of Japan’s land-bound infantry against the powerful naval artillery the Europeans now possessed that he published his fears under the title On the Military Situation of a Maritime Country ( Kaikoku heidan) and presented a copy to the shogunate, a trespass on the ruler’s prerogatives that he knew full well might cost him his life. He spent the rest of his years under arrest in Sendai in the house of his brother.

In this charged atmosphere, a Russian emissary caused a minor panic in 1792 by asking for trading rights with Japan. Matsudaira Sadanobu, the senior councillor of the shogunate, now ordered the northern domains to prepare their defenses against foreign ships, and in 1799 placed the eastern part of Ezochi (modern Hokkaido) under the direct control of the shogunate. Aft er Russian soldiers burned a Japanese settlement on one of the Kuril Islands in 1807, the shogunate extended its control to all of Ezochi and required Sendai and other domains to dispatch soldiers to garrison the northern islands.

e personal overlaps between the opponents of infanticide and the advocates of vigilance in the North are striking. Apart from directing foreign policy, Matsudaira Sadanobu introduced child bounties and hired mediums to conjure

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Even a Strong Castle 187

the spirits of murdered infants. Hayashi Shihei’s father had written about infanticide, and Shihei’s close friend Fujitsuka Tomoaki published a pamphlet against the killing of twins.16 Among the last visitors a sick and dispirited Shihei received in his confi nement was Kimura Kenji, who had obtained a copy of *Military Situation * in Sendai and wished to talk to its author.17 Kimura, a country doctor of Mito, has made previous appearances in this book; he compiled the greatest extant collection of pamphlets and essays about infanticide, memorialized his lord about possible countermeasures, and corresponded with a shogunal intendant about its eradication; he also explored the islands north of Honshu and proposed a system of decoys, gun batteries, and beacon fl ags to defend the coasts of Mito against foreign ships.18

Another man of Mito, Fujita Yūkoku, recorded his strong views about infanticide on the Hiraiso stela and elsewhere, but he is perhaps most famous for educating a generation of xenophobic intellectuals supremely concerned with Japan’s place in the world. According to the recollections of one of them, Aizawa Seishisai, Fujita taught his students about the “fearsome, cunning nature” of the Russians.19

Fujita even went so far as to openly attack his lord’s inaction on foreign policy, a sally that temporarily cost him his position and permanently severed his ties to his teacher, Tachihara Suiken.20 Tachihara, in turn, we last encountered admiring a copy of Suzuki Busuke’s poster with the cat-faced woman, but this infl uential scholar was also deeply involved in the question of how to counter the Russian threat in the North. It was Tachihara who dispatched Kimura Kenji to explore Ezochi, and for another young scholar, Ōhara Sakingo, he passed an essay on the Northern problem to the highest levels of the shogunate.21 Ōhara went on to become one of the most determined advocates of a bellicose attitude toward foreigners; he also, as we shall soon see, proposed that saving the victims of infanticide could help Japan tighten its hold on the North.

e fact that many intellectuals wrote about both infanticide and the foreign threat is perhaps unsurprising in an age that allowed a man to be a medical doctor, scholar of the classics, divination master, economist, agronomist, artillery expert, geographer, and political consultant all at once. However, there was a special affi

nity between infanticide and foreign aff airs. To think in demographic categories is to zoom out of the complexity of daily experience. Looking at individuals and seeing a population is not unlike looking at a landscape and seeing a map in its trees, streams, and houses. Th

is habit of mind came more easily to men who

charted coastlines and contemplated the contest of nations.

Consider the works of Nagakubo Sekisui, a preceptor to the Mito lord who shared close personal ties with Kimura, Tachihara, and Fujita. Nagakubo interviewed Japanese castaways aft er they returned from Vietnam, surveyed the Northeast with a compass in hand, and is today chiefl y remembered for creating Japan’s fi rst map with longitude and latitude.22 A few years aft er these accomplishments, he turned his

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188 Redefining Reproduction

attention to the rural crisis in Mito. In the 1770s, well before the fear of Russia began to fi re Japanese imaginations, he wrote perceptively about why villagers killed newborns, but considered the eff ects of infanticide from a coolly demographic perspective that put the interests of the state front and center. Nagakubo was especially opposed to the “thinning” of newborn girls, since women were “vessels of childbearing” ( seiiku no utsuwa) and thus “treasures of the country.” To his mind, bondservants were another such treasure, that would be in good supply as long as the poor raised many children. Failing that, he argued that in place of infanticide, child abandonment should be encouraged, so that the rich could raise the foundlings and ease their labor supply problems by keeping them as “slaves and vassals.”23

Infanticide and a concern for Japan’s national security were more than two current issues with intellectual affi

nities. Most intellectuals read infanticide either as a

reaction to poverty or as a symptom of moral decay;24 in either interpretation, it evoked a sense of crisis. Confucian rulers were expected to protect the welfare and guard the moral quality of their subjects. Misgovernment and even fundamental systemic malfunction were therefore just a short logical step away from a discussion of infanticide. Commoners occasionally turned this to their advantage.

e headmen of Shirakawa, for example, greeted a new lord with the helpful suggestion that lower taxes would help his subjects rectify their ways and give up infanticide.25

Ambitious thinkers could spin this line of argument much further. Fujita cited infanticide as one of several reasons why the state should clamp down on merchants and restore the status order to its former purity.26 In a plan that featured the eradication of infanticide as one of its benefi ts, Satō Nobuhiro proposed to do away with the system of domains altogether, and divide all of Japan into units of equal size in which each man and woman would be assigned a trade.

Although some intellectuals may have used infanticide as an excuse to advance a varied agenda of reform, some had a genuine sense of crisis. In Fujita’s view, Japan’s defenses depended on the unity of ruler and people. Inasmuch as infanticide implied bad governance, it revealed how vulnerable Japan had become by the 1790s. In a letter to Nagakubo, Fujita worried that the rulers of Japan might suff er the fate of the Shang Dynasty, whose inept last king was overthrown when his troops abandoned him in the decisive battle against King Wu of Zhou; the Russians, Fujita feared, might similarly seduce the “stupid commoners” of Japan with their Christian teachings and “beguile them with lucrative benefi ts.”27 In one of his essays, Fujita described how excessive taxation and merchant greed had exhausted the people and made it impossible for many commoners to make ends meet in agriculture.28 A population thus weakened and disillusioned with its rulers, Fujita feared, would be easily seduced by the Russians and their religion, whose power many of the “Europe-watchers” of the day admired as much as they loathed its subversive potential.29

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Even a Strong Castle 189

T H E D E M O G R A P H I C A R G U M E N T

F O R E X PA N S I O N OV E R S E A S

Others saw the unwanted children of Japan as a reservoir that could water the ambitions of national security and imperial expansion. In 1797, Ōhara Sakingo was among the fi rst to make this connection. Born in Sendai and educated as a Confucian scholar in Edo, Ōhara visited Ezochi at the invitation of the lord of Matsumae, the domain that perched on the southern promontory of Ezochi, the great island we now call Hokkaido. Upon his return to Edo, he published a range of ideas for how to improve national defense, and proposed to kill the crews of all “barbarian ships” that approached Japan. He had three ideas for ensuring that there were enough Japanese on the thinly settled northern islands to prevent a foreign takeover. In Ezochi itself, he hoped to turn the Ainu natives into full subjects of Japan through education. Migration would further increase the Japanese population of Ezochi. Ōhara observed that the Japanese who had moved to Ezochi thus far were mostly men, which was not a promising recipe for a self-sustaining settler society. Ōhara looked to Echigo, a province famed for raising all children but notorious for selling some of them into prostitution, to help these bachelors marry and multiply; instead of indenturing its daughters, Ōhara argued, Echigo should send them to Ezochi as brides. His greatest hope, however, lay in the victims of infanticide. Ōhara wanted the authorities to establish one foundling home ( yōiku no yakata) for each of Japan’s seven hundred–odd districts. Upon reaching the age of fi ft een, the foundlings would be married to each other and sent to reclaim land in the domains of Morioka (northern Honshu) and Matsumae, and ultimately also in the more distant northern islands of Sakhalin and the Kuriles.30

Only a year later, Honda Toshiaki, a mathematician and student of Europe who was connected to Ōhara through his friendship with Tachihara Suiken, formulated a plan that made Ōhara’s scheme for national defense look almost conservative.31

Honda’s proposal called for transforming the infrastructure, material culture, and political economy of Japan and culminated in the acquisition of an overseas empire. Japan would produce large quantities of gun powder and use it to blast new canals into the soil. It would extend the navigable reaches of its rivers, make its ships more seaworthy, and replace wood with metal to protect its buildings from fi re. Th

is, along with government subsidies for parents and the country’s enhanced ability to move food from where it was rotting to where it was needed, would leave the people so prosperous and secure that they would cease killing their infants. Th e

end of famine and infanticide, in turn, would release the potential for population growth. Honda calculated that a human population could grow 19.75-fold every thirty-three years, a fi gure that is fortunately quite impossible.

Japanese scholars are fond of pointing out that it was in 1798, the very year that in faraway England Th

omas Robert Malthus published the fi rst edition of his

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190 Redefining Reproduction

*Essay on the Principle of Population, * that Honda Toshiaki framed the same ideas in Japan: that no matter how much the productivity of a given area of land could be improved, unchecked population growth would ultimately outstrip it.32 Honda’s formulation, however, lacks the mathematical rigor as well as the body of empirical evidence that Malthus assembled in painstaking research, and it is not just a sign of Anglo-Saxon hegemony that to this day, demographers, economists, and historians argue with or against Malthus while Honda is merely a fi gure of intellectual history. Nevertheless, Honda’s insight had major implications for his views on infanticide. Honda understood it as a response to poverty. Poverty in turn was inescapable when, to use his terms, unlimited population growth exceeded the limited productive potential of each country. Honda believed that his infrastructure schemes would enrich the people but thought that even if the resulting prosperity would temporarily eliminate the need for infanticides, the subsequent population growth would eventually immiserate the people and force them to resort to infanticide once again. Th

e possibility of eff ective contraception does not

seem to have entered Honda’s considerations, no more than it entered Malthus’s.

e only way to escape from this trap, in Honda’s view, was therefore to expand Japan’s territory overseas. As he looked north, Kamchatka struck him as an especially promising place to plant a colony; at the same latitude (or so he believed) as Britain, that frigid peninsula was, he thought, destined to be a seat of empire. Honda seems to have assumed that given suffi

cient demographic vigor,

the inconvenient fact that Kamchatka was presently controlled by the Russian empire could be easily rectifi ed.33

When Satō Nobuhiro elaborated Honda’s ideas in the early nineteenth century, he also reserved a special place for Kamchatka in his designs, considering it “the throat of the Eastern Seas.” We have encountered Satō before as the author of a scheme to provide daycare spots for every child in Japan, which he hoped would release the productive and reproductive potential of the people. Like Honda, Satō

thought foreign expansion, population growth, and an end to infanticide all desirable, each in its own right. As Satō was fond of asking, “is there any human being who does not love his or her own child?”34 Yet Satō followed Honda’s reasoning on the inevitability of infanticide in a closed country: “A country that . . . has no commerce with other countries does not possess the skills to increase its profi ts beyond the long-established ( arikitari) domestic products. As its population proliferates ( *jinmin hansoku), * the country therefore progressively weakens and declines, and ultimately the poor fi nd it diffi

cult to take care of their parents, and it reaches the

point where they secretly abort their unborn children.”35

Again, foreign expansion was part of the solution. Satō shared Honda’s taste for an overseas empire, but whereas Honda dreamed of Japan as the England of the East, Satō had even roomier visions of the future. Among his works is A Secret Plan for [the] Unifi cation [of the World] ( Kondō hisaku), a project whose steps he

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Even a Strong Castle 191

outlined with the gleeful detail of a man moving imaginary armies across the map.

One Japanese fl eet would seize the Philippines, another sail up the Amur and occupy the Manchu homeland. Upon the seizure of Nanjing by a third force, the Chinese would join Japan and together they would bring Europe and America under their sway. Before any of this could happen, however, Japan needed to learn new techniques, develop its resources, and unleash its potential population growth.

Whatever the precise logical role of infanticide in such fears, dreams, and proposals, the frequent juxtapositions alone eroded its cultural position. Th e

recurring portrayal of infanticide as a sign of social failure, as a waste of human potential that could instead be harnessed to build a prosperous nation able to defend itself and to expand its sway overseas, contradicted the more positive understandings that had long prevailed in many villages.

How many villagers were actually exposed to this new view of reproduction is diffi

cult to assess. Although some of the works cited in this chapter were intended for a general audience, others cannot have circulated very widely. A dense and extensive network linked the leading voices with each other and with a much wider circle of warrior administrators, scholars, village doctors, and headmen.

is means that many hundreds would have been touched by their ideas even in their lifetimes. Before they reached millions, however, they had to be absorbed into one of the late Edo period’s great currents of popular thought: Nativism.

NAT I V I S M : G O D S , C H I L D R E N ,

A N D NAT I O NA L D E F E N S E

e single greatest vehicle for the idea that childrearing was a patriotic duty seems to have been neo-Shinto Nativism.36 Nativists rejected Chinese elements in language and thought, decried the ills of the present as stemming from the loss of a primordial Japanese harmony within their communities and with their tutelary deities, and saw a love of fecundity as part of that lost world. Many absorbed the sense of foreign threat and national crisis from earlier thinkers but put much greater stress on the cosmic and spiritual dimensions of Japan’s supposed troubles.

Satō Nobuhiro was an early participant in this discourse.37 From the 1830s, many other Nativists weighed into the conversation about infanticide. Some were most agitated by its blasphemous qualities. Others made ready connections between infanticide and national defense.

e claim that infanticide saddened gods and buddhas had long been a staple of moral suasion texts and images. Some of the earliest suasion materials had also argued that children were the gift of superior beings. A 1793 poster, for example, pointed out that women only realized that they were pregnant aft er three or four months had passed. “If you do not know it in your own body, it is also not a child

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192 Redefining Reproduction

you have made yourself. You must understand that it has been bestowed by gods and buddhas.”38

A generation later, some Nativists eagerly seized on such arguments, and tried to remove reproduction from the realm of human decisions altogether. For example, Miyauchi Yoshinaga, writing in 1834 at his shrine near the easternmost point of Shimōsa, stressed that conception and pregnancy were the result of divine will, not human agency; the selfi shness of people who aborted or killed their children was therefore nothing less than sacrilegious.39 Th e view that gods and

buddhas played a role in the conception and growth of a child had long been commonplace;40 that parents therefore trespassed against a divine prerogative if they aborted or killed their children, however, was an interpretation that seems to have become prominent only aft er the rise of Nativism.

Students of the global fertility transition have long emphasized as one of its key preconditions that reproduction has to come within the “calculus of conscious choice.” Even in the late twentieth century, fertility remained outside the calculus of conscious choice in many societies. In parts of Mali, Ghana, and Nigeria, for example, women would answer survey questions about their desired family size with “that is up to God.”41 Conscious choice was of course a defi ning characteristic of the culture of infanticide. By contesting this basic foundation of Eastern Japan’s reproductive system, the opponents of infanticide argued for a radically diff erent subjectivity, which would surrender a critical area of human autonomy to divine will.

e reason Nativists feature in this chapter on infanticide and national defense, however, is that their religious notions oft en prompted them to see the depopulation crisis in both a sacred and an international context. In the words of Miyaoi Sadao, the Shimōsa headman whose visions of the underworld we glimpsed in Chapter 8: “To propagate the human seeds is the foundation for developing our imperial country of Japan. . . . To lay waste the country [by committing infanticide and abortion] is an act of disloyalty against the earth gods. When the hairy foreigners hear this, it becomes a national disgrace for Japan. It is the height of stupidity not to consider the interests of the country but [to think] only about one’s own cares and avoidance of inconvenience.”42 In Miyaoi’s worldview, a growing population would always be in the “interests of the country.” Honda Toshiaki and, at least in the fi rst half of his career, Satō Nobuhiro worried about how and where a growing population could be accommodated; men like Miyaoi, in contrast, believed that the potential for growth was unlimited even without conquering new lands. “A large number of people will require a great deal of food, but they also produce excrement in abundance; with nightsoil in good supply, the fi elds will give rich harvests.”43 Elsewhere, Miyaoi explained: “Somebody asked me: If throughout the whole realm infanticide is strictly banned and all the people do as dogs do and raise many children, will there not be too many people in the land, so that there

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Even a Strong Castle 193

will not be enough clothing and food? . . . I answered: . . . Th e more people

multiply, the more the country also gradually multiplies and expands, and fi elds increase in number. . . . You should consider that even today, polders have been created along the coasts of various provinces. Th

ere is no way of knowing how vast

Japan will be in four or fi ve centuries.”44 Miyaoi believed that “the rise and fall of countries” depended on the prevalence of infanticide. “Enlightened rulers of great countries,” he argued, therefore made infanticide bans their top priority. “Th ey

give childrearing money to those who raise many children, and recognize their meritorious service in other ways. Th

ey rule in a way that increases the population

and hardens the military preparedness so that the country shall not go to waste.”45

A generation later, another Nativist fi rebrand, Suzuki Shigetane, found even stronger language to bind childrearing to the common good in general and the defense of Japan in particular: “For a couple to have children and grandchildren

[serves] the great principle of statecraft , and is not a matter for one private individual. We must consider the fact that the wealth of the country and its military preparedness depend entirely on the quantity of its people. Even good fi elds are worse than a wilderness if there is nobody to till them. Even a strong castle cannot be defended without soldiers.”46

is was not the obscure argument of an isolated hothead. In 1857, Sasaki Bokuan, a doctor who at the orders of Sendai revised a seventeenth-century book of medical recipes for popular distribution, replaced on old section on abortion by repeating Suzuki almost verbatim. His handbook was distributed throughout Sendai, disseminating messages such as “without tillers, even good fi elds are the same as a wilderness; without soldiers, even a famed castle cannot be defended” to villagers who consulted his handbook with no loft ier goal than getting well again.47

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