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158 For all the passion their creators poured into them, pamphlets and paintings were relatively cheap. The perceived urgency of fighting infanticide is more impressively evinced by the prodigious resources that governments and individuals poured into far costlier countermeasures. If moral suasion redrew the boundaries of humanity and argued that infanticide was not compatible with a pleasant afterlife, childrearing subsidies and pregnancy surveillance focused on the material conditions that their designers saw as motivating and permitting infanticide: poverty and impunity. Such policies reached into remote villages, consumed great quantities of paper, and tied up considerable administrative and financial resources. Depending on the locality, a sizable fraction of parents received subsidies for their children. Pregnancies were registered in the hundreds of thousands. Officials and doctors investigated stillbirths and infant deaths, and on occasion jailed men who had not bothered to report their wife’s pregnancy. In spite of their scale, the evidence for the ultimate success of subsidies and surveillance is surprisingly equivocal. Infanticide declined where child bounties were paid and pregnancies monitored, but this decline was neither complete nor did it always outpace the same trend in areas without such policies. This may suggest that the true power of subsidies and surveillance lay not in their effect on the relative costs of childrearing and infanticide but in their symbolism. When lords rewarded parents with coin and rice from their privy purse, or when local notables made large donations to subsidize the childrearing of their less pecunious neighbors , they elevated the social meaning of childbirth. Placing pregnancies under surveillance stated plainly that they were not a private matter but the concern of the state. Bearing and rearing children, therefore, was no longer a matter for 10 Subsidies and Surveillance Subsidies and Surveillance 159 individual families or even individual villages. Every child was a contribution to society—to a village forlorn amid its fallow fields, to a lord over disappearing taxpayers, perhaps even to the whole of Japan. The expensive policies powerfully embodied this notion; once it took root in the minds of villagers, their conversations , friendships, and marriages bore it beyond the borders of their domain. HOW SUBSIDIES AND SURVEILLANCE CAME TO BE EXPECTED FEATURES OF GOOD GOVERNANCE It was at the very edge of the archipelago, in the island domain of Tsushima midway between Kyushu and Korea, that Japan’s first childrearing subsidies were disbursed in 1667.1 Since the domain received a large grain allowance from Korea, this may have been a way to share some of that bounty with peasants struggling to coax barley from their windswept rocks.2 Every peasant child, the lord of Tsushima announced, would receive one bale of grain for each of the first three years of its life. While subsequent reforms made firstborn children ineligible and changed the amount and timing of the payout, Japan’s earliest childrearing subsidy regime was also one of its most inclusive. Between 1683 and 1701, 4,417 children, or about every third child born during those years, received a total of 8,834 bales of umaregomugi (“barley for babies”).3 The next time we hear of policies to encourage childrearing, they issue from the center of the Tokugawa polity. In 1690, Tokugawa Tsunayoshi, who over the previous years had banned the maltreatment of dogs, horses, and nesting birds, ordered that people too poor to raise their children should appeal to their employers, headmen , or magistrates for help. Pregnant women and children under seven would henceforth require registration.4 Another law later ordered tenants in Edo to report pregnancies through their landlords, and each ward to forward a list of infants to the town magistrate. It is not clear how long this system operated in Edo, however, and it is unlikely that anything like it was ever implemented in the shogun’s villages.5 In emulation of Tsunayoshi’s laws, the domains of Kaga and Shinjō ordered the registration of pregnancies in the mid-1690s, and Owari promised economic support for abandoned children.6 Although the surviving documentation is modest, Kaga seems to have continued its policies against child abandonment for generations . When in 1767 the shogunate asked all domains to forward a ban on infanticide , Kaga responded that newborns were already safe within its borders.7 Shinjō repeated and elaborated its laws in 1718 and 1733, but if pregnancy surveillance records were actually compiled at this time, they have not come down to us.8 After his death, Tsunayoshi was widely remembered as an eccentric. For the...

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