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14. Conclusion
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232 CONTINUITY, CHANGE, AND DIFFUSION Eastern Japan’s culture of infanticide lasted longer than the modern reproductive system of reliable contraceptives and safe abortions has so far endured in any part of the world. In some areas, it spanned more than two centuries, assuming its distinctive characteristics in the late seventeenth century and persisting into the age of cinema and motorcars. Infanticide was rooted in the most fundamental worldviews of those who employed it to plan their families. Springing from particular understandings of humanity, death, and immortality, it expressed ideals of responsible parenthood and obligations to elders, of how families should seek economic security and the respect of the community. When these understandings and ideals changed, so did the reproductive culture they once sustained. The people of Eastern Japan did not rearrange their worldviews spontaneously; rather, they did so gradually and in response to prodigious efforts on the part of governments and private individuals. Some of these men argued against infanticide even though they seem to have shared some of its premises—most importantly, that infants were not fully formed human beings. Their opposition to infanticide was often, if by no means always or exclusively, motivated by the problems declining populations caused in a society whose institutions were designed for stability, not for growth or contraction. The fiscal health of a domain, however, did not make for very persuasive rhetoric among villagers . Opposition to infanticide was therefore predominantly framed in moral terms. Genuine outrage no doubt played its role, but it is possible that some who argued against infanticide on ethical grounds convinced as much themselves as 14 Conclusion Conclusion 233 their intended audience that newborn children could not be killed and that raising many children need not lead to poverty. A second theme in this conceptual rearrangement concerned the social meaning of reproductive choices. In the culture of infanticide, excessive childrearing had been considered irresponsible toward both the chosen children and the larger community. When public policy began to contest infanticide, it marked numerous progeny as a social contribution rather than as a sign of foolish self-indulgence. From the 1790s, the growing perception of a foreign threat drew infanticide into a discussion about national security, and from the 1820s, the rise of neo-Shinto Nativism introduced the wishes of gods into the discussion. The concepts that favored or negated infanticide did not live silently in individual minds, but were propagated and reinforced in conversations. Some of these exchanges connected people across considerable distances, and many concerned questions of policy. In this sense, they may have amounted to a genuine public sphere. Administrators looked across their borders to see how other domains combated infanticide.1 So did their subjects. When they learned from friends, travelers, or business partners that other lords invested in the protection of infants, they came to expect that their own ruler would live up to the same standards of benevolent governance. The texts and images of the moral suasion effort drew on one another and elaborated shared themes; the busy networks of concerned samurai, priests, headmen, and village doctors that read and copied these materials could therefore project the thoughts of a townsman of Mito into every village of Sendai within a matter of months, or confront women in Tsuyama with an image devised by a retainer of Kurobane more than four hundred miles away. Most conversations about rearing or thinning children, however, were local. The web of discourses that made infanticide seem unproblematic, advantageous, and often necessary was spun between neighbors, friends, and relatives. Such exchanges could sometimes cross long distances, but far more frequently they were bound by the limited physical spaces in which most people lived their lives. Infanticide was therefore rendered normative or outrageous by the balance of an overwhelmingly local conversation. Some of the best evidence for this process can be found in the stillbirth statistics of the 1890s. Elevated stillbirths tended to cluster. These clusters—Tosa, Bizen, and Bitchū, the mountainous spine of northern Honshu, the stretch of land between eastern Kazusa and southern Hitachi, and a few others—had only one conspicuous commonality: their historical records bear clear traces of infanticide in the Edo period or in the 1870s. Most of them did not experience long-term pregnancy surveillance and childrearing subsidies. The clusters often crossed the prefectural boundaries of the 1890s, so that it is unlikely that local policies at the time these statistics were collected were a major influence. In the Kantō, high stillbirth rates radiated...