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1 Deep in the mountains of Gunma, a chapel stands amid cedars and forest flowers. Under its eaves, a wooden tablet has slowly surrendered its paint to two hundred years of wind and rain. Yet when the light falls from the right angle, the eroded image still calls out its warning to travelers: It is early spring. The branches of a plum tree are still bare. In an open pavilion, a woman has just given birth. Next to her, a midwife kneels—and strangles the newborn. While the infant soul soars toward a bodhisattva, floating above on curled clouds, the midwife is destined for a darker place. On the right side of the panel, flames lick her face, and two devils break her body.1 The tablet is a relic of a hundred-year war of images and words over the cultural place of infanticide and abortion in Japan. Especially from the 1790s to the 1870s, and especially in Eastern Japan, infanticide was a central topic of the public conversation , with abortion often mentioned in the same breath. The traces of this conversation are lopsided. While opponents of infanticide produced a steady stream of policy proposals and pamphlets with haunting illustrations, acceptance expressed itself less in writing than in killing one’s own babies and speaking ill of neighbors with too many children. Proponents of infanticide also articulated their logic in a number of widely shared metaphors. The most famous of these, mabiki or “thinning,” likened infants to rice plants, some of which needed to be uprooted as seedlings to give their siblings the space and light to thrive. The metaphor encapsulates two of the fundamental assumptions of the act it described: that newborn children were not fully formed humans, and as such were disposable; and that to do right by their chosen children, responsible parents might need to destroy some infants at birth. 1 Introduction Contested Worldviews and a Demographic Revolution 2 Introduction Beyond the question of its moral status, infanticide permitted a range of interpretations . Administrators worried about dwindling populations and falling revenues , and often thought that it was a love of luxury that prompted people to kill their children. Villagers complained that poverty left them no other resort, and sometimes helpfully suggested that lower taxes would do wonders for the safety of their newborns. Men of learning often believed that moral education could convince villagers to give up infanticide, but some thinkers argued that it would take a fundamental reform of the political system to achieve that goal. Men of substance who were content to work within the established order, meanwhile, reinvented themselves as moral leaders of their communities and wrote to their governments with offers to finance the eradication of infanticide. Most domains in Eastern Japan built expensive systems of welfare and surveillance. By 1850, the majority of women north and east of Edo were obliged to report their pregnancies to the authorities, and the majority of the poor could apply for subsidies to rear their children. Over the same years, a demographic revolution was set in motion. In the eighteenth century, the consensus of many villages in Eastern Japan was that parents could, and under many circumstances should, kill some of their newborns. Perhaps every third life ended in an infanticide, and the people of Eastern Japan brought up so few children that each generation was smaller than the one that went before it. By 1850, in contrast, a typical couple in the same region raised four or five children, and a long period of population growth began. By the 1920s, the average woman brought six children into the world, and in Eastern Japan, as elsewhere in the nation, overpopulation at home became an argument for expansion abroad.2 Eastern Japan, in other words, had experienced a reverse fertility transition. While infanticide became less frequent, it nonetheless persisted. With the overthrow of the Tokugawa order in 1868, the elaborate countermeasures vanished together with the old regimes that had devised them. Around 1870, the first generation of governors of the new Meiji state announced ambitious eradication schemes, but their programs were short-lived. After about 1880, infanticide does not seem to have attracted much public notice, even though it continued to claim many newborn lives. At the beginning of the twentieth century, entire prefectures reported stillbirth rates so absurdly high as to suggest that in some of them up to one child in five died in an infanticide or a late-term abortion. Although these numbers...

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