Mabiki : infanticide and population growth in eastern Japan, 1660-1950 / Fabian Drixler.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Drixler, Fabian Franz, 1978-

Series:

Asia--local studies/global themes ; 25.

Asia: Local Studies/Global Themes ; 25

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Fertility, Human--Japan--History.

Fertility, Human.

Infanticide--Japan--History.

Infanticide.

Japan--Population--History.

Japan.

Japan--Social life and customs--1600-1868.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (440 p.)

Edition:

1st ed.

Other Title:

Infanticide and population growth in eastern Japan, 1660-1950

Place of Publication:

Berkeley, Calif. : University of California Press, c2013.

Language Note:

English

Summary:

This book tells the story of a society reversing deeply held worldviews and revolutionizing its demography. In parts of eighteenth-century Japan, couples raised only two or three children. As villages shrank and domain headcounts dwindled, posters of child-murdering she-devils began to appear, and governments offered to pay their subjects to have more children. In these pages, the long conflict over the meaning of infanticide comes to life once again. Those who killed babies saw themselves as responsible parents to their chosen children. Those who opposed infanticide redrew the boundaries of humanity so as to encompass newborn infants and exclude those who would not raise them. In Eastern Japan, the focus of this book, population growth resumed in the nineteenth century. According to its village registers, more and more parents reared all their children. Others persisted in the old ways, leaving traces of hundreds of thousands of infanticides in the statistics of the modern Japanese state. Nonetheless, by 1925, total fertility rates approached six children per women in the very lands where raising four had once been considered profligate. This reverse fertility transition suggests that the demographic history of the world is more interesting than paradigms of unidirectional change would have us believe, and that the future of fertility and population growth may yet hold many surprises.

Contents:

Front matter

CONTENTS

ILLUSTRATIONS

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

A NOTE ON CONVENTIONS

1. Introduction. Contested Worldviews and a Demographic Revolution

2. Three Cultures of Family Planning

3. Humans, Animals, and Newborn Children

4. Infanticide and Immortality. The Logic of the Stem Household

5. The Material and Moral Economy of Infanticide

6. The Logic of Infant Selection

7. The Ghosts of Missing Children. Four Approaches to Estimating the Rate of Infanticide

8. Infanticide and Extinction

9. "Inferior Even to Animals". Moral Suasion and the Boundaries of Humanity

10. Subsidies and Surveillance

11. Even a Strong Castle Cannot Be Defended without Soldiers. Infanticide and National Security

12. Infanticide and the Geography of Civilization

13. Epilogue Infanticide in the Shadows of the Modern State

14. Conclusion

APPENDIX ONE. The Own-Children Method and Its Mortality Assumptions

APPENDIX TWO. Sampling Biases, Sources of Error, and the Characteristics of the Ten Provinces Dataset

APPENDIX THREE. The Villages in the Ten Provinces Dataset

APPENDIX FOUR

APPENDIX FIVE

APPENDIX SIX

APPENDIX SEVEN

NOTES

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Index

Notes:

Description based upon print version of record.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Description based on online resource; title from title page (ebrary, viewed May 24, 2013).

ISBN:

9780520953611

0520953614

OCLC:

844362766