MABIKI: Infanticide and Population Growth in Eastern Japan, 1660–1950 | By Fabian Drixler
Asia: Local Studies/Global Themes, 25. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013. xvii, 417 pp. (Maps, illustrations.) US$75.00, cloth. ISBN 978-0-520-27243-9.
Historians have long known that parents in early modern Japan sometimes killed their newborns, a practice euphemistically called thinning the shoots (mabiki). Fabian Drixler’s ambitious book skillfully blends statistical and textual analysis to explain how the culture of infanticide evolved over three centuries, shedding light on the intellectual, cultural, and institutional history of early modern Japan and offering a fascinating, and at times harrowing, case study of population control.
Drixler’s methodology is rich and complex. In the introduction he explains that a “feedback loop between demography and discourse goes through several cycles in this book” (21), a simple statement that belies the complexity of his argument. Until recently, historical studies of the demography of early modern Japan relied on structuralist assumptions that viewed social, political, or economic relationships as static. Drixler sets aside these static assumptions and argues instead that the practices and demographic consequences of infanticide evolved through dynamic processes of social change that were influenced by widespread debate about infanticide. While he uses discourse analysis he cites no post-structuralist sources in the notes or bibliography. His approach is neither structuralist nor post-structuralist, but rather bears an affinity with the new interactive structuralism. The result is an insightful, dynamic view of the culture of infanticide backed up by a sophisticated quantitative analysis.
The quantitative analysis is audacious in scope. Where most demographic studies of early modern Japan examine a single village, Drixler analyzes data from ten provinces in eastern Japan, a region that stretches from north of what is now Tokyo to the northern tip of the main island of Honshū. Most of his quantitative conclusions appertain to that region but he provides context by explaining population change, sex ratios, and fertility levels throughout all of Japan based on data compiled from secondary sources. For the main statistical analysis he collected roughly 780,000 observations from 3,300 population registers coming from over one thousand villages in eastern Japan and compiled the data into thousands of spreadsheets. To this data he applied the “Own Children Method” (OCM) that estimates fertility based on a snapshot of the surviving children in a family. By analyzing many thousands of entries from population registers Drixler generated an estimate of where and how often infanticide took place. His results show that infanticide was common in eastern Japan, sometimes shockingly so, that it was only sometimes sex-selective, that it was not practiced uniformly throughout the region and that rates of infanticide changed over time, rising to high levels in the eighteenth century before decreasing in the nineteenth (he uses different data to show it ended in the middle of the twentieth century). Many tables, maps and charts make the quantitative results more accessible.
The book is quite readable because Drixler has placed most of the technical explanation in appendices and endnotes, but readers who venture into the end matter will have a better view of the scope and complexity of the analysis. To organize the data for analysis Drixler had to make what must have been a staggering number of adjustments to the hundreds of thousands of observations he used. To use the OCM he also had to make assumptions about a number of values that are difficult to estimate, such as mortality rates. He explains how he made these adjustments and assumptions but for reasons of space cannot provide details. The estimates and assumptions look plausible, however, and the adjustments to the data look reasonable so his results are probably correct. In at least one case, however, his explanation lacks adequate transparency. He uses a Monte Carlo simulation to examine the comparative frequency of infanticides and abortions, referring readers who want a fuller description of the method to an article he has not yet published. Readers may want to withhold judgment about the results of the simulation until he publishes the supporting article.
His analysis of the discourse on infanticide is fascinating and shows that commentators in early modern Japan had diverse attitudes about the practice. He argues that infanticide became widely accepted in eastern Japan in part because priests in some Buddhist sects began to promise they “could transform a dead soul into a divine ancestral spirit” through the ongoing performance of rituals (62), and limiting family size through infanticide helped to stabilize households and secure heirs who could ensure the future performance of the rituals. Cultural practices such as costly reciprocal gift giving at the birth of a child and the belief that having a large family would lead to poverty provided further justification for infanticide by shaping social expectations about the need to limit family size. The diverse discourse also included criticism of infanticide based on Confucian ideology and Buddhist theology. Drixler argues that such discursive attacks, backed up by domain policies to monitor pregnancies, exert moral pressure on villagers, and subsidize child-rearing, led to lower levels of infanticide in the nineteenth century.
The dynamic development of the discourse on infanticide came to an end with a radical political rupture at the beginning of the modern period, and this is the most problematic part of Drixler’s analysis. To some extent early modern debates about infanticide had to take into account the hereditary patrimonial authority of the domain lords, especially after domains began to implement countermeasures to curtail infanticide. When the Meiji Restoration (1868) swept away the old system of domain-based political authority it also swept away the underpinnings of that discourse. Drixler describes insightfully how the discourse died out, but he underestimates the extent of the discursive rupture that took place. As a result he conflates incommensurate understandings of civilization (Chinese and Western) and pays insufficient attention to how meanings of civilization changed during the process of reshaping state power after the Restoration. Drixler’s explanation of how the culture of infanticide ended in the twentieth century is first rate, however, and his analysis of discourse in the early modern period is on firm ground. On the whole the book is packed with interesting insights that will appeal to a wide range of readers.
Robert Eskildsen
International Christian University, Tokyo, Japan
pp. 939-941
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