The San-ikukai hospital in Tokyo’s Sumida ward is much like any other in the Japanese capital, save for one special feature. It has had, since March of last year, a small room on the first floor with a cradle (and nothing else), where mothers can anonymously deposit their babies, never to see them again. The hospital accepts babies up to four weeks old. They are then cared for until foster families or infant homes can be found. In July, the hospital announced it had just received its twentieth baby, most of whom had been left within 24 hours of birth.
The scheme is the first in the capital but not the first in Japan. Since 2007, the Jikei hospital in Kumamoto City has been accepting unwanted babies in its ‘Storks Cradle’ programme (modelled on the German ‘Babyklappe’ scheme) and claims to have ‘saved’ 170 babies. If San-ikukai is deemed a success, more ‘baby hatch’ programmes are planned, with Osaka next on the list for later this year.
The initial impetus for both the Jikei and San-ikukai programmes was an alarming increase in unwanted pregnancies, abandonment and sometimes fatal child abuse (cases of which have tripled in the last ten years). Sociologists generally attribute this to the atomisation of society, shrinking families and a weakening of community bonds, leaving isolated parents with no one to turn to.
The most vivid manifestation of this grim trend was the spate of babies deposited in public coin-operated lockers in train stations in the Seventies and Eighties, most of which were found dead. There were 191 such cases between 1980 and 1990. The ‘Coin Locker Babies’ became an international embarrassment for Japan after the story was fictionalised in the Bildungsroman of the same name by Ryu Murakami and translated into English.
There is a deeper and darker background, though. The problem of abandoned and fatally abused babies has a very long history in Japan, stemming from at least the Edo period (1600 -1868), where neonaticide was commonplace, especially in traditional rural communities. The word that euphemistically described this practice was ‘mabiki’, which means ‘thinning’. It is an agricultural term referring to the selective removal of plants or flowers to allow those that remain to thrive with the maximum sunlight and water.
Mabiki is the kind of hidden history of Japan you won’t see in proud, glossy period dramas. Babies were often either abandoned or suffocated with a wet towel. It was more commonly practiced on girls, babies with disabilities and multiple births (considered an abomination for some reason). Mabiki was justified by ancient Buddhist beliefs, which characterised the practice not as murder, but as returning the newborn to the spirit world.
Proponents of the baby hatch system say they are providing a last resort to desperate mothers who might harm their baby
It is assumed that mabiki was a relic of a bygone age, but there is evidence it continued well into the 20th century. It has been estimated that between 1886 and 1940, between 1.7 and 2.8 million false stillborn reports were filed by parents wishing to conceal infanticides.
Proponents of the baby hatch system say they are providing a last resort to desperate mothers who might harm their baby, perhaps even to the point of a modern form of mabiki. They claim poverty and societal pressure place intolerable burdens on some women and are the main reasons for the drop-offs. The problem is that this is exceptionally hard to prove. Information on the mothers is inevitably scant. Unless they wish to tell their stories (you can leave a letter with the baby) or the hospital manages to get in touch, exactly what drove the mothers to surrender their newborns is hard to ascertain.
Some are sceptical. According to a critical report from Nippon.com from 2017, which assessed the Jikei’s record on its 10th anniversary, the Kumamoto hospital admitted that when they did make contact with mothers, there were various reasons for the abandonment and all denied ever having considered harming their child.
A former counsellor at a government social welfare office in Kumamoto said that what the mothers really needed was material and emotional support. If the baby hatch facility had not been available, she said, some might have come to them, others might have just coped. The counsellor, who was familiar with some of the mothers, said, ‘I don’t believe any of them would actually have killed their baby’.
There was also a scandal on the very first day at Jikei when a three-year-old child who had lost its mother in a traffic accident was left at the baby hatch. It was later discovered that the true motive for the ‘abandonment’ was embezzlement of the insurance money due to the child. The infant could speak and identified himself. A relative later confessed to the crime.
Another problem is that 10 per cent of babies left at the Jikei hatch are disabled, making it difficult to find foster parents, meaning they will see out their days in institutions. Still another is that even those that do find homes experience bureaucratic difficulties, like being unable to enrol in health programmes due to having no official identity. And most live out their lives with the trauma of having no clue as to who their real parents are.
Could baby hatches come to the UK? At the moment, no. Under Section 1 of the Children and Young Persons Act 1933, any form of abandonment is a crime punishable by up to ten years in prison. And there is weighty opposition from charities such as Save the Children, who cite the UN’s view that such schemes conflict with a child’s right to know their biological origins.
Our politicians, in their wisdom, have instead decided that the humane thing to do to help desperate mothers-to-be is to decriminalise abortion up until birth. A very British form of mabiki.
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