Help Finding Japanese International Adoptee

I've wanted to write this post for several weeks, but other things kept getting in the way. More likely, it's a very sad subject for me because it brings up some frustration. But I need to get it out there, so here it comes.

I know a woman from a forum who, just like me, is the child of an adoptee from Japan and also an adoptive parent. She goes by "celebratewewill" on the forum. Her mother is the adoptee. C's mother is dying and C is trying to uncover her roots in Japan.

My father and her mother were both indirect victims of WWII. My father's bio father died on a battleship in the Pacific, his mother died shortly thereafter, and he was sent away to a family in a mountain village that could take him in. C's mother was found/abandoned/given up after the war. She was taken to an orphanage and adopted internationally by an American couple.

My father is 100% Japanese (though he may not be fully ethnic Japanese, but that's another story) both biologically and culturally. C's mother is mixed-race and was raised in America, and was not interested in looking back. What they both have in common is the stoic survivor mentality. The past is past, there's no use talking about it, suck it up and move on.

Being the child of an adoptee with this kind of perspective can be frustrating. We have a major gap in our history. As my father said once as he was in a poetic mood, "my family tree is withered".

To explore our past, we have to travel through our parent's trauma. Do we have the right? Is this partly our story, or does it belong wholly to them? It's hard to weigh all the ethical and emotional factors.

These frustrated yearnings wax and wane over a lifetime. At times of birth and death, they become especially powerful.

C's mother will soon pass away, and the link to her ancestors will become more tenuous.

Here are some details she provided me:

• The details I have are almost all verbal, and who knows how much as been added or subtracted. We do have a lot of "adoption papers" in Japanese, if i can find where they are hidden in my parent's house. Her papers have her name as Misao Okuno (I am going on memory only, I may have mispelled), dob 8-11-52.
• My dad says he remembers my grandpa (mom's dad) mentioning a "Reny Sawada" who ran the orphanage; he thought it was a Catholic orphanage, and they targeted Americans to adopt these children who were half Japanese. I found a Miki Sawada who fits this, the Elizabeth Sanders Home. But i'm thinking if she was just brought to the home by a stranger, no name or dob would be available. I don't know how often the children's mothers brought them directly to the orphanage; anything I can find is that these children were found on the street, sometimes dead. I don't know really how her original name and bday could have remained with her.
• My dad said that a few years ago, he contacted the japanese embassy and forwarded copies of all the papers they have. They couldn't figure out where she got her name (I don't know if that meant they did a search of her name and hometown, though, like you suggested). Next time I'm down visiting, I'm going to make copies of everything for myself.
• My dad does remember my mom's dad telling him that the orphanage told him she was Japanese/Portuguese. How they would have known that is beyond me, if she was indeed found on the streets eating out of the garbage, as the story goes. It would explain my brother's appearance, but perhaps more Brazilian since he's so dark-skinned.

Here's some advice I gave her:

• In Japan there are very detailed family records called koseki. Back in that time period, all facts of birth and adoption would be recorded in the koseki. Today, to access the koseki for the home region you would need to prove your relation and right to access it. I know this stuff in general but I don't write or speak Japanese so I can't help anymore than that. It's not certain C's mother would be in the koseki under that name. When my dad wanted to find out more about his biological parents, all he had to do was go to the koseki and look them up.
  
• I suggested that C get a genetic test. That could at least tell her the ethnicity of her mother's mother. There are millions of Japanese-Brazilians, many of mixed ancestry, but I can't recall circumstances of why they would actually be in Japan during the immediate postwar period. Perhaps for reconstruction work? I am going to ask my dad about that next time he's in town.
  
• Adoption.com is a site I would never recommend because of multiple ethical challenges and censorship issues. Nevertheless, it's one of the highest-traffic adoption sites on the web. At the forum there were several adoptees who said they were adopted from the Elizabeth Sanders home. I suggested that C contact them and see if she could learn from their searches.
  

If you have any suggestions or resources please post them here or email me. You could also contact C directly by registering with Adoption Threads and messaging "celebratewewill".

Loyalty

The concept of loyalty has been swirling around in my head lately.

Loyalty or allegiance is not a prominent part of the modern American psychic landscape. It's too connected to old or alien ways, feudal kings and queens, primitive tribes.

I free-associated the word. It connects with solidarity. But solidarity implies more of an idea of equals working together. There's the possibility of power inequality in loyalty. Dogs are the paragon of loyalty. Parents are not loyal to their children. Brothers and sisters are loyal to each other. You're supposed to be loyal to your friends, but not to your parents. Unless you're in a divorce custody case or family feud. Then, you might have "divided loyalties". When it comes to families, loyalty, as long as the family holds together, is absent, or hidden and unspoken.

This helps me puzzle out the way my father thought of his adoption. He has so little connection with any family left. I don't talk about it much, but I miss that feeling of family. My only connection to Japan is through him. Because of a series of events that was triggered before I was born, I have a half-brother that I have never met, and a half-sister I haven't talked to in more than 15 years.

He calls his adoptive parents "stepparents", never talks of them, and has only told me a few bare details about his biological mother and father. But his loyalty lies near his adoptive home, in the mountains west of Tokyo. It's an attachment to place, to clan, to a name, to the spirits of the earth and water. It's not an attachment to people.

More than a hundred years ago, an order came down that everyone (even peasants!), must have a last name. This was part of a sweeping modernization movement. It made a lot of sense. My father's adoptive ancestor went to the records official, who asked him where he lived. When he told them, they wrote that down and it became his last name.

I get a headache thinking about this stuff. It's like I'm wearing a pair of glasses. In one lens, I look at a world where everyone is a separately formed individual moving around in search of love and belonging while trying to be rational. In the other lens, I see half-formed people sprouting from seemingly random webs, sometimes trying desperately to disentangle themselves, with the webs constantly being ripped apart by invisible forces and woven back together again.

I'm not a huge cultural relativist; I believe all humans are basically the same, but they tend to see their worlds in very different ways.

The Day I Learned All My Grandparents' Names

(For another post on this same topic, see Clan Loyalty, Genetics, and Fear of Heights)

This is very exciting for me. I knew a few of my paternal grandparents' when I was 10, when I was given a family tree assignment in school. But dad only wrote down his adoptive parents, and besides that he wrote them in Japanese so I didn't how they were pronounced. I lost that tree a long time ago.

This morning we had a large breakfast of the typical style I described a few days ago. My mother came by as well, then left after breakfast to meet my stepfather and so some gardening.

Dad seemed very relaxed, sitting back and reading the Sunday New York Times.

I asked him if he could do a favor for me and he gave me a suspicious look.

"I'm putting together a scrapbook. Could you write down your family tree?"

"My family tree is too withered."

"Just anything you can remember. You don't have to write it in English." I gave him a sketchpad and walked off and did something else for a while.

He wrote down his adoptive mother and father, in English.

"Could you add in your adoptive sister? And your biological parents?"

"Too many names! I don't remember."

"I know you know your biological father's name."

I walked off again.

He drew a dotted line to "biological FA". He gave his biological father's real name and pen name. I know he was a left-leaning intellectual in the early 20th century. The pen name is a major, major, major piece of information. With a bit of quiet help from someone living in Japan, I could find some kind of biography. Over his adoptive parents' names he put "stepfather" and "stepmother".

"You know your biological mother's name, don't you?" I walked off again.

He put his mother's name, "biological MO" and a notation that she was not married to his father.

"THAT IS IT! NO MORE!"

I took the hint and removed the family tree. "Thanks Dad!" It's now scanned and uploaded to my private Flickr account. Whew. This was a lot easier than I thought it would be.

Clan loyalty, genetics and fear of heights

Here's a very personal, family-related post with a light adoption focus (or dark humor adoption focus, depending on how you look at it).

My mother was over at my house last night; we had a fresh baked trout and watched Inside Man. She, my husband and I talked a little bit about how much I resemble my father. He'd asked her recently, "How did my genes so throughly defeat yours?" My mother and father are almost polar opposites personality-wise.

My mother is a social genius. She can ask anyone the most personal questions in such a charming and self-deprecating way that they end up telling her their life story in just a few minutes. She's way too independent to work in a social services or psychological setting, but her gifts have still helped her in running her own business, since she can instantly recall the faces, families, birthdays, pets and significant life events of any of her clients. My father happens to be a misanthrope and professional conversation-killer. When people asked him "How are you doing?" he used to like to reply with "I'm dying". Then when they offered their shocked condolences, he would say, "but aren't we all dying... every day?" He has no love of humanity, or even mammals for that matter, although he does seem to appreciate plant life and small invertebrates.

I'd like to resemble my mother more in social areas, but realistically, I only received about 25% of her social intelligence and extroverted nature. I think I'm fairly average... I enjoy meeting new people, but get tired very quickly of small talk and would rather stay home with my husband than go to most social situations. Another area where I'm in the middle is fear of heights. I hate peering over cliff ledges, but I've been out hiking in mountains a few times and mostly loved it. My father has no fear of heights whatsoever. My mother, past about ten feet up, gets faintness, dry sweats and electric tingling pain in her feet.

As my mother, my husband and I were talking last night, I noted that my father almost never talks about his adoptive parents. In fact, I know slightly more about his biological parents than I do about his adoptive. My mother countered with the fact that he has a very strong sense of loyalty to the place where he grew up and also to his clan. I remember his constant refrain when I was a child that he was the first person in his clan to go to college, and that meant as the next generation I was obligated to get a graduate degree so I could beat his own bachelor's degree. I have an MBA now, but he says it doesn't really count. I honestly have to agree with him -- as long anyone has solid studying discipline and the most basic grasp of pre-calculus math, business degrees are pretty easy to get. Nevermind, I'm sure I'll have another more interesting master's degree at some point within the next five years.

I'd known for a long while that my dad used to dangle me over the edges of balconies when I was a baby. My mother told me it was only one of a series of differences in childrearing philosophies that contributed to their eventual divorce. He argued that holding me over the edges of buildings would innoculate me against a future fear of heights. She very strongly disagreed. All I can say is that while I have a strong relationship with my father, I'm glad he was never close to being my primary parental caregiver.

When I heard about the Michael Jackson scandal (the one a few years ago where he dangled one of his kids over the hotel balcony) I felt a little bit embarassed. Hey! That was me!

My mother, in reminding me of my dad's feelings of clan loyalty, mentioned the underlying reason he wanted to cure me of a fear of heights by holding me over the edges of balconies: because the clan were roofers.

This is another piece of the puzzle coming together. Now if I only knew their names. A long time ago I asked him, for a grade school project, to do a family tree for me, adoptive and biological. It took a lot of nudging, and I think he refused to write anyone's names in English characters. The piece of paper was lost long ago. Maybe when he's staying with us for his recuperation period, I can get him to draw me another one.

Adoption in Japan (Revisited)

Over the break, two articles on adoption in Japan came out. I'm excerpting a long Japan Times article below. It confirms my prior research (see this long post from last month) that there are many children growing up in institutions due to domestic anti-adoption attitudes.

It's also very interesting to see what the Japanese conception of American adoption is like. I don't think that our adoption processes are nearly as child-centered as the ISSJ representative states. I do think that the ISSJ is trying to push the "we're not as child-centered as we should be" line to raise awareness of adoption in Japan, and it sounds like a good strategy to me. If invoking national shame will get a few more adoptive parents to even consider the possibility of adopting an older child from a children's home, then great.

Cultural attitudes spell few adoptions By SETSUKO KAMIYA

Couples looking to start a family naturally want their own children. But amid the recent debate over whether to legalize surrogate births in Japan, one question has largely been overlooked: What about adoption?

Without a doubt, there are many children without parents who need loving families, but adoption of unrelated children is rare in Japan, partly because of doubts that placing them in an unfamiliar home environment is better than raising them in a public welfare facility.

Temporary foster care, in which families agree to care for a child for a few weeks or even several years without becoming the legal parents, is not common either.

Child welfare specialists argue there must be a change in the mind-set of parents -- a desire to act in the best interests of children -- if adoption is to take root.

....

Adoption is less common in Japan than in some Western countries. In 2004, family courts recognized only 322 adoptions of children under 6, according to official statistics. There were also 998 children over age 6 adopted the same year.

By contrast, in 2004, 5,360 children in England and Wales found new families. In Germany the figure was 5,064. And as many as 1.6 million children under 18 found new homes in the United States.

Many factors can affect adoption rates, including legal differences and cultural notions of family. But a big reason for the small number in Japan is that there are few children considered good candidates for would-be parents.

"Most couples want healthy babies and they want to raise them as if they were their own, but we tell them their chances are slim," said Harumi Takahashi at the Tokyo Metropolitan Government's Bureau of Social Welfare and Public Health, which deals with adoptions and foster parenting.

Currently, some 30,000 children under 18 are living in welfare facilities around the country. They may have suffered abuse; their parents may be too ill or financially unable to care for them; their parents may be in prison or may have simply given them up. Some children are placed in foster care temporarily and eventually reunited with their parents.

But of course, not all the children waiting for permanent homes are "desirable": many are older, some have disabilities.

Another limiting factor is the reluctance of many biological parents to give up their parental rights even though they cannot raise their children, said Takahashi. With the exception of orphans, the biological parents must give their consent for adoption to be possible.

As of the end of March, only 29 children were under the care of registered foster parents who were expected to complete adoption procedures in Tokyo. About 120 couples are on a waiting list, Takahashi said.

Adoption of kids from overseas is meanwhile practically unheard of in Japan. In the United States, by contrast, 13 percent of adopted children were born in another country. In Germany, such children make up nearly a third of the total.

Cultural norms about what constitutes a family also play a big part. "(When) Westerners say they want to adopt a child, it is because they are blessed with such capability and want to do so for the sake of the child," said Kuniko Omori, general director of International Social Service Japan, a welfare organization headquartered in Geneva that offers advice for people seeking to adopt internationally.

Age or disability hardly matters to adoptive parents in the West, Omori said. "In the mind-set of many Japanese, there is still the sense that they want to adopt the child to carry on the family line."

....

The next article is an excerpt from a memoir at Salon.com. The memoir is "Bento Box in the Heartland: My Japanese Girlhood in Whitebread America" by Linda Furiya. The writer's grandfather came to America at the beginning of the 20th century. The writer's father was born in America, but when his mother died young, he was sent back to relatives in Japan.

"In Japan, I lived in the countryside in a town north of Mount Fuji for five years when I was nine. My grandmother couldn't afford to care for Sumiko-chan and me, so we moved to Tokyo to live with our new parents who adopted us. I missed the fresh air and view of the mountain. That was the best place for a boy to be. But that was a long time ago."

When Dad said "adopted," I glanced over at my brothers. They wore masks of nonchalance.

"Mom, the rice is finished!" Dad yelled from his seat. As Mom stood at the table, spooning out the thick rice porridge using a wooden rice paddle, I saw her look at Dad before asking if he was okay.

Dad quickly nodded his head, cleared his throat, and lifted the lid. His eyes closed just as a puff of steam blurred his features for a second. "When I moved to Tokyo, my name became Ichiro Shimura. No longer was I called James Furiya. My new parents were civil servants of the Japanese military. They could not have me using my American name.

My brothers and I leaned into the table, our bowls of porridge in hand and our heads drawn together so we could eat and listen at the same time. Mom handed Dad a bowl before starting on her own.

Shifting his attention to his porridge, he said, "The rice needs a little salt." Mom reached across the table for the shaker, sprinkled it generously into the rice mixture, and then gave it a couple of stirs.

"If you were adopted, didn't that make you part of their family?" Keven interrupted.

"No, it was different in Japan at that time than it is here and now. Adoption was the same thing as being a servant," he explained matter-of-factly, responding to my brother's question in English. It was a fact of life that if a family couldn't afford to support a child, or if the home situation changed, orphanages or well-off families were a place to send them.

"One of my responsibilities was washing all the corridors of the house," my father continued. "First with water, then dry it with a towel, and afterward rub it with okara, the leftover soybean fiber after it's made into tofu. I wrapped it up in a cloth and used as a cleaner. Then I followed with linseed oil. If you didn't rub the oil into the wood well enough, the wood felt sticky. I had to rub the wood for a long time. It was a big house, too." Dad made fast swiping motions with his hands as if scrubbing an invisible surface. Maybe he was trying to protect himself, or maybe us, by continuing with these details in English rather than his more articulate Japanese. But he didn't realize how the details told in his choppy English actually made the story more shocking.

"Sometimes I had no time to eat breakfast, just enough to clean up the house and go to school." Dad pushed rice into his mouth.

"One morning I used too much oil and needed to rub it in longer. I thought I was finished. When my stepfather inspected it, he got very angry at me. I was on my hands and knees, and he yelled at me, 'Still feels sticky, keep rubbing!' He pushed his stocking foot on the floor, then kicked me hard.

"It was early morning and I was already tired and hungry, but I rubbed down the corridors again. I was late getting to school, so my teacher made me stay late that afternoon. This made me late getting home. Boy, my stepfather was angry. As a punishment, he made me sit like this for two hours." Dad put down his rice bowl and chopsticks and got down on his hands and knees on the floor. He sat on his calves and ankles, the traditional way Japanese women typically do.

Standing up shakily, he said, "I can't do this now. Too painful. My legs go numb. But at the time, if I moved, my stepfather hit me on the head with a bamboo stick." He slapped his hands together, then quickly cowered and covered his head as if deflecting imaginary blows. Angrily Dad hissed, "Still, to this day, I hate that man."

My eyes turned down, I stirred and blew on the half-eaten rice porridge, even though it was already cooled, for something to do. Then, holding the bowl to my mouth, I scraped heaps of rice in with my chopsticks. These simple, normal motions felt exaggerated and awkward. The silence blared in my ears and remained after our rice bowls were empty.

My own father's adoption has some parallels... it took place a few decades later and was occasioned by dire poverty. I don't think it was as bad as the writer's father experienced, though I honestly don't know. His adoptive family wasn't rich at all, and lived in a village in the mountains.

A commenter provides further context:

Not an entirely accurate characterization of adoption.

"If you were adopted, didn't that make you part of their family?" Keven interrupted.

"No, it was different in Japan at that time than it is here and now. Adoption was the same thing as being a servant," he explained matter-of-factly, responding to my brother's question in English. It was a fact of life that if a family couldn't afford to support a child, or if the home situation changed, orphanages or well-off families were a place to send them.


While this might have been true for Ms. Kuriya's father, the typical circumstance for a male being adopted into a family (often that of his wife) is the lack of a male heir.

My father-in-law, roughly the same age as Ms. Kuriya's, was adopted by a family whose son had died as a young boy. Far from being a servant, my giri otou-san was adopted to replace the son so that the family name and family business would continue.

I suspect that Ms. Kuriya's father's circumstance may have been influenced by the fact that his new "family" may not even have considered him a "real" Japanese, as he was born and live in America until he was nine years old.

To this day, many Japanese treat Japanese who have lived abroad for extended periods of time, as, at best, something exotic. Stories of returned ex-pat Japanese children being driven to violence or suicide because of bullying at school are not uncommon.

-- nandemosan

I'm starting to get a picture of at least three models or ways of looking at Japanese adoption: indentured servant, replacement son, and "child-centered". The servant model has been archaic since Japan's industrialization, but still has a strong hold on the national consciousness. "Child-centered" is being formed in comparison with non-Japanese adoption practices, but will end up being uniquely Japanese if it starts gaining momentum.

Stateless Children / Anchor Babies

This post is a carryover from my previous post on adoption in Japan. The Japanese social services webpage admits that stateless children are a special problem. They recognize a responsibility to these children, but express some doubt as to how to best serve the interests of the child.

Unlike Japan (and most other countries in the world), American citizenship is conferred by birth alone. It's guaranteed by the Constitution. Our laws and social services are far from perfect, but I'm proud of this principle. It's also called "jus soli" or "right of the soil".

From Wikipedia:

Jus soli is common in countries in the Americas that wanted to develop and increase their own citizenry. It is still applicable in a few nations outside the Americas as well. Some countries that observe jus soli:

* Argentina
* Brazil
* Canada (There are some limitations concerning the children of foreign diplomats)
* Colombia
* Jamaica
* Mexico
* Pakistan
* United States (There are some limitations concerning the children of foreign diplomats. See Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution)
* Uruguay

It really irritates me when anti-immigrant pundits start railing against "anchor babies" and "birth tourism". Anchor-baby-hating anchor baby and all-around evil bitchtroll Michelle Malkin is constantly harping on this issue. If we change the law so that children born in the United States to non-citizens don't get citizenship, then what do we do with these children if they end up in the care of the state? Drop them off in a forest and hope a wolf pack adopts them? Turn them into sausages?

Adoption in Japan

My father was adopted in Japan. When he was adopted, Japan was a very different country. He grew up in a rural society that has now almost entirely disappeared. In between 1945 and today, Japan went through radical changes, much more radical than America during the same time. And this was on top of a previous century of radical changes. The only country I can think of that changed so much in the 20th century was Argentina. At one point in the early 20th century, one-third of the population of Argentina was foreign-born.

In Japan, the social engineering did not involve immigration; it was technological, familial, educational, economic, ecological.

The circumstances of my father's adoption are totally different than what takes place in Japan now. I've been researching it on and off for a while, and it's pretty depressing. Since I don't speak or read Japanese, I have to warn anyone who reads this that my perception might be misleading, so do your own research if at all possible. I can't rely on my father for information. He's decided that there is no adoption in Japan, whatsoever, period paragraph end. His logic is that there are so few children in Japan that it's impossible anyone would give one up.

Here are some basic differences between domestic adoption in America and in Japan.

1) Japan has an extremely low birth rate. For the large majority of the population, there is no religious or cultural proscription against birth control or abortion. This is one of the things that contribute to a low birth rate. Another is that Japan is in a "middle zone" in terms of population growth. In societies where children are labor commodities and support their parents, and women have few rights, the birthrate is going to be high. Once this economic dynamic changes -- children start costing money to raise and educate, and women gain a measure of reproductive freedom -- then the birth rate goes way down. This is where Japan is at right now. Spain and Italy are in a similar position.

Some of the Scandinavian countries have gone a step further and had success in increasing their birthrates, using generous maternity leaves and state subsidies. But in Japan, women have little incentive to have children. Sexism in the workplace is very strong. If a Japanese woman wants to have a career, a child is a major handicap. As long as she stays child- and husband-free she has one of the most materially enviable lifestyles in the world.

Japan is an aging country with few, very treasured children. Japanese are very conscious and fearful of the graying of their population. The alternative would be to keep the population at replacement level by allowing increased immigration. This brings us to number 2...

2) Japan is NOT a multicultural or multiracial society. There are minority groups like the Ainu and Korean-Japanese, but racism/ethnocentrism is strongly present against those who are not "real" ethnic Japanese. Racism is one reason why Japan will not allow increased immigration. Some of the children in the childcare system in Japan are multiracial, and some are the children of foreign workers, and these children are officially stateless. There would be major social obstacles in placement of these children in adoptive homes. See this ISSJ webpage for more context.

3) Japanese have an anti-adoption attitude. The new prime minister's wife is an infertile woman who has gone public about why she doesn't have a child. Apparently people don't talk about these things much, so her willingness to step forward was very radical. Unfortunately, she also gave voice to the common belief that adoptive parents cannot fully love their children.

From the China Daily:

Akie Abe's remarks to a magazine were remarkably frank for a prime minister's wife, reflecting her effort to show a more human side of her husband, Japan's youngest post-World War II premier.

Shinzo Abe, 52, has pledged to encourage Japanese to have more children to reverse a declining birthrate, triggering media speculation as to why he is childless himself.

In an interview with the monthly magazine Bungei Shunju, Akie Abe, 44, confessed she felt strong pressure to bear children because her husband is a third-generation politician.

"Coming from a household of politicians, there was of course a lot of pressure, including from local constituents. But now it has become difficult, in part because of my age, so people no longer tell me to keep at it," she said.

"At the early stage, I did go through fertility treatment. But I think that I should accept my fate that I am the wife of a politician who became prime minister, and that we did not have the gift of having children."

She said she considered adopting a child a rare occurrence in Japan other than within extended families and noted that adoption was "very common in the United States."

"But I wasn't able to go through with it mentally and I didn't have the confidence to raise a child, so it didn't become a reality."

4) Japanese are very good at ignoring problems. This is a pretty subjective statement. But for abandoned and abused Japanese children, there is a big problem, and everyone is busy ignoring it.

From a corporate foundation webpage:

Even though Japan is in the midst of a declining birthrate, every year more and more abused or neglected children are being placed children's homes. The number of facilities (555 as of 2005/12) to treat abused children is increasing nationwide, but chronic overcrowding persists with many needy children placed on waiting lists to receive care. In FY 2005 the social security budget was 84.2668 trillion yen out of which only a mere 3.8% went towards expenses related to children and family. Expenses related to care for the elderly took up 70.4% of the total budget. This is an enormous gap in priorities.

The flip side of the ability to ignore is the ability to create rapid change. America is known for its "can do" spirit but the Japanese can do even more. Once they fully set their mind to solve a problem or to change their society, they will accomplish their goals. Akie Abe's public mention of adoption is a tiny beginning.

So to put all these together, there are very few children born in Japan who are given up into the care of the state. Since Japan is so wealthy, children are rarely given up for reasons of poverty. Few children whose mothers did not want to conceive are born, because women have a fair amount of reproductive freedom and weak proscriptions against abortion.

An article was going around recently about a hospital in Japan that had installed a baby chute for women to drop off their infants. If this story was true, doesn't it mean that contrary to what I said, there is a lot of relinquishment going on?

TOKYO (Reuters Life!) - A Japanese hospital plans to set up the country's first "baby hatch" where mothers can drop off unwanted babies, who could then be offered for adoption.

Jikei Hospital in southern Japan said it plans to install what it is calling a "stork's cradle", consisting of a flap in an outside wall which opens on to a small incubated bed.

An alarm bell would ring within minutes after a baby was deposited so hospital staff could come and care for the infant.

"By installing the hatch, we want to rescue both parents and babies," said a hospital official. "Maybe there are some people who are suspicious about it, but we should not pretend not to see them and let them die. Babies are innocent."

The head of the hospital was inspired to set up the "baby hatch" after visiting Germany, where they have already been introduced. The hospital wants to set up the baby hatch by the end of this year after getting approval from local authorities.

Adoptions are relatively rare in Japan, while there is little resistance on religious grounds to abortions.

This is either a stupid, made-up story or a stupid hospital administrator falling victim to the "must have the latest dumbass gadget" syndrome which is endemic in Japan.

I once had a book of photographs from 1930s Japan. One was a very bizarre photo of a bunch of smiling young schoolboys naked except for dark goggles and speedos, clustered around a shiny metallic chamber. I asked my dad what on earth was going on in that photo. He explained that it was a UV chamber. They had them in Germany in the 1930s so that children would get more UV exposure and hence more Vitamin D. There was no medical reason at all for these chambers in Japan, since children there get very dark playing outside and there's much more sun than in Germany... but because the Germans had UV chambers, the Japanese had to have them too.

Anyway, there aren't many children, proportionally speaking, in the care of the state. But according to that foundation website, the number is growing. As the traditional extended family breaks down further and further, their numbers will grow even more.

Here's an account from a woman who adopted from one of the children's homes. It's from a publication called kanjiclinic.com:

Sho had been placed in the children's home by his birth mother when he was 3 months old. 25,000 children live in Japan's 527 state-run or subsidized children's homes. They are rarely discussed in public, and most are not available for adoption. The majority of Japanese who place their children in the permanent care of the state will not relinquish their parental rights. They would rather have their children remain in institutions, until the age of 18, than be adopted by strangers.

Sho's birth mother was an exception. She had recently agreed to allow his adoption, and the social worker was anxious to find a family for him immediately. After his second birthday, in just a few weeks, he would be uprooted from here and moved to a different institution, one for older children.

Of course, Sho was unaware of the enormous effect this encounter could potentially have on his future. Still, he sensed that something was in the air, and he was tense as he gazed at "Mama" and "Papa" for the first time. Clinging ever more tightly to the caregiver's neck, the poor little fellow burst into tears.

Here's a very sad passage from later in her account:

As my husband and I cuddled some of the other children at bedtime, Cha-chan told us that while the basic needs of all the children were met, there were simply not enough available laps and hands to give them a fully satisfying amount of affection. Most had no, or only rare, visitors.

Twice a year, she said, the director sent each legal guardian-- a parent or relative-- a photo documenting their child's growth. These were mailed out prior to New Year's and Bon, with a plea that the child be taken home overnight for those holidays, but few guardians came to get them.

Only Sho and one other child there were slated for adoption. Their guardians, unlike the great majority of others, had agreed to relinquish custody of the children so that they could be adopted. The others would be moved to an institution for older children when they turned 2.

Here's a description of the children from an internship program at UC Davis:

Since 1993, this program has offerd UC Davis students a unique opportunity to participate in an international, cultural and educational exchange. The children's homes accepting interns are long-established institutions with years of success preparing Japanese children for productive and successful lives. The homes are not quite orphanages, and not quite group homes; there is no direct English translation. Together with the Japanese staff and native college-student interns, UC Davis interns will share in the lives of school-age youngsters.
...

LIVING WITH THE CHILDREN:
The children sometimes behave badly because they have not been able to live with their own parents or maintain normal relationships with other adults from whom they might absorb normal social behavior. Accordingly, if such problems occur, the interns will be expected to point them out and try to convince the children to behave properly, even scolding them if necessary. This approach is the foundation on which to build a trusting relationship.

The principle elements of the intern's work will be helping out with the children's daily dressing, meals, schoolwork, plus any other duties necessary to maintain a supportive environment. A lot of time will also be devoted to entertaining and playing with the children.

With only 1 or 2 exceptions, the children at the institutions are both mentally and physically able to participate in normal activities. However, some children who appear to be normal and cheerful may in fact have experienced personal difficulties before coming to these institutions and will be suffering from severe emotional wounds.

My first reaction when learning about the childrens' homes was anger. How could the families of these children condemn them to such a life? How would these children ever complete the educational path which is so crucial to Japanese society and identity? If their families allowed them to be adopted, they'd at least have a chance not to live at the margins of society.

After I thought about it some more, I realized my anger was misplaced. I tried to put myself in their shoes. If I was the guardian of one of these children, I might think of adoption as the worst of all evils. "Adoptive parents can never fully love their children. If I allow them to be adopted, they would just be abused and treated like a servant. I have a lot of trust in government institutions. They will know what's best for us. They can raise them."

I don't think this is a very healthy attitude.

Many people argue the case that adoption in the U.S. -- and they mainly refer to infant, private adoption -- is viewed too positively. I've found that I basically agree with that. Adoption shouldn't be the best of all possible alternatives - the default choice. If someone doesn't want to parent, they shouldn't be forced; otherwise, the child belongs with their blood relatives over anyone else. I don't run into that "adoption uber alles" sentiment a lot in foster care system adoption perspectives, but I know it's out there, and it's kind of weird, especially since it's usually wrapped up in religion. When we did our adoption classes we had several exercises where we had to take the perspective of the social worker and decide who should stay where. It was pretty clear who belonged back with their parents, who should be adopted, who should stay in foster care and enter independent living. Of course real lives are much more complicated than condensed sample case histories, but the principle is the same: adoption is one of several possible solutions for the welfare of the child.

The problem in Japan is that adoption is almost written out of the picture. In my opinion, their domestic adoption is more messed up than their international adoption program, which is so expensive it disqualifies too many people, but overall seems logical. A tiny number of children (the last yearly figure I remember is 40) are adopted out of the country each year, and the rules require a strong connection to Japan. It's possible this rule might be slightly relaxed for the stateless or non-ethnic-Japanese children. One couple I read about qualified because they lived in Hawaii surrounded by a Japanese-American community, but most people qualify because they themselves are Japanese-American. I would qualify, if I could afford the massive fees (I've heard $40-$50,000 ) and if my father didn't have a blindfold fastened so firmly on his eyes. I would love to adopt a multiracial child from the system there, because I have a "there but for the grace of God go I" feeling when I think about growing up multiracial in Japan. I've faced a lot of racial problems here, but it's nothing compared to what it would have been like had my family stayed in Japan. There are families that stick with it, and I wish them all the best; with a lot of parental foresight and the right choice of school, the children will grow up happy. These kinds of families are eventually going to change Japan for the better. But a multiracial child growing up in a childrens' home... it really hurts me to think about it.

I hope that in future there is greater awareness in Japan about adoption, and a greater willingness to believe that waiting children can be loved by their adoptive parents. Like I said before, the Japanese can solve any problem they really want to solve, and once awareness begins, I predict a snowball effect, a massive information campaign and a complete change leading to increased domestic adoption and greater childcare support services.

I also think Japan should start a special international program for the adoption of stateless and multiracial children waiting in childrens' homes and subsidize a percentage of their legal adoption fees.

By the way, if you are a reader who knows anything more about this subject, I would greatly appreciate a comment or an email. If you disagree violently with anything I said, just let me know why.

One Last Post on the Theme of Genealogical Frustration

I think I've been doing these posts as a way to procrastinate on a longer post I have in mind on religion and adoption.

My mother's family is from West Virginia, although they left the state when my mother was very small. The only time I've ever been to the home state was for a family reunion over the weekend held in honor of my recently deceased grandfather. I was a teenager at the time. I'd met several of my relatives before, so I didn't feel like I was among strangers.

My great-aunt told me some family stories at the reunion. She said with great pride that our family could trace ancestry from General Robert E. Lee, but the records were burned in a house fire in the 1930s, so there isn't any proof. So this was why all my male relatives had "Lee" somewhere in their name! I was quite impressed at this possible connection to such a famous historical figure. When I later asked my mother about it, she laughed and rolled her eyes. She told me that half the population of West Virginia has Lee in their name, but of course their records vanished in (pick one) a house fire/flood/earthquake/sinkhole/meteor strike.