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.