ASIJ Essay Contest - Kari Wadden "The Lost Children of Japan: Restoring the Rights of Institutionalized 'Orphans'" ― 2014/05/01 12:38
The Lost Children of Japan: Restoring the Rights of Institutionalized “Orphans”
By Kari Wadden
Only 309 children were adopted in 2010. - The Japanese Ministry of Health, Labor, and Welfare
I remember watching Saki pick up the baby—not much smaller than her and propped up on a towel. She warmed new milk and held the infant in her arms just as a mother would, rocking and cooing barefoot on the floor of the communal kitchenette; her head barely reaching the countertop. Saki was six years old. Back then, I was a foreigner entering our neighborhood school and I was instantly drawn to her, sensing that she might be a potential outcast like me, with her husky voice, bowl-cut hair, and big pink glasses. That day she brought me to the large red orphanage across from the gates of school, I saw where she, the baby, and scores of other children lived.* It was a crowded and understaffed orphanage. It was what they called home. Later on I remember asking the always talkative and ebullient Saki, with my naively rude six-year-old curiosity, who made her obento lunches since she didn’t have a Mom and Dad. “The obasan,” she said, falling silent for a long moment, “but I hope someday it will be my new mom.”
*This scene is still vivid in my memory, but in most cases infants, babies, and toddlers are kept in separate facilities until they are three years old.
When I think back to that time and our memories together, I vividly remember the children there. I had always wondered, though, how did they end up in the orphanage? Why were there so many orphans in that house across from our school? What was life for them really like? What did their future hold? And the big question, Did they ever get adopted? And if not, why?
Saki’s likely permanent status as an orphan was the result of being inescapably stuck at the unfavorable end of the cumbersome process of adoption in Japan, a process that was, and is still now, riddled with skewed laws and powerful enduring cultural stigmas that would label her very birth, childhood, and possible adoption as a black mark in society. It is this potent combination of cultural and legal issues that keeps tens of thousands of children like her from being placed with loving families, undermining their human rights as guaranteed by the Japanese Constitution.
Saki and the other children at the facility were among the staggering number of Japanese so-called orphans living in one of the the nation’s 539 institutional children’s homes who most likely will never be adopted (Lee). In fact, ten years after our playing in the schoolyard together, Saki is almost certainly one of those 29,399 children (as of 2012) still in an orphanage (Lewis). She would now be seventeen and have just one year left before she is released at age eighteen. She and the baby she tried to mother that day are probably among the 83 percent of “orphans” (koji), who are not technically orphans in the English sense (the Japanese term is difficult to translate), but who were taken away from an abusive or neglectful parent (Lee). A majority of these children actually have guardians. A small number get a visit from a parent or a guardian every weekend; some have erratic and unpredictable visits from time to time, while others never receive a visit. And there are those who simply have no parents to visit at all.
A volunteer at a Japanese orphanage, Sophia Lee, tells a story that illustrates this predicament: At the orphanage a young boy or girl dressed in his or her best clothes waits by the door for Mom, but she never comes. Apparently this scene is common during New Year’s and other holidays. Lee, who has written extensively and knowledgeably about Japan’s national adoption policies, observes that the current system holds out the promise of children being reunited with parents and family members, but it seldom happens. Even in cases such as when a baby is left in a train station locker and the parents never found, courts may still rule the baby is unavailable for adoption because the mother or father “might be looking for it.” Legally, the baby, whose parents have plainly abandoned the little boy or girl, cannot be adopted because parental consent is compulsory (Goodman). But if the parents have disappeared, how can they consent to an adoption? Tom and Kanoko Frederic, a couple living in Kanto who wished to adopt a young child, reflect on their unsuccessful attempts by remarking, “The problem was there were not enough children because a child’s guardian — usually the mother — has to agree to the adoption” (Lewis).
The reluctance to consent to adoption in particular, and ultimately the plight of Japan’s orphans in general, though multifarious in its origins, can be traced to the significance of bloodlines and family ties in Japan. The legal concept of family is embodied in what is called the Koseki or Family Register, a government document that records each family member’s birth, marriage, and death under that family’s surname. Many of the reasons why adoption is undesirable and daunting stem from this record. When any child is born, he or she will be newly recorded in the family register. If for any reason the biological family is unable to care for the baby, he or she is put into an orphanage—such as the large red building that Saki and the baby lived in. As the child is raised in this institutional foster-care system (they are seldom placed in foster families), the biological family’s register will list his or her birth and status normally, not citing the status of living in a care facility. From glancing at the register, it would be impossible for anyone to discern whether the child was living at home or in an orphanage. However, as soon as the child is legally given up for adoption—moved out of the facility to permanently live as a member of a different family—the register will change the child’s status to that of legally adopted (“Adoption”). This can be pinpointed as the stage when the biological parents’ willingness to release their child for adoption completely halts. Single mothers, often already regarded by conservatives as ignominious blemishes on society, are explicitly identified and degraded by the change of register. The family register often has powerful consequences when the record of an adoption is discovered, such as if an employer requests it from a job applicant. Social stigmatization from potential spouses and their families who will settle for nothing less than a scandal-free koseki can turn biological parents into social pariahs, though the parents were only trying to do the right thing for a child they couldn't raise. For traditionally minded Japanese, a genealogy laid down in a koseki—both their own and the people around them—is clearly of great significance, and to show that an adoption took place is an indication to some that they were unfit to be married, to have a baby, or to raise children. Shaming from this public register can have damaging repercussions throughout an entire extended family (Lee; Lewis). But this pales in comparison to the koseki’s potential effect on a child who is consigned permanently to institutional care.
Why this crippling emphasis on family image? In Japan, there is a pervasive belief that personal character is deeply tied to blood and even biologically pre-determined. One historical belief was that if one’s parents were farmers from the countryside (inaka), one was also born to be a farmer. For nearly 1,000 years Japan maintained such a caste system. Similarly, and more recently, the assumptions underlying “purity of blood” were so strong that laws for mandatory eugenic sterilization of women with disabilities were on the books until as late as 1996 (Tsuchiya). At present, these beliefs reinforce the idea that “bad blood” exists in orphanages. Concerns range from whether the child’s biological parents have a criminal record, mental illness, or genes from an undesirable race. A child born of rape is considered an especially “un-ideal orphan” to prospective parents (Hayes & Habu). In adoption, this enduring fixation on “pure” and “ impure” blood has led adoption agencies to take the draconian measure of preventing applicants from turning down or “rejecting” an available child. One study by Peter Hayes and Toshie Habu, who authored the book Adoption in Japan, found that more than half of the prospective parents decide to opt out of adoption after discovering that they would not know their child’s familial history; they were especially fearful of receiving a defective child. Even the current Japanese prime minister, Shinzo Abe, and his wife, who were unable to have children, decided against adoption because Abe’s wife believed she could not raise a biologically un-related child (“Japan PM's wife in rare interview”).
In addition to cultural and legal barriers to adoption, a lack of government interest in helping adoptive parents before and after the process of adoption erects further hurdles to adoption. The Child Welfare Office, which regulates the adoption of children who are wards of the state, provides little help to private orphanages that have the same objective it allegedly does of uniting a child in need with new loving parents. In rare cases in which adoption occurs, private agencies have paltry training to solve or even monitor problems faced by adoptive parents. Families rarely have a support system of other adoptive families; in reality, they typically move away to conceal and keep secret the adoption and avoid the problems caused by the family register (Sudia). Although the purpose of the Child Welfare Office is to oversee the well-being of the country’s most vulnerable citizens, it fails to safeguard some of their most basic rights.
The Japanese Constitution guarantees equal rights and freedom from discrimination for all Japanese. Article 14, in particular, appears to protect the rights of the approximately 30,000 children like Saki when it states that there shall be “no discrimination in political, economic, or social relations because of… family origin.” Furthermore, Japan has ratified the UN Treaty on the Convention on the Rights of the Child. The widespread use of institutional care for children and the brutally difficult process of adoption clearly contradicts important clauses of this international agreement which Japan has pledged to uphold, which specifically includes “[to] recognize[e] that the child, for the full and harmonious development of his or her personality, should grow up in a family environment, in an atmosphere of happiness, love and understanding.”
The Convention on the Rights of the Child concedes that it is sometimes necessary to remove children from their parents to protect them from “abuse or neglect of the child” and to place them, “if necessary” in “suitable institution.” But here, the guiding principle, as Article 3 states, is that “the best interests of the child shall be a primary consideration.” Clearly, it is not in the best interest of foster children and actual orphans in Japan to live their entire childhood in institutions, and to be denied the possibility of growing up "in a family environment, in an atmosphere of happiness, love and understanding.”
To better protect the rights of children, to better provide for their welfare, and to fulfill its obligations to its Constitution and the international treaties it has signed, Japan should take the following steps.
• Change the national policy of the Child Welfare Office so that its emphasis and its goal is to place children in foster homes and with adoptive parents rather than in institutional orphanages
• Change the legal standing of the family register to protect the privacy of children and their parents by preventing public disclosure of their koseki so that children who have been neglected, abused, abandoned, or orphaned can be adopted or placed in loving foster families
• Change the cultural attitudes towards circumstances of birth, blood, and background
Altering the policy the Child Welfare Office is simply a matter of will. Revising the legal standing of the family registry is a matter of law. Reshaping cultural attitudes will require the most effort and many people might be skeptical that it is even possible. To those who are doubtful about the ability of the Japanese nation and people to change their cultural attitudes, I would like to offer this story.
During the year that Saki and I played together in the schoolyard, there were several abductions of young Japanese school children. Parents and schools across the country were alarmed. In our classes we were instructed to walk home in groups, and shrill portable alarms were distributed to us so that we could set off these bohan buzzers if we felt threatened. Homes, restaurants, and stores across the country began to display yellow plastic posters that signified safe havens for children. Although Japanese society can be criticized for a value system that sometimes seems to be carved in stone, there is also a personal desire to do the right thing that is at the core of Japanese identity. When I was a first-grader, the individuals who created countless safe havens across the country collaborated and showed a concern for children who were not their own.
If the plight of Japanese orphans was better known, their rights under the Constitution upheld, and the Convention of the Rights of the Child honored, Japan could and would change its attitude towards young children who suffer deprivation through no fault of their own and who should be able to “grow up in a family environment, in an atmosphere of happiness, love and understanding.”
Ten years ago my friend Saki took it upon herself as a six year old to care for a baby who also had no mother. Surely the legal issues and cultural attitudes in Japan can change to allow open-hearted families to care for a lonely child hoping for a home.
Work Cited
“Adoption.” Japan’s Children’s Rights Network. http://www.crnjapan.net/The_Japan_Childrens_Rights_Network/res-ado.html
Convention on the Rights of the Child. http://www.ohchr.org/en/professionalinterest/pages/crc.aspx
Goodman, Roger. Children of the Japanese State. Oxford University Press, 2000.
Hayes, Peter and Habu, Toshie. Adoption in Japan: Comparing Policies for Children in Need. London: Routledge, 2006.
Japanese Constitution. http://www.kantei.go.jp/foreign/constitution_and_government_of_japan/constitution_e.html
“Japan PM's wife in rare interview” The BBC. October 12, 2006. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/6044608.stm
Sudia, Cecelia. “Child Welfare Services in Japan: An Overview.” Children Today. March 1988. 26-28.
Lee, Sophelia. “Sophelia’s Adventures in Japan.” http://sopheliajapan.blogspot.jp/2013/01/adoption-in-japan-part-1-why-are-there.html
Lewis, Charles. “Cultural and legal hurdles block path to child adoptions in Japan.” The Japan Times. September 30, 2013. http://www.japantimes.co.jp/community/2013/09/30/issues/cultural-and-legal-hurdles-block-path-to-child-adoptions-in-japan/#.Uujscnemr-k
Tsuchiya, Takashi. “Eugenic Sterilizations in Japan and Recent Demands for Apology: A Report.” Newsletter of the Network on Ethics and Intellectual Disability, Vol.3, No.1 [Fall 1997], pp.1-4. http://www.lit.osaka-cu.ac.jp/user/tsuchiya/gyoseki/paper/JPN_Eugenics.html
By Kari Wadden
Only 309 children were adopted in 2010. - The Japanese Ministry of Health, Labor, and Welfare
I remember watching Saki pick up the baby—not much smaller than her and propped up on a towel. She warmed new milk and held the infant in her arms just as a mother would, rocking and cooing barefoot on the floor of the communal kitchenette; her head barely reaching the countertop. Saki was six years old. Back then, I was a foreigner entering our neighborhood school and I was instantly drawn to her, sensing that she might be a potential outcast like me, with her husky voice, bowl-cut hair, and big pink glasses. That day she brought me to the large red orphanage across from the gates of school, I saw where she, the baby, and scores of other children lived.* It was a crowded and understaffed orphanage. It was what they called home. Later on I remember asking the always talkative and ebullient Saki, with my naively rude six-year-old curiosity, who made her obento lunches since she didn’t have a Mom and Dad. “The obasan,” she said, falling silent for a long moment, “but I hope someday it will be my new mom.”
*This scene is still vivid in my memory, but in most cases infants, babies, and toddlers are kept in separate facilities until they are three years old.
When I think back to that time and our memories together, I vividly remember the children there. I had always wondered, though, how did they end up in the orphanage? Why were there so many orphans in that house across from our school? What was life for them really like? What did their future hold? And the big question, Did they ever get adopted? And if not, why?
Saki’s likely permanent status as an orphan was the result of being inescapably stuck at the unfavorable end of the cumbersome process of adoption in Japan, a process that was, and is still now, riddled with skewed laws and powerful enduring cultural stigmas that would label her very birth, childhood, and possible adoption as a black mark in society. It is this potent combination of cultural and legal issues that keeps tens of thousands of children like her from being placed with loving families, undermining their human rights as guaranteed by the Japanese Constitution.
Saki and the other children at the facility were among the staggering number of Japanese so-called orphans living in one of the the nation’s 539 institutional children’s homes who most likely will never be adopted (Lee). In fact, ten years after our playing in the schoolyard together, Saki is almost certainly one of those 29,399 children (as of 2012) still in an orphanage (Lewis). She would now be seventeen and have just one year left before she is released at age eighteen. She and the baby she tried to mother that day are probably among the 83 percent of “orphans” (koji), who are not technically orphans in the English sense (the Japanese term is difficult to translate), but who were taken away from an abusive or neglectful parent (Lee). A majority of these children actually have guardians. A small number get a visit from a parent or a guardian every weekend; some have erratic and unpredictable visits from time to time, while others never receive a visit. And there are those who simply have no parents to visit at all.
A volunteer at a Japanese orphanage, Sophia Lee, tells a story that illustrates this predicament: At the orphanage a young boy or girl dressed in his or her best clothes waits by the door for Mom, but she never comes. Apparently this scene is common during New Year’s and other holidays. Lee, who has written extensively and knowledgeably about Japan’s national adoption policies, observes that the current system holds out the promise of children being reunited with parents and family members, but it seldom happens. Even in cases such as when a baby is left in a train station locker and the parents never found, courts may still rule the baby is unavailable for adoption because the mother or father “might be looking for it.” Legally, the baby, whose parents have plainly abandoned the little boy or girl, cannot be adopted because parental consent is compulsory (Goodman). But if the parents have disappeared, how can they consent to an adoption? Tom and Kanoko Frederic, a couple living in Kanto who wished to adopt a young child, reflect on their unsuccessful attempts by remarking, “The problem was there were not enough children because a child’s guardian — usually the mother — has to agree to the adoption” (Lewis).
The reluctance to consent to adoption in particular, and ultimately the plight of Japan’s orphans in general, though multifarious in its origins, can be traced to the significance of bloodlines and family ties in Japan. The legal concept of family is embodied in what is called the Koseki or Family Register, a government document that records each family member’s birth, marriage, and death under that family’s surname. Many of the reasons why adoption is undesirable and daunting stem from this record. When any child is born, he or she will be newly recorded in the family register. If for any reason the biological family is unable to care for the baby, he or she is put into an orphanage—such as the large red building that Saki and the baby lived in. As the child is raised in this institutional foster-care system (they are seldom placed in foster families), the biological family’s register will list his or her birth and status normally, not citing the status of living in a care facility. From glancing at the register, it would be impossible for anyone to discern whether the child was living at home or in an orphanage. However, as soon as the child is legally given up for adoption—moved out of the facility to permanently live as a member of a different family—the register will change the child’s status to that of legally adopted (“Adoption”). This can be pinpointed as the stage when the biological parents’ willingness to release their child for adoption completely halts. Single mothers, often already regarded by conservatives as ignominious blemishes on society, are explicitly identified and degraded by the change of register. The family register often has powerful consequences when the record of an adoption is discovered, such as if an employer requests it from a job applicant. Social stigmatization from potential spouses and their families who will settle for nothing less than a scandal-free koseki can turn biological parents into social pariahs, though the parents were only trying to do the right thing for a child they couldn't raise. For traditionally minded Japanese, a genealogy laid down in a koseki—both their own and the people around them—is clearly of great significance, and to show that an adoption took place is an indication to some that they were unfit to be married, to have a baby, or to raise children. Shaming from this public register can have damaging repercussions throughout an entire extended family (Lee; Lewis). But this pales in comparison to the koseki’s potential effect on a child who is consigned permanently to institutional care.
Why this crippling emphasis on family image? In Japan, there is a pervasive belief that personal character is deeply tied to blood and even biologically pre-determined. One historical belief was that if one’s parents were farmers from the countryside (inaka), one was also born to be a farmer. For nearly 1,000 years Japan maintained such a caste system. Similarly, and more recently, the assumptions underlying “purity of blood” were so strong that laws for mandatory eugenic sterilization of women with disabilities were on the books until as late as 1996 (Tsuchiya). At present, these beliefs reinforce the idea that “bad blood” exists in orphanages. Concerns range from whether the child’s biological parents have a criminal record, mental illness, or genes from an undesirable race. A child born of rape is considered an especially “un-ideal orphan” to prospective parents (Hayes & Habu). In adoption, this enduring fixation on “pure” and “ impure” blood has led adoption agencies to take the draconian measure of preventing applicants from turning down or “rejecting” an available child. One study by Peter Hayes and Toshie Habu, who authored the book Adoption in Japan, found that more than half of the prospective parents decide to opt out of adoption after discovering that they would not know their child’s familial history; they were especially fearful of receiving a defective child. Even the current Japanese prime minister, Shinzo Abe, and his wife, who were unable to have children, decided against adoption because Abe’s wife believed she could not raise a biologically un-related child (“Japan PM's wife in rare interview”).
In addition to cultural and legal barriers to adoption, a lack of government interest in helping adoptive parents before and after the process of adoption erects further hurdles to adoption. The Child Welfare Office, which regulates the adoption of children who are wards of the state, provides little help to private orphanages that have the same objective it allegedly does of uniting a child in need with new loving parents. In rare cases in which adoption occurs, private agencies have paltry training to solve or even monitor problems faced by adoptive parents. Families rarely have a support system of other adoptive families; in reality, they typically move away to conceal and keep secret the adoption and avoid the problems caused by the family register (Sudia). Although the purpose of the Child Welfare Office is to oversee the well-being of the country’s most vulnerable citizens, it fails to safeguard some of their most basic rights.
The Japanese Constitution guarantees equal rights and freedom from discrimination for all Japanese. Article 14, in particular, appears to protect the rights of the approximately 30,000 children like Saki when it states that there shall be “no discrimination in political, economic, or social relations because of… family origin.” Furthermore, Japan has ratified the UN Treaty on the Convention on the Rights of the Child. The widespread use of institutional care for children and the brutally difficult process of adoption clearly contradicts important clauses of this international agreement which Japan has pledged to uphold, which specifically includes “[to] recognize[e] that the child, for the full and harmonious development of his or her personality, should grow up in a family environment, in an atmosphere of happiness, love and understanding.”
The Convention on the Rights of the Child concedes that it is sometimes necessary to remove children from their parents to protect them from “abuse or neglect of the child” and to place them, “if necessary” in “suitable institution.” But here, the guiding principle, as Article 3 states, is that “the best interests of the child shall be a primary consideration.” Clearly, it is not in the best interest of foster children and actual orphans in Japan to live their entire childhood in institutions, and to be denied the possibility of growing up "in a family environment, in an atmosphere of happiness, love and understanding.”
To better protect the rights of children, to better provide for their welfare, and to fulfill its obligations to its Constitution and the international treaties it has signed, Japan should take the following steps.
• Change the national policy of the Child Welfare Office so that its emphasis and its goal is to place children in foster homes and with adoptive parents rather than in institutional orphanages
• Change the legal standing of the family register to protect the privacy of children and their parents by preventing public disclosure of their koseki so that children who have been neglected, abused, abandoned, or orphaned can be adopted or placed in loving foster families
• Change the cultural attitudes towards circumstances of birth, blood, and background
Altering the policy the Child Welfare Office is simply a matter of will. Revising the legal standing of the family registry is a matter of law. Reshaping cultural attitudes will require the most effort and many people might be skeptical that it is even possible. To those who are doubtful about the ability of the Japanese nation and people to change their cultural attitudes, I would like to offer this story.
During the year that Saki and I played together in the schoolyard, there were several abductions of young Japanese school children. Parents and schools across the country were alarmed. In our classes we were instructed to walk home in groups, and shrill portable alarms were distributed to us so that we could set off these bohan buzzers if we felt threatened. Homes, restaurants, and stores across the country began to display yellow plastic posters that signified safe havens for children. Although Japanese society can be criticized for a value system that sometimes seems to be carved in stone, there is also a personal desire to do the right thing that is at the core of Japanese identity. When I was a first-grader, the individuals who created countless safe havens across the country collaborated and showed a concern for children who were not their own.
If the plight of Japanese orphans was better known, their rights under the Constitution upheld, and the Convention of the Rights of the Child honored, Japan could and would change its attitude towards young children who suffer deprivation through no fault of their own and who should be able to “grow up in a family environment, in an atmosphere of happiness, love and understanding.”
Ten years ago my friend Saki took it upon herself as a six year old to care for a baby who also had no mother. Surely the legal issues and cultural attitudes in Japan can change to allow open-hearted families to care for a lonely child hoping for a home.
Work Cited
“Adoption.” Japan’s Children’s Rights Network. http://www.crnjapan.net/The_Japan_Childrens_Rights_Network/res-ado.html
Convention on the Rights of the Child. http://www.ohchr.org/en/professionalinterest/pages/crc.aspx
Goodman, Roger. Children of the Japanese State. Oxford University Press, 2000.
Hayes, Peter and Habu, Toshie. Adoption in Japan: Comparing Policies for Children in Need. London: Routledge, 2006.
Japanese Constitution. http://www.kantei.go.jp/foreign/constitution_and_government_of_japan/constitution_e.html
“Japan PM's wife in rare interview” The BBC. October 12, 2006. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/6044608.stm
Sudia, Cecelia. “Child Welfare Services in Japan: An Overview.” Children Today. March 1988. 26-28.
Lee, Sophelia. “Sophelia’s Adventures in Japan.” http://sopheliajapan.blogspot.jp/2013/01/adoption-in-japan-part-1-why-are-there.html
Lewis, Charles. “Cultural and legal hurdles block path to child adoptions in Japan.” The Japan Times. September 30, 2013. http://www.japantimes.co.jp/community/2013/09/30/issues/cultural-and-legal-hurdles-block-path-to-child-adoptions-in-japan/#.Uujscnemr-k
Tsuchiya, Takashi. “Eugenic Sterilizations in Japan and Recent Demands for Apology: A Report.” Newsletter of the Network on Ethics and Intellectual Disability, Vol.3, No.1 [Fall 1997], pp.1-4. http://www.lit.osaka-cu.ac.jp/user/tsuchiya/gyoseki/paper/JPN_Eugenics.html
