Paper short abstract:

Drawing upon historiography, folklore studies, and archeological data on prenatal deaths, this study explores the conceptualization of personhood and the beginning of life in the late Tokugawa period.

Paper long abstract:

Differentiation in treatment of the dead is one way in which people make distinctions between person and non-person. Only the deaths of socially recognized persons are given public recognition, and the structure of the burial, co-buried objects, and grave markers reflect people's views of the dead. This paper examines the social positions of the fetus and infant in the premodern Japan, by analyzing how people in the Tokugawa period reacted to and treated miscarriage and stillbirth. To decipher people's perception of the beginning of life, this study draws upon findings from multiple fields, including folklore studies, history, and archeology. Folklore scholars had been central in the studies of childhood as well as pregnancy and childbirth in premodern Japan, and argued that children under seven years old were seen as near-deities. They maintained that the bodies of the fetus and infants were buried within family property or special burial sites to wish for a quick return in the form of another child. Folklorists further considered that such view justified abortion and infanticide, common methods for controlling family size during the Tokugawa era. Archeological findings complicate such dominant understanding of the beginning of life in Japan, however. Archeologists found that there had been cases in which infants, and even the fetuses, received Buddhist funerals and were buried in cemeteries adjacent to temples. This research grapples with such seemingly contradicting dynamics and demonstrates that the practices surrounding perinatal deaths represented people's competing and changing views on the genesis of life. That is, while the small children's lives might have been seen as ephemeral, people came to have emotional investment to their children and many experienced great sense of loss in cases of their children's deaths, no matter how young they were.