They say if you love something, let it go.
Japan really loved babies.
They had a practice called mabiki 間引き, which meant killing your own newborn babies
so you could better take care of your other children.
It wasn’t just Japan.
It happened in many, many, many, many other cultures.
Human history was full of babies having really bad days.
It was a regular part of life for humans.
Farming, visiting prostitutes, and killing your newborn.
All in a day’s work.
The Japanese believed they were “sending the baby back” to the spirit world.
There, the baby souls would pick their noses and wait until they were called to return
to the human world.
You should watch my previous video where I talk about this practice.
But today in this episode of the Kid-Killer Chronicles, we discuss the campaigns in Japan
to stop this practice.
Who tried to stop it? Why? And were they successful?
Now mabiki was popular in the Edo Period, mostly in Northeast Japan and parts of the Southwest.
Less popular in central Japan, but people still dabbled in it to show that they were edgy too.
Things were going well for a while, but surprisingly, the mabiki craze caused a problem.
See if you can guess the problem.
Here’s the population of Japan in the first half of the Edo Period.
It looks healthy, the population is growing, things are going pretty well.
But here’s the second half of the Edo Period.
Things are not going well.
It’s starting to look like my bank account after I became a YouTuber.
And like me, when the Japanese saw what was happening, they panicked.
More towns and villages shrank in size than ever before.
The number of children wasn’t enough to replace the deaths from diseases and famines.
Households were disappearing like newborn babies.
Everyone must have thought the world was ending.
The elites were like, “This is terrible, society is collapsing.
How will we ever invent anime now?”
And so the anti-mabiki movement started.
They identified the problem: mabiki = less people.
Who knew baby murder had such dire consequences.
It looked like the babies got the last laugh, they laughed all the way to the grave.
The elites gathered the top mathematicians, and they arrived at a solution:
no mabiki = more people. Genius.
Now you may think that it would’ve been easy to convince parents not to off their
children, but you’ve obviously never tried to tell a parent how to raise their kids before.
Who says that death is bad for my boys? Mind your own business.
Walkers of the mabiki way thought they were the moral ones.
The immoral ones were the people who had whole litters of kids like dogs.
Humans were supposed to be superior to dogs.
Those people were greedy.
Those people sold their kids like products to brothels for money.
I know, this mindset was crazy, I can’t believe that they thought humans were better than dogs.
Writers wrote pamphlets full of anti-mabiki arguments and stories about mabiki aficionados who met terrible ends.
Artists drew paintings of mabiki-practicing women looking like monsters,
like they lost their humanity.
These paintings rarely included men though, and even when they did, men were not drawn as monsters.
Because dick.
Thinkers birthed from their heads argument after argument in favor of the bebes,
which the bebes appreciated.
Some arguments were based on shame, the secret to Asian compliance.
They would say, even animals take care of their offspring.
Even animals sacrifice themselves for their young.
If you send back your child, you’re worse than an animal.
Or they would argue that people who had enough evil in them to kill their own child were
demons who likely would have had no problem killing their neighbors’ children too.
Some arguments were pragmatic.
You know, it’s an unpredictable world. Famine is right around the corner.
Having a kid count of 2 or 3 is dangerously low.
They could all die and end your family line.
Children were like tires, you ought to have a few spares.
Some argued that newborns were full human beings, or at least had a right to live.
Buddhist arguments were all about fear and punishment, the secret to Western compliance.
Parents in the afterlife were supposed to be tortured by demons,
or even by the very babies they mabiki’d.
Buddhist priests were front line fighters in the anti-mabiki movement.
They went from village to village giving scathing sermons against the practice.
They handed out posters and writings, which people hung outside shrines, temples, inns,
and homes, decorating their towns with beautiful images of evil mothers and their bloody babies.
Here’s a nice one showing babies in the afterlife stabbing their mabiki mama with nails
in front of Great King Enma, Lord of Hell.
The law also stepped in to give babies some love.
Japan had a million different domains and communities, each with its own laws and rules,
each trying to solve the depopulation issue in its own way.
Rewards for getting married were common.
Some places gave loans to newlyweds.
One domain gave newlyweds abandoned land, building materials,
and tax exemptions for a few years.
One official said that his goal was to make “the birthing cries of babies ring from all directions,"
which was probably not a helpful thing to say.
Officials did advertising campaigns for their domains and villages,
hoping to entice women to move in.
They sent Buddhist monks to surrounding areas to spread the word about how great their village was.
Come for the view, stay for the desperate men.
In villages that lacked women, officials even bought brides from outside for their men.
Every family had to register with a pregnancy record-keeper whenever they had a baby event,
like a pregnancy, a birth, or the death of an infant.
This program gave birth to a gold mine of baby records that made historians leave their
spouses and kill their kids so they could devote all their time to studying it.
Most people complied with the reporting requirements, but when historians combed through the records,
they found a suspiciously high number of miscarriages and stillbirths.
It looked like Japan was suffering from a disease that only killed infants,
a disease called parents.
Turns out, mabiki enthusiasts were sending back their kids, but falsely reporting it
as miscarriage or stillbirth.
For example, one common reason for miscarriage was falling.
It could be that pregnant women had little rest from work and chores,
and so they fell a lot.
It could be...but that would mean that these people tricked you from 300 years ago.
No, it was because couples who wanted to send back their kid would plan for the pregnant
wife to fall somewhere in public where everyone could see,
then blame the baby’s death on the fall.
Now the authorities weren’t dumb, they knew all about the old Falling Mama Trick.
They checked suspicious cases often.
Investigations could get real detailed, with the investigator visiting your house to inspect
every part of the dead body for signs of bad parenting.
Record keepers were fired for helping people misreport.
Some places bit the arrow and paid poor families to raise their kids, giving them grains and rice,
pleading with people to stop sending back their babies like they were returning an Amazon order.
Tsushima had kind of a child tax credit.
Each time a couple had a baby, they received a bale of grain each year
for the first 3 years of the baby’s life.
Some poor communities urged the wealthy to donate to childrearing funds.
One historian estimated that roughly 10% of children in Eastern Japan received some kind
of government help.
And as we see so often, there were bootstrap pullers who scoffed at people that took government money.
These children were seen as welfare cases.
Some families refused any help due to shame and embarrassment, and chose the mabiki path instead.
It’s not clear how effective the welfare and registration laws were,
but the whole BabyLivesMatter movement seemed to work.
The culture started to shift.
Having children used to be a mostly private matter, but all the attention from the law
made people think of it as a matter of state and society.
As Japan moved towards the modern age, people started looking outwards.
The elites saw a large population as both a defense against foreign invaders and a means
to take over and settle in foreign lands.
A popular saying went, “Even a strong castle cannot be defended without soldiers.”
Imperialistic intellectuals saw raising children as a patriotic duty.
They thought up plans to increase the population almost 20 times every 30 years,
which was ridiculous because one, that’s impossible,
and two, no one needs that much anime.
Bigger families became the hip new thing.
In the first half of the Edo Period, couples usually had 2-3 children.
In the second half, that number rose to 4-5.
And in the Meiji Period, it rose to 6.
And in the modern period, it’s -6.
When the Meiji government took power in 1868, they did try to continue monitoring pregnancies,
but after a few years, they stopped caring as much.
By 1880, there was no more surveillance nor welfare for poor parents.
The population was exploding again.
Looks like the babies they killed were all reincarnating back.
People thought mabiki was an uncivilized practice of the past.
But when historians looked closer, they saw plenty of villages that had suspiciously high
numbers of stillbirths, and way too many boys than girls.
Looks like mabiki was still happening in the early 1900s, it was just less common.
In those times, people often said “I sent my daughter to pick flowers”
and “I had my son gather crabs,”
which sounds nice, until you find out that those were euphemisms.
Mabiki rates plummeted from the 1910s to the 1940s.
We’re not sure why, but we do have guesses.
It might have been a culture shift.
Japan was modernizing, and people might have thought that mabiki had no place in a modern civilized society.
Also, Japan was enthusiastically spreading its culture to other Asian countries at the time.
The government passed wartime policies to help newlyweds and large families.
It became patriotic to “give birth and multiply.”
The final nail in the tiny coffin for mabiki was hammered in 1949, when Japan legalized abort ion.
By then, the procedure was safe for the mother, no longer the danger it once was.
For example, they no longer used mercury.
The number of a-boar-shins skyrocketed, removing the need for mabiki.
It became the main form of birth control for a decade, until modern contraceptives appeared,
just in time for them to become irrelevant.
Alright we have a quiz question this week:
When the Mongols invaded Japan, what was the name of the bay in Kyushu that they sailed to?
Answer in the comments.
You have 24 hours until I pick the winner from among the correct answers.
Winner gets one of these babies. Good luck.
We have some new people on Patreon:
TanukiBapt,
Sano-Ichiro,
KpopDivafromTexas oh we have a famous person,
and The_Boosker.
Alright I love you, and spread the knowledge.