If you look through a book of Japanese folktales, you may come across stories
about an old practice that seems pretty crazy.
These stories had a million versions and were told
so widely that historians had to ask,
did they really carry out this practice?
One story goes like this.
In a poor village in the mountains,
there lived a man and his 60-year-old mother.
One day the mother told her son
that it was time to take her up the mountain.
You see, this village had a custom that people who turned
60 had to be taken deep into the mountain forest and left there.
Old people ate precious food,
but didn’t contribute to the community.
Tough times call for tough crimes.
The man refused, but his mother insisted.
She didn’t want to be a burden.
After some time, the man sadly agreed and he carried her into the mountain forest.
As they were walking, he noticed that his mother was breaking off
twigs from tree branches along the way and dropping them on the ground.
He asked what she was doing and she said
she was leaving marks on the ground so that he would not get lost on the way home.
A love tsunami of affection and gratitude washed over the man,
and he turned around.
He took her home and vowed to take care of his mother from then on.
One day, a lord came to the village and gave the villagers a task, a puzzle.
He told them to make a rope out of ash for him.
People tried and tried, but it was impossible.
How could you tie ash into a rope?
The man went home and mentioned it to his mother.
She was like, “Oh, piece of cake!”,
and told him to wet some straw with salty water
and make a rope with it.
After drying, burn it to ashes.
It would keep the shape of the rope.
The man thought, wow mommy is so smart, and he did as she said.
The lord was impressed and asked if the man thought of this himself.
That was when he admitted that he did not abandon his mother
and that the ash rope was her idea.
The lord thought about this,
then declared that people should no longer abandon their elderly parents.
Although old people couldn’t contribute much physically,
they made up for it with their wisdom.
In a different version of the story, a man carried his old father up in a basket,
and the man’s young son tagged along.
After the man dropped off his father, the young son said,
“We should take the basket back too, so that I can carry you when you get old.”
The man said, “Son of a bish,” and carried his elderly father back down.
The mountain was called Obasuteyama 姨捨山, the Mountain of Abandoned Old Women.
According to legend, this mountain still exists today.
Stories like this passed from the mouths of so many people
that historians put down the wine,
pulled a few graduate students from the closet,
and got to work.
They wanted to answer the question:
did obasute 姨捨, the practice of abandoning old women,
actually exist in Japan?
There were some stories of people abandoning their fathers,
but most stories had a son getting rid of his mother for some reason.
Killing the elderly to benefit the community
was something documented in a few cultures in history,
but those unlucky wankers usually lived in harsh environments
where eating was something you only did on holidays.
Japan’s natural environment, however, consists of
Pokemon and anime girls.
Plenty of things to eat.
Not normally a society where mommy gets cut because the family’s running low on tofu.
When historians looked at this question, they looked at it more broadly,
not just whether people left their mothers in the mountains.
Taking mom on a one-way walk in the woods is pretty dramatic,
and traumatizing, for everyone.
“Sorry Mika, grandma’s gone. She’s up above now, watching over us.”
“She’s in heaven?”
“No, she’s on the mountain, watching us cuz she’s hungry.”
But there were more straightforward ways to get rid of someone,
like starving them or just neglecting them.
The tales suggest that people might have seen
old women as burdens,
and their families might have neglected or mistreated them.
But wait, the old stories didn’t say that only
burdensome old women had to be taken up the mountain, they said all old women.
What about the women who were successful and had positions of power,
why kill them? That would have harmed the community.
The Burdensome Mother Argument didn’t really make sense,
so some historians said, well maybe it was something else,
like competition between women in the household.
The argument goes like this.
An old mother typically runs the household,
and it’s nice being the boss.
You’re important, you feel needed, and you have a lot to do.
But when your son gets married and brings home
an ungrateful little ho-in-law who wants to
take your position and is always fighting you, you might just have a heart attack.
As the daughter-in-law takes over the role of household manager,
it increases the mother’s stress and lowers her status, happiness,
and maybe even access to food and money,
causing the mother to die sooner.
That’s the argument. It kinda makes sense.
Historically, the people in a family most likely to fight
were daughter-in-law and mother-in-law.
The daughter-in-law always trying to take power,
the mother-in-law always trying to get this lil bish
to follow the ways of the household.
The dishwasher is for drying dishes only!
There was a study that looked at families from the
Edo [1603 - 1867] and Meiji [1868 - 1912] Periods
to see if the evidence supported the Dangerous Daughter-in-Law Argument.
It looked at women who were 60 years old to see how long they lived for,
depending on what was happening at home.
Yeah the study marked old age at 60. Some people may disagree.
I know you guys don’t all think 60 is too old,
I’ve seen the websites you visit.
If the argument is correct, then we’d expect to see
old women who lived with a daughter-in-law
die earlier than women who did not live with a daughter-in-law.
And…when researchers looked at the data, they did not see that.
They saw the opposite.
Women who lived with a daughter-in-law
survived a bit longer than women who did not.
That’s a minus 1 for the argument.
Then they looked closer at the ages of the two women,
and found that if both women were closer in age, mother-in-laws tended to die sooner.
Women who had a young daughter-in-law lived on average 25 years after 60,
but women who had an older daughter-in-law lived
only 16 years after 60. What’s happening there?
Well, women closer in age had similar goals,
and they were more likely to fight for similar
things like control of the household.
Choosing an older wife for your son was a health hazard.
This seemed to support the Dangerous Daughter-in-Law Argument,
but the researchers concluded that since most mothers were more than 30 years older
than their daughters-in-law, it didn’t have a big effect.
Researchers also looked at grandchildren,
did THEY kill grandmothers?
A new daughter-in-law didn’t have much power in the household,
until she popped out a few kids and gained massive clout.
Bebes are excellent for promotions.
And that promotion might have threatened the mother-in-law’s authority.
So women who had grandchildren in the home might have died sooner.
After digging into it, researchers again discovered the opposite.
Man, these predictions were pretty s--t.
Women with grandchildren lived wayyy longer than women without,
about 3 times longer after 60.
This is why your parents want grandchildren.
It’s a matter of life and death.
Be a good son or daughter and stop murdering your parents.
Why were grandchildren the key to long life?
It could have been that having an important job
like caring for a grandchild gave women purpose and happiness.
Or it could have been that households that were more well off produced grandchildren.
It meant a couple was able to have kids,
the kids grew up and married,
and the marriage produced more kids, all without them dying.
Back then, kids were like crypto investors, they often didn’t make it.
So a household that passed all those hurdles
was probably doing well financially.
It made sense that people lived longer in those households.
From the data, it looks like the daughter-in-law
wasn’t responsible for the death of her mother-in-law.
So what was responsible?
They found that the women who lived the longest, into their 80s and even 90s,
were married women who lived with a young daughter-in-law and had grandchildren.
The next group was the largest group,
who lived into their late 70s and early 80s.
They were married women as a whole.
This included women who lived with and without a daughter,
with or without grandchildren.
The third group was pretty sad, only lived until 65, 66 on average.
These were widows who did not live with a daughter-in-law
and did not have grandchildren.
She was the boss of the household,
but she lost her husband and her s--tty son had no children.
But these weren’t the worst off women.
This next group only lived a few years after 60,
and about 95% of them died before 65.
These were women who lived in a household where they were not
part of the main line of descent.
So they were not the main mother, grandmother, or great-grandmother.
For example, a sister of the man of the house could move in,
living with the man’s family, but had no family of her own.
She was a side character in the house,
didn’t have much power, and probably wanted
to take her chances in the next life anyways.
It was all pretty normal compared to other cultures.
Now this was just one study,
but most scholars don’t believe that Japan had a special culture of mommy-killing.
And the idea of specifically leaving mothers in the woods
was probably a folktale.
But there was another gruesome practice that did happen in Japan’s past:
killing a frickin bebe right after it’s born.
Click here to see why they did that
and what the bebe community thought about it.
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The Shogun.
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Alright I love you, and spread the knowledge!