No, this is not “weird Japan news week”; however, I cannot help commenting on the decision of Jikei Hospital in Kumamoto to set up a “baby box” (a.k.a. “Cradle of the White Stork”). Essentially, the box is a receptacle into which women can place their unwanted newborn infants. Of course, it’s not really just a box: it’s an opening in the hospital wall that connects to an incubator and an alarm alerts hospital staff when an infant is left in the incubator.

When I first saw this story in today’s print version of the Asahi (online version here), I thought it was just another bizarre Japanese news story. Not just the idea of the box itself, but the fact that it would be necessary to have such a thing in a country where there is not one shred of debate about the “morality” of abortion, and where, in practice, there is no real stigma attached to abortion. Religion and state are truly separate here and one of the most obvious results is that women have the right to choose when it comes to pregnancy.

It turns out, however, that the idea for the box originated in Germany (I’d never heard about the program there until reading today’s article, but it apparently started several years ago). The other interesting twist is that the program in Germany was started in Hamburg by a Christian organisation, and, as it turns out, Jikei Hospital was founded as a clinic by Christian priests in the late 1800s. According to the current director, Jikei Hospital (which does not accept requests for abortions) has initiated the program in order to “give women with unwanted pregnancies, especially younger ones, an option other than abortion.”

Naturally, there is some concern about the legality of such a system (there are laws against abandonment) and the question of whether or not it would just encourage irresponsible people to deposit their unwanted babies in a guilt-free manner. In a country that is not Christian and in which abortion is fairly commonplace (close to 300,000 took place in 2005), the box system comes across as a very personalised response to the fact that, earlier this year, a university student (also in Kumamoto), who was afraid to tell anyone she was pregnant, ended up abandoning her newborn – the child ultimately died and the woman was sentenced to six years in prison.

The article reminded me of an excellent book I read a long time ago (The Kindness of Strangers, by the very scholarly John Boswell), which traced the history and custom of abandoning children in Western civilization from antiquity to the Renaissance. In reality, however, this is not 15th C Christian Europe and very few newborns are actually abandoned in Japan (the article quotes a very low number, but doesn’t specify a time frame). In addition, the other thing worth considering (aside from easy access to abortion) is that Japan is not a culture big on adoption, so, in the long run, what happens to children who are dropped in the box?

Off the top of my head, the concept of a drop-off box seems to perpetuate the idea of secrecy and shame. It’s great for women to have options, but that’s not truly the mandate of Jikei Hospital.

On a somewhat related note, one interesting custom in Japan is that women often place statues of Jizo in temple cemataries after a miscarriage or an abortion (Jizo protects aborted or miscarried babies, among a number of other things). Here are some very old Jizo from a temple in Sado Island: