Abstract
In Europe, while they do exist, abortions are infrequent; in Japan this is so common that there are women who have had twenty abortions. In Europe, an infant is rarely or almost never killed after birth; in Japan, the women step on the neck and kill any children to whom they give birth that they believe they cannot feed.1 Jesuit Luís Fróis's 1585 Tratado das contradições e diferenças de costumes (Treatise on the contradictions and differences in customs), a text that summarised the dissimilarities between Japan and Southern Europe for newly arrived missionaries, discussed in this manner abortions and infanticides. Thanks to more than 600 couplets that contrasted European and Japanese practices, this text is commonly described as normalising numerous aspects of Japanese culture and, therefore, as striving to relativise culture in general.2 The apparently neutral tone of these quoted couplets however dissembles the history of Jesuit endeavours to eradicate both practices in the country. Even if Jesuit literature from Japan stated that abortions and infanticides were commonplace, like Fróis did, it did not report often about it.3 This article uses these accounts as a case study to analyse the strategies of knowledge production about Japan, by European Jesuit missionaries in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. It analyses the references to abortions and infanticides to identify which narratives the missionaries created about them, how they changed through time, and why. To do so, it considers the Catholic worldview that the Jesuits brought from Europe, but also the wider discourse they were creating on Japanese people, and their strategies of evangelisation. Although the Jesuit corpus often featured children as relevant actors,4 discourses on abortions and infanticides focused almost exclusively on the women involved, ignoring the foetuses and only very rarely considering the infants. Indeed, the missionaries' narratives discussed Japanese women as “mothers,” and, in time, attributed practices of abortion and infanticide to their unwillingness to raise children, their poverty, their incorrect beliefs, and, finally, to their incorrect emotional practices of motherly love.5 While the precise reasons behind this phenomena were complex, scholarly consensus nowadays is that affection (or lack thereof) had little to do with these acts, which were far from being an exception worldwide.6 Practices of abortions and especially infanticide in Japan have been the object of much debate, although research suggests that they were not quantitatively significant as previously believed.7 While references to these practices can be traced back at least to tenth century, the Edo period (ca. 1603–1868) might have seen a significant increment of their incidence.8 Most of the relevant historical documents date to this latter era, when the Tokugawa shogunate and many domains issued bans against them.9 An overview of the vocabulary used for the phenomena approximately during the decades of 1860–1870s indicates that different attitudes towards abortion and infanticides existed in Japan, even if they were carried out in most of the country.10 Traditionally, poverty had been singled out as their cause,11 especially due to famines, but maintaining the family's social status and its estate by controlling expenditure were also important preoccupations.12 Religious and folklore studies have offered additional explanations, suggesting for instance the desire to conceal adultery, or preoccupations about women's health in the case of abortions.13 Regarding regions where these practices were accepted, there was the perception that infants could be returned to the spiritual world of the kami whence they had come, with terms such modosu (モドス to give back) used to indicate infanticide.14 Buddhist cosmology, too, could inform these practices: according to so-called funerary Buddhism,15 the Japanese stem family (ie 家) required only one descendant to grant a good afterlife to its members, by worshipping them as ancestors.16 This is the reason why such practices did not seem to be selecting on grounds of sex, but aimed at a balance among the living children. Subsequent sons and daughters could be perceived as a drain on the family's resources, so the correct and responsible practice towards the stem family was to “thin them out” (mabiki 間引き) and return them to the cycle of reincarnations, to wait for a better chance at life.17 If the impact of abortions and infanticides in the Edo period is difficult to measure, even more complex is the study of the years of civil war of the sixteenth century. Some of funerary Buddhism's key narratives on death existed already during this time,18 suggesting that the part of the stem family's perspective, too, was already current.19 No specific study has been done, to my knowledge, on medieval Kyūshū, the region where the Jesuit wrote most of their references to these practices. Nevertheless, eastern Kyūshū (Buzen, Bungo, and Hyūga) was infamous in popular culture for its infanticides.20 When the Jesuit missionaries discussed abortions and infanticides in Japan as an anomaly, they applied preconceived notions originating from their cultural background. Scholarship has shown that abortion and infanticide were common to many cultures throughout history.21 Regardless of the opinion held by Fróis and the other Jesuits, these practices were undertaken in Western Europe since antiquity, too, although Christian theology struggled to find a single, coherent reading of the phenomenon. Infanticides were associated foremost with women, Jewish people, and heretics, and thus easily with the Devil.22 If the “monstrous” Jewish woman who ate children was a recurring trope, the figure of the homicidal mother (or midwife) in the Christian imagination coalesced with that of the witch.23 Indeed, between the beginning of the sixteenth century and the end of the seventeenth, anxieties around infanticides and abortions grew exponentially in both Catholic and Protestant Europe. Following a tendency to equate sin with crime, Holy Roman Emperor Charles V's 1538 law reform made abortion after quickening (i.e., when the mother felt the foetus moving, considered the moment when it acquired a soul) an offence punishable by death and comparable to infanticide.24 Tridentine stricter social control spurred the intensification of the persecutions of these acts: infanticide, previously considered extremely difficult to prove and thus rarely indicted, become a capital offence and, in time, equivalent to intentional murder.25 This systematic prosecution supported the naturalisation of motherly love as limitless, and thus as a common human trait found in all cultures. Any woman that did not wish to prioritise her children was expected to defend her decision strenuously, and could be accused of cruelty even for choosing a spiritual life instead.26 As this article will analyse the strategies of creation of knowledge about abortions and infanticides in Japan by the Jesuit missionaries, it is important to note that, albeit considering them both sins, they clearly distinguished the two practices. Fróis's quotation above easily illustrates this by dedicating to each one a different couplet. However, just like the Japanese of the time, the missionaries did not consider birth as a particular discriminating moment. If the Europeans identified quickening as the moment after which the killing of a soul (foetus or infant) took place, Japanese belonging to infanticide-admitting cultures believed that “a child's acquisition of human status was a gradual process premised on the parents' decision to nurture it,” on which the moment of birth had a secondary effect.27 These friars have carnal conversation with those nuns who, however, never give birth, because [the monks] give them medicine to not conceive.28 [The monks] live together with the nuns of their same order. The people have a very negative opinion of them, believing that this close contact with the nuns is bad. All laypeople say that when one of these nuns feels pregnant, she takes a medicine with which she expels the child.32 The development of Jesuit knowledge about abortions and infanticides in Japan is difficult to map for the following six years, due to lacking and somewhat contradicting sources.33 A change in perception seems to have taken place in 1550, when the group first arrived in Yamaguchi. In a history written in the 1580s, the Historia de Japam (History of Japan),34 veteran missionary Fróis stated that, while preaching in the streets, the Jesuits identified the three major sins of the Japanese as idolatry, sodomy, and “women [who] killed their children when they gave birth to them, to not raise them; or drank medicine to abort them, which is an enormous cruelty and inhumanity.”35 The reliability of this piece of information, reported by a text written more than thirty years later when none of its actors were alive anymore, could be called into question. Indeed, no other Jesuit text reported any preaching against infanticides and abortions at this junction.36 Fróis's Historia might be an exception to this trend due to its singular sources: some oral accounts by Torres' companion, Brother Juan Férnandez, and a written document by the same Brother that was found as the Historia was being composed, now lost.37 Fróis's use of these testimonies supports therefore the interpretation that the Jesuits, in 1551, had concluded that infanticide and abortions were carried out in Japan also by the laity, and believed that they were relevant enough to be identified as one of the main three sins of Japanese people. The specific vocabulary used, instead, seems borrowed from a later period: the idea of cruelty appeared in this context only after 1565, including in a letter penned by Fróis, as shown below. This suggests that it was a product of the years when the Historia was written, rather than Xavier's opinion.38 At the same time, “cruel” had been common descriptors for women who committed infanticides, and for non-Christian peoples in general, since the Middle Ages.39 The idea of cruelty was culturally dependent, and had known a renewal in the West from the end of the medieval period, especially in relation to the sexual sphere and to cannibalism. When condemned, cruelty was “irrational and nonhuman violence,” such as that of demons and animals; when seen positively, it was the violence exercised by the tribunals of law.40 In the case of the abortions and infanticides, that belonged to the first group, it was matched to a lack of humanity and thus contributed to their association to the devil and gentility. It followed that cruelty conceptualised in this manner could not be a product of love, differently from other kinds of violence.41 The accuracy of the remaining information of this passage of the Historia, that the missionaries in 1551 attributed infanticides and abortions to the unwillingness of women to raise their children, is questionable too. The lack of previous discussion of this supposed inclination of Japanese women (or nuns) suggests that Fróis here employed an interpretation that would be in use only years later, just as he did with the vocabulary. In any case, no reasons behind this unwillingness to raise children was mentioned. It was only later, therefore, that the Jesuits addressed the causes behind these acts, by creating two specific narratives. Indeed, following Xavier's departure, the small mission continued to produce knowledge on the cultural landscape of Japan, or at least on how it appeared from their bases: Yamaguchi; Ikitsuki and Hirado in northern Kyūshū; and especially Bungo and its capital city Funai (modern-day Ōita) in eastern Kyūshū, which became their headquarters in 1556. As they strove to understand better Japanese culture to devise how to counteract non-Christian practices, the missionaries came to attribute the killing of infants and abortions to two kinds of causes: those belonging to the religious sphere and those belonging to the socio-economic one. The second [commandment] says that when a woman menstruates [she cannot] appear in front of the kami, nor sleep and eat with her husband and family. […] They forbid this because they believe that menstruation is very unclean and an offence to the kami. The third commandment [says that] when a woman gives birth, she is forbidden as she is during menstruation. […] We tell them that [their commandments] prohibit childbirth because it allows [human beings] to go to Heaven, of which the Devil is envious. For this reason, it is not a sin nor strange among them to consume drinks to kill the creature in the womb, or after it is born.44 The Summary, focusing as it did on the kami and Buddha, unsurprisingly assigned only religious causes to abortions and infanticides. Other documents glossed over the supposed influences of the Devil, to point instead to socio-economic causes. I argued that the reason of this divergence is not to be found in a change of understanding of the missionaries, but rather in the fact that these later documents were letters penned with different audiences in mind, even if the missionaries could not anticipate exactly how their correspondence would circulate. One of the Summary contributors, Baltasar Gago, offered an example of this. In 1555, he wrote three different letters mentioning infanticide, making it the first time since 1549 that these practices appeared in correspondence. The two letters destined to his superiors in Rome and to the King of attributed them to socio-economic expected them to be The third letter instead, written for his Jesuits the as some of the The by these three how the missionaries knowledge to according to the specific that their At the same time, they could different information in a all three letters have a that to prioritise the of in Japan and the important taken by the missionaries to sin among the These Japanese kill many children when they are both because of poverty and because of the in them […] When the of these to and missionary Luís he was to a as We the of the […] and to that killed children, but instead brought them to a that would would raise them and do could so that they did not of and, if they they would go to a good They believe that there is no more than being and but to them about these and them instead to their to they easily In to the many that these people there is one that is killing children, in the or while they are because they are not their or because they are or to the of the Devil them through a manner he This passage some that the Jesuit was although the missionaries had a religious to the as shown by the Summary, this appeared in destined for the missionaries' An discussion of the that the Devil held over the Japanese might have been for the European when focusing on other causes the perception of a of on a of this might have that Japanese people were not so towards as which would the and for the that the Jesuits were not very infanticide in Jesuit the was as about to be by the creation of the and of its the of therefore appeared to infanticide only when it could become part of an Indeed, it is that from 1549 to the of abortions and infanticides from Jesuit even if both the Summary and the Historia indicate that at the time with This suggests that the missionaries narratives to these practices, if they did not to the of the Japanese people that they had If this was by the against religious later from the them to knowledge on Japanese practices of infanticide their to a in do this among all sins, which is killing their children. Some because they say that many children are not because one or two are enough to raise their who live and as children they do not as one they kill them, as they would if they all their They kill them because they cannot In this some for and some for […] kill their children. also believe that, due to menstruation a woman who gives birth will go to and cannot be for this they that the [The very little to sin in they even their children. they are very in they would many for a but when they are just they have no love for them at They easily kill them, as I The of the of infanticide from an emotional point of seems to appear here However, a latter letter by Brother who had Japan three between and suggests that in those years preoccupations with the Japanese to love in were among the to two other concluded his of the practice of infanticides that in this the do not love for one they that the that most them is [the for the and the of love among the Japanese could be a major for the of because love was considered a key for In medieval the two of love were as an to towards and which one were to be as first of making to a particular of relation in which the of the The Jesuit missionaries were to practices in Japan the Japanese to love was perceived in a although this only in the 1580s, with Tratado and If a of for a Christian could be a for the had abortion as a sin against since at least As the preoccupations with infanticides grew in Europe, a and culturally of was by the Catholic creating specific in the missionaries too. A mother was expected to raise and love her children of and social to out of This did not practices of abortion and infanticide, and their prosecution supported the naturalisation of motherly love as The missionaries' to the that love was a trait of was by the of abortions and infanticides as It therefore that two different narratives were in the mission from the end of the motherly an which Japanese women's of their children, and into the perception that all Japanese people had a in this and a second which the on the of the women's emotional practices, rather than their to love this are very in This had in the Catholic of the to motherly love when it took a and the to it into the more love of children as of were perceived as a to the by her from The to children, in the same was practice attributed to love, as it did not their and thus their spiritual While this second the love of Japanese it held it to be in to be changed according to Christian [The believe that poverty is a and from this it their which they consider a that if they are and many children, when they are they a on their and kill them, especially their of abortions and infanticides in Jesuit correspondence appeared extremely rarely between when the Bungo was and when the Jesuit arrived in the country. The references from this period, too, are in in the Christian of Funai was as an example of on motherly The were as choosing to a that the of King who who was the mother of an infant by to kill it and which woman that she Most of the references to infanticides after this were by and that preaching on the of abortions and infanticides were with the of the in the after if or in Heaven, if For a woman who of an abortion in Ikitsuki was described as to a in a to she had been by and could be in the Christian is most and against all of the often kill their children, or in the to have an or their on their and them after they are this is only to not be by to raise them, or because they say they are and cannot raise many children. The have no little for this of because they this to the they did with their nuns […] which was so that many of them now give and to those who for them, to it seems to kill them when they are children, than them live in poverty, even if among them abortions are more than killing them thus […] This is not among people who do not believe in the of In Fróis that in of was such that it had an end to all A years later, Catholic Japanese women would become the of motherly The by the mission focused on the by the bans of that would an end to the mission as In this Japanese Catholic women were as to the of mother who her children to the point of their death for the spiritual to these narratives had an in Europe, they an of for their to so and as was expected of by The of the Jesuit narratives abortions and infanticides a case study to the process of knowledge creation by the missionaries on a that was held to be very and, due to its perceived the of the Japanese as to This that the missionaries their knowledge according to their and to the behind their but in specific not to their wish to an all but the references to infanticides and abortions appeared specific missionary which offered specific It was these latter that the of the and the of its causes. The missionaries focused on a spiritual when such as the creation of a became to The wish for a better emotional of Christian women the of the interpretation of who were not because they were but because they were This understanding also all missionaries their to to the Japanese as as so to an end to these practices. the creation of the major Christian of Japan, the only of specific of abortions and infanticides by became an where was followed by in this world or the As the of over all during the persecutions and of the Christian in the the of the mother by the Christian who her by her love for by as part of the is not to this article as no were created or in this