Adoption in Japan Part 3: How to and Experiences

If you have personal experiences you are comfortable sharing, or are affiliated with an agency not listed, please get in touch! Likewise, if you notice a mistake in anything I have said please let me know. I am not a social worker, lawyer or in any professional capacity connected to adoption and I urge you to do your own research before pursuing adoption in Japan. You are welcome to contact me with follow up questions or of course comments, but please don't email me to ask for information that is already in this post if you'd bothered to read it! I love to hear from readers and am very happy to answer genuine questions.

Sorry for the wonky scan. Chart from Adoption in Japan: Comparing Policies for Children in Need (Routledge Contemporary Japan Series) by Peter Hayes and Toshie Habu

This post is about how to adopt a child residing in Japan when you are also residing in Japan. If you are outside Japan there are some agencies that can help you, particularly Faith International and ATW Adoptions for North Americans. I link some blogs at the end by families who have adopted a Japanese child from outside Japan, but that is not what this post is about. If you are living in Japan and wish to adopt a child from another country that is also possible, particularly through ISSJ, but also is not what I am writing about in the body of this post.

If you are considering adoption in Japan, it would be helpful to read part one, about why so many children are in orphanages in Japan, and part two, about attitudes to adoption, before reading this post.

Japan’s adoption system is to all intents and purposes unregulated. As such, prospective adoptive parents need to be extremely pro-active in ensuring that if they chose to work with a private agency rather than the public system that they select an agency with ethical practices and published financial records. There is a long history of babies and children being sold into “adoption” in Japan, just as in most countries. I’m not saying this to be off-putting. There are plenty of ethical agencies, and the public system has worked well for many non-Japanese or international prospective parents. It’s important to be realistic however, and recognise that there are some organisations who use questionable practices to obtain and select placements for children.

The Public System 

In Theory

Adoption through the local child guidance centre (CGC) is the cheapest and most straight-forward method. Interested prospective adoptive parents (PAPs) register as a foster-to-adopt family (this is separated right from the start from foster-only families) and attend some basic training. A  CGC worker will conduct a home visit and basic interview (although one couple I spoke to just submitted a floor plan of their apartment) then approve the application. When a child becomes available the PAPs will be taken to the orphanage to visit the child, then asked to make a decision. If the PAPs want to go ahead the CGC will place the child and the PAPs can apply to the family court for an adoption. There is a six month trial period during which the PAPs are paid a foster family allowance. If there have been no major problems after six months, the court will approve the adoption. Some families “foster” for longer than the minimum period, holding off applying for the adoption for months or even years and continuing to receive government payments. CGCs place children under the age of six; after six the adoption law changes and as far as I understand the situation most CGCs no longer seek families for older children.

CGCs have their own individual guidelines for approving PAPs. Some require very large living spaces, leading to complaints in Tokyo particularly that the requirements are unrealistic. Some require PAPs to have a high income or to be certain ages. Some accept single applicants while some will only consider married couples. It seems to depend entirely on your location.  You can read some stories about successful adoptions here and here, but there are many more.

My Experience

Fortified with a number of stories about wonderful CGC adoption experiences in Nagasaki, Yokohama and Osaka, we contacted ours. It didn’t go too well. At first they said they needed time to “research” how to deal with foreigners. We told them that they didn’t need to do anything differently (for Australia, expatriate adoptions have to be finalised in the country of residence before one can start anything on the Australian end anyway). They were unconvinced. Three months passed. A friend who works in an orphanage called to ask them what the hold-up was on our behalf. It seemed like a good idea at the time, but in hindsight it probably wasn’t. They eventually got back to us and said basically that they would never place a child with foreigners. So that was that. I’ve spoken with adoptive parents all over Japan, and no one else was ever treated like that. I guess it’s the drawback of living in the countryside.
Update: Since Tiger was placed with us, our local CGC has actually been incredibly helpful and supportive. When we originally contacted them they said they had many waiting Japanese families, and since a child would not be placed with us ahead of a Japanese couple, we'd never get a placement. At the time, armed with all the statistics I'd been reading about Japan's low placement rates, I assumed they were just unwilling to deal with us. There definitely was an element of that, and if we speak to someone other than our caseworker they do freak out about having to engage with "gaijin". However, after getting better acquainted we discovered that they do actually have a long list of waiting families and they place every single child who has been freed legally for adoption. We agree that without a doubt, a Japanese family should be the first choice, so in the end it was us who misjudged the CGC and not the other way around. Our skepticism was not entirely unwarranted however, since the high placement rate here was equally surprising to social workers from other prefectures we spoke to.

Private Agencies, National

There are innumerable other ways to pursue adoption in Japan. Some are national agencies, some are local, and some are obstetricians and gynecologists who dabble in adoption on the side. I can’t list them all; I’m just giving some examples here.

Wa no Kai

Wa no Kai has a philosophical commitment to giving birth mothers all the support and options it can. Adoption is not promoted to birth families in preference to other options, and support is offered for whatever choice the mother makes including assistance if she decides to raise the child herself. After surrendering her child a birth mother has three months to change her mind and ask for the child back after it has been placed, or even longer if she requests that the child not be placed with PAPs immediately. All adoptions are partially open, with letters and pictures exchanged via Wa no Kai if the birth parent/s express a desire to do so. On the PAP side, Wa no Kai does not allow any kind of preference for age, sex, race or health/ability. The financial cost is quite high, but it is a registered NPO and financial reports are published every year.

To adopt through Wa no Kai you first have to attend an orientation meeting. The cost for this is about 5,000. If you decide to proceed the next stage is an interview in Tokyo with the directors. They make a final decision then. The fees for adoption are something in the order of AUS$30,000 but I can't remember exactly. The approval process is quite straightforward and arbitrary. There is no home visit, background check or anything… they just like you or dislike you.

My Experience

In our case, they disliked us. Their website requires that PAPs be under a certain age, have been married for a certain period of time and that one parent be home full-time. We could clear those requirements, but it turned out that there was another requirement I assume they didn’t specify because they hadn’t considered it necessary; infertility. The first question they asked us was what fertility treatments we had been trying and for how long. When we said we were adopting by preference not necessity that was pretty much the end of the interview. They also seemed quite upset that we were not Christians, which was unexpected. We were apparently the first foreign couple to apply with them, but they seemed open to the idea. They were concerned about maintaining the open adoption if we moved back to Australia and about our inability to contribute to future orientations (the organisation seems to rely quite heavily on successful applicants for a support network and volunteering, which is actually one of the things we really liked about the organisation). I have no reason to think that they would refuse to deal with an infertile foreign couple and I have no hard feelings about being rejected (although we did waste quite a lot of money traveling to the orientation and then interview).

Baby Pocket

Baby Pocket is also an NPO with a strong network of adoptive families supporting one-another.  You can read blogs by Japanese families who have adopted through Baby Pocket here, here, here and here (Japanese only).

My Experience

We decided not to apply with Baby-Pocket because they required a commitment not to have biological children after adopting and that isn't a decision we have made yet. Anyway, we are ineligible based on their age requirements (both husband and wife (only married couples are considered) must be over 30 (I'm not), the husband under 46 and the wife under 43). From memory they didn't say anything specifically about international parents but one of the bloggers mentioned a Canadian family who had adopted through the agency so I am assuming there wouldn't be any particular issues.

International Social Service Japan

ISSJ specialises in inter-country adoptions and have since the 1950s. They have English-speaking staff and "ISSJ’s caring methodology is based on the Hague Convention on the Protection of Children". They will consider singles and PAPs with biological children, unlike most other agencies I researched. ISSJ is very careful to ensure that PAPs understand that their priority is the child. Their website states:

In 2008, the Ministry of Health and Welfare announced its key policy of shifting social custodial care from childcare institutions to more home-like facilities as part of its effort to improve the placement ratio from foster parents. In contrast to Europe and the United States, where the placement ratios are high as around 80%, the placement ratio is currently only about 10% in Japan.

Recognizing how important it is for children to be taken care of in a more family-oriented setting, ISSJ has been conducting an “international children and families counseling service”. This service supports children in the custody of childcare institutions and for infants resulting from unplanned pregnancies. ISSJ supports intercountry adoption as a means of protecting and raising these children with new families.

ISSJ, with its motto of “Children’s happiness first”, carefully and sensitively conducts interviews with birth parents in order for their children not to be put up for intercountry adoption without prior thoughtful consideration and to support birth parents to bring up their own children if at all possible. If, under certain conditions, intercountry adoption is determined to be the best option for the child as well as the birth parents,ISSJ will endeavor to choose the best adoptive family. In the process of choosing the best family, we will determine whether the adoptive parents can accept the child according to his/her age, racial and ethnic background, any handicaps, and whether they are ready to welcome that child into their home. After all this, ISSJ will arrange a match. Throughout the entire process, we will pour our efforts into providing thorough counseling support to the birth parents who have decided to give up their child for adoption.

ISSJ also assists PAPs in Japan (Japanese and non-Japanese) with inter-country adoptions from countries other than Japan. ISSJ is affiliated with the Intercountry Adoption Board (ICAB) in the Philippines. To read about the experiences of an American couple in Japan adopting a Thai child through ISSJ click here.

My Experience

Our experiences with ISSJ have been all good. Very helpful, transparent and communicative. I'm not going to say anything more than that because we are in the middle of adopting and I am going to need a bit more perspective of time to know how much of what I say about our experience infringes on our son's right to privacy about his experiences throughout this process.

Christian Agencies

For foreigners pursuing a Japanese adoption, some of the most welcoming and experienced agencies are Christian. There is a long history of faith-based agencies sending Japanese children abroad for families. I discuss some concerns below based on both my observations and reading I've done from authoritative sources. I am extremely concerned that these concerns not be seen as an attack on all Christian agencies in Japan. I have no doubt that there are many wonderful faith-based agencies. I am not sharing more contact details because it simply isn't an avenue we researched as we are not Christian.

My Concerns and Experiences

This agency appears to have an ethical approach and do not state that they require PAPs to be Christian, so we briefly considered them. However, they state that

Japanese Children may best be served by placing them within Japan with Japanese families.

Non-Japanese children or mixed race children's needs may best be served by placing them with international families or overseas if immigration is possible.

This sounds an awful lot like "pure Japanese babies should be placed with Japanese families, mixed race babies should be sent away from Japan". They probably don't mean it like that, but that’s the feeling I got reading their website and it made me very uncomfortable. There are some pretty glaring ethical issues with the way some Christian agencies approach adoption. I'm not trying to paint all Christian agencies in Japan with one brush, just raising a note of caution. For some agencies their preferences for placement are 1: Japanese Christians 2: Non-Japanese Christians followed at a distant 3^rd by Japanese non-Christians. In other words, they will refuse to place a baby with a local family who have the wrong theology, preferring to send them into a different language, culture and country. I don’t agree with that, but it isn’t the main issue that put us off. The treatment of birth mothers is deeply problematic. Again, I have not researched every Christian agency and I am sure that there are some with impeccably ethical behaviour; but don’t assume that an agency will do the right thing just because they say they are Christian, research first.

I wish I could word that in a way that sounds less like I am generalising but since I can’t think of better wording I’ll just say again: Some Christian agencies may have all or some of these practices. That is not to condemn each and every Christian adoption agency in Japan or to say that there aren’t non-Christian agencies that also have problematic policies and priorities. 

Regional Agencies

For obvious reasons I don't have information on a lot of small local organisations, but one example from Osaka is http://home.inet-osaka.or.jp/~fureai/. They have worked with foreign/Japanese mixed families in the past and are also looking for weekend foster parents. Your local CGC should be able to give you contact details for any agencies in your area.

Gynecologists/Obstetricians Associations

I have no direct experience to call on here but Adoption in Japan describes the process of adopting through various regional medical associations. PAPs indicate their desire to adopt with their OBGGYN and if a pregnant patient indicates that she is considering adoption the association will look over their list of PAPs. These arrangements are usually conducted by word of mouth not advertising and are seen by some physicians as a natural extension of their patient care. According to Adoption in Japan, there are often more babies that PAPs in these situations because the requirements for PAPs are onerous and the costs quite high.

I mentioned in a previous post the occasional instances of practices such as registering a baby's birth to the adoptive parents not the birth parents, thereby side-stepping any actual adoption. The fact that some underhand incidents have occurred should not taken to besmirch the work of all medical associations who assist in adoption placements, particularly when those associations register as NPOs.

Experiences Others Have Shared

This lovely story is about a couple's adoption through the public system.

We visit Yuto in the orphanage for hours, days, weeks, months. Finally we can bring him home for an overnight. Then, finally, we can bring him home forever, just after his second birthday.
We go to a playground where he can see the bullet trains passing overhead. At the playground, he comes up to the other kids and wants to play with their toys, or play ball, or play with them in general. He likes to hold hands. He wants contact, touch, closeness. Because he grew up in an orphanage where everything was communal, he misses it. He has no concept of personal ownership.
The first time we give him Ai-Ai, the stuffed monkey we’d brought to take with him in the car—he tries to leave it at the orphanage. We have to convince him that he can keep it. He’s never had a single thing of his own.
 He is the opposite of other kids, who have to learn how to share. He brings his own toys to share, but the other kids don’t take much interest in them. I don’t want to try to make sense of things like this, or explain everything to him. He’ll learn. I want to cut a path in this crazy forest of life with him.  Sitting Zen. Walking Zen. Playing Zen. Mothering Zen. It’s all practice, and we have a lifetime.
But my aunt doesn’t. I want him to meet her before she dies.
So we bring him to San Francisco. He loves his seven-year-old cousin Shaviv, but he cannot pronounce Sh, so he calls him Habib. My sister tells me Habib means “friend” in Hebrew.
We see a homeless man with a cat on the street in front of Macy’s on Union Square. The cat has been hit by a car and the man needs money for its hospital bills. Everyone rushes by the man and the cat, but Yuto pulls my arm, insists on petting the cat. Then he sits down on the pavement and tries to pick up the cat to hug it. I tell him the cat is hurt and he shouldn’t touch it. So he pets it instead. Now people stop to look at the little boy sitting on the sidewalk, blocking their path. Some mothers pull their children away. A photographer stops to take a picture. Others put money in the basket. More children come to sit by his side.
Somehow, he brings together the splintered worlds of strangers. He is a healer of cats and hearts, a small wonder in this world of so many wonders. If I ever felt any doubts, I do not now.

This touching account of collecting their son from his orphanage is also by a mother who adopted through the public system.

All of Sho’s “siblings” attended his farewell party, which was held only three days after our arrival. The 2-year-old guest of honor sat in a tiny chair at the front, facing the other toddler attendees.
They sang a song for Sho in their inimitable 1-year-old way, and then everyone ate cake. Each caregiver gave him a toy or an article of clothing; these, plus similar gifts they had given him on his first birthday, were the personal possessions Sho would be taking to his new home.
He was placed front and center between his new parents, with a bouquet of flowers, for the final group photo. Later, Sho spent his last night in the communal nursery, unaware that he would probably never see any of these children again.
The next morning, Cha-chan cried as she said goodbye to Sho. Confused by her sad demeanor, Sho burst into tears. He was soon smiling again, however, as we finally began walking to the station to catch the train home.
As we stood waiting on the platform, I heard tiny voices behind us: “Sho-chan, Sho-chan, bye-bye!” We hadn’t noticed, but the caregivers and children had followed us. Despite the sweltering August heat, they were going to give us a station sendoff.
Some were standing, others were seated in baby strollers — all were pressed up to the outside fence. As the train doors closed, I held my new son up to the window. I wanted him to see the waving hands until they were completely out of sight.

This story is about staff from the US embassy adopting in Japan.

Finally, for some stories about parents who have adopted Japanese children from outside Japan, check out

http://ourjapaneseadoption.blogspot.jp/
http://www.netsato.com/2006/09/14/a-japan-adoption/
http://mrsandreas.blogspot.jp/2013/03/japan-adoption-timeline.html
http://familycech.blogspot.jp/2008/05/adopting-from-japan.html

*It is possible to adopt a child over 6, but the special adoption law 特別養子縁組 is exclusively for children aged six and younger.