Before the tsunami, there were more than 36,000 children in “orphanages”
in Japan. Around 3,000 of them were housed in 乳児院 (nyujiin: infant nurseries, usually for children under two
years old). The overwhelming majority of these children are not orphans in the
sense of having no living guardian. Nor have they been removed from their
parents’ custody. The majority have living parents who retain legal custody but
who are not raising them. In some cases children are housed in orphanages
temporarily. In other cases, they will remain in institutions from birth until
adulthood, never meeting their parents. Because parents maintain legal rights
to the children, they are unable to be adopted. The emphasis on maintaining
legal custody for biological parents is so strong that even in cases where a
baby is found abandoned in a train station locker or in a park, the local
courts may rule that the baby is unavailable for adoption just in case the biological parent ever comes looking for them. In
other cases a family member other than the parent is the legal guardian but
does not want to be responsible for giving the child up for adoption, despite
not wanting to have anything to do with them.
Both for the families of children
in orphanages and for society at large, there is no resistance to the idea that
children grow up in institutions. For most people I have talked to, it seems
like “the right place” for “nobody’s children” to be taken care of. Some
乳児院 send photos to the birth parents and entreat them to
take the babies home for special events like the child’s birthday or New Year’s
celebrations. Their aim is to eventually reunite the biological family. At the
乳児院 I volunteer at, some parents visit their children every
weekend, trying to maintain contact despite the circumstances that prevent them
from caring for them full time. Others drop in sporadically and shower the kids
with presents and affection, then don’t come back for months. Others promise to
come then don’t, leaving the children waiting in their best clothes beside the
door, waiting for it to open, hour after hour. No one seems to question the idea that reuniting biological families is the best outcome, even when we read about cases where children are killed after being reclaimed from orphanages by their parents. In
one heartbreaking case, an eleven year old girl was beaten to death by her mother with a golf club after spending many years in an orphanage. News reports dwelled on the tragic letter the little girl had written to her mother telling her how much she loved her while in care. I saw something very different in that letter~ well meaning staff encouraging her to write to her mother to facilitate a reunion regardless of the documented history of abuse.
Even in cases of serious, documented abuse it is very difficult to
forcibly sever parental rights. One of the reasons volunteers are asked not to
share pictures taken in orphanages is that children may be in hiding from
abusive parents. The state can remove children and place them in orphanages,
but if the biological parents find out where they are they can just walk in and
drag them home. In some cases parents have laid in wait near school gates and
abducted their children as they leave. Because the legal custody has not been
severed there is little anyone can do.
There is also little awareness of child abuse
as a social issue.
A 1996 article quotes
Tsuzura Masako, then head of the Tokyo child welfare office, denying over the
course of several years that child abuse existed; despite her own office taking
hundreds of calls a year relating to child abuse. Her exact words: “Child
abuse? There is no such thing. Parents hitting their own kids is just a
temporary thing. It’s just discipline.” Abuse is unlikely to make it to court
until it becomes fatal, and even then penalties are light. The infamous
Heki-chan case of 2006, in which parents tortured their three year old using a
variety of implements over many hours until his death, resulted in a seven year
jail sentence for the father and six and a half years for the mother. In my
prefecture a woman who
buried her two year old daughter in the woods then
claimed she had been abducted from a supermarket car park was given
a two year suspended sentence for dumping the body but was not prosecuted for killed the
child, because by the time her body was discovered she was “too badly
decomposed to determine cause of death.”
I want to emphasise that my experiences in orphanages have
been nothing but positive. The many staff I know personally are committed to
doing the very best they can for the kids in their care. However, the care given
to the children in orphanages is utterly insufficient to prepare them for participation
in society even in the best case scenario. At the same time, not every
orphanage is a best case scenario. There
are also serious problems with abuse in orphanages themselves. Many of Japan’s orphanages are privately
managed, including many operated by Catholic churches. Some private orphanages
are treated like family businesses, with the director passing the position on
to their son or daughter when they retire. In the 1990s a number of cases of sexual abuse
in privately operated homes resulted in no action being taken because the perpetrator
was the child of the director and heir apparent to the “business”. In one case,
after an employee reported the sexual abuse of a twelve year old girl to the
child welfare office, the director of the orphanage took a voluntary two month
pay cut. This was considered an appropriate response and no criminal proceeding
were pursued, nor was the perpetrator prevented from continuing to work in orphanages.
Technically the private institutions are under the supervision of the government,
but as with all government positions in Japan staff are transferred in and out
of the supervisory positions without any specific training. When they go to “inspect”
the orphanages they have no idea what they are looking at, and may simply
visit, drink tea in the director’s office, then leave.
Even without facing abuse, institutions just aren’t
appropriate places for children to grow up.
“A little boy had been brought over from the baby orphanage
to join the 3-to-18-year-olds’ orphanage. This is the way the system is set up
here. Suddenly uprooted from the only home he had known, he was plopped down
into a big building full of older boys. Though I had just walked into the room
and he was seeing me for the first time, he clung to me for all he was worth
and would not be comforted. I’ve rarely witnessed anything as pitiful.”
The social worker who is working with us through our
adoption application suggested that we should try to take the child to the
supermarket and involve them in cooking meals as much as possible, because they
may be used to prepared food being delivered in a dining hall and have no
mental association between fresh ingredients and prepared food. For a child in
that situation, imagine the shock of suddenly being thrust out into the world
to fend for him or her self?
In Japan school is compulsory only until junior high.
Although 90% of students attend high school (high school graduation is require
for almost all jobs), the figure is inverted for children who live in
orphanages. One reason for this is that in order to pass high school entrance
examinations Japanese children usually attend cram schools, the cost of which
can run into hundreds of thousands of dollars. The government does not provide
any money for orphans to attend cram schools, because that would mean they
would have to admit that the system exists. The official line is that public
education provides everything children need to pass their exams, and although
it is blatantly untrue and no one believes it for a second, the educational
futures of orphans are sacrificed to maintain the meaningless charade. One of
the most helpful things university student volunteers do in orphanages is offer
free tutoring.
Even if a child survives their orphanage upbringing with few
emotional scars and a passable education, they may face lifelong discrimination
in employment, housing and marriage. Yet, despite all this, adoption or even
foster care remains rare. In a country with an aging population, declining
birth rate and reluctance to accept immigration as a solution to its
demographic crisis, one would think that domestic adoption would be encouraged.
In practice, a combination of social attitudes and specific government policies
discourage adoption.
References:
“Adoption in Japan” by Peter Hayes and Toshie Habu, 2006,
Routledge
“Children of the Japanese State” by Roger Goodman, 2000,
Oxford
“Becoming aware of child abuse” by Meiko Hashimoto in Japan Quarterly; Apr/Jun 1996
“Why Nobody Knows - Family and Society in Modern Japan” by
Alexander Jacoby in Film Criticism; winter
2011; 35, 2/3
“Child abuse and neglect in Japan” by Yasuhide Nakamura in Pediatrics International; 2002, 44
“Child Welfare Services in Japan: An Overview” by Cecelia
Sudia in Children Today; Mar 1988;
17, 2
“Fatal child abuse in Japan: Does a trend exist toward
tougher sentencing?” by Saori Nambu, Ayako Nasu, Shigeru Nishimura, Akiyoshi
Nishimura and Satoshi Fujiwara in Japan
Injury and Violence Research, 2011 Jul; 3, 2
“Health education for nurses in Japan to combat child abuse”
by Beverly M. Henry, Reiko Ueda, Masaki Shinjo and Chieko Yoshikawa in Nursing and Health Sciences, 2003, 5
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