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Japanese Orphanages
This post discusses some of the key ways that they differ from over here, and presumes that everyone's reasonably familiar with the issues that generally surround children who enter state care. This is mostly a fragmentary post putting together various bits and pieces from articles I read this evening.
1. Orphanages aren't necessarily full of "orphans."
This was repeated on basically every writeup of the issue, probably because it's so shocking to those of us over here.
Parental legal rights run very, very strong in Japan. So strong that there's apparently one practice where parents leave children they can't care for at these places, without ever giving up their rights to the child. In some sense they're gaming the system: because Japanese culture expects elders to be cared for by their children, these parents still expect their "orphaned" children to come back and be part of the family and raise them after they're all grown up.
This practice strikes me as pretty messed up, naturally. Even more tragic, many parents hardly visit these cases, yet retain their rights, preventing these children from being adopted.
Part of the issue may be for lack of privacy:
One major reason adoption rates are low is the lack of confidentiality in the Japanese family registry, called koseki. One form, requested by some employers and even potential spouses, lists information on all marriages, divorces, deaths, births and adoptions. A child listed as adopted out of the family is potentially embarrassing, as it may be seen as a sign the child was unplanned or unwanted.
You don't have to report dropping your child off in the care of the state in the same way: A child who is raised in an orphanage appears normally on the register (in most cases).5
The family record issue is so much of an issue that Japan now has this:
Some obstetricians have run a black market in matching infertile couples with patients experiencing unplanned pregnancies and illegally registering the birth of the latter’s child to the former’s register.
2. Laws don't do shit about abuse (from the family)
Parents usually maintain their rights even in cases of abuse. Apparently one reason that orphanages don't allow pictures is in fear that the parents will find their runaway children, and then there is nothing they can legally do to stop them from taking their kid back. Conversely, some are so culturally idealistic about the sanctity of blood that they try to encourage the families to take them back, sometimes to fatal results.3
Perhaps every society would like you to forget that child abuse exists, but even then, the extent of this denial in Japan is shocking:
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.
[...]
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.”
Mark points out that this is from fifteen years ago. In 2000 a child abuse prevention law was enacted4 though research has found that legal penalties for fatal child abuse have remained roughly the same, comparing pre-2004 to 2009.
3. Laws don't do shit about abuse (from the orphanage)
I think I'm just going to quote Source 3.
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.
However, it's somewhat difficult to understand what's the norm. The writer of Source 1 says she worked at a nursery-orphanage with a one-to-two ratio of caregivers to children. That's seriously impressive.
4. Belief in eugenics is still a Thing.
Yes yes, people in the US still think that if you have your own kids they'll probably be smarter. That's not... this.
I wrote in a post about an orphanage Christmas party I organised that a co-worker commented that the kids would “just end up in jail anyway” because they had “bad blood”. Her view is definitely not a fringe or minority one. Ideas of pure and impure blood and of personalities based on blood types are commonplace and largely unquestioned. There is a pervasive belief that everything from your taste in food to the language you speak is biologically pre-determined. Even teachers will unabashedly say things like “Japanese ears have a different internal structure that can’t distinguish between R and L” or “Japanese language uses a different part of the brain from other languages”. These casual assumptions may not seem serious enough to warrant my use of the term eugenics, so let me also point out that laws providing for compulsory sterilisation of women with disabilities were not abolished until mid-1996.5
That's the end of this fragmentary post.
Sources/Further reading: (Be warned that many of these go into more gruesome detail than I did about child abuse cases.)
1 - http://openprivatelife.blogspot.com/2013/01/japanese-orphanage-orphan-foster.html
2 - http://japandailypress.com/japans-forgotten-children-113905
3 - http://sopheliajapan.blogspot.com/2013/01/adoption-in-japan-part-1-why-are-there.html
4 - http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,2081820,00.html
5 - http://sopheliajapan.blogspot.jp/2013/01/adoption-in-japan-part-2-attitudes-to.html
1. Orphanages aren't necessarily full of "orphans."
This was repeated on basically every writeup of the issue, probably because it's so shocking to those of us over here.
Parental legal rights run very, very strong in Japan. So strong that there's apparently one practice where parents leave children they can't care for at these places, without ever giving up their rights to the child. In some sense they're gaming the system: because Japanese culture expects elders to be cared for by their children, these parents still expect their "orphaned" children to come back and be part of the family and raise them after they're all grown up.
This practice strikes me as pretty messed up, naturally. Even more tragic, many parents hardly visit these cases, yet retain their rights, preventing these children from being adopted.
Part of the issue may be for lack of privacy:
One major reason adoption rates are low is the lack of confidentiality in the Japanese family registry, called koseki. One form, requested by some employers and even potential spouses, lists information on all marriages, divorces, deaths, births and adoptions. A child listed as adopted out of the family is potentially embarrassing, as it may be seen as a sign the child was unplanned or unwanted.
You don't have to report dropping your child off in the care of the state in the same way: A child who is raised in an orphanage appears normally on the register (in most cases).5
The family record issue is so much of an issue that Japan now has this:
Some obstetricians have run a black market in matching infertile couples with patients experiencing unplanned pregnancies and illegally registering the birth of the latter’s child to the former’s register.
2. Laws don't do shit about abuse (from the family)
Parents usually maintain their rights even in cases of abuse. Apparently one reason that orphanages don't allow pictures is in fear that the parents will find their runaway children, and then there is nothing they can legally do to stop them from taking their kid back. Conversely, some are so culturally idealistic about the sanctity of blood that they try to encourage the families to take them back, sometimes to fatal results.3
Perhaps every society would like you to forget that child abuse exists, but even then, the extent of this denial in Japan is shocking:
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.
[...]
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.”
Mark points out that this is from fifteen years ago. In 2000 a child abuse prevention law was enacted4 though research has found that legal penalties for fatal child abuse have remained roughly the same, comparing pre-2004 to 2009.
3. Laws don't do shit about abuse (from the orphanage)
I think I'm just going to quote Source 3.
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.
However, it's somewhat difficult to understand what's the norm. The writer of Source 1 says she worked at a nursery-orphanage with a one-to-two ratio of caregivers to children. That's seriously impressive.
4. Belief in eugenics is still a Thing.
Yes yes, people in the US still think that if you have your own kids they'll probably be smarter. That's not... this.
I wrote in a post about an orphanage Christmas party I organised that a co-worker commented that the kids would “just end up in jail anyway” because they had “bad blood”. Her view is definitely not a fringe or minority one. Ideas of pure and impure blood and of personalities based on blood types are commonplace and largely unquestioned. There is a pervasive belief that everything from your taste in food to the language you speak is biologically pre-determined. Even teachers will unabashedly say things like “Japanese ears have a different internal structure that can’t distinguish between R and L” or “Japanese language uses a different part of the brain from other languages”. These casual assumptions may not seem serious enough to warrant my use of the term eugenics, so let me also point out that laws providing for compulsory sterilisation of women with disabilities were not abolished until mid-1996.5
That's the end of this fragmentary post.
Sources/Further reading: (Be warned that many of these go into more gruesome detail than I did about child abuse cases.)
1 - http://openprivatelife.blogspot.com/2013/01/japanese-orphanage-orphan-foster.html
2 - http://japandailypress.com/japans-forgotten-children-113905
3 - http://sopheliajapan.blogspot.com/2013/01/adoption-in-japan-part-1-why-are-there.html
4 - http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,2081820,00.html
5 - http://sopheliajapan.blogspot.jp/2013/01/adoption-in-japan-part-2-attitudes-to.html