Need for baby hatches in Japan seems greater than ever

“Lonely childbirth” is the English title Spa (June 3-10) gives its report. Can a deeper loneliness be imagined? A girl, a teenager, perhaps in her early 20s, a child herself, at an age when “knowing the facts of life” means knowing what fun they are. That’s a start. The childish mistake is thinking it’s the end. Suddenly grownup reality rears its ugly head.

It’s a rude awakening. “Aoi Tanaka” (a pseudonym), now 21, recalls hers for Spa. She was 19, a high school graduate, adrift in Tokyo after arriving from the country to attend vocational school. She dropped out to pursue a night life centered on “underground idol” bands that play small venues and interact with fans. Her funds ran out. Seeking easy money and finding an easy way to it, she slept her way to financial solvency – so far so good – and – grim anticlimax – pregnancy. You’d think she’d never heard of it.

The truth sank in slowly. Her period, she explained, had always been irregular, She’d feel something moving inside her but her belly scarcely swelled; she was a full eight months gone before she visited a gynecologist. Who was the father? Who knew? What next? Ditto.

It was too late for an abortion. She’d have to give birth, but as to raising the child, “What kind of mother would I be?” Like her own mother, perhaps, who seems to have borne her under similar circumstances and, though she did in fact raise her, was, in her chronic poverty, constant desperation and occasional violence, a negative example at best: “I didn’t want to be to my child what my mother was to me.”

Her ward office counseled adoption. It seemed best. The child – a boy – was born. “I tried to spend as little time with him as possible,” she says, “so that love wouldn’t grow in me, but when the time came to part I held him tight and yes, I cried. I hugged him and sobbed, ‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry.’” She still is, and if her sorrow hasn’t changed her lifestyle much, it has at least made her more careful.

An unsettling reflection of unsettled times is a recent succession of incidents of infanticide and infant abandonment. Spa mentions two: a teenage high school student arrested in Nagano Prefecture in April on suspicion of murder of the infant she’d just given birth to at home, and, a month later, a young woman in her early 20s, charged with abandoning her one-month-old on somebody’s veranda – hoping perhaps in her despair that it would fall into kindly hands.

“Circumstances were likely such,” speculates Dr Takeshi Hasuda (of whom more in a moment), “that the felt need for absolute secrecy was the overpowering consideration. Alone, in labor and in pain, bleeding, panicking, they are not capable of normal judgment, so that they may be driven even to murder.”

What to do, and who to do it? Japan’s government, notoriously slow to address issues that in more traditional times were family matters, remained numbly inactive as more and more cases of this sort roiled the social waters. 

Someone, somewhere, at some point, sufficiently moved and with sufficient energy and influence to seize the initiative, would have to take the first step. It happened at last – in the Kyushu city of Kumamoto. In 2006 the director of the local Jikei Hospital was Taiji Hasuda (1936-2020). His notion, inspired by similar facilities then common in Germany, was a “baby hatch.” Mothers in unwanted pregnancies, or others acting on their behalf, could deposit newborn infants or even, as the case may be, somewhat older children – anonymously. No questions asked. The hospital would see to the child’s medical needs and arrange either adoption or placement at an orphanage. It would, Taiji hoped, at the very least save infant lives and offer mothers an alternative to desperate infanticide.

Authorization granted by the pertinent local governments, the “Stork’s Cradle” baby hatch opened in 2007. (The stork’s long bill and innocent white coloring makes it the perfect folkloric baby-bringer, a natural and culture-spanning answer to a small child’s question “Where do babies come from?”)

Among the first children to “come from” Stork’s Cradle was one Koichi Miyatsu – of whom more in a moment. Takeshi Hasuda, to return briefly to him, is Taiji Hasuda’s son and Jikei Hospital’s current director. He carries on his father’s work. It’s a lonely undertaking – absolutely so until this past March, when a Tokyo hospital opened the nation’s second baby hatch – the “Baby Basket” – along the lines of Stork’s Cradle, which as of March 2024 had taken in a total of 179 children.

How many of them would have perished otherwise? There is no knowing. Does the hatch’s existence offer a too-easy path to the casual skirting of responsibility? That and other ethical issues swirl. The distressed mother’s right to anonymity is one thing. What about the child’s right, later in life, to know his or her origin? That too must enter the equation.

179 children, no doubt 179 stories, encompassing so vast a range of emotions – even within one child, let alone 179 – that generalization is impossible. As for Miyatsu, “The day I was left there was the day a new chapter of my life began,” he told AFP News a year ago. Not, as it happens, the first chapter. He was five months old when his mother was killed in an accident, and going on three when the relatives caring for him left him at the hatch. “I have no recollection of the moment when I was dropped off… but the image of the hatch’s door is seared into a corner of my brain.” Two years earlier he had told the Yomiuri Shimbun, “I was saved because of (Stork’s Cradle).”

He has reason to be grateful. In short order he was adopted by a couple whose love needed no blood ties to awaken it. Now 21, he is a student at Kumamoto University and a founding director of “University for Kids Kumamoto,” in which capacity he addresses local elementary and junior high school kids “about the importance of life,” as Kyodo News reported last December. It’s a vast subject – one on which he has a unique perspective.

© Japan Today