Contestation and consensus: The morality ofabortion in Japan

·期刊原文

Contestation and consensus: The morality of abortion in Japan

By William R. LaFleur

Philosophy East and West

XL:4 1990.10 p. 529-542

(C) by University of Hawaii Press

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p. 529

I. ETHICAL DISCOURSE AND ITS CARETAKERS IN JAPAN

One of the things we in the West still lack is
anything even approximating a Western-language
history of ethical thought in Japan. We have mere
bits and pieces. One unfortunate result of this Lack
of an adequate historical account is that Western
studies easily fall prey to whole-cloth attempts to
identify the Japanese ethic--as if it were something
timeless and changeless. Moreover, inasmuch as Western
work on Japanese intellectual history is still so
sketchy, talk about Japanese ethics habitually
becomes a discussion of "the Japanese system of
values," and, once there, it is a simple and easy
matter to adopt and revalorize the findings of
anthropologists and social psychologists--but without
recognizing that the supposition of synchronicity is
built into this method from the outset. History loses
out every time. This, of course, means that present
patterns of social and moral life tend to be
projected back into the whole of the past. It is no
wonder, therefore, that "seamless-garment"
descriptions of Japan dominate our literature, both
scholarly and popular.

One concept that seemingly bedevils all efforts
to break this pattern is the widely held assumption
that in Japan the life of the mind was neatly
categorized and parcelled out. In this telling it was
to Buddhists and the practitioners of Shinto that the
religious life went, whereas to Confucianism was
given the whole of the moral and ethical domain. It
is usually assumed that this neat differentiation
"worked" throughout the ages, so that Buddhism and
Confucianism, for instance, usually stayed out of
each other's territory. In this way, what I would
call a kind of "intellectual etiquette" is imagined,
one in which ideas stay in set places and friction is
minimal if not nonexistent. On this view it is often
believed that, if and when Buddhism aspired to be
comprehensive, the fact that it was "other-worldly"
meant it had virtually nothing to say about ethics,
and, as a consequence, Buddhism usually plugged this
particular lacuna within itself by adopting norms and
values that were Confucian in origin. In this view
ideas are at their best when characterized by a kind
of hardware-store handiness; they plug and fill holes
in systems.

The West's favorite version of this is usually
cast in the neat "this-worldly/ other-worldly"
rubric, a concept that for many decades has not only
filled the pages of social science writing but has
also left a deep imprint on attempts of
humanists--not only in the West but reflexively in
Japan as well--to deal with the great complexities of
Japanese intellectual, moral, and religious history.

This compartmentalization is, I maintain, not
something to which all Japanese thinkers, and
especially those early in history, would have readily
------------------------------
William R. LaFleur is a professor of Japanese in the
Department of Oriental Studies at University of
Pennsylvania.
Philosophy East & West, volume 40, no. 4 (October
1990).copyright by University of Hawaii Press. All
rights reserved.

p. 530

assented. They seem not to have shared our more
modern and hard distinction between religion and
ethics--or the notion that these are divisible
domains. Kukai(a) (774-835), for instance, in a work
like Sango shiiki(b), strongly preferred Buddhism
over Confucianism (and Taoism as well), but not
because Buddhism is religious and as such belongs to
an intrinsically different (or higher) realm. Rather
he saw it in its entirety as a religio-ethical system
more comprehensive and satisfying than Confucianism.
That is, in his interpretation, it is as an ethic too
that Buddhism was to be preferred. Extending
arguments used in China. Kukai held that Buddhism
was more ethically penetrating than Confucianism
because it does not narrowly focus on duties to
parents but articulates the principle of "great
filial piety," according to which all creatures are
deserving of attention and respect.(n.1) Becoming a
monk or leaving "householding life" was for Kukai an
act of unity with this larger moral community.(n.2)
In a similar way Buddhists in early Japan argued for
acceptance of the teaching of karma--Kyokai(c) in
the eighth century for instance--because in their
view karma was the mechanism for greater moral
sensitivity.(n.3) Thus, it would have amazed them to
hear modern discussions of a Buddhism needing
Confucianism to take care of ethical matters. It was
possibly not until the Muromachi period
(1334-1573)--and especially with new language about
the "three teachings'' (Buddhism, Confucianism, and
Taoism) and their complementarity--that a different
model was offered. Even then, however, this was a
controversial matter and remained so throughout much
of the Tokugawa period. It was not until the Meiji
era (1867-1912) that the notion of divided mental
labor became fixed--a dogma that was in many ways
ideological. The peculiar thing is that we inherit
that short history--and think it long. We also, of
course, often think it "natural."

That division, however, has had a semblance of
truth in part because throughout the centuries
prominent Japanese Buddhists did not appear to
formulate specifically ethical systems. That is,
there was a considerable reluctance on their part to
conceive of ethics as an independent object of
inquiry--and especially not as the subject for a genre
of writing identifiable as "the treatise on ethics."
It should come as no surprise, then, that when
Watsuji Tetsuro (1889-1960), having been encouraged
by others early on in his career to write a truly
modern and systematic work on ethics from a Buddhist
perspective, faced this problem in 1927 in writing
his Genshi Bukkyo no jissen tetsugaku(d) (Original
Buddhism's Philosophy in Praxis). Both his dilemma
and his approach are instructive. After a lengthy
preface he began his first chapter by taking up the
problem of `Saakyamuni's famous "silence'' when the
latter was addressed with certain kinds of
questions.(n.4) Although the usual explanation of
`Saakyamuni's "silence" was that he refused to answer
such questions because they had no value in the quest
for religious liberation--as if "religion" in that
narrow a sense were the Buddha's prime concern--Watsuji
rejected this view. Instead he insisted on reading
the Buddha's silence as signaling an

p. 531

enlightened refusal to buy into the problematics of
an abstract metaphysics; like Kant he wanted to turn
instead to the realm of the practical and what has
been experienced. Watsuji read `Saakyamuni as having
turned to the "experience" of everyday life. Since in
this way he took it as primarily concerned with
matters of praxis, Watsuji has been reclaiming
Buddhism as an ethic.

It may be that Watsuji, in trying to reclaim
ethics as a realm of primary interest to Buddhists,
overstated the case and in his own way neglected
"religion." (n.5) His attempt to correct the Meiji
distortion of Buddhism by restoring its place within
traditional Japanese ethics, however, is important--
and a point with which modern studies still have not
adequately reckoned. Japanese history will be
incorrectly rendered if it is assumed that
throughout it Buddhism handled ultimate religious
questions and left ethics and the whole of diurnal
life in the care of Confucianism. The
"this-worldly/other-worldly" way of categorizing
things, so important to modern interpreters, must be
treated with caution and suspicion when used to
describe the past.

I am also suggesting here that the tendency to
overlook or dismiss Buddhism's investment in the
ethical dimension arises from the fact that the bulk
of Buddhist ethical positions and insights have--at
least in Japanese history--often come down in
"mixed'' forms: in discussions of the workings of
karma,(n.6)in ritual actions that are more interested
in adumbrating "order,"' (chitsujo(e)) than in what
Western ethics identify as a concern for "justice,"
and in treatises like Shotoku Taishi's(f)
"Constitution of Seventeen Articles''
(Jushichi-jo-kenpo(g))--the latter being a document
in which the Buddhist component can be easily, but
mistakenly, read as being little more than merely
doxological. There can be no neat correlation between
a given tradition's actual contribution to a people's
moral and ethical life and the corpus of its
discursive writings dealing distinctively and
unmixedly with ethics. Actual moral reasoning is more
likely to combine a variety of disparate things.
Borrowing Levi-Strauss' term, Jeffrey Stout has
written of the need to recognize the reality of
"moral bricolage," and I think he is right.(n.7)
Actual reasoning often employs bricolage.

Lack of clarity on that point has meant that the
scholarly community, especially in the West, has
habitually by-passed or denigrated vast amounts of
materials that are important to understand the
history of ethical thinking in Japan. It has also led
to a systematic pattern of ignoring and downplaying
those times and ways in which there was real conflict
and contestation in Japanese ethical and religious
life. In keeping with the fact that some recent works
in Japanese have paid increasing attention to the
reality and energy of intellectual contestation in
Japanese history,(n.8) I am here suggesting that we,
at least for heuristic purposes, reject as flawed the
common assumption that there usually was a neat
division of intellectual labor in Japan. To assume
that Buddhists merely plugged Confucianism into their
teachings as a kind of

caretaker for "the world," ethics, and the family is
an assumption that tends to flatten the real shape of
ethical discourse in Japan. It also reads as
complementary and "harmonized" certain points that
were, in fact. often fraught with conflict over both
principles and practice.

II. ABORTION IN JAPAN: THE CONTESTATION

I believe this to be eminently true in the case
of Japanese thinking about abortion. I have elsewhere
narrated what I take to be the history of Japanese
Buddhist thinking about abortion as a moral and
religious problem.(n.9) Within that history I have
located a phase in the early half of the nineteenth
century when what I call a distinct difference
between Buddhists on the one hand and Confucians and
Shinto-based Kokugaku scholars on the other took
shape. I detail why it is clear that the Buddhists
for the most part took the position that abortion was
what we call a "necessary evil"--although their term
was a "necessary sorrow." Their opponents rejected
all abortion as morally and religiously wrong. A
common Buddhist position, in this sense comparatively
"soft" on abortion, is expressed in the tradition of
memorial rituals (kuyo(h) ) provided in cases of
abortion; it can also be known from the materials in
which Buddhists were attacked on this point by their
opponents.

This is not to say that Buddhists had no qualms
about abortion or did not recognize a tension between
its practice and the precept against taking life. It
is merely to note that they were more flexible on
this point than were the Confucians and proponents of
late Kokugaku. The latter, especially. mixed religion
and politics unabashedly; beginning in the nineteenth
century a family's reproductivity was read as an
index to patriotism. This became intense in the Meiji
period--an eloquent demonstration of Bellah's
observation that in Japan "the family does not stand
over against the polity but is integrated into it and
to an extent penetrated by it."(n.10)

Therefore, the Buddhist stance at that time was
charged with being a threat to national well-being
and as a flagrant offense to the gods--gods that
protect the nation and are happiest when people's
'seeds" germinate into whole persons in great
numbers. Of course, the fact that there was a
political aspect to the entire discourse also helps
explain why the Buddhists dared to express their
"soft" stand only indirectly. In fact, the Buddhist
"position" on this was articulated not so much
through treatises as through ritual, surely a "safer"
medium in their situation. I would, however, point
out that this indirect, mixed, or muted discourse on
specific moral questions had by this point already
become 'traditional' for Japanese Buddhists. Here was
an instance where a traditional mode of expression
also happened to be the only politically viable one;
that it came in a muted form, however, does not mean
it was not a distinct and discernible position. Its
opponents knew it was at odds with their view and we,
too, can reconstruct why that was so--and, therefore,
its structure as an ethical stance on abortion.

p. 533

During the later half of the nineteenth century,
much changed in Japan. What the government perceived
as a "population stagnation" conflicted with imperial
designs. Japan's growing need for human manpower, a
need that was to grow with rapid industrialization
and a military buildup for foreign wars, fit
hand-in-glove with the antiabortion arguments
advanced early in the nineteenth century by Kokugaku
advocates and Confucians. This meant that a process
was in place that led to the criminalization of
abortion soon after the Meiji Restoration in 1868.
During the latter half of the nineteenth century and
the first half of the twentieth, therefore, the case
against abortion, identifiable with this Shinto
revival and with Confucian points of view, held sway
in Japan. What I call "fecundism" became the order of
the day and was associcated in the public mind with
"family" values.

Given the fact that in 1945 Japan underwent as
thorough and total a crisis as can be imagined, the
ban on abortion. too, began to be rethought. Whereas
during the decades of rapid industrialization,
militarization, colonial expansion, and war, abortion
had been proscribed, after the Pacific War things
were completely different. To some degree what had
been the Kokugaku/ Confucian opposition to abortion
had been totally discredited by the events of
history, most especially Japan's a own defeat in 1945.
Beginning at that time--especially given the tightness
of basic resources--there was a deep concern about an
explosion of the population. Thus once again a more
"Buddhist' view, traditionally amenable to seeing
abortion as a "necessary suffering," was the view
that for all practical purposes was adopted when, in
1948, the process was begun to legalize abortion once
again. Although what we here call "the Buddhist view"
was not articulated in terms of explicit arguments,
it was implicit in Buddhism's readiness to provide
"rituals of memorial" for aborted fetuses
(mizuko(i)), a view widely perceived as tolerating
abortion. It is probably not an exaggeration to say
that, at least since 1948, on this ethical question
it has been the Buddhist view which, consciously or
not, has been what underlies actual practice.
The point that I want to emphasize here is not
the one that ethical positions merely traipse along
in the wake of political needs but, in fact, a quite
different one--namely, that ethical discourse in
Japan has in fact been much more diverse and
conflict-ridden than most commentators assume. It
also interests me that, once we begin to derive our
readings of ethical positions from materials that
are "mixed" and do not necessarily come in a genre
recognizable as "the ethical treatise," we can more
readily reconstruct what clearly seems historically
to have been a distinctly Buddhist approach to
abortion in Japan, a position in actuality quite
different from the total opposition--at least from
the early nineteenth to the mid-twentieth
centuries--to it by persons selfconsciously representing
Confucianism and the Neo-Shinto phase of Kokugaku.
This is not to say that certain schools of Buddhists,
especially those in the Pure Land tradition, have not
objected both to abortion and to the

p.534

mizuko rites. It is merely to note a trajectory of
comparative tolerance of the practice.

III. ABORTION IN JAPAN: CONSENSUS

What are we to make of the fact that, whereas
what I call Japan's conflict over abortion was most
aggravated in the middle of the nineteenth century,
there is relatively little debate today--when in
Europe and America the debate has become strong and
often acrimonious?

One might expect that, given the high rate of
abortion in Japan as well as the diversity of
religious positions represented there, Japan would
have been the locus of protracted and spirited
debates about the ethics of abortion in recent years.
Such, however, has not been the case. What is
impressive, at least to the Western scholar looking
for such, is the fact that comparatively little has
been written on this topic during the past few
decades--and that what has appeared has for the most
part dealt with the politics of abortion, the
legalization of the contraceptive pill, and
criticisms of certain entrepreneurial temples for
capitalizing on the mizuko boom. Voices advocating
the repeal of legalized abortion have, by contrast,
been almost nonexistent. I think it significant that
what a century ago had been strongly expressed
Confucian and neo-Shinto objections to legalized
abortion have today in Japan largely dissipated and
disappeared.

There are groups--such as Seicho no Ie(j) (The
House of Life), a "new religion"--that vocally oppose
abortion. Such groups during the early 1980s evoked
strong opposition from the Women's Movement in Japan,
but as far as the general public is concerned these
rather small groups opposed to abortion are little
more than a blip on the screen of public
consciousness. Some Buddhist and Christian groups
express alarm at the number of abortions performed,
yet in Japan today there could hardly be anything
that could rightly be called a real or wide public
debate on this issue. Books on abortion as a public
policy problem can scarcely be found. Many assume
that the legalization of the pill will in time cut
back the abortion rate. In fact, it is the absence of
such a debate at the present time which, in my
opinion at least, is the salient datum that deserves
exploration and interpretation.

I would contend that this absence of public
debate also needs to be interpreted as a sign of
something present-namely, a fairly wide consensus on
this matter. There is a consensus that abortion
constitutes a painful social necessity and as such
must remain legal and available, although
religiopsychological mechanisms for relieving bad
feelings about abortion--the mizuko rites, for
instance--in most cases probably play a positive,
therapeutic role. And, of course, this is to say that
it is now what I have termed a Buddhist position on
abortion which has, for all practical purposes, won
the day.

A "position" is expressed not only by what is
said but also by what goes

p. 535

unsaid. Therefore, in my view, it is significant that
within the Japanese Buddhist community the discussion
of abortion is now limited largely to criticisms of
those temples and temple-like organizations which
employ the notion of "fetal retribution" to coerce
the "parents" of an aborted fetus into performing
rituals that memorialize the fetus. remove its
"grudges, " and facilitate its rebirth or its
Buddhahood. Many Buddhists find repugnant such types
of manipulation of parental guilt--especially when
expressed in the notion that a fetus in limbo will
wreak vengence (tatari(k)) on parents who neglect to
memorialize it.

But, of course, the focus here is on the morality
of using this concept of retribution; the question of
the morality of abortion perse is, by comparison,
something that goes almost without discussion. In
other words, it seems now widely accepted that the
Buddhist praxis developed over centuries on this
issue is itself basically a moral and viable way of
handing this complex and vexing problem.

Although I cannot here recapitulate things
discussed in more detail elsewhere, a very rudimentary
statement of the matter is that most Japanese
Buddhists have accepted abortion as a necessary
sorrow but at the same time have contextualized the
termination of pregnancy--and also infanticide in an
earlier epoch--through Buddhist ritual. One result of
my analysis has been to demonstrate that historically
the belief in transmigration and rebirth effectively
attenuated any sense of "finality" in abortion--thus
giving the "parents" of an aborted fetus the
expectation that the fetus' entry into the world had
been merely postponed.

Thus parental prayers and ritual memorializations
were expected to palliate guilt, create what is taken
to be a continuing relationship between parents in
this world and a fetus in a Buddhist "limbo," and
render close to moot many of the West's protracted
debates about life's inception, fetal rights, and
ownership of the bodies of women. Although those
Japanese Buddhists who take this position face
various conceptual and ethical problems in its wake,
these are rather different--and in terms of upheaval
in the larger society certainly less severe--than the
problems we have faced in trying to deal with
abortion in the West in general and the United States
in particular.(n.11)

This is not to say that women's rights advocates
feel no need for vigilance vis-a-vis Buddhist
institutions on this matter. It is merely to call
attention to the fact that, even though their
acknowledged concerns are political and focus on the
danger of being, as women, manipulated, those
feminists who have written about Buddhism and
abortion have tended to focus their criticisms on
those who employ the concept of "fetal retribution,"
and that is something which, as noted above, many
Buddhists themselves are quick to condemn.(n.12) My
sense is that many feminists in Japan find, at least
in the present context, a kind of odd, unanticipated
ally in the Buddhists. Those feminists who are also

p. 536

ideologically Marxists are troubled by this
convergence, but most feminists show reluctance to
refuse the Buddhist hand that seems to render
indirect help to this part of their cause. Obviously
the Marxist critique of religion is itself "softened"
in this.

My own personal conversations with
representatives of various religious constituencies
in Japan leads me to conclude that, especially if the
legalization of "the pill" and a wider use of
contraceptive devices can effectively reduce the
number of abortions, there will be no deep objection
to the continued legalization of abortion and the
tendency to keep in place those Buddhist kuyo
rituals that ritually memorialize fetuses and may
serve as a conscience-solace for parents. The status
quo, especially if numbers can be controlled, is
acceptable to a surprisingly wide spectrum of persons
engaged in discussions of religious and ethical
questions. To that degree at least--and in contrast
to American society--there is in Japan a fairly wide
public consensus on this matter.

IV. MORAL HIGH GROUND

Sometimes on moral questions a consensus forms
because the participants in a protracted debate are
exhausted or the issue no longer seems so important.
On other occasions, however, consensus comes into
being because something tagged as a "higher" value is
recognized and respected by those who had earlier
been partisans of differing positions; in such
instances the "higher" can begin to override the
former concern to sharpen differences. If a sense of
exhaustion happens to coincide with a sense of moving
towards a value deemed "higher" by both sides, the
potential for consensus becomes eminently realizable.

My view is that in Japan's consensus on abortion
today we can observe an instance where these two
motives have, in fact, coincided quite remarkably.
Interest in opening the old wounds is
minimal--especially given the high social cost of the
years of abortion-proscription. In addition, there is
a widely generalized perception that abortion,
however much regretted as a source of suffering, is
not only demographically necessary but even a means
for protecting what are felt to be "family" values.
In most basic terms it is necessary to prevent the
hemorrhaging of population in a land where the
density is already unusually high. More importantly,
however, abortion is perceived as a mechanism whereby
families can maximize the opportunities for their
children by a "rational" investment of resources in
the education and upbringing of a limited number of
children, usually two. It would not be too much to
say that in Japan the high emphasis placed upon
family life is itself a factor in the current
consensus in favor of keeping abortion legal and
available.

Religious institutions--perhaps Buddhist ones in
particular--articulate and reinforce these family
values in Japan. This means that in most instances
such

p. 537

institutions cannot be expected to move in any
significant way to curtail a practice they perceive
as a regrettable but necessary component in ensuring
the persistance of good family life and national
life. The consensus among religious groups to leave
abortion legal and available will, I suspect, remain
as long as it seems clear to the majority that,
however unpleasant and painful abortion may be,
family life in the aggregate is far better served by
having it available than by criminalizing it once
again. In my own conversations with Buddhist clergy
in Japan on this problem 1 detect two concerns, but
they are not, it should be noted, of sufficient
weight to prompt any strong movement for a change in
the rather liberalized law.

The first concern is that people not become
inured to abortion and trivialize it. Many Buddhists
are worried that, especially if there is no real
grief and ritual, a kind of personal degradation
becomes the pattern: from repeated abortions to a
flippant acceptance of the practice and from there to
a deterioration in a person's (read: woman's)
capacity for generalized sensitivity. This consists
in a "hardening," something serious because in the
psychoethical vocabulary of the Japanese this is a
matter of the kokoro(l) or "heart.'' If too many
people within society become persons who take
abortion as simply a matter of course, then the tenor
of society itself will change for the worse.

The legal and social admission of abortion as a
practice is different from being psychologically and
spiritually inured to it. Japanese Buddhists worry
more about the latter than the former and focus their
energies accordingly. Japanese Buddhists will often
go on to argue that the meaningful performance of
remembrance rites can, in fact, offset what is to be
most feared. That is, the ritual of mizuko kuyo, a
kind of "requiem mass" for the fetus, can, it is
claimed, do much to prevent this 'hardening" of the
kokoro and dehumanization.

The second concern is for a possible nexus
between the accessibility of abortion and an
appreciable growth in the numbers of persons who
adopt what is now called the "single" (shingaru(m))
style of the larger urban centers. Within Buddhist
periodicals, for instance, there can be found more
and more discussions of the single life-style as a
threat to family life. A decline is detected and
projected: from the extended family to the nuclear
family and from there to the single life-style and
the one-parent "family." It is important to note that
virtually every Buddhist institution is committed to
the superior values of the traditional family and is
itself dependent upon such a family's readiness to
support temples for the performance of ancestral
rites. Partially no doubt because of this, the single
life-style is pinpointed as a threat to societal
values in general. It is also seen as an index to the
growth of a dangerous form of (Western-style)
individualism, and fundamentally contrary to
traditional values that are at the same time
understood to be "national" values.

On the basis of things I have heard and read. it
probably can be predicted

p. 538

that, if the single-life style were to become really
widespread, the ready accessibility of abortion could
eventually come under attack. To date, however, this
does not seem likely. The anxiety about a nexus
between "liberated sex" and a changing structure of
the family has for now focused on the danger of
making "the pill'' readily available. If that anxiety
tends to deepen, it will more likely jeopardize the
legalization of the contraceptive pill rather than
the availability of abortion.

In fact, "conservative" views in Japan can at
times take strikingly unexpected turns--at least when
judged by what would be expected if they are thought
to be the equivalent of "conservative" views in
American public life. For instance, one privately
will often be told in Japan that the availability of
abortion is in fact protective of family values to
the degree that it makes unnecessary the birthing of
unwanted children. Then, because it is assumed,
first, that unwanted children are both pitiable and
more prone to become problematic for society itself
and, second, that family strength and well-being are
maximized when it can be assumed that all persons
within it are wanted and valued, logic seems to
compel the conclusion that abortion is needed as a
necessary "safety valve" to ensure familial,
societal, and national strength. Buddhists go on from
this to argue that, especially if the "hearts" of
persons who have had abortions can be "softened'' via
the rituals that keep alive a sensitivity to the
departed fetus as still alive in the Buddhist limbo
(sai no kawara(n)), the cumulative danger to society
is reduced.

In Japan, surprisingly then, it seems to be the
case that the most politically effective argument for
legalized abortion, even though it comes down in
muted forms, is based on fairly "conservative"
concerns for the quality of family life. To many
persons with fairly traditional religious and social
views in Japan it is difficult to imagine why
"conservative'' Americans can be found favoring a
public policy--the criminalization of abortion--that
will in effect result not only in giving birth to
obviously unwanted children but, beyond that, also to
the psychic pain, both individual and social, that is
bound to follow such a policy. In addition it is
assumed in Japan that there must be some close
correlations in any society among the degree to which
children are wanted, such children's perceptions of
being wanted and loved, the quality of the care they
receive, and whether or not their subsequent behavior
becomes deviant or criminal.

To criminalize abortion, thus, looks irrational
and socially foolhardy. To Japanese ready to express
candid views on these things, this scarcely seems to
be the direction in which American public life should
sensibly be moving today. Given the existing problem
of large numbers of unwanted children as well as the
exorbitant crime rate in America, those who push for
abortion's recriminalization appear to be courting
what to some Japanese looks like a kind of social
suicide. To some Japanese it is even somewhat
baffling why

p. 539

certain Americans, viewing themselves to be
"conservative" in their views of the family, do not
recognize that forcing others to have children they
do not really want is itself a morally questionable
stance.

Clearly that location called the "moral high
ground' can be approached from different directions.
What is interesting--and potentially instructive--in
the Japanese case is that interpretations of the
relationship between religion and abortion have not
been forced down the either/or chutes of "rights of
the unborn" or "rights of the woman." In part that is
undoubtedly because the Japanese traditional concern
for social order (chitsujo(e) ) still seems almost
automatically to take immediate precedence over any
public scenario of "rights" and "liberation."

V. ABORTION AND THE POLIS

I believe the chief value in the study of
Japanese thinking about abortion may be heuristic.
That is, in this way we can see a society permitting
abortion while avoiding interminable debate over
conflicting rights. In a sense we can see a society
that, through trial and error, has learned to opt for
access to abortion as a way of enhancing the quality
of social life itself. Neither the rights of the
individual fetus nor those of the individual woman
are high-lighted; instead these claims--often taken
in the West as "opposite"--are both seen as driven by
the ideology of individualism. There are other
reasons to legitimate abortion, reasons which, it is
felt, have to do with the quality of common life of
the society itself. The health of the larger society
is at issue.

Robert Nisbet grasped this point. As an advocate
of the contemporary relevance of the position on
these things held by ancient Greeks and Romans rather
than by medieval Christians, Nisbet found in the
Japanese case a ready instance of exactly what he had
in mind. In the entry on "abortion" in his
Prejudices: A Philosophical Dictionary, he wrote:

In the contemporary world it would be hard to
find a family system more honored and more important
in its authority than that of Japan. But abortion
there has for long been easily available.(n.13)

My own analysis has suggested that, although
Nisbet did not realize how historically complicated
things really had been in Japan and how painful had
been the process to legalize abortion there, he was
entirely accurate in his grasp of the nexus between
tolerance of abortion in Japan and the high
valorization of family life there today. That is, he
grasped that there is an argument for abortion based
upon familial and societal values, an argument
furthermore that is not hound to prioritize
individuals and individual rights.

Alasdair MacIntyre, in his Whose Justice? Which
Rationality? refers to "the unborn" in a way that
suggests how he reads the history of Europe very
differently from Nisbet. In depicting what he calls
the emergence of the "Au-

p. 540

gustinian alternative" to Aristotelianism, MacIntyre
locates the moral payoff of that alternative as
making itself evident in the following way:

The law of the civitas Dei requires a kind of
justice to the unborn which Aristotle's proposed
measures for controlling the size of the population
of a polis deny to them.(n.14)

It would be difficult to find a more pithy
statement of what many in the West have often held to
be how Christianity gained its own moral high ground,
a position assumed to be superior even to that of
Aristotle,

The problem, of course, is that the trajectory
right into individualism seems to have been prepared
at the same time. Augustine, says MacIntyre, had
found a way to require "a kind of justice to the
unborn" but he neglects to point out that in
Augustine the importance of the polis was at the same
time being drastically reduced. In his De nuptus et
concupiscentia, the Bishop Hippo, having declared
that childbearing is "the end and aim of marriage,"
goes on to judge that, unless they have that intent
of being fecund, a man and woman, however legally
married, are really only having sinful sex. Without
the aim of propagation a woman is just her "husband's
harlot" and the man is his own "wife's
adulterer."(n.15) Ultimately marriage is something for
the Church to define, not the state.

Once such views were injected into the
consciousness of the West--and later defined in such
a way that something uniquely "Western" and morally
"higher" was implied in their observance--it became
extremely difficult to go back and recapture
Aristotle's important and still valid point about
eugenics and the quality of life in the polis. That
point had been compromised, of course, because
Aristotle had viewed it, unnecessarily I think, as
something the polis must force upon its citizens. But
the Christians went beyond merely objecting to the
coercion. With their polemic against paganism,
Christians tended toward the obscuring of the view
that the polis might have eugenic concerns that are
legitimate and, in fact, ethically worthy. In this
way, what was important in Aristotle was effectively
obliterated by the "Augustinian alternative," and
with the articulation of that alternative the course
of the West was set.

If eugenics become a matter of consensus rather
than coercion, however, the picture changes
significantly. Then it appears to be possible to
avoid, on one side, the forced compliance that
Aristotle mandated and, on the other, the prizing of
individual rights--either to "life'' in the fetus'
case or to "choice" in the pregnant woman's--at the
expense of what is good for the larger social
entitily.(n.16) While I do not imply that the Japanese
have arrived at a perfect solution to these problems,
their present practice with respect to abortion and
the family avoids, I wish to suggest, some of the
most serious pitfalls of our own practices. In
addition, an understanding of how their

p. 541

practice has been put together as an instance of
moral "reasoning" is--however initially odd by our
usual criteria--itself a reason for studing it with
care.

NOTES

1. Kukai, Major Works, trans. Yoshito S. Hakeda (New
York: Columbia University Press, 1972), p. 125.
2. Ibid., p. 129.
3. See my The Karma of Words: Buddhism and the
Literary Arts in Medieval Japan (Berkeley and Los
Angeles: University of California Press. 1983).
pp. 26-48.
4. Watsuji Tetsuro zenshu, vol. 5 (Tokyo: Iwanami
Shoten), pp. 90-172. (Original version published
in 1927.) See also Yuasa Yasuo, Kindai Nihon
tetsugaku to jitsuzon shiso (Tokyo: Sobunsha,
1970), pp. 113-116.
5. Yuasa Yasuo implicitly suggests as much in his
own interpretation of "jissen" (praxis) as
something embracing also the physical-spirtual
disciplines (shugyo(o)) (Lecture in Department of
Ethics, Tokyo University, June 11, 1985).
6. See my The Karma of Words. chap. 2.
7. Jeffrey Stout, Ethics After Babel: The Languages
of Morals and Their Discontents(Boston. Beacon
Press, 1985), pp. 74ff.
8. For example, Imai Jun and Ozawa Tomio. eds.,
Nihon shiso ronsoshi (Tokyo: Perikansha. 1979).
9. William R. LaFleur, [tentative title] Liquid Life:
Budddhism, Abortion, and the Family in Japan.
Published studies on mizuko in English to date
include: Anne Page Brooks, "Mizuko kuyo and
Japanese Buddhism, "Japanese Journal of Religious
Studies 8, nos. 3-4(September-December 1981):119-147;
Emiko Ohnuki-Tierney, Illness and Culture in
Contemporary Japan: An Anthropological View
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984).
pp. 78-81; Hoshino Eiki and Takeda Dosho. "Indebtedness
and Comfort: The Undercurrents of Mizuko Kuyo in
Contemporary Japan." Japanese Journal of Religious
Studies 14, no.4 (December 1987): 305-320;and
Bardwell Smith. "Buddhism and Abortion in Contemporary
Japan: Mizuko kuyo and the Confrontation with Death,"
Japanese Journal of Religious Studies 15, no. 1
(March 1988):3-24. There is, of course, an extensive
bibliography in Japanese.
10. Robert N. Bellah, Tokugawa Religion: The Values
of Pre-Industrial Japan (Glencoe. Illinois: The
Free Press, 1957), p. 19.
11.For the incredulous, somewhat appalled response
of a Japanese woman legal expert present at
European debates trying to pinpoint the exact time
of a soul's entry into the body, see Nakatani
Kinko, "Chuzetsu, Dataizai no Toraekata," in Nihon
Kazoku Keikaku Renmei, ed.. Onna no jinken to sei
(Tokyo: Komichi Shobo, 1984), p. 29.
12. See, for example. Anzai Atsuko, "Mizuko kuyo'
shobai no ikagawashisa," in Nihon Kazoku Keigaku
Renmei, ed., Kanashimi o sabakemasu ka (Tokyo:
Ningen no Kagakusha, 1983), pp.137-138. The
critique of tatari from within Buddhism, however,
is also strong. There is widespread censure of it,
for instance, in a special issue devoted to this
problem in the interdenominational Buddhist
journal Daihorin, vol. 54(JuIy 1987). For details
see my larger study.
13.Robert Nisbet, Prejudices: A Philosophical
Dictionary (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard
University Press, 1982), p. 1.
14.Alasdair MacIntyre, Whose Justice? Which
Rationality? (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame
Press, 1988), p. 163.
15.Augustine, ''Of Marriage and Concupiscence," in
Marcus Dods, ed.. The works of Aurelius Augustine.
Bishop of Hippo, trans. Peter Holmes (Edinburgh: T
& T Clark, 1985), vol. 12, p. 116.
16.For a discussion of how, in fact, history shows
there is nothing absolute about "respect for life"
in the West's religions, set John A. Miles, Jr.,
"Jain and Judaeo-Christian Respect for Life,"
Journal of the American Academy of Religion 44.
no. 3 (1976): 453-457.

p. 542

a 空海 i 水子
b 三教指归 j 生长的家
c 景戒 k 崇
d 原始佛教实践哲学 l 心
e 秩序 m 
f 圣德太子 n 赛河原
g 十七条宪法 o 修行
h 供养