Ritualization Of Pregnancy And Childbirth Before The Meiji Restoration (1868)

The area of ritual and state in modern Japanese religious history is a very rich one. Research on the symbolism of state rites has been a topic of enduring interest, as have functionalist studies of the significance of state rites, especially Shinto ritual, in the support of Japanese nationalism and the state before 1945. Speaking of ritualization and de-ritualization calls attention to the fact that a givensocial practice may be the focus of much ritual in one era, but that the practice may notnecessarily have always been so ritualized. Further, the fact that it is ritualized at onepoint in time should not lead us to assume that it will necessarily always be the object of ritual for all future time. When the state takes an interest in the practice in question, theearlier ritual practitioners may be displaced, replaced with state ritualists, or the state's involvement may lead to a de-ritualization of the practice, the removal from it of ritual. Depending upon the degree of continued cultural significance of the formerly ritualized practice, it-or some aspect of it-may later be ritualized again, depending upon the ability of entrepreneurial ritualists to create a sense of need for ritual and upon their ability successfully to commoditize and spread the rites they create in response to the 'need' so created.

During the Tokugawa era (and for much of previous Japanese history), midwifery was practiced outside any state framework. Pregnancy and childbirth were extensively ritualized, and the midwife's role was highly ritualistic in character. The birth of a woman's first child constituted a rite of passage into the community of fully adult women, raising her status within her affinal family and cementing her membership in it. This traditional mode of birth required women to accumulate specialized, sex-segregated knowledge based on their own experience and transmitted over generations to younger women. It was expected that a special relationship would be formed between a child and the midwife who delivered it, conferring upon the child duties of gift-giving. The Role of the Japanese State in Ritual and Ritualization attendance at the child's subsequent rites of passage upon the midwife.

A woman's first pregnancy was initially recognized by a rite 'binding' her to the midwife expected to deliver the child, in which the midwife tied a wide belt or belly band around the pregnant woman's abdomen during the fourth or fifth month of pregnancy, a practice accompanied by feasting, where the midwife was treated as the guest of honor. Typically the band contained a charm for safe childbirth; the charms showed much regional variation, but cloth from the husband's loincloth was one widely used. From that time on, the woman was subject to food taboos specific to pregnancy (again with much regional variation), and was instructed to keep the band tight, to prevent the fetus from growing too large. Midwives were typically women who themselves had borne several children, who practiced and resided in the same village as the women they served, not generally travelling widely to deliver women outside their own areas.

Their ritualized character derived in no small part from beliefs surrounding the fetus and newborn children, according to which both represented the transit from another world of a soul into human form in this world in the process the midwife was no less than a psychopomp, a conductor of souls, and master of their transition from the liminal state within the womb to a full-fledged member of the human community. Here it is important to note which moments of the journey were singled out for ritualization, as they do not necessarily correspond neatly with western practice, and it would be an error to import assumptions from outside the Japanese cultural sphere. The idea of a 'moment of conception' attracted no ritual or ideological attention. The binding of the iwata obi marks the pregnancy's public visibility, the moment from which a woman entered the liminal status of the ninpu a 'pregnant woman'.

The existence of the fetus is recognized from this stage, called by a number of regionally specific names, not all of which incorporate the character ko or ji which would mark it as distinctively human. There is much evidence to suggest that the fetus before birth was not regarded as fully human; explication of this evidence may proceed more smoothly on the basis of a short discussion of premodern practices of contraception, abortion, and infanticide. All three of these practices were widespread in Tokugawa Japan. Although much controversy surrounds the question of the weight any of them should be given in accounting for the stability of population figures during the era, no one seriously argues that they did not exist. In the absence of reliable contraceptive barrier devices, contraceptive and abortion practice probably relied heavily on locally-variant pharmacopeia and magical means, prolonged breast feeding, assisted by patterns of seasonal migration by men of some areas for work, so that males could be absent for long periods.

Contraceptive pharmacopeia and botanical abortifacients were the province of the midwife, and in many cases it was she who carried out infanticide if the former two measures failed. It is important to recognize that in a premodern context contraception, abortion, and infanticide were not alternatives to each other in the sense of clearly bounded choices an individual might make (in any case it would not necessarily have been the pregnant or newly postpartum woman making any such 'choice'). Instead, contraception, abortion, and infanticide existed along a continuum, corresponding to the continued liminal status of the newborn. Newborn not carried to term, whether as the result of abortion or miscarriage, did not typically receive the full funeral rites due an adult; generally they received none at all, though there are scattered cases of memorialization of both. Both the shogunate and the domains repeatedly inveighed against both abortion and infanticide, but the frequency of farmine and widespread poverty among the peasantry meant that numerous births constituted too great an economic hardship for many communities to bear, leading them to resort to both practices throughout the period. Neither was frequently punished, and neither was heavily stigmatized by religious institutions.