Unloving Mothers: Jesuit Knowledge Production on Abortion and Infanticide in Japan in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries*

Abstract

Jesuit Luís Fróis's 1585 Tratado das contradições e diferenças de costumes (Treatise on the contradictions and differences in customs), a text that summarised the dissimilarities between Japan and Southern Europe for newly arrived missionaries, discussed in this manner abortions and infanticides. Thanks to more than 600 couplets that contrasted European and Japanese practices, this text is commonly described as normalising numerous aspects of Japanese culture and, therefore, as striving to relativise culture in general.2 The apparently neutral tone of these quoted couplets however dissembles the history of Jesuit endeavours to eradicate both practices in the country.

Even if Jesuit literature from Japan stated that abortions and infanticides were commonplace, like Fróis did, it did not report often about it.3 This article uses these accounts as a case study to analyse the strategies of knowledge production about Japan, by European Jesuit missionaries in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. It analyses the references to abortions and infanticides to identify which narratives the missionaries created about them, how they changed through time, and why. To do so, it considers the Catholic worldview that the Jesuits brought from Europe, but also the wider discourse they were creating on Japanese people, and their strategies of evangelisation.

Although the Jesuit corpus often featured children as relevant actors,4 discourses on abortions and infanticides focused almost exclusively on the women involved, ignoring the foetuses and only very rarely considering the infants. Indeed, the missionaries' narratives discussed Japanese women as “mothers,” and, in time, attributed practices of abortion and infanticide to their unwillingness to raise children, their poverty, their incorrect beliefs, and, finally, to their incorrect emotional practices of motherly love.5 While the precise reasons behind this phenomena were complex, scholarly consensus nowadays is that affection (or lack thereof) had little to do with these acts, which were far from being an exception worldwide.6

Practices of abortions and especially infanticide in Japan have been the object of much debate, although research suggests that they were not quantitatively significant as previously believed.7 While references to these practices can be traced back at least to tenth century, the Edo period (ca. 1603–1868) might have seen a significant increment of their incidence.8 Most of the relevant historical documents date to this latter era, when the Tokugawa shogunate and many domains issued bans against them.9 An overview of the vocabulary used for the phenomena approximately during the decades of 1860–1870s indicates that different attitudes towards abortion and infanticides existed in Japan, even if they were carried out in most of the country.10 Traditionally, poverty had been singled out as their cause,11 especially due to famines, but maintaining the family's social status and its estate by controlling expenditure were also important preoccupations.12 Religious and folklore studies have offered additional explanations, suggesting for instance the desire to conceal adultery, or preoccupations about women's health in the case of abortions.13 Regarding regions where these practices were accepted, there was the perception that infants could be returned to the spiritual world of the kami whence they had come, with terms such modosu (モドス to give back) used to indicate infanticide.14 Buddhist cosmology, too, could inform these practices: according to so-called funerary Buddhism,15 the Japanese stem family (ie 家) required only one descendant to grant a good afterlife to its members, by worshipping them as ancestors.16 This is the reason why such practices did not seem to be selecting on grounds of sex, but aimed at a balance among the living children. Subsequent sons and daughters could be perceived as a drain on the family's resources, so the correct and responsible practice towards the stem family was to “thin them out” (mabiki 間引き) and return them to the cycle of reincarnations, to wait for a better chance at life.17 If the impact of abortions and infanticides in the Edo period is difficult to measure, even more complex is the study of the years of civil war of the sixteenth century. Some of funerary Buddhism's key narratives on death existed already during this time,18 suggesting that the part of the stem family's perspective, too, was already current.19 No specific study has been done, to my knowledge, on medieval Kyūshū, the region where the Jesuit wrote most of their references to these practices. Nevertheless, eastern Kyūshū (Buzen, Bungo, and Hyūga) was infamous in popular culture for its infanticides.20

When the Jesuit missionaries discussed abortions and infanticides in Japan as an anomaly, they applied preconceived notions originating from their cultural background. Scholarship has shown that abortion and infanticide were common to many cultures throughout history.21 Regardless of the opinion held by Fróis and the other Jesuits, these practices were undertaken in Western Europe since antiquity, too, although Christian theology struggled to find a single, coherent reading of the phenomenon. Infanticides were associated foremost with women, Jewish people, and heretics, and thus easily with the Devil.22 If the “monstrous” Jewish woman who ate children was a recurring trope, the figure of the homicidal mother (or midwife) in the Christian imagination coalesced with that of the witch.23 Indeed, between the beginning of the sixteenth century and the end of the seventeenth, anxieties around infanticides and abortions grew exponentially in both Catholic and Protestant Europe. Following a tendency to equate sin with crime, Holy Roman Emperor Charles V's 1538 law reform made abortion after quickening (i.e., when the mother felt the foetus moving, considered the moment when it acquired a soul) an offence punishable by death and comparable to infanticide.24 Tridentine stricter social control spurred the intensification of the persecutions of these acts: infanticide, previously considered extremely difficult to prove and thus rarely indicted, become a capital offence and, in time, equivalent to intentional murder.25 This systematic prosecution supported the naturalisation of motherly love as limitless, and thus as a common human trait found in all cultures. Any woman that did not wish to prioritise her children was expected to defend her decision strenuously, and could be accused of cruelty even for choosing a spiritual life instead.26

As this article will analyse the strategies of creation of knowledge about abortions and infanticides in Japan by the Jesuit missionaries, it is important to note that, albeit considering them both sins, they clearly distinguished the two practices. Fróis's quotation above easily illustrates this by dedicating to each one a different couplet. However, just like the Japanese of the time, the missionaries did not consider birth as a particular discriminating moment. If the Europeans identified quickening as the moment after which the killing of a soul (foetus or infant) took place, Japanese belonging to infanticide-admitting cultures believed that “a child's acquisition of human status was a gradual process premised on the parents' decision to nurture it,” on which the moment of birth had a secondary effect.27

The development of Jesuit knowledge about abortions and infanticides in Japan is difficult to map for the following six years, due to lacking and somewhat contradicting sources.33 A change in perception seems to have taken place in 1550, when the group first arrived in Yamaguchi. In a history written in the 1580s, the Historia de Japam (History of Japan),34 veteran missionary Fróis stated that, while preaching in the streets, the Jesuits identified the three major sins of the Japanese as idolatry, sodomy, and “women [who] killed their children when they gave birth to them, to not raise them; or drank medicine to abort them, which is an enormous cruelty and inhumanity.”35 The reliability of this piece of information, reported by a text written more than thirty years later when none of its actors were alive anymore, could be called into question. Indeed, no other Jesuit text reported any preaching against infanticides and abortions at this junction.36 Fróis's Historia might be an exception to this trend due to its singular sources: some oral accounts by Torres' companion, Brother Juan Férnandez, and a written document by the same Brother that was found as the Historia was being composed, now lost.37 Fróis's use of these testimonies supports therefore the interpretation that the Jesuits, in 1551, had concluded that infanticide and abortions were carried out in Japan also by the laity, and believed that they were relevant enough to be identified as one of the main three sins of Japanese people.

The specific vocabulary used, instead, seems borrowed from a later period: the idea of cruelty appeared in this context only after 1565, including in a letter penned by Fróis, as shown below. This suggests that it was a product of the years when the Historia was written, rather than Xavier's opinion.38 At the same time, “cruel” had been common descriptors for women who committed infanticides, and for non-Christian peoples in general, since the Middle Ages.39 The idea of cruelty was culturally dependent, and had known a renewal in the West from the end of the medieval period, especially in relation to the sexual sphere and to cannibalism. When condemned, cruelty was “irrational and nonhuman violence,” such as that of demons and animals; when seen positively, it was the violence exercised by the tribunals of law.40 In the case of the abortions and infanticides, that belonged to the first group, it was matched to a lack of humanity and thus contributed to their association to the devil and gentility. It followed that cruelty conceptualised in this manner could not be a product of love, differently from other kinds of violence.41

The accuracy of the remaining information of this passage of the Historia, that the missionaries in 1551 attributed infanticides and abortions to the unwillingness of women to raise their children, is questionable too. The lack of previous discussion of this supposed inclination of Japanese women (or nuns) suggests that Fróis here employed an interpretation that would be in use only years later, just as he did with the vocabulary. In any case, no reasons behind this unwillingness to raise children was mentioned. It was only later, therefore, that the Jesuits addressed the causes behind these acts, by creating two specific narratives. Indeed, following Xavier's departure, the small mission continued to produce knowledge on the cultural landscape of Japan, or at least on how it appeared from their bases: Yamaguchi; Ikitsuki and Hirado in northern Kyūshū; and especially Bungo and its capital city Funai (modern-day Ōita) in eastern Kyūshū, which became their headquarters in 1556. As they strove to understand better Japanese culture to devise how to counteract non-Christian practices, the missionaries came to attribute the killing of infants and abortions to two kinds of causes: those belonging to the religious sphere and those belonging to the socio-economic one.

The Summary, focusing as it did on the kami and Buddha, unsurprisingly assigned only religious causes to abortions and infanticides. Other documents glossed over the supposed influences of the Devil, to point instead to socio-economic causes. I argued that the reason of this divergence is not to be found in a change of understanding of the missionaries, but rather in the fact that these later documents were letters penned with different audiences in mind, even if the missionaries could not anticipate exactly how their correspondence would circulate. One of the Summary contributors, Baltasar Gago, offered an example of this. In 1555, he wrote three different letters mentioning infanticide, making it the first time since 1549 that these practices appeared in correspondence. The two letters destined to his superiors in Rome and to the King of Portugal attributed them to socio-economic causes; Gago probably expected them to be circulated widely. The third letter instead, written explicitly for his fellow Jesuits only, mentioned the phenomenon religious' dimension as well, echoing some concepts of the Summary.48 The examples provided by these three texts show how the missionaries selected carefully what knowledge to transmit, according to the specific objectives that their texts pursued. At the same time, they could present different information in a similar framing: all three letters have a marked edifying structure that aims to prioritise the bright (imagined) future of evangelisation in Japan and the important steps taken by the missionaries to avoid further sin among the population.

This passage highlights some elements that the Jesuit narrative was acquiring. First, although the missionaries had recognised a religious dimension to the phenomenon as shown by the Summary, this connection appeared in texts destined for the missionaries' eyes only. An explicit discussion of the power that the Devil held over the Japanese might have been too disedifying for the general European readership. Gago's intention when focusing on other causes arguably lessened the perception of a lasting influence of gentile worldviews on baptised people: a notion of this kind might have implied that Japanese people were not so inclined towards Christianity as initially believed, which would jeopardise the political and economic support for the mission, or, worse, imply that the Jesuits were not very efficient missionaries.

Second, once infanticide reappeared in Jesuit correspondence, the matter was framed as about to be solved, by the creation of the foundling home, and devoid of its twin, the still unresolved issue of abortion. Gago therefore appeared eager to discuss infanticide only when it could become part of an edifying narrative. Indeed, it is telling that from 1549 to 1555 the matter of abortions and infanticides disappeared from Jesuit letters, even if both the Summary and the Historia indicate that at the time evangelisation engaged with it. This suggests that the missionaries needed constructive narratives to present these practices, if they did not want to disavow the glowing depiction of the Japanese people that they had cultivated. If initially this was provided by the polemics against rival religious specialists, later support from the daimyō allowed them to frame knowledge on Japanese practices of infanticide within their efforts to run a foundling home.

The examination of the phenomenon of infanticide from an emotional point of view seems to appear here suddenly. However, a latter letter by Brother Gonzalo Fernández, who had visited Japan three times between 1557 and 1559, suggests that in those years preoccupations with the Japanese ability to love in general were rising among the missionaries. Writing to two other Brothers, Fernández concluded his brief description of the practice of infanticides declaring that “since in this land the gentiles do not feel love for one another, they declare that the thing that most surprises them is [the hospital for the foundlings and the sick].”62

Lack of love among the Japanese could be a major problem for the Jesuits' plans of evangelisation,63 because love (caritas) was considered a key virtue for Christians. In medieval times, the Gospels' two commandments of love were elaborated as an exhortation to hold virtuous feelings towards oneself, one's neighbours, and God, which augmented one another.64 Human beings were to be loved as God's creatures first of all, making caritas “an ‘emotional ethic’ designed to promote a particular type of community relation in early modern Europe,”65 which directed the actions of the faithful. The Jesuit missionaries were keen to encourage caritas' practices in Japan too.66 Moreover, the Japanese purported inability to love was perceived in a gendered manner, although this categorisation emerged explicitly only in the 1580s, with Fróis' Tratado and Alessandro Valignano's writings.67 If supposedly loveless converts represented a problem of untold consequences for a burgeoning Christian community, unloving mothers could be a particularly horrifying prospect for the missionaries.

Christians had framed abortion as a sin against caritas since at least 100 ce.68 As the preoccupations with infanticides grew in sixteenth-century Europe, a specific, historically and culturally defined category of “mother”69 was universalised by the early modern Catholic worldview, creating specific assumptions in the missionaries too. A mother was expected to raise and love (amar) her children regardless of economic difficulties and social condemnations tied to sex out of wedlock. This image did not admit practices of abortion and infanticide, and their prosecution too supported the naturalisation of motherly love as limitless.70 The missionaries' adherence to the belief that maternal love was a natural, shared trait of humankind was illustrated by the labelling of abortions and infanticides as “inhuman” specifically.

It appears therefore that two different narratives were circulating in the mission from the end of the 1550s, regarding motherly love: an older one, which denied (most) Japanese women's capability of loving their children, and fed into the perception that all Japanese people had a shortcoming in this matter; and a second one, which shifted the focus on the correctness of the women's emotional practices, rather than denying their ability to love altogether. Vilela's above-mentioned words clarify this difference: “they are very sensual in loving them.” This statement had roots in the early modern Catholic understandings of the dangers intrinsic to motherly love when it took a mundane dimension only, and the need to sublimate it into the more generalised love of one's own children as creatures of God.71 Unmoderated maternal feelings were perceived as a threat to the mother's salvation, by distancing her from God.72 The refusal to discipline children, mentioned in the same passage, was another practice attributed to unchecked love, as it did not dispel their sinful tendencies and thus stunted their spiritual growth.73 While this second narrative recognised the love of Japanese mothers,74 it held it to be in need to be changed according to Christian principles.

Explicit mentions of abortions and infanticides in Jesuit correspondence appeared extremely rarely between 1560, when the Bungo hospital was closed, and 1579, when the Jesuit Visitor, Alessandro Valignano, arrived in the country. The extant references from this period, too, are embedded in edifying narratives: in 1561, the Christian community of Funai was presented as an example of successful evangelisation on motherly love. The converts were depicted as choosing to stage a nativity play that included the Biblical story of King Solomon, who discovered who was the true mother of an infant by threatening to kill it and observing which woman acted distressed, showing that she loved it.80 Most of the references to infanticides after this year were produced by Froís, and suggest that preaching on the matter continued. Actual instances of abortions and infanticides were solved satisfactorily, with the reinstatement of the penitent in the community after punishment, if alive, or in Heaven, if dead. For instance, a woman who died of an abortion in Ikitsuki (northern Kyūshū) was described as appearing to a young man in a dream, to let everyone know she had been forgiven by God before dying and could be buried in the Christian cemetery.81

In 1585, Fróis boasted that in Nagasaki “the fear of God” was such that it had put an end to all abortions.92 A few years later, Catholic Japanese women would finally become the perfect embodiment of motherly love. The last narrative produced by the mission focused on the martyred mothers produced by the shogunate's seventeenth-century bans of Christianity, that would soon put an end to the mission as well. In this context, Japanese Catholic women were finally depicted as able to embody the perfect ideal of mother who loves her children to the point of facilitating their death for the highest spiritual aspiration, martyrdom.93 Needless to say, these narratives too had an edifying objective. Widely circulated in Europe, they fostered an image of perfect mothers, grateful for their children's divine recall to heaven so young and innocent, as was expected of martyrs chosen by God.94

The analysis of the Jesuit narratives surrounding abortions and infanticides offers a case study to observe the process of knowledge creation by the missionaries on a topic that was held to be very disedifying and, due to its perceived ubiquity, risked jeopardising the depiction of the Japanese as ready to embrace Christianity. This analysis showed that the missionaries declined their knowledge according to their readers and to the motivations behind their writing, but in specific manners, not limited to their wish to send an edifying message. Almost all but the oldest references to infanticides and abortions appeared contextualised within specific missionary approaches, which offered specific solutions. It was precisely these latter that guided the framing of the issue and the identification of its causes. The missionaries focused on a spiritual resolution when practical ones, such as the creation of a foundling home, became impossible to actuate. The wish for a better emotional evangelisation of Christian women favoured the emergence of the overarching interpretation of mothers who were unloving not because they were naturally cruel, but because they were ignorant. This understanding also exhorted all missionaries (and their patrons) to strive to convert the Japanese as soon as possible, so to finally put an end to these practices. With the creation of the major Christian communities of Japan, the only possible representation of specific acts of abortions and infanticides by converts became an edifying one, where punishment was followed by reconciliation, either in this world or the other. As the narrative of martyrdom prevailed over all others during the persecutions and extinction of the Christian presence in the country, the image of the unloving mother finally disappeared, substituted by the stalwart Christian heroine who assured her children's salvation by prioritising her love for God.