This magnificent book takes up the controversial subject of infanticide in early modern Japan. Historians and demographers have long understood that infanticide—known euphemistically as mabiki or “thinning”—was quite common in the Tokugawa era, and that it was more widely practiced in some regions than in others. But they have not agreed on why. Was it the last resort of the desperate poor or the coldly rational strategy of the upwardly mobile? Through virtuosic statistical analysis of population registers and a careful reading of an array of primary sources, including pamphlets, petitions, votive tablets, pregnancy reports, and policy memos, Fabian Drixler addresses this question and many others. The result is an expansive argument that opens up new terrain in both population studies and Japanese history.
Focusing on “eastern Japan,” roughly northeast Kantō and southern Tōhoku, Drixler argues that infanticide was even more common than historians previously recognized. Before 1790, a combination...
