<b>Why child adoption is taken as dark and unhappy in Japan?</b>

DOI
  • Takeuchi Michiru
    Graduate School of Human and Environmental Studies, Kyoto University
  • Rakugi Akiko
    Faculty of Health and Welfare Science, Okayama Prefectural University

Bibliographic Information

Other Title
  • <b>養子の暗いイメージは、いかにして形成されたのか</b>
  • A historical consideration
  • その歴史的考察

Abstract

How dark and unhappy conception of child adoption was historically formed in Japan was discussed in this paper. In the Tokugawa period, until the mid of the nineteenth century, child adoption was widely used to maintain a lineage of household not only in a governing class but in common people and was taken positively along with a notion that it was sometimes more advantageous even for a first son than taking over his own household. It was emphasized in this paper that a household in the Tokugawa period, characterized as a business organization, shrank the variety of business that had been done in it in the process of modernization and finally became a current form of family in which nothing but child rearing remains as a business. Importantly, this process has proceeded without sufficient development of individualism by which a family is underpinned in the West. It follows that a child who is not reared by real parents tends to be regarded as unhappy because he/she cannot identify him/herself either as a member of any family or as an individual person. Also, adoptive parents who cannot enjoy child rearing unless taking over such a child tend to be looked at with dark impression.

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Details 詳細情報について

  • CRID
    1390001205484789376
  • NII Article ID
    130004624407
  • DOI
    10.11245/jjgd.23.81
  • ISSN
    21854718
  • Text Lang
    ja
  • Data Source
    • JaLC
    • CiNii Articles
    • KAKEN
  • Abstract License Flag
    Disallowed

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