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This article explores the legal norms and regulatory mechanisms in Japan that structure child welfare placement decisions, focusing specifically on the legal category of “parental rights.” It is suggested that the ways child welfare officers and caregivers understand the concept of “rights”—both those of the biological parent(s) and the child—construe kinship relationships as problems to be managed, but with a particular orientation toward what is called in the article the temporality of attachment. Child welfare caseworkers’ understandings of legal categories, processes, and forms of documentation (such as the Japanese family registry) produce particular forms of kinship that prioritize a child's possible future relationship with an absent parent, above and beyond the day-to-day relationships children might develop with alternative caregivers such as foster parents. Despite the fact that the author's Japanese interlocutors often described kinship as an immutable relationship of blood ties, the author shows how kinship is in fact produced through specific encounters between (mostly absent) parents and their children, child welfare caseworkers, and foster and institutional caregivers, scaffolded by their engagement with legal and bureaucratic regimes. The article explores what parenthood means within Japanese child welfare, both as a temporalized form of relationality and as a set of legally structured claims to the right to care.

Youth who grow up in Japanese child welfare institutions (‘children’s homes’ or ‘orphanages’) are socially and structurally marginalized, and many have pasts characterized by neglect and abandonment. In a contemporary context in which young people in Japan are encouraged to think of themselves as agentive, ‘self-responsible’ subjects, I argue that Japan’s child welfare system disproportionately depends on chance in shaping positive or negative outcomes for state wards. Japan’s system of care and emancipation from the child welfare system is, I suggest, rooted in a non-empiricist view of experience: despite the fact that most of us depend on our past experiences to guide our expectations for the future, the child welfare system demands that youth leaving care break with a past of dependency and social marginalization to care for themselves with minimal or no state assistance. This article focuses on Tanpopo, a self-help group for people with putatively common experiences receiving care in a child w...

The articles in this special section address the stakes for welfare and well-being when normative ideas surrounding family intersect with state policy and practice in Japan. The central argument mo...

This article explores the unintended consequences of the ways scholars and activists take up the science of child development to critique the Japanese child welfare system. Since World War II, Japan has depended on a system of child welfare institutions (baby homes and children's homes) to care for state wards. Opponents of institutional care advocate instead for family foster care and adoption, and cite international research on the developmental harms of institutionalizing newborns and young children during the "critical period" of the first few years. The "critical period" is understood as the time during which the caregiving a child receives shapes neurological development and later capacity to build interpersonal relationships. These discourses appear to press compellingly for system reform, the proof resting on seemingly objective knowledge about child development. However, scientific evidence of harm is often mobilized in tandem with arguments that the welfare system is rooted in Japanese culture, suggesting durability and resistance to change. Further, reform efforts that use universalizing child science as "proof" of the need for change are prone to slip into deterministic language that pathologizes the experiences of people who grew up in the system. This article explores the reasons why deterministic models of child development, rather than more open-ended models like neuroplasticity, dominate activist rhetorics. It proposes a concept, "ethics of engagement," to advocate for attention to multiple scales and domains through which interpersonal ties are experienced and embodied over time. Finally, it suggests the possibility of child welfare reform movements that take seriously the need for caring and transformative relationships throughout life, beyond the first "critical years," that do not require deterministic logics of permanent delay or damage.

Child welfare institutions in Japan provide accommodation for children whose parents cannot care for them. A recent movement seeks to make them small enough in scale to provide household-like care with deep attachments between children and staff. Based on participant-observation ethnographic research at one institution, this chapter, by Kathryn Goldfarb, focuses on the difficulties the director and staff encountered in trying to provide homes for children and the experiments in care that they developed to overcome them. Bodily interactions—a few intensely physical and affective practices such as food preparation, eating, sleeping, and bathing together—constituted the nexus of staff-child interactions. At first they were designed to produce a sense of community and a fictive kin network, but when food preparation was relegated to part-time staff, many workers felt that an important emotional bond created by eating together had disappeared.