Event

Around 1900, at least 97 percent of homicide victims in Japan were newborn children. Official statistics obscured this fact by reporting only a handful of infanticides each year, but they also preserved it in the guise of impossibly frequent stillbirths and distorted sex ratios. We argue that this striking failure to enforce the law was not reflective of insufficient state capacity. The false stillbirth reports were not primarily a matter of subjects deceiving the agents of the state, for those agents frequently knew that some share of the stillbirth reports they received in fact referred to an infanticide. With some exceptions, they made no attempt to find out whether a particular stillbirth report was real or false. This interaction is best understood as a performance of law-abidance, jointly delivered by subjects and officials to reconcile two conflicting values—the omote (official reality) of the state’s legal protection of newborns and the naishō (tacit arrangement) of household autonomy over family planning and reproduction. We argue that performative law-abidance, itself a legacy of early modern political practices, was embraced by both state and population to negotiate the process of statebuilding. Creating spaces of autonomy where deviance was tolerated had benefits for both sides. It made it easier for subjects to accept the authority of the Meiji state and its expanding agenda, while also permitting the state not to stake its authority on the full observance of every law.