\u3000A notice by Dr. Noboru Kikuta, an obstetrician and gynecologist in Ishinomaki City, Miyagi Prefecture, was published in the Ishinomaki Hibi Shimbun and Ishinomaki Shimbun on April 17, 1973: \u201cUrgent! Seeking a newborn baby boy to raise as my own.\u201d Kikuta had been persuading women who wanted abortions to give their children up for adoption instead, in an effort to prevent the loss of these children\u2019s lives and find comfortable living environments. In reality, what he was conducting were \u201cstraw bed adoptions,\u201d whereby the child that was born would be registered as the child of the adoptive parents in their family register from the start, without undergoing the adoption procedures. We now know that straw bed adoptions were practiced not only by Dr. Kikuta, but in places throughout Japan. The reasons for this varied, from wanting to hide the pregnancy from family or those around them, to knowing it would be difficult for them to provide for the child. Some did not want to add a child to their family register.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
When giving a child up for adoption through official means, the child, once born, must first be placed in the birth parents\u2019 family register. Family registers are used in Japan to register and notarize a person\u2019s family relations from when they are born to when they die. Family register affairs are conducted by municipalities, and in the past were generally open to the public, which meant that anyone could pay a handling fee to view someone else\u2019s family register and request a certificate of the family register or certificate of individual records. A 1976 amendment of the law abolished this open-viewing system, requiring those requesting a certificate of family register or certificate of individual records to give a reason for doing so. Even then, however, there was no end to the misuse of this system, with many obtaining unauthorized copies of others\u2019 family registers. (The 2007 amendment to the law tightened the requirements and procedures for requesting a copy of a third party\u2019s certificate of family register.) Thus, in an era when family registers could be seen by anyone, straw bed adoptions were the only method available to those who wanted to conceal their pregnancies and keep it hidden from their family registers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Reference: Nihon no Kazoku to Koseki (Family and Family Registry in Japan) <\/em>[2019], Miyuki Shimoebisu, University of Tokyo Press<\/p>\n\n\n\n