Lord, Lord, Lord, I didn’t think
I could be a daddy
That flat stomach I’ve loved
So much is going to grow full
PART OF YOU
If it was any other
man’s, I could kill
it, but it’s yours
Honey. It’s yours, and
you’re so special to
me, such a good
kind man. How are we
going to kill a part
of you? How can I
kill a part of a man
I love so much?
We’re going to kill part
of ourselves if we do
that Honey. We’re going
to kill part of ourselves.
Mizuko ("water child") is a Japanese term for a dead fetus. At one time the characters were read “suiji” and the term was a posthumous name given after death. Mizuko kuyō is a ceremony for those who have had a miscarriage, stillbirth, or abortion; the practice originated as an offering to Jizō, a bodhisattva believed to protect children. ("Mizuko jizo" literally means the water baby's Bodhisattva, a potential Buddha who declines nirvana in order to serve mankind.) The modern form only developed after World War II and has become particularly visible since the 1970s with the creation of shrines devoted solely to this ritual. It is unclear whether it is a historically authentic Buddhist practice, and specifics vary from temple to temple, sect to sect, and individual to individual. A tiny statuette, a mizuko jizo, is placed at the shrine for regular consolation. (In recent decades it has also come to refer to aborted fetuses who are stranded on the banks of the river that according to Japanese Buddhist tradition separates the worlds of life and death. Because the fetuses are too young to have souls, they need to be guided across to the land of the dead.) Formerly, the belief was that even newborns were not full human beings and could only have a relationship with the family after the parents performed the proper rites of passage; and infanticide was a common form of family planning for reasons including sex selection. Abortion is legal in Japan during the first five months of pregnancy, the last legal restrictions being removed in 1948. However, birth control pills have been virtually banned for a variety of reasons, including a concern that their use instead of condoms could contribute to the spread of AIDS, worries over their safety, fears that they encouraged promiscuity, and the notion that they might depress a birth rate that was already considered too low. As a result, tens of thousands of mizuko jizo reside in temples across the nation and are regularly visited by their distraught parents to express their grief, fears, confusions, and hopes of forgiveness; they pay a fee to adopt a mizuko jizo and inscribe their names on it and regard it as representing their own forsaken baby, who lives at the temple. They dress them up like newborns, wrapping them with red bibs, hand-knit sweaters, booties, or hats against the cold, and they pour water over them to quench their thirst. Gynecologists also occasionally go to a shrine or a temple in a group in order to attend a special memorial to purify themselves. A similar practice, yingling gongyang, is found in Taiwan, emerging in the mid-1970s and growing significantly in popularity in the 1980s. It draws from traditions dating back to the Han dynasty and from the Japanese practice, and is generally regarded as a Japanese import.
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