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Marketing the Menacing Fetus in Japan. By HELEN HARDACRE. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997. 310 pp. $35-00 (cloth); $17.95 (paper).
The subject of this book defies easy categorization. Mizuko kuyj is a religious ritual appeasing the spirits of aborted fetuses, a ritual that gained transsectarian and commercialized prominence in 1970s Japan. As brilliantly analyzed by Helen Hardacre, Reischauer Institute Professor of Japanese Religions and Society at Harvard University (and the author of three previous books), mizuko kuyu(which literally means rites for aborted fetuses) is presented as a complicated behavior that reflects a host of multifarious roots and impulses. Boldly refusing to reduce this practice to any specific element, Hardacre sees mizuko kuyj as stemming from particular conditions operating in the socioeconomic environment of 1970s Japan as well as religious and historical traditions surrounding the ritualization of reproduction (in this case, its disruption in abortion). The result is a scholarly accomplishment of unusual breadth: one that is refreshingly interdisciplinary in investigating a behavior whose strands include religion, commoditization, popular culture, gender ideologies, and sexuality.
Hardacre lists her main orientations as feminism and religion (her previous books have been on Shintoism and the state, new religions, and lay Buddhism) and the feminist approach taken here muddles the waters of a more conventional religious study. This is a welcome and wonderful contribution to the field of Japan studies. To be clear though (for those who fear the political correctness of feminism), this is anything but a polemical book. Marketing the Menacing Fetus is solidly grounded in scholarship of the first order and also incorporates methodological techniques of multiple types-archival research, surveys, personal accounts, textual analysis, participation observation (of rituals), and multi-sited ethnography (in four separate locales where mizu kuy57 is being currently practiced). Throughout, Hardacre's interest is in investigating the intersection of ritual and abortion by asking: when, how, under what state control, and with what dimensions of power has abortion, and women's reproduction more generally, been both practiced and ritualized? This leads to two chapters tracing the historical background to the contemporary emergence of mizuko kuyi7, laying out various practices, beliefs, and regulations associated with reproduction (infanticide, birth, abortion, sexuality both outside and inside marriage) from 1600 to the present. Hardacre...