Cover -- Imprint -- Subvention -- Title -- Copyright -- Contents -- Illustrations -- Acknowledgments -- A Note on Conventions -- 1. Introduction: Contested Worldviews and a Demographic Revolution -- Eastern Japan -- Unlocking Fertility Histories -- A Reverse Fertility Transition -- Fertility: A Special Definition -- The Meanings of Infanticide -- The Case for a Regional Perspective -- Discourse and Demography -- Part I. The Culture of Low Fertility, ca. 1660-1790 -- 2. Three Cultures of Family Planning -- The Geography of Infanticide Countermeasures -- Traces in the Demographic Record -- The Changing Geography of Infanticide -- Three Regimes of Demographic Moderation: Infanticide, Antlion Cities, and Emigration -- A Multicultural Archipelago -- 3. Humans, Animals, and Newborn Children -- Of Bugs and Babies -- Vengeful Spirits and Liminal Souls -- The Long Road to Human Status -- The Tolerance of Priests and Doctors -- Shadows of Doubt, Traces of Guilt -- Animal Spirits -- Multiplying like Birds and Beasts -- 4. Infanticide and Immortality: The Logic of the Stem Household -- The Laws of Disinheritance -- Imagined Communities of the Dead, the Living, and the Unborn -- Grandparents and the Decision to Raise or Return -- Mabiki as Filial Piety -- 5. The Material and Moral Economy of Infanticide -- A Short Historiography of Poverty and Infanticide -- Rates of Fertility and Infanticide Stratified by Landholdings -- Poverty and Subsistence Crises -- The Conflict between Production and Reproduction -- Children's Labor and the Weakness of Parental Control -- Consumption and the Moral Economy of Childrearing -- Numeracy, Planning, and a Fertility Norm -- 6. The Logic of Infant Selection -- Gendered Work, Succession Plans, and the Perfect Balance of Boys and Girls -- Decoding the Pattern of the Future.

The Numerology of Personal Time: Sex Divination and Yakudoshi -- Tsunoda Tōzaemon's Diary -- Horoscopes and the Cosmic Pattern of Time -- Folk Beliefs and Expert Knowledge -- Monstrous Births -- Fate Outfoxed -- The Advantages of Child Spacing -- 7. The Ghosts of Missing Children: Four Approaches to Estimating the Rate of Infanticide -- Edo-Period Statements of the Rate of Infanticide -- Missing Girls and Missing Boys -- A Monte Carlo Simulation -- The Balance of Abortions and Infanticides -- The Contraception Puzzle -- The Stillbirth Statistics of Imperial Japan -- Ten Million Children -- Part II. Redefining Reproduction: The Long Retreat of Infanticide, ca. 1790-1950 -- 8. Infanticide and Extinction -- The Depopulation Crisis of the Late Eighteenth Century -- Thinking Beyond an Heir and a Spare -- A New Flowering of Branches -- A New Vision of Family Life -- 9. "Inferior Even to Animals": Moral Suasion and the Boundaries of Humanity -- Animal Analogies and the Inhumanity of Infanticide -- Buddhist Hells -- Infants as Humans -- The Scale of the Suasion Effort -- Gender and the Power of the Dehumanized Mother -- 10. Subsidies and Surveillance -- How Subsidies and Surveillance Came to Be Expected Features of Good Governance -- The Finances of Benevolence -- The Scale of the Subsidies -- Pregnancy Surveillance -- Forensic Statistics: Second-Guessing the Surveillance Systems -- Punishments -- Successful Policies, Powerful Symbols -- 11. Even a Strong Castle Cannot Be Defended without Soldiers: Infanticide and National Security -- Rearing Children for the Realm -- Japan in Peril -- The Demographic Argument for Expansion Overseas -- Nativism: Gods, Children, and National Defense -- 12. Infanticide and the Geography of Civilization -- Japan and China -- A Barbarous Anachronism of the Peripheries -- Civilization and Infanticide in the Early Meiji Moment.

Head of Dragon, Tail of Snake -- Unspeakable Truths in a Civilized Nation -- 13. Epilogue: Infanticide in the Shadows of the Modern State -- Infanticide in the 1870s -- The Formal Criminalization of Abortion -- Licensed Midwives and Reproductive Surveillance -- Lone Voices -- The Retreat of Infanticide in the Taishō Period -- Subcultures of Infanticide in the 1930s and 1940s -- The Return of Pronatalist Policies and the Legalization of Abortion -- 14. Conclusion -- Continuity, Change, and Diffusion -- Eastern Japan in World Demographic History -- Fertility and Modernity -- A Future of Many Possibilities -- Open Questions -- Means and Ends -- Appendix 1. The Own-Children Method and Its Mortality Assumptions -- Appendix 2. Sampling Biases, Sources of Error, and the Characteristics of the Ten Provinces Dataset -- Appendix 3. The Villages in the Ten Provinces Dataset -- Appendix 4. Total Fertility Rates in the Districts of the Ten Provinces -- Appendix 5. Regional Infanticide Reputations, According to Contemporary Statements -- Appendix 6. Scrolls and Votive Tablets with Infanticide Scenes -- Appendix 7. Childrearing Subsidies and Pregnancy Surveillance by Domain -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Index.