Adoption in Japan

Japan’s adoption law has not seen any significant change since the 1947 Child Welfare Law was created to address issues of orphaned children at the end of WWII.

Last month, however, the Health, Labor and Welfare Ministry drafted a new set of guidelines in response to worries about profiteering by agencies and international trafficking concerns.

Presently, privately run adoption agencies are allowed payment only to cover costs. The list of approved expenses covers ten categories, including travel, phone and counseling services.

… the ministry urged all 47 prefectural governments, and 15 major cities with adoption-related authorities, to tighten measures to eliminate adoption agency profiteers.

The guidelines prohibit agencies from receiving any money prior to the completion of the adoption process. However, “donations” are often difficult to distinguish from legitimate costs for adoption services, officials said.

In one instance, a Tokyo adoption agency that featured “free adoption services” asked one of their clients–a Japanese couple living in the Netherlands–for a 5.5 million yen donation in advance. Believing the fee to be too high, the couple declined to pay. However, the agency then told them it would stop looking for candidate children, according to the ministry.

The ministry’s guidelines are the first step in clamping down on unscrupulous agencies that violate the Child Welfare Law, which bans profiting from adoption.

Talk of human organ trafficking and child pornography has attention focusing on the fact that government and agencies get little if any info on children once they go abroad, since the law doesn’t oblige anyone to follow up.

Further, the number of agencies operating without government registration is believed to be rising, the ministry officials said.

Prof. Hiroto Suzuki, of Chuo University, said: “The existing simple registration system should be replaced by a system under which adoption agencies are not allowed to operate without government screening or a license. The current framework is inadequate for bringing the real state of affairs to light.”

Well, those certainly seem easy problems to solve … license agencies and require PPRs.

A tougher issue runs deeper, however: attitude.

There should also be renewed efforts to lessen the number of children who need to be adopted.

The majority of children put up for adoption are due to “unwanted pregnancies,” such as babies born to minors with no means of support, or to women who have been raped.

According to reports, there have 335 adoptions arranged in Japan in a three year period since 2001, of which seventy-six involved overseas residents.

This number seems surprisingly low, given that the population of Japan is above 127.5 million … until you see some other numbers:

There were 40,000 abortions performed on minors in 2003, compared with 14,000 in 1955.

During the same period, the total number of abortions decreased 310,000 from 1.17 million, meaning the ratio of minors having abortions compared to the total number of abortions jumped 13-fold during the 1955-2003 period.

The report ends with a couple of almost criminal understatements:

Effective measures for dealing with the problem of unscrupulous adoption agencies will not be found without tackling the abortion problem.

In addition, society as a whole must address the issue of protecting and raising newborn babies that have been born under adverse circumstances.

Here is some information on adopting from Japan.

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