It was Saturday morning and time to go to the orphanage again to
“teach” English. I wondered who would come to the class this week and if
an adult would help me. My goal was modest…make this class a positive
experience for the children. I had failed many times before. Fights
would often break out. Fits of anger would ruin the class for everyone.
Sometimes I was the target of aggression. More often the weakest in the
class was bullied. Why did I keep going? The answer was simple. There
was one little boy who looked forward to my coming and tried his best to
learn. He would often be waiting at the door for me. I couldn’t let him
down.
Once while I was there, I saw something I will never forget. A little
boy had been brought over from the baby orphanage to join the
3-to-18-year-olds’ orphanage. This is the way the system is set up here.
Suddenly uprooted from the only home he had known, he was plopped down
into a big building full of older boys. Though I had just walked into
the room and he was seeing me for the first time, he clung to me for all
he was worth and would not be comforted. I’ve rarely witnessed anything
as pitiful.
There were 36,450 children in the orphanage system in Japan in March,
2011. Only 12% or 4,373 were adopted or placed in foster care during
the preceding 12 months. Orphanages abound here; there are 14 within the
Nagoya city limits alone. You may wonder why there are so many children
without parents in Japan. The fact is that the vast majority of
children in orphanages here do have parents. Parents are allowed to put
their babies/children in orphanages for any number of reasons. They
don’t even need to visit them. They can leave them there, and often do,
until they reach 18 years of age. The government will not proactively
sever their parental rights.
Last month, a Chukyo Television director who was documenting this
problem, asked a high government official why Japan had such a system,
as opposed to promoting adoption and foster care like other developed
nations. The man, whom I respect for his honesty, basically said that
after the war there were many children without parents. At that time,
many orphanages were built. So, that became Japan’s system to this day.
Let me translate that for you…There are many jobs involved in this
system. Plus, we don’t like change.
Orphanages receive government funds based on the number of children
they have and are thus not motivated to try to get children adopted or
into foster care. And to be fair, they have their hands full, especially
because many of the children have been abused by their parents. I have
found orphanage workers to care very much about the children but also to
be overwhelmed by the task. An orphanage where I taught for two years
was very well run. But even there, the workers admitted there were many
problems and they worried about the children who had to leave at age 18
with no support system.
The issue the government doesn’t seem to want to face is the negative
impact on children who grow up in institutions. Tokuji Yamanta, a
former child welfare worker in Aichi prefecture and well-known champion
of Japan’s children, told me recently that the children who live in
orphanages for many years are hurt in deep and complex ways. Some who
eventually end up in family environments can develop reactive attachment
disorder in which they regress to behaving like a baby. Some years ago,
Britain did a study of children who grew up in orphanages and the
findings were so disturbing that they shifted their policy to ensure
more children were cared for in foster families. The Japanese government
doesn’t study this issue, in Mr. Yamanta’s opinion, “because it doesn’t
want to know the truth and thus be forced to change.”
When you consider that there are so many couples in Japan who want to
adopt, it is hard to understand why the government opts for a system
that keeps children, even babies, in institutions. An underlying reason
is that many in Japan have a hard time believing that adopted children
can be happy. (While abortion became legal in the 1940s here, adoption
wasn’t legalized until 1988.*) When I asked a Japanese friend if
Japanese people think that children who grow up in orphanages are happy,
she said that no one’s thinking about that, as most people aren’t even
aware of the system.
The government hopes that once children grow up and leave the
orphanage, they can return to their parents where they belong. Hence,
the government doesn’t force parents to either meet certain conditions
to get their children back or eventually lose their parental rights.
Children end up waiting for parents to visit and hoping to go home…for
years. Sadly, as Mr. Yamanta pointed out, when he worked in child
welfare, 80% of the time the children no longer had a connection with
their parents by the time they left the orphanage.
In Japan, there is a saying that the nail that sticks up gets
hammered down. But I know another saying, “You can’t keep a good man
down.” In my next column, I will write about Mr. Yamanta’s unwillingness
to go along with a bad system and the ray of hope that is dawning for
Japan’s forgotten children.
*Before 1988, adoption did exist in Japan, but primarily among
relatives, especially for the purpose of having an heir. In 1988,
adoption for the benefit of the child, where the rights of birth parents
are terminated, became legal.
