Grief, Debate and Personal Choice

Mizuko kuyo sits at a genuinely contested point in scholarship and in Japanese public life, and the atlas describes that contest rather than resolving it. Some researchers and commentators, most notably the historian of religion Helen Hardacre, have argued that certain temples in the 1970s and after actively marketed the rite using language warning of the spiritual danger an unappeased mizuko spirit, a tatari, might pose to the living family, a promotional pattern Hardacre and others read critically as exploiting grief and anxiety around abortion, which had become common in postwar Japan, for temple income.

Other scholars and many practitioners describe mizuko kuyo differently, as a sincere and genuinely comforting practice that gives grieving parents, and mothers in particular, a recognised ritual outlet for a loss that many societies leave with no formal mourning practice at all, filling a real pastoral gap rather than manufacturing a false one. Both readings appear in the serious literature on the subject, and the rite continues to be sought voluntarily by many Japanese families today for miscarriage and stillbirth as well as for abortion, performed and received across a range of personal circumstances and religious feeling the ceremony itself does not require families to explain or justify.