Marketing the Menacing Fetus in Japan

Helen Hardacre's Marketing the Menacing Fetus in Japan is a scholarly study of mizuko kuyo, the memorial rites for aborted and miscarried fetuses that emerged as a significant commercial and religious practice in postwar Japan, examining both the genuine grief the rites address and the way some temples marketed fear of fetal spirits to sell memorial services. Hardacre is a recognized scholar of Japanese religion and the book is published by the University of California Press. Its strength is combining sympathetic attention to bereaved parents with a clear eyed account of the commercial exploitation some temples engaged in, a genuinely two sided treatment rather than either simple credulity or simple dismissal. Its limit is that it is a study of the practice's late twentieth century form specifically, so a claim about mizuko kuyo's more recent development needs a more current source.