Adoption and the Maintenance of the Early Modern Elite: Japan in the East Asian Context

Abstract

More than anywhere else in the early modern world, adoption in late imperial China, Chosŏn Korea, and Tokugawa Japan was a way of life. Legally codified and socially sanctioned, the practice of adopting to acquire an heir was not simply a strategy to optimize family success; given the demographic realities pertaining at the time, it was absolutely necessary for perpetuating the family system itself, in political, economic, and spiritual terms.The reliance on adoption stemmed from a problem common across early modern East Asia: in contrast to the demographic pattern typical in preindustrial societies, in which rates of fertility and mortality tended to be high and population growth substantial, the Chinese, Korean, and Japanese populations overall between the sixteenth and late nineteenth centuries experienced relatively low fertility, moderate mortality, and low to moderate population growth. 1 At the same time, due to shared Confucian ideals, families felt compelled to practice male primogeniture in matters of succession and inheritance. These two essentially incompatible factors-strict succession rules on the one hand, and a limited pool of potential heirs on the other-made an alternative solution necessary if the family system were to survive. Adoption was that solution.However, adoption took quite different forms across East Asia, in great part because kinship, marriage, and succession practices-indeed the structure of family systems themselves-developed along distinct trajectories in each place over time. This chapter begins by briefly summarizing recent research in the historical demography of late imperial China and Chosŏn Korea with regard to adoption, and then uses those findings as the broader context in which to discuss the results 48 the Early Modern Elite