<Articles>The Process of Selecting Menoto in the Modern Imperial Family

The Japanese imperial family maintained a long-standing custom of employing menoto, or wet-nurses, who provided their breast milk to royal princes and princesses. The new Taishō-era royal couple, Crown Prince Hirohito and his wife Nagako, later to be the Emperor Shōwa and Empress Kōjun, seeking to modernize their family, tried to raise their children by themselves, contrary to imperial tradition. Obviously, employing wet-nurses stood in contradiction with the modernization of the imperial family. However, the new couple kept the wet-nurse custom. Furthermore, the scale of the pool from which wet-nurses was selected was enlarged year after year. This paper examines why and how the wet-nurse system was preserved in the late Taishō and pre-war Shōwa periods (1925-1939), while Hirohito and Nagako sought to modernize their family. It also focuses on the transition of relations between the royal family and the people of Japan. The reason the menoto tradition was kept might simply have been the difficulty in abolishing the long-enduring system. However, it is more important to point out that, instead of abolishing the tradition, the couple and the imperial household officials introduced the new idea that they would use the menoto system as a medium to connect the royal family with the people. The Imperial Household Ministry sought wet-nurses in Tokyo and suburban prefectures, and later more broadly across eastern Japan, irrespective of the social rank and professions of the candidates' families. Wet-nurses were recruited through local governments, although in previous generations they had mainly been found through personal connections. On the assumption that the nation had been socially equalized, in principle, any healthy mother could be selected as a wet-nurse. The first child of Hirohito and Nagako, Princess Shigeko, was born in 1925. In that year, two women were selected as wet-nurses, one being Hirayama Shizuye. She attracted considerable attention since she was from a rural village in Kanagawa Prefecture. In a word, proximity to the people was valued in the initial phase of the generation of Hirohito and Nagako. However, the process of selecting wet-nurses later encountered grave difficulties. For instance, in 1929, a woman who wet-nursed Princess Kazuko, Takemura Tamae, was criticized by newspapers because her grandfather, a town mayor in Kochi prefecture, had been charged with embezzling public money and had been driven to commit suicide. In 1934, it was discovered that Shindō Hana, a wet nurse of Crown Prince Akihito, had a relative with some kind of hereditary disease, and she was replaced. This issue led the minister of the royal household to consider resigning, although he ultimately kept his position. Such criticism arose out of regional political conflicts and feelings of jealousy toward the families of women chosen as menoto. Consequently, as time passed, the standards for the selection of wetnurses became ever more rigorous. For instance, even the causes of death and health conditions of a candidate's great-uncles and great-aunts had to be thoroughly examined, however difficult such an examination could be because of the remoteness in time. Candidates were scrutinized in particular to determine whether they had relatives with such diseases as pulmonary tuberculosis, leprosy, or mental disorders. As a result, two social classes became favored as suppliers of wet-nurses. One class consisted of housewives in middle-class families in urban areas, especially the housewives of government officials or military men. The other class was women from families prominent in local society. The significance of the menoto system gradually changed, becoming something more than merely wet-nurses nourishing royal princes and princesses. It was transformed into a system to praise women who sacrificed themselves and their families, and who rendered good service to the nation and the royal family. When wet-nurses departed for the Imperial P