Focus on the J-Family

A 17-year-old has turned himself in at a police station in Aizu-Wakamatsu, after severing his mother's head and packing it in his school bag. He said he wanted to kill people and fight terrorism. Under Japanese law, he was not able to purchase automatic weapons. Apparently he was not well-organized or patient enough to travel to the United States before beginning his killing spree. He will probably go into counseling for a few years and come out later with a new identity like former teenage decapitation fetishists. Or, with any luck, they just may try him as an adult. (Asahi, DY)

In other news focusing on the family, the controversial newborn baby abandonment drop slot at Jikei Hospital in Kumamoto has had its first customer, a child about 3 or 4 years old, left by his father. (JT, DY, Asahi) I don't like the idea of this easy baby drop-off. It legitimizes the idea of baby abandonment. I don't oppose it for the reason that Prime Minister Abe does, that parents should not be able to abandon their children anonymously. I think perhaps parents who do not love and will not care for their children should lose their children, and society should care for them, in particular Japanese society, which has a severe depopulation problem. I also think that it should be easier for parents to give up their children for adoption if they do not want them. As the Japan Times reported:

Jun Saimura, a senior researcher at the Japan Child and Family Research Institute, said he thinks the boy was dropped off at the hospital because people tend to feel that it's difficult to talk to municipal governments or public child consultation centers.

This drop box cater to people who are too timid to step up and talk to an actual human about giving up their child for adoption. The controversy about this is increasing the stigma, but it actually needs to be addressed squarely and not by shame, or the child abandonments will increase more. We need to say, look, if for whatever reason, you cannot deal with it, you need to come forward and say that. If that is accepted, there will be no stigma in giving your name. There should be few questions asked, whether your reason is financial, emotional, or due to a relationship. Thanks for coming forward. This could prevent suicides, infanticides, abuse, neglect, and abandonment. I guess that what I am saying is that the solution is in the human systems, not in the installation of a baby drop box, a physical technology. It also too closely resembles the idea of trash bins for recycling paper, plastic, cans, bottles, and feces (see picture). Imagine responding to a child's question and having to explain, "Oh, that's the place where we take the babies when we don't want them anymore." I also doubted that many people would use it. While meant to prevent deaths due to child abandonment in unsafe places, it really sends the message that society accepts and enables that. The parents will not use the designated box, however, (I thought), for fear of being observed and photographed, but will just dump the kid somewhere else as they did with their puppies years earlier.