栃木県農村部における他子養育の慣行について

抄録

In the farm areas, especially the rice field areas in Tochigi Prefecture, there had been a custom called ‘fosterage’ among farmers for a long time. The farmers who employ the fostered children of school-age take care of them for the purpose of securing the agricultural labor power in the future. These children mostly come from the needy peasant families in the six prefectures in the northern part of Honshu Island and from within Tochigi Prefecture. They are usually sold with the apprenticeship, which lasts till the age of adulthood, either through the intermediation of the professional mediator called ‘Keian’ or through the direct bargaining between parents and employers. The survey on the slave trade cases during the period from Dec. 1948 to Apr. 1949, published by the Ministry of Labor, shows that 134 out of 282 total sufferers all over Japan were found in the farm areas in Tochigi Prefecture, being distributed at large to three areas, around the basins of the River Gogyo, the Rivers Kinu and Ta, and the Rivers Kuro and Sugata, and that most of these children were under 18 years of age.
According to the authors' investigation, around the basin of the River Gogyo, the farmer had, in general, a bigger cultivated acreage and not a few landlords owned 122 to 245 acres of rice fields before the Agrarian Reform soon after World War II. The housing, food, and clothing for fostered children were distinctively discriminated from those of farmers' own children. Farmers' own children would not work on farm; if they had to work on farm, they were the supervisors over fostered children. Around the basins of the Rivers Kinu, Ta, Kuro, and Sugata, in contrast, the farmer had a much smaller farmland and most of the farmers were owner farmers of 4.9 to 12.3 acres of rice fields before the Agrarian Reform. Being brought through parents-employers' direct bargaining, fostered children, most of whom were born within this prefecture, were treated just as the same as farmers' own children as indispensable labor power to the agricultural management of farmers and could become independent by marriage or by finding other occupation as the farmers' own second or third children could. Furthermore, some of them were legally adopted as soon as they were brought to farmers'. The registration filed of 1962 at Child Welfare Center, Tochigi Prefecture, which shows the existence of 8 foster parents around the basin of the River Gogyo and of 62 fostered children around the basins of other rivers, would prove such a custom of ‘fosterage’ still alive in those areas.
From the answers to the questionairs sent by the authors to all the foster parents in those areas and in Utsunomiy City, the prefectural metropolis, is drawn the conclusion that there can be made a division into three types of fosterage, that is, rural, intermediate, and urban types, by the differences of farm-land, scale of agricultural management, and familial type between the families, and that this prewar custom has been the transformed in favor of the fostered children especially around the basin of River Kinu.