Developmental logics: Brain science, child welfare, and the ethics of engagement in Japan

Social Science & Medicine xxx (2014) 1e8

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Developmental logics: Brain science, child welfare, and the ethics of engagement in Japan Kathryn E. Goldfarb a, b, * a b

University of Chicago, 1126 East 59th Street, Chicago, IL 60637, USA Harvard University, Program on U.S.-Japan Relations, 61 Kirkland Street, Cambridge, MA 02138, USA

a r t i c l e i n f o

a b s t r a c t

Article history: Available online xxx

This article explores the unintended consequences of the ways scholars and activists take up the science of child development to critique the Japanese child welfare system. Since World War II, Japan has depended on a system of child welfare institutions (baby homes and children's homes) to care for state wards. Opponents of institutional care advocate instead for family foster care and adoption, and cite international research on the developmental harms of institutionalizing newborns and young children during the “critical period” of the first few years. The “critical period” is understood as the time during which the caregiving a child receives shapes neurological development and later capacity to build interpersonal relationships. These discourses appear to press compellingly for system reform, the proof resting on seemingly objective knowledge about child development. However, scientific evidence of harm is often mobilized in tandem with arguments that the welfare system is rooted in Japanese culture, suggesting durability and resistance to change. Further, reform efforts that use universalizing child science as “proof” of the need for change are prone to slip into deterministic language that pathologizes the experiences of people who grew up in the system. This article explores the reasons why deterministic models of child development, rather than more open-ended models like neuroplasticity, dominate activist rhetorics. It proposes a concept, “ethics of engagement,” to advocate for attention to multiple scales and domains through which interpersonal ties are experienced and embodied over time. Finally, it suggests the possibility of child welfare reform movements that take seriously the need for caring and transformative relationships throughout life, beyond the first “critical years,” that do not require deterministic logics of permanent delay or damage. © 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Keywords: Japan Child welfare Child development Neuroscience Neuroplasticity Critical period Care Ethics of engagement

When Yoriko Suzuki conducts trainings for Japanese foster parents on attachment disorder, she asks volunteers to form two circles. (All personal names, unless otherwise noted, are pseudonyms.) Each circle of foster parents bodily represents the neurons within the brains of two babies, Baby A and Baby B. Individual people within each circle stand for neurons responsible for hearing, smell, sight, physical sensation, taste, language, and emotion. Suzuki explains that when neurons stimulate each other, synaptic connections form between them. Suzuki gives each circle a ball of yarn to represent synaptic connections. She reads the stories of Baby A, who is loved and nurtured, and Baby B, who is raised in a child welfare institution and has no attachment relationship to

* McMaster University, Chester New Hall, Room 533, 1280 Main Street West, Hamilton, Ontario L8S 4L9, Canada. E-mail address: [email protected].

caregivers. The case of Baby B strikes a chord for the training participants, many of whom are fostering children who previously lived in institutions. As Suzuki reads, volunteers pass the ball of yarn between them, performing and embodying synaptic development. “The more synaptic connections there are,” Suzuki tells them, “the better the baby will be at processing data, and the more affectionate and smart the baby will be.” The purpose of the exercise is to dynamically enact the connections between human relationships, caregiving, brain development, and a child's capacity for love and intelligence. The wording of this exercise seems to reinforce a deterministic view of sensory input and brain development. At the same time, Suzuki's training on attachment disorder enacts the complex ways that child development occurs within a densely relational space, in the interstices of crisscrossing social ties. Suzuki would not go so far as to claim that “human beings are essentially reducible to their brains,” what Francisco Ortega and Fernando Vidal term “cerebral

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Please cite this article in press as: Goldfarb, K.E., Developmental logics: Brain science, child welfare, and the ethics of engagement in Japan, Social Science & Medicine (2014), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.socscimed.2014.11.036

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subjects” (2007:255). And yet Suzuki's focus on brain development evokes a figure of “neurological humanity” (Rees, 2010), one in which the human is indelibly shaped by the first years of life (the so-called “critical period”). Childhood is understood as a stage of intense and formative change that humans traverse, such that “to ~ eda, be a true adult [is] to have passed out of development” (Castan 2002:41). As neuroscientific research becomes ever more available for popular engagement, it is striking to note the contexts in which neuroscience is mobilized to evoke deterministic and teleological representations of human developmentdparticularly in light of research on neuroplasticity, the continued development of the brain throughout life. Of course, arguments regarding the determinative impact of early childhood have long been articulated vis-vis culturally and historically specific ways of knowing about a humanity. However, as Nikolas Rose and Joelle Abi-Rached argue, what is new are the ways neuroscience specifically has been recruited as “objective” proof of early childhood's influence on adult lives (2013:196). “Objective” forms of knowledge are often selectively mobilized in ways that leave complexity unexplored, and highlight tensions with culturally relevant discourses about the social responsibility to raise neurologically vital children. These projects are never morally neutral. This article explores instances in which scholars and activists take up the science of child development with the intention to critique the Japanese child welfare system. Since World War II, Japan has depended on a system of child welfare institutions (baby homes and children's homes) to care for state wards. Opponents of institutional care engage with international research on the developmental harms of institutionalizing newborns and young children, advocating instead for family foster care and adoption. These discourses appear to press compellingly for system reform, the proof resting on seemingly transparent and objective knowledge about child development. However, scientific evidence of harm is often mobilized in tandem with arguments that the welfare system itself is rooted in Japanese culture, suggesting durability and resistance to change. Made invisible are the complex ways that interpersonal relationships over time contribute to emergent and always transforming selves. My own thinking on these topics has been shaped by my interlocutors' impassioned efforts for change and by their feelings of frustration, despair, and hope. I have also been struck by how the experiences of people raised within the child welfare system are in many ways elided by reform efforts that make use of universalizing child science as “proof” of the need for change. These collective (and sometimes contradictory) commitments have “caught” me, as the ethnographer, such that my own analysis is profoundly connected to the hopes and frustrations of my research subjects (Crapanzano, 2003; Miyazaki, 2006). This article is an effort to think the possibility for open-ended bio-psycho-social interaction that takes seriously the need for caring and transformative relationships over time, beyond the first few “critical years,” and that does not pathologize those who grew up outside of normative families. I see my own effortsdas well as those of my interlocutors, although through different means and with different rhetoricsdas part of a broad “ethics of engagement.” By “ethics of engagement,” I evoke a desire for attention to multiple scales and domains through which interpersonal ties are experienced and embodied over time, as a way to address the complex problems of social policy, care, and subjectivity implicated in deinstitutionalization discourses. This article has been an iterative project of conceptualizing how and why reform efforts slip into deterministic and pathologizing idioms, even as reformers generally believe that interpersonal relationships can be transformative throughout life, and that true change will entail attention to creative, multi-level interventions. I

hope this article contributes to imagining a space of possibility for a conversation that calls for reform without leaning on the deterministic logics of permanent delay or damage. I approach this topic ethnographically by way of the Japanese child welfare system's institutions, legal regimes, children and youth in state care, and networks of caregivers, as well as international child welfare movements. Since 2008, I have conducted anthropological fieldwork in Japan, establishing research contacts through personal introductions and participation in public events. I have substantial language training in Japanese. I obtained research ethics board approval from the University of Chicago, Harvard University, and McMaster University, provided written consent forms for everyone I interviewed, and audio-recorded oral consent. My two major research sites for participant-observation were a Japanese child welfare institution (children's home) and a selfsupport group for youth raised in institutional care. Additionally, I conducted extensive participant observation and interviews with foster and adoptive families. To understand commonly cited “blood ideologies” in Japan, I interviewed men and women pursuing infertility treatment and attended public events on the topic. I interviewed child welfare workers, policy makers, toured over fourteen child welfare institutions in the Kanto, Kansai, and Kyushu areas of Japan, and interviewed these institutional directors. Altogether, I audio-recorded interviews with over 120 people. Finally, I participated in numerous trainings and symposia, and collected audio-recorded files from over 30 such events. Together with native Japanese transcription assistants, I transcribed my interviews and portions of research symposia, which I analyzed as verbal texts, tracing narrative flow, contradictions, and recurrent themes. I supplement my analysis with extensive fieldnotes and Japanese documents (training materials, symposia records, government white papers, newspaper articles, online weblogs). 1. The brain as history I now return to Yoriko Suzuki's foster parent training on attachment disorders. Most of the foster parents attending Suzuki's training would be caring for children who had spent significant time in institutional care. In Japan around 3000 children under the age of two live in child welfare institutions for babies, 30,000 in institutions for children between the ages of two and eighteen, and around 4500 in family foster care (MHLW, 2014). While some children return to their families of origin, many live in institutions or foster care until adulthood. Most end up in the Japanese child welfare system because of abuse, neglect, divorce, and maternal illness (Goodman, 2000; MHLW, 2014; Bamba and Haight, 2011; Goldfarb, 2013). The participants at Suzuki's trainings generally attend because they have had trouble with their foster or adoptive children. Suzuki reinforces to her participants that neurological development and later capacity to build interpersonal relationships are highly influenced by the caregiving a child receives during the “critical period” of growth. Many of my interlocutors cited these trainings as revelatory, helping them understand their children's behaviors as rooted in the past, soothing concerns that they were inadequate caregivers. Through these training seminars, Suzuki cements a particular set of claims about the neurological basis for human relations, and a corresponding relational basis for neurological development. Baby A, Suzuki tells the group, has nurturing parents and a safe home. Suzuki asks the volunteers embodying Baby A's neurons to enact a script of a day in the baby's life. The person representing the neuron for emotion takes up the ball of red yarn first, “because the mother loves the baby.” “The baby cries. The mother comes quickly and picks up and hugs the baby, soothing and speaking to the baby.

Please cite this article in press as: Goldfarb, K.E., Developmental logics: Brain science, child welfare, and the ethics of engagement in Japan, Social Science & Medicine (2014), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.socscimed.2014.11.036

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What neurons are stimulated?” Volunteers pass the ball of yarn between “emotion,” “hearing,” “smell,” “sight,” “physical sensation,” “language.” At the end of Baby A's day, the synaptic connections enacted and embodied by the volunteers and their ball of yarn are dense and crisscrossing. Baby B is not so lucky. Baby B lives in a child welfare institution for infants. “Baby B does not have an attachment relationship with any caregiver,” Suzuki says, “and right now the baby is hearing its own crying voice. So let's start the ball of yarn at ‘hearing.’ Baby B is crying because it is hungry, but no one comes. So we don't need to pass the ball of yarn. Finally it's time for bottle-feeding. The bottle is propped up against the baby's pillow and the baby sucks at it.” Volunteers pass the ball of yarn from “hearing” to “taste” and “smell.” “The baby needs its diaper changed and it cries, but no one comes.” The ball is passed back to “hearing.” “Finally,” Suzuki says, “it's time for diaper changing, and the staff person talks to the baby and smiles at it.” Volunteers quickly pass the yarn between emotion, smell, sight, physical sensation, hearing, taste, and language. At the end of Baby B's day, Suzuki shows the audience, Baby B's synaptic connections are much fewer than those of Baby A. In particular, the connections to “emotion” and “language” are sparse. “Both babies' basic needs are met, and neither baby is abused or abandoned,” Suzuki says. “But I think you all see that an emotional relationship between the baby and its caregiver is imperative for the baby's developing brain.” Suzuki's training teaches the participants to understand neural pathways and processes as durable indices of past relationships, instantiated repetitively over time: Baby A's brain is a history of love and care, while Baby B's brain is a history of neglect. Parental input literally matters in shaping a child's brain. The participants, passing between them their ball of string, construct a “dynamic figuration” (Silverstein, 2004:627) in which they produce a physical diagram in real time that seems to correspond to actual brain structures and reflect histories of care. The culturally and historically specific perspective that children require “input in order to ~ eda, 2002:75) aligns with local logics of develop fully” (Castan parenting in Japan, including the so-called “myth of three years” (san sai shinwa), which holds that a child must be cared for fulltime by its birth mother, who presumably nurtures the child “best,” until three years of age. Thus many of the participants would find these logics familiar, neuroscience providing an “objective” basis for commonsense knowledge (Rose and Abi-Rached, 2013:162). This enactment recalls the words of philosopher of neuroscience Catherine Malabou. “It's not just that the brain has a history … but that it is a history,” Malabou claims (2008:1). A historically particular conceptualization of the braindthe view that neurons are formed early and only early in life, and that synaptic pathways are solidified during early childhooddprovides an interpretive framework within which Suzuki's trainees understand the meaning of the histories the brain constitutes. This model of the brain matters because it points to what awaits Baby A and Baby B. If their present synaptic connections imply their future possibilities, Baby B is in big trouble. Complicating this vision is the notion of neuroplasticity. Two types of neuroplasticity are increasingly recognized today, both of which problematize claims regarding the primacy of “critical periods” of child development. Suggested in the early twentieth century, the concept of “functional neuroplasticity” describes neural networks as evolving during early childhood, but the creation of new synaptic connections allows for functional changes in brain behavior throughout life. However, in this view, synaptic changes occur within an already fixed brain structure. A more radical type of neuroplasticity was suggested during the late 1990s, based on the emergence of new neurons throughout life: adult neurogenesis. The

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concept of adult neurogenesis shakes up the conviction that humans are special because they are born incompletely developed, and spend childhood and adolescence traveling toward a fully formed and fixed adult brain (Rubin, 2009; Rees, 2010). Despite the emerging science of neuroplasticity, the view that early childhood constitutes a “critical period” of growth that will determine future possibilities is still durable, both in brain science and in popular engagements with child development. Neuroplasticity has not (yet) been taken up within Japanese child welfare reform effortsda result, perhaps, of the ways popular engagement with science often leaves complexity unexplored. Additionally, an argument for neuroplasticity might seem to justify the institutionalization of young children, who could presumably recover from early deprivations later in life. (Notably, if child welfare policy were to ground itself in this rather perverse view of human resilience, system reform would still be necessary in order to nurture the conditions of possibility for former state wards to build and maintain interpersonal ties.) While the concept of continued development throughout life offers a more hopeful vision of humanity, the politics of contemporary reform narratives seem to depend on linear connections between institutionalization and permanent damage. In what follows, I show that the history seen as embodied in the brain can be made to point to the broad political spheres underlying child welfare regimes, highlighting how “local figurations of the child are also always imbricated in global processes” of knowledge ~ eda, 2002:6). The circulation and human rights discourses (Castan activists I spent time with in Japan tend to mobilize models of child development that require one sort of actionddeinstitutionalization, specifically the abolition of baby homesdbased on the model of the brain with which they engage (Rees, 2010). On the other hand, the people who were themselves raised in baby homes or conditions of neglect often have trouble embracing the ethics required by the scientific model of the brain and person determined by early childhood experiences. This observation aligns with Margaret Lock's argument that in Japan, “for many people ‘person’ does not reside in the brain, nor is it exclusively associated with the mind.” In fact, “there is no ‘center’ that takes priority over everything else” (2002:228). While a “critical period” view of the brain ethically requires deinstitutionalization, the ambivalence of people raised within the system requires a different notion of the human: a holistic view in which the brain is not the crux of subjectivity, an image of humanity in which we are all always open to social influence and development throughout life. 2. The Japanese state is a cold parent In the course of my fieldwork, I met many passionate child welfare scholars who advocate for changes to Japanese child welfare policy and practice. Tetsuo Tsuzaki, a professor of social welfare at Kyoto Prefectural University, is adept at connecting logics about child development to his criticisms of the Japanese child welfare system. (His real name is used with permission.) While Tsuzaki does not always cite brain science in his public lectures, his opinions have been deeply shaped by international studies on child welfare and child development, which inform his particular ethics of engagement. Tsuzaki's voice is not representative of all child welfare scholars in Japan, who generally fall into two camps: those who oppose the institutionalization of young children (arguing that institutionalization has negative repercussions), and those who support it (who tend to argue that there are no better alternatives in Japan). However, Tsuzaki's arguments are in some way taken up by almost all the people I met in Japan who oppose the institutionalization of infants, and he was repeatedly cited in a recent Human Rights Watch report, discussed below.

Please cite this article in press as: Goldfarb, K.E., Developmental logics: Brain science, child welfare, and the ethics of engagement in Japan, Social Science & Medicine (2014), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.socscimed.2014.11.036

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Tsuzaki does some interesting rhetorical work in his presentations. First, he engages the science of child development to posit a causal connection between state caregiving regimes and the embodied characteristics of a child. Second, he politicizes the figure of the developmentally delayed child, so that the image of the child is taken as a direct expression of a social failure to properly care. Third, he mobilizes these embodied failures of state caregiving regimes as an ethical call to reform Japan's child welfare system. Tsuzaki summons the image of the child as a rights-bearing citizen susceptible to damage by an uncaring state. Tsuzaki was the keynote speaker at a symposium in March 2010 in Tokyo, organized by a local foster parent support organization. He faced the symposium audience of foster parents, child welfare scholars and practitioners, reporters, and a handful of government workers. “Japan has always been a terribly cold nation when it comes to children,” he told the audience. (Quotes are my translations from the symposium report.) Tsuzaki drew connections between historical Japanese practices of infant abandonment and infanticide and what he characterized as contemporary forms of the same: state-sanctioned placement of newborns and infants in baby homes, rather than in foster or adoptive care. Even more damning were his claims that Japan is “delayed” or “behind the times” (okureteiru), its governmental welfare regimes anachronistic. Further, Tsuzaki argued that Japan disregards international standards for child rights, including the United Nation's Convention on the Rights of the Child, to which Japan became a signatory in 1994. These standards, he said, are based on research showing that institutional care for infants and young children actually creates disabilities and developmental disorders. “As you know,” Tsuzaki told the audience, “in the Convention it is clearly written that ‘family-style care must be prioritized,’ but the stipulations in the World Report [on Violence Against Children] are even more clear: ‘The placement of a child under three years of age in group care is the equivalent of violence perpetrated by the state.’” Japan's practice of placing infants in institutional caredlong-term, for child welfare purposes, instead of adoptive or family foster caredis “systemic abuse.” He indicated the bold red text on his Powerpoint slide. “If an individual perpetrates abuse or neglect, it's a human rights abuse, it's a crime. But if the country perpetrates it, it's welfare work.” Tsuzaki bases many of his critiques in the authority of the United Nation's publications and his own research on British foster care systems (Tsuzaki, 2009). Like the United States, Canada, and Australia, northwestern European countries generally place over 70 percent of children in state care in foster settings and also have robust adoption programs (Browne et al., 2006; MHLW, 2014:23). In Tsuzaki's hands, a mere citation of these foreign practices becomes an indictment of Japanese child welfare systems, where almost 90 percent of children in state care are placed in institutions. Many peopledfoster parents includeddsummon cultural reasons why the foster care system remains marginal in Japan, arguing that Japanese people value blood ties in families. (See Goldfarb 2012, 2013, and n.d. for close analyses of this claim. Goodman, 2000 illustrates how the bias for institutional care should be understood in light of the fact that child welfare institutions are often run as hereditary family businesses.) The adoption of an unrelated child is relatively uncommon in Japan (there have been less than 500 per year for the past twenty years (Hayes and Habu, 2006:137)). These figures may seem in tension with the central role adoption has historically played in Japanese kinship practices, specifically for the purposes of obtaining an heir to the family line, company, property, or to obtain a caretaker for family graves (Paulson, 1984; Bryant, 1990). However, in these cases the adoptee is often an adult or a relative or both, a

 practice that continues today and is called “regular adoption” (futsu shi engumi). The system to adopt a young child under the ausyo pices of child welfaredadoption “for the sake of the child,” who is often unknown and unrelated, rather than for the sake of family continuitydwas enacted in 1988, and is called “special adoption” shi engumi), thus marking its non-standard status (tokubetsu yo (Goldfarb n.d.). The term “adoption,” thus, entails specific historical valences in Japan. Foster parents, activists, and other scholars frequently echo Tsuzaki's sentiment that Japan's welfare system is “delayed.” So many people told me that the system is “behind the times” that this comment ceased to be surprising. These arguments are even present in Japanese governmental documents; the Ministry of Health, Labor, and Welfare has published reports recognizing the potential developmental harms of baby homes and the goal to increase foster care placement (MHLW, 2014). The annual Ministry report on the status of the child welfare system compares foster care placement rates from 2010: England (71.7%), Germany (50.4%), France (54.9%), Italy (49.5%), United States (77%), Australia (93.5%), Hong Kong (79.8%), Korea (43.6%), and, finally, Japan (12%). Although the report cautions against simple comparisons between complex systems (ibid.:23), the discrepancy between Japan and its “peer” nations, with Japan listed at the bottom of a bar graph and so divergent from the other countries, is visually striking. It is also significant that placements of infants in Japanese institutions have continued to increase over the past twenty years (ibid.:2). Most recently, the representation of Japan as “behind the times” gained international relevance in a scathing report by the Tokyo office of Human Rights Watch (HRW), entitled “Without Dreams: Children in Alternative Care in Japan” (2014). Citing “international human rights standards,” HRW notes that “alternative care for young children under three should be, almost without exception, in family-based settings, and many child development specialists suggest that infants are at risk for attachment disorder, developmental delay, and neural atrophy when in institutional care” (ibid.:4). Based on visits to institutions across Japan, HRW argues that “the conditions in some institutions may also qualify as abusive, as may the overuse of institutions. Extensive research by child development experts has shown that institutionalization can cause severe developmental delays, disability, and irreversible psychological damage. Such negative effects are more severe the longer a child remains in an institution, or when the conditions of the institution are poor” (ibid.:24). Aware of the weight of international opinion, reformers hope these external critiques will provide impetus for internal change. The HRW report has indeed made a publicity impact, resulting in scores of Japanese and English-language popular press reportage; at the time of writing, a short film connected to a feature story on this topic is streaming on Al Jazeera's website (Ambrose, 2014). In private conversation with Tsuzaki, it is clear that he does not believe that all children raised in institutional care have been irredeemably damaged. He also thinks that moving children from institutional care to family-based care, even later in life, can be beneficial to children's long-term prospects. This is a position substantiated by a wide range of studies on the effects of institutionalization on development, and the potentially remediating impacts of subsequent family placement (Dobrova-Krol et al., 2008; Rutter et al., 1998; Browne, 2009; Nelson et al., 2007; Vorria et al., 2006). Further, while critiques of Japan depend on pointing out its -vis other “developed” nations, Browne et al. exceptionalism vis-a (2006:486) note that among WHO European countries with available data, France and Spain, along with Russia, Romania, and Ukraine, have the highest numbers of children under three years of age in institutional care; Belgium has one of the highest percentages of institutionalized young children out of the total child

Please cite this article in press as: Goldfarb, K.E., Developmental logics: Brain science, child welfare, and the ethics of engagement in Japan, Social Science & Medicine (2014), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.socscimed.2014.11.036

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population. Japan is thus not exceptional in its child welfare practices. Despite these caveats, why do Tsuzaki and other reformers use such strong language emphasizing the determinative and negative power of institutional care and the “coldness” of Japan to the nation's children? Underlying this indictment of government policy is a complex set of understandings regarding “normal” child development and modernity itself. The figure of poorly cared for children is not easily disambiguated from critiques of the Japanese state more broadly. Representations of Japan's continuity between past and present “cold” attitudes toward children imply that Japan is “delayed,” and a critique of national welfare policy and practice emerges through citation of international welfare policies and practices. Tsuzaki adds flair with his strong wording, which echoes language used by international human rights organizations, arguing that these critiques are justified because Japanese child welfare practices are themselves a form of violence that creates disabilities and disorders. Tsuzaki juxtaposes “progressive” countries with the “delayed” Japan, whose very welfare regimes, he claims, constitute criminal abuse. He implies that while Japan's treatment of children is “cold,” other countries' caregiving regimes must be much “warmer.” Indeed, the Human Rights Watch publication itself mobilizes the notion of stunted futurity in its title, “Children Without Dreams.” The model of child development that focuses on a child's “critical period” of early growth solicits an ethical commitment to deinstitutionalization. 3. Delayed bodies, delayed states At a two-day symposium in Tokyo in December of 2009, a foreign child welfare activist, a young man I will call Colin Smith, structured his critiques of Japanese child welfare practices around logics very similar to Tsuzaki's, while tapping into the epistemological frameworks of child development and neurobiology. This event's objective was to provide a forum for youth who had experienced state care to discuss their experiences in front of an audience of foster parents, children's home staff members, and child welfare researchers. Colin, who had spent a good part of his childhood in a United Kingdom child welfare institution, had been invited as a keynote speaker because of his work to bring “the voices of youth in care” to international policy makers. Colin structured his presentation around the theme of individual activism, encouraging youth in the audience to involve themselves in systemic change. But in the second part of his talk, he shifted his mode of address, speaking directly to the adults. Colin had been surprised to learn that in Japan abandoned, neglected, or maltreated babies are generally placed in child welfare institutions, rather than in foster or adoptive care. He told the audience that this practice was particularly surprising because Japan is a wealthy industrialized country, and the use of baby homesdwhich international child welfare research criticizesdseemed old-fashioned. Colin admonished the audience that baby homes are opened every year in Japan, while “countries in the former Soviet Union are closing [such] institutions every day.” This practice, he argued, contradicts the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, which “says that every child has the right to grow up in a family environment … There is clear academic, medical, scientific evidence to prove that babies in institutions do not grow up to be normal, full-functioning adults,” he said, looking over the audienceda number of whom were themselves cared for in institutions during infancy. The translator added an extra flourish to Colin's last sentence. She had spent time in the United States working with a non-profit organization that supports foster care, and was well versed in issues surrounding child welfare. In Japanese, the translator said: “In both medical and scientific fields, this point has been

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proven in many ways: from the perspective of the brain's development, from the perspective of the body's development, children who were raised in baby homes just cannot develop completely, like a regular child.” The translator had anticipated a point Colin was about to make about physical and neurological development. “I wish I had the xray with me that shows a three-year-old baby's brain that's grown up in an institution. Because of the lack of physical contact, their brains do not develop, the part of the brain for emotional capacity and love … Their physical bodies will be smaller than their counterparts. And as they grow older, they will be unable to maintain personal and social relationships with their peers and friends. I have no idea how Japan will get from this stage to the stage it should be at today.” Colin mobilized a brain image as a self-evident message with a single referent, an image that is itself an argument (Dumit, 2004). As Joseph Dumit has contended, brain images are often understood as easily interpreted (even by lay viewers), despite scientists' emphatic opinions to the contrary. The complexity of the image, and the necessity for situated and informed interpretation, is lost in circulation. For Colin, Japanese welfare practices indicated something delayed and retrograde about Japan itself, a characterization that mapped onto the “type” of child the welfare regime produces. Although Japan is a rich and “developed” country, explicitly contrasted with “former Communist countries,” Japan's welfare practices seem to index something stubbornly retrograde and undevelopeddbecause the type of child produced by these caregiving regimes is, itself, undeveloped. The evidence of this connection seems right before our eyes, in the figure of a brain image or the too-small body of a child, and further indexed in a posited lack of affective ties. As in Tsuzaki's argument, does a cold state produce cold people? Colin's references to Japan's current and ideal “stage[s]” place state and child development in parallel. The body becomes an index of the state, and an x-ray of a three-yearold's brain becomes a synecdoche for the child as a whole. Frozen in time at the moment of documentation, lack is palpable in the small body of an institutionalized child. As discussed above, these representations closely articulate with public discourses and governmental reports that either explicitly state or indirectly imply that Japan is “behind the times” or “delayed.” The salience of these discourses reinforce the continued relevance of older scholarly arguments regarding anxieties sur-vis the Western other and its rounding Japanese status vis-a standing as a fully “modern” nation. Marilyn Ivy has argued that perceptions of Japan as not modern endure in both the West and Japan, a non-modernity supposedly “sustained by patterns of social organization and symbolic production that persist no matter what goes on in the fabulous realms of advanced capitalism” (1995:2). These very self-representations contribute to a deep “unease” in Japan about the connections between Japanese culture and capitalist modernity (ibid.:9), a modernity Japan is seen as having “domesticated,” but not fully inhabited. These anxieties linger behind the claims of many of my interlocutors, who despair that Japan may never “catch up” with other developed nations' child welfare systems. Beyond the question of modernity is the issue of Japan's situation in an international sphere. On the one hand, the conversations and discourses I have presented so far occupy a marginal space off the side of public discourses surrounding welfare. However, the fact that “outside” researchers are brought forth to critique the Japanese system should be considered in historical perspective. One might argue that Japan's postwar history has been a history of being critiqued from “outside.” The legal status of the family, the concept of individuals as rights-bearing subjects, and the welfare system itself are artifacts of the postwar American occupation (Dower,

Please cite this article in press as: Goldfarb, K.E., Developmental logics: Brain science, child welfare, and the ethics of engagement in Japan, Social Science & Medicine (2014), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.socscimed.2014.11.036

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1999). The ease with which my interlocutors internalized the concern that Japan is “behind the times” aligns with this history. Throughout my research, I understood that my own “outsider” status was viewed as a potential resource by some of my interlocutors, who thanked me for my interest and urged me to write critically about the system. I had become “implicated” in their hopes for something different (Miyazaki, 2006). 4. On not being “cerebral subjects” Not everyone identifies with the idea that only normative sorts of care at a “critical period” will result in a fully developed adult. During the lunch break after Colin's presentation, I was sitting at a table with some friends. The young man to my left, whom I will call Toshio, was almost in tears. “I was cared for in a baby home,” he told the woman sitting across the table. “The baby home saved me. If there hadn't been baby homes, I probably wouldn't be here.” Toshio had been placed in a baby home as a newborn. As is typical in Japan, when he had turned two years old he was transferred to an institution for older children, where he lived for a few years. Later he was placed in a foster home, and, when he entered legal adulthood at eighteen, he moved into his own apartment. Toshio planned to study child welfare, and his dream, he told us, was to open his own baby home. For Toshio, Colin's repeated insistence about the harms of baby homes did not accord with his own perceptions, and these arguments drew into question the validity of Toshio's own personhood, developmental status, and ability to make claims on behalf of his past experiences and future dreams. Toshio was unable to reconcile the assertion that institutionalization as an infant causes permanent developmental damage, and the simultaneous enjoinder that youth in state care should speak up, articulate their views, and work for change. In fact, a roundtable discussion at this same symposium made it clear that people who had themselves been cared for in institutions had complex feelings regarding their pasts and the necessity for change. On the one hand, developing the foster care system would offer increased options to the diversity of children requiring placements, but there first needed to be holistic support systems for foster families. Other roundtable participants had grown up in child welfare institutions and were currently working in institutions, and, like Toshio, they felt strongly that institutional caredeven for babiesdwas a necessary part of Japan's welfare regime. Many people spoke about their suffering in institutional care, specifically abuse from staff and other children. Some of these people had indeed had significant trouble developing lasting interpersonal relationships. But rather than understanding interpersonal difficulties to result from brain development, these people linked the experience of abuse in institutional caredimplicitly contrasted with neglectdas cementing a deep distrust for others. The majority of these people advocated not abolition but rather improvement of institutions. This is a stance taken by the leadership of the self-support organization for youth who grew up in children's homes, where I conducted ethnographic fieldwork. Many feel that their children's home is their “true home” (jikka or furusato), a place to return and difficult to critique, as their experiences growing up have constituted their current selves. Some even consider the directors and staff as parents (Hinata Bokko, 2009). At the same time, they recognize that it is difficult to create durable relationships in an institution, where staff members work in shifts and turnover is high. In a follow-up interview a year after the 2009 symposium, Toshio further explained his position. He hoped to eventually start a small group home that could care for both infants and children, so that babies would not be removed when they turned two years old.

This disruption in attachment, he thought, was one of the most damaging aspects of the child welfare system. Toshio had lived in a baby home until he was about three years old. In his case, that infant home was connected to a child welfare institution for older children, where he was transferred at age three, and thus he maintained connections with the staff. But around age five he was moved to a foster family, and his foster parents did not explain his status as a state ward until he was seventeen and about to age out of the system. He never had the opportunity to assert his own preferences; his foster parents' desires to make him their son felt overly forceful, and he knew he wasn't their biological child but could not bring himself to ask about his own background. Toshio's image of an ideal institution maintained attachment relations between children and caregivers, while being transparently institutionaldthere would not be the risk that the children would misconstrue their status. He wanted his group home to be a child-centered place for people to return after aging out. Toshio situated his vision within a critique of Japan's system as behind the times. “Japan is delayed (okuretemasu),” Toshio told me, “the child welfare system is.” Later he said, “There is still a long way to go. Decades, probably. I want it to change … but the entire time I wonder if change is even possible.” Importantly, however, Toshio did not understand this “delay” or inability to change in neurological terms. “I've heard it said that for every three years a child lives in institutional care, the brain is delayed one year.” “What do you think about that?” I asked him. “Hmm. But in that case I'm definitely messed up (okashii).” “That doesn't mean it's everyone, does it?” I responded. “Right,” he said. “I don't think the brain's development is that delayed. What actually matters is the inability to relate to other people. I do think sometimes I'm different from other people … Well, there are a lot of children from institutions who have trouble making interpersonal relationships.” This ambivalence characterized the narratives of my other interlocutors who had experienced institutional life. One intelligent and articulate woman who had lived her entire infancy, childhood, and youth in large child welfare institutions, took a few moments to respond when I asked her how it felt to hear institutional care described as irredeemably harmful to physical and neurological development. “It feels … unpleasant (iya),” she finally replied. “You start to wonder about yourself. I'm short, you know?” she laughed. “Maybe it's because of the baby home.” Another interlocutor who had lived his entire young life in institutions liked to remind people that he grew 26 cm in two years after leaving institutional care. He had always been the smallest of his cohort, and was mercilessly bullied throughout his time in the institution. He attributed his sudden growth to the ways stress is known to inhibit growth hormone. This scientific explanation coexisted, however, with a more experiential and embodied register: in the children's home he could not possibly have grown tall, he said, since he was trying to protect himself, trying to be small so no one would notice him. Although he campaigns actively for the abolition of baby homes and the expansion of foster care, he does not cite his own experiences as justification for his activism. Instead it is the experience of his foster son, who has been labeled as attachment disordered, that he holds up as evidence of the detrimental aspects of institutional neglect. I think one reason Colin had been able to speak about the neurodevelopmental ills of baby homes is because he himself had not been raised in one. Developmental models of human growth that posit neglect during a young child's “critical stage” of the first years of life imply that institutional care prevents the emergence of a fully developed body and a coherent, adult subjectivity. In Japan, there is not a “biosocial” community of people who come together because they share the same medicalized identity due to having been cared for in a baby home. In contrast to “neurodiversity” movements (like ones that celebrate autistic identity,

Please cite this article in press as: Goldfarb, K.E., Developmental logics: Brain science, child welfare, and the ethics of engagement in Japan, Social Science & Medicine (2014), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.socscimed.2014.11.036

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analyzed by Ortega, 2009), people who grew up in Japanese institutional care have little inclination to embrace a “cerebral subjecthood” that frames them as reducible to their brains or developmentally damaged by the system that raised them. Even as logics of neurology inform the development of “human kinds”dthe “developmentally delayed child”dthose labeled do not necessarily engage with these discourses or consider themselves as such “types” (cf. Hacking, 1996). 5. Towards an ethic of engagement Ramon y Cajal, the early twentieth century neuroanatomist, famously stated that “[o]nce development has ended, the fonts of growth and regeneration of the axons and dendrites dried up irrevocably. In adult centers, the nerve paths are something fixed and immutable: everything may die, nothing may be regenerated.” Cajal closed, however, with the hope that someday neural regeneration might be possible: “it is for the science of the future to change if possible this harsh decree” (quoted in Rubin, 2009:410). Tobias Rees calls Cajal's “harsh decree” a “heroic act,” heroic because science “required heroically facing the scientific truthdhumans are fixed and immutable machines” (2010:156). Rees writes that “the ethical challenge” of the neurologically fixed brain “was to think behavioral phenomena … within the narrow confines of the neuroscientific conception of the brain as something immutable” (ibid.). Rees's notion of the “heroic” speaks to the passion with which child welfare activists address the importance of saving children from neglect. However, a similar heroism is required by those raised within the system, who struggle to articulate a sense of self capable of action and social recognition. As an alternative to this desperate heroism, I close by considering an ethic of engagement that lingers beneath the ambivalent narratives of my interlocutors and bridges neuroscientific and culturalist arguments. This ethic of engagement points to the imperative of exploring multiple scales and domains of concerndindividual, interpersonal, social, national, transnationaldas well as different ontologies, diverse concepts of causation and possibility. Multiple frames of analysis allow for the incorporation of ambivalence into explanatory models, which is, I believe, the most responsible way to engage the problems addressed in this article. An ethic of engagement brings together modes of analysis and activism, framing them together as a project for open-ended consideration. Indeed, I suggest, this ethic of engagement undergirds the very academic papers on child development that my interlocutors cite. While conclusions are often written from the perspective of the “heroic” stakes of humans' neural fixity, the data themselves indicate not only the power of early experiences to shape brain function, but the transformative possibilities of interpersonal relationships later in life. A “heroic” stance is placed front and center in a survey paper, “Young Children in Institutional Care at Risk of Harm,” that examines “the research evidence on the impact of institutional care on brain growth, attachment, social behavior, and cognitive development” (Johnson et al., 2006:34). The authors on this paper are well known in the field of child welfare, particularly Kevin Browne (Colin mentioned Browne during his keynote speech, and Tsuzaki translated a 2009 paper by Browne into Japanese). In the paper's abstract, Johnson et al. outline their strongly worded conclusions: [Y]oung children placed in institutional care are at risk of harm in terms of attachment disorder and developmental delays in social, behavioral, and cognitive domains … The findings suggest that the lack of a one-to-one relationship with a primary caregiver is a major cause of harm … Evidence indicates that infants who are placed in institutional care will suffer harm to

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their development if they are not moved to family-based care by the age of 6 months. The neglect and damage caused by early privation and deprivation is equivalent to violence and policy makers should work to ensure that every child has the opportunity to grow up in a family environment (ibid.). Lacking neurobiological studies that fit their selection criteria, the authors begin their paper with a discussion of theoretical understandings of neurobiology to underpin their survey and conclusions. The now-canonical studies this article describesdranging from John Bowlby's (1951) research on attachment to contemporary studies of children adopted out of Romanian orphanages (Rutter et al., 1998; Zeanah et al., 2003)dtell a story about correlation, in which severe, long-term deprivation has relatively clear negative consequences. Still, the relationship between institutional care in general and child development depends, well, on relationships. In line with the narratives of Toshio and my other interlocutors, the surveyed studies show that many people raised in institutions have trouble forming interpersonal relationships because of attachmentrelated, behavioral, and emotional problems. However, these problems “were very much a function of the environment that the child had been placed in after institutional care” (Johnson et al., 2006:48). While midcentury research argued that institutional care caused permanent cognitive damage, more recent studies illustrate that “high quality” institution-based care is not necessarily associated with (permanent) cognitive damage. Supportive and caring relationships, even beyond the “critical years,” can have a powerful impact on human development. The ethic of engagement called for in these scholarly articlesdan orientation that undergirds the narratives of all my interlocutorsdrequires a multitude of orientations and options, a holistic analytical and policy framework that incorporates many levels of interest and evidence. Studies of child development and neurology, in the context of deprivation and neglect, work to build understandings of how social relationships and their absence get “under the skin.” Scholarship on neuroplasticitydeven in its nascent stagesdpromises to illuminate these very questions. What all these research studies, including my own, have shown is that care rooted in steady social relationships is what matters most, and systems of state care must be constantly attentive to the importance of social ties, and to the critical necessity of social recognition for people raised within the system. If the concept of human brains as “fixed and immutable” motivates a “heroic” ethic of care (Rees, 2010), which articulates with culturalist arguments regarding delay and the turgidity of systemic change, I suggest that in attending to human lives as constantly in flux, emergent, and in transformationdand constantly impacted by social relationshipsdwe come to a different ethic of engagement. This ethic requires care and relationality throughout the life course, during the “critical stages” and beyond. It requires engaging the people who grew up in nonnormative kinship configurations and perhaps deprivation, but outside a pathologizing framework that posits them as damaged and leaves them struggling to account for their allegiances, desires, and dreams. An ethic of engagement requires no heroism, but rather an expansive commitment to the belief in systemic and (inter)personal transformation. Acknowledgments Thanks most of all to my research interlocutors in Japan. This paper has benefited from the thoughtful feedback of many people over many incarnations. Thanks to Dominique Behague and the participants of The Rise of Child Science and Psy-Expertise

Please cite this article in press as: Goldfarb, K.E., Developmental logics: Brain science, child welfare, and the ethics of engagement in Japan, Social Science & Medicine (2014), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.socscimed.2014.11.036

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workshop at Brunel University. Thanks, too, to participants and discussants at the University of Chicago's Medicine, Body, and Practice workshop, the American Anthropological Association conference, the University of Chicago's Human Development and Clinical Ethnographies workshop, Harvard University's Department of Anthropology colloquium, the History of Medicine Research Group at Tokyo University, and the McMaster University Department of Anthropology. Particular thanks to Tatiana Chudakova, Carly Schuster, Alex Blanchette, Elayne Oliphant, Sloan Speck, Judy Farquhar, Michael Fisch, Sue Gal, Junko Kitanaka, Danilyn Rutherford, Mara Buchbinder, Elizabeth Fein, Christine El Ouardani, Eli Thorkelson, Kate McHarry, Gabe Tusinski, Julie Chu, Kaushik Sunder Rajan, Eugene Raikhel, and three anonymous reviewers. All omissions are of course my own. Finally, I express gratitude to my funders: Fulbright IIE and the Wenner-Gren Foundation for fieldwork, and a P.E.O Scholar Award, a Toyota Dissertation Fellowship at the University of Chicago, and Harvard University's Program on U.S.Japan Relations for write-up.

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Please cite this article in press as: Goldfarb, K.E., Developmental logics: Brain science, child welfare, and the ethics of engagement in Japan, Social Science & Medicine (2014), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.socscimed.2014.11.036