The Evolution of Child Adoption and Child Welfare Policies in Japan and Korea

Child adoption is an institution that permits legal creation of parent-child relations. As such, it is the only means for a child who lost parental care to obtain a new and permanent home. In Korea, child adoption plays an important role in the protection of children in need of care, while in Japan it plays little such role. In this paper, to understand why the roles of child adoption in child welfare systems greatly differ between Korea and Japan, we compile comparable historical statistics and document the paths of institutional development in the two countries. Our analysis shows that both countries shared similar initial conditions in the 1950s, as the governments introduced modern child welfare systems during the turmoil of postwar years. Due to the differences in state fiscal capacity and other factors, however, their paths began to diverge : In Korea, in cooperation with foreign relief organizations, the government promoted child adoption to protect orphaned or abandoned children. By contrast, as child welfare institutions and government agencies formed collaborative relations, institutional care became a dominant mode of child protection in Japan, which delayed an adoption law reform and limited the role of child adoption in the area of child welfare.