From the internet, a blog comment (not the highest level of authority, no doubt)
Is that true? I never heard of this before. At best it sounds like it dates from the time period of Shogun. Can I still be adopted by Papa Toyota? Free car?
Wtf. No
Adopting adults does happen, although this is definitely something that was much more common in the past. This was typically done for lack of heir rather than because a child was disowned. To keep the business a family business people would adopt someone they could trust to take over.
Historically, adoptions were very common amongst nobles, although obviously that’s less relevant nowadays.
IANAJL but from what I’ve read, it is impossible to legally disown a natural child without a very good reason, for instance, if the parent was physically abused by the child, if the child was sentenced to five years or more in prison, or if the parent paid off large gambling debts incurred by the child.
You hear about stories like the last case, but that has really nothing to do with adopting adults.
But not only in Japan: legal systems may allow for actual legal adoption of an adult or not (by which I mean, the kind which says this person will pay “inheritance by child” taxes rather than “inheritance by stranger” ones), but in Spain at least that kind of situation was common enough in the last two centuries to be considered more of a footnote than anything else. I wouldn’t try to explain to the current owners of one of those businesses that they don’t really count as descendants of the founder, they tend to take it badly.
An example in the USA:
I had a friend in her 60’s who adopted a daughter in her 30’s. The two had developed a very close and dependent relationship. The older woman was completely estranged from her own children, and didn’t want them making decisions for her as she aged. There was little or no inheritance in the picture, (perhaps a very small Condo? an old used car?) these were not wealthy people. they both had low-middle class incomes, the younger woman’s being higher by about 30%.
The response of most of our friends (and her family) was as if she were wealthy and this were some sort of con artist, rather than a woman who had been her support and close friend for a decade. It was just so unheard of that folks had trouble believing it could be benign.
I was reading the Wikipedia entry about Japanese family names recently, and discovered that, at one time, a person seeking Japanese citizenship would need to be adopted by a Japanese family and take their family name. The example given is of Lafcadio Hearn, who was adopted by his wife’s family and took the name of Koizumi Yakumo.
I don’t know what this means as to rates of heirs being disowned by their families, but it suggests that adoption of adults in Japan was certainly not unheard of.
Found a cite for what the OP was talking about. Sounds like it is true. According to Freakonomics, underperforming sons who are not deemed worthy of taking over family firms can be replaced by adoptees. Often these new sons will marry daughters and be adopted as sons-in-law, but if the man they want is already married, he and his wife can both be adopted.
The quote in the OP is still off base. While the study Freakonomics links to does state that most adoptions in Japan are of adults, it also states that most adult adoptions are into families lacking heirs. So the high average age of adoption in Japan is due to a lack of sons, not the widespread disowning of heirs.
Also, there aren’t as many babies and young children adapted in Japan, which also makes the average age higher.
In Japan, adoption is also a way to get your gay lover to legally be registered as a part of your family. So two gay men, who have different family registers, can be put on the same family register if one adopts the other. I’m told it helps with probate issues (but I’m not sure on the specifics).
You’d probably know better than I would about whether this is still true, but when I was living in Japan several years back there seemed to be a (from my perspective old-fashioned) stigma about adopting children. The topic rarely came up, but I remember a couple of people being curious as to why there were so many adoptions in the US and why we were so open about it. One of my coworkers said it was better for the child if they never, ever learn they were adopted. Since Japan has such a low teen birth rate (PDF, see page 4), and a very low birth rate in general, I’m assuming there are not a lot of unwanted children born in Japan in the first place.
I think that’s related to the more general stigma of being different.
If you can read Japanese, or want to trust automated translation, there’s an article in Asahi Shimbun’s supplement:
http://globe.asahi.com/feature/111106/04_1.html
Some of the info you can glean from it:
There are 47,000 orphans or children who have been taken from their custody. The number is rising, as people are more and more likely to report cases of domestic abuse.
90% of them live in institutions.
The government recently greatly raised the financial support for foster parents. However, this does not include adoption, hence becoming a foster parent is more or less treated as a job. Special financial support is not given to adoptive parents, because as parents they are legally obliged to take care of their kids. The ministry’s position is that it would be “unnatural” for the government to pay parents for something that’s an obligation.
Appart from the total number of adoptions, there is no sort of data whatsoever gathered. There is almost no way for journalists or researchers to get a global view of the situation.
According to one institution, they get on average 10 children that are abandoned by their parents every year. They also get 140 people interested in adopting a child. A large number of those are couples with sterility problems. Up to 90% according to another institution.
After the war, there was a great number of orphans, and society was very open towards adoptions. This changed during the economic boom.
Experts point out that the adoption system’s problem are structural. It is inefficient at both supporting pregnant woman who are considering offering their child for adoption, and couples who are interested in adopting.
The part I find hard to believe about the OP is the “disowning” part. Nepotism is high in Japan, and family bonds are very strong. Unless the son was a screwup of truly epic proportions they’d still rather leave the business to a son than to someone not related.
I guess this might have happened in a few cases, or where there is no son then I can believe they adopt an Adult but to make the case that the adult adoption rate is high because of disowning has the logic backwards.
Right, that’s confusing me too. I totally get adopting the person who would make the best successor, but how does that require disowning the unsuited child? Either the child has some disability, or the parents must feel a sense of responsibility for how they turned out.