Making Babies in Ninth- and Tenth-Century Japan

Abstract What methods could women wanting to conceive children in premodern Japan potentially use to enhance their fertility? The written and material evidence surviving from ninth- and tenth-century Japan suggests that during that time fertility-enhancing methods stemmed mostly from two distinct and at times overlapping or competing traditions of written knowledge: Buddhist and medicinal expertise. Focusing on a ninth-century handbook attributed to a prominent Japanese Tendai scholar, this article first traces the Buddhist theories of infertility and the adoption of premodern Indian, Chinese, and possibly Korean pharmacological knowledge on aiding conception. Next, it investigates a new infertility theory and prescriptions on aiding conception included in Japan’s earliest surviving medical encyclopedia, the tenth-century Essentials of Medicine ( Ishinpō 医心方 , 984), before drawing conclusions on how these diverse types of knowledge may have coexisted in early medieval Japan.