I wrote a lot of papers on this at my Very Catholic PhD, and the idea a kami that protects aborted fetuses and guides them safely to a new incarnation because it wasn't their time yet, with no recrimination or blame on the mother, went over like a lead balloon. #FolkloreThursday https://twitter.com/Yokai_Parade/status/1354786371223879680

There's also some really interesting practices in the north of Japan where shrines devoted to Jizo also perform spirit weddings for sons who died unmarried, particularly soldiers killed in WWII. Without a wife and children, they were still children in the family structure.

Families would buy beautiful dolls in elaborate, traditional bridal kimono, and the priest would conduct a spiritual marriage for the deceased and the doll, satisfying the need for the dead young men to become adults and be able to move on in their karmic cycle.

This is where it's important to note that in Japan, you're born Shinto and die Buddhist, as Shinto doesn't really do funerary rites.

Jizo, however, is both a kami (Shinto spirit) and a bodhisattva (an enlightened being who helps others to enlightenment). Dual purpose!

Anyway, Jizo is very, very neat, and the attitude towards death and abortion is obviously wildly different in Japan than it is in the West, especially the US.

Abortion is part of life, and Shinto accepts that for what it is. Jizo helps people navigate their feelings about it.

Granted, Jizo likely started as a kami who looked out for miscarried or stillborn children, or children who died young because infant mortality and childhood mortality were common. But he evolved to handle aborted fetuses as well, because that is modern Japanese reality.

Obviously, I am a huge outsider to this. But as a study of comparative religion and how religion evolves to handle change and societal upheaval (such as massive Japanese casualties in WWII), Jizo is incredibly useful and interesting.

If anyone is really interested, I can drag up my bibliographies about him and about these various spirit marriages and death practices of children and young people in Japan. There's also interesting research on Jizo in Taiwan, though a very different tone than Japan.