Miyuki Ishikawa was born in 1897 and by the 1940s was the midwife in charge of the Kotobuki maternity hospital in Shinjuku, Tokyo. Japan in the last years of the war and the first years of the occupation had no functioning welfare provision, no legal abortion, severe food shortages and a great many parents who could not keep a newborn.
Ishikawa took them in. Parents paid a fee, generally less than the cost of a legal adoption, on the understanding that a home would be found. She and her husband Takeshi, who handled the money, then left the infants without food or care until they died.
The killing required a working chain of adults and the chain held for nearly four years. A doctor, Shiro Nakayama, wrote the death certificates. An undertaker was paid to dispose of the bodies. A mortician accepted them for burial. Nobody in it needed to be told what was happening, and nobody stopped.
Japanese reporting called her Oni Sanba, the demon midwife.
It came out in January 1948 when two police officers in Waseda found the remains of five infants and traced them back. The subsequent excavation and inquiry recovered the remains of over a hundred. The figure given at trial was 103, with estimates running as high as 169.
Ishikawa was given eight years and had it reduced to four on appeal in 1952. Her husband got four, reduced to two. The court accepted an argument that the parents had been complicit in abandoning the children. Which is to say that the defence was the same fact the prosecution had opened with, and it worked.
The scandal contributed directly to the passage of the Eugenic Protection Law in 1948, which legalised abortion in Japan. The state's answer to a hundred dead infants was to concede that the parents had needed a lawful option and had not had one.
The date of her death is not recorded. Two photographs exist of the police scrum outside the station on the day of her arrest, and no clear photograph of her face is known, which is why this entry carries no portrait.