On January 12, 1948, two officers from the Waseda police station in Tokyo came across wooden boxes holding the bodies of five infants. The autopsies showed that the babies had not died naturally: three had pneumonia and malnutrition, two had frozen to death, and all of them had empty stomachs. The undertaker who had been carrying the boxes told the police where they came from, the Kotobuki maternity home in Shinjuku, and that he had been paid five hundred yen a body to dispose of them. Three days later, on January 15, the home's director, Miyuki Ishikawa, and her husband, Takeshi, were arrested.
She was born Miyuki Omaru, or Komaru, on February 5, 1897, in the village of Honjō, now part of Kunitomi, in Miyazaki Prefecture. In 1914 she moved to Tokyo, and on September 30, 1919, she qualified as a midwife through the Tokyo Imperial University. That year she married Takeshi Ishikawa, three years older, from Ibaraki Prefecture, a former sergeant in the Kenpeitai, the military police, and a former police officer, who helped with her work and had no regular job of his own. A hysterectomy had left her unable to have children; the couple raised a son from Takeshi's first marriage and adopted two boys and a girl. By the 1940s she was an experienced midwife who held posts in several midwives' associations and ran the Kotobuki home, Kotobuki San'in, in Shinjuku, and in April 1947 she stood, unsuccessfully, for the Shinjuku ward assembly. In the last years of the war and the first years of the American occupation, Japan had severe food shortages, no legal abortion for economic reasons, a heavy stigma against unmarried mothers, and a great many parents who could not keep a newborn. Most of the infants brought to the home had been born outside marriage to mothers too poor to raise them, fewer foster parents were coming forward, and the home took them in.
The Ishikawas charged parents a fee, presented as less than the cost of raising a child, on the understanding that the babies would be cared for or placed. Instead they were left without adequate food or care until they died. A physician, Shiro Nakayama, signed false death certificates attributing the deaths to natural causes, and an undertaker disposed of the bodies. Most of the other midwives at the home resigned rather than take part. The Shinjuku ward office did not act.
The home's own records give a measure of what happened there. The list of infants taken in rose from eight in 1943 to a hundred in 1947, 211 in all, and the home obtained eighty-four burial permits between 1945 and early 1948. When the Ishikawas were arrested, seven infants were still alive in the home, and two of them died soon afterward. Officers from the Public Health and Welfare Section of the American occupation headquarters came to inspect the home. The police found the ashes of more than forty infants at a mortician's house and thirty more at a temple. The prosecution charged that the couple had murdered at least twenty-seven of eighty-four infants who died between April 1946 and January 1948. On January 17, 1948, the Asahi Shimbun reported that the couple were suspected of 169 killings. The figure most often cited since is 103, and estimates range from 85 to 169. The Japanese press called Ishikawa Oni Sanba, the demon midwife.
Only five deaths were prosecuted. At trial in the Tokyo District Court, Ishikawa argued that the parents who had abandoned their children bore the responsibility, and much of a public worn down by the war was sympathetic to that view; the humorist Musei Tokugawa was among those who agreed, while the writers Yuriko Miyamoto and Michiko Fujiwara called it discrimination against abandoned children. On October 11, 1948, the court convicted the Ishikawas of five murders by omission, counting two of the babies found alive who died after the arrests, and sentenced Miyuki to eight years and Takeshi to four. Nakayama was also sentenced to four years. Both sides appealed. On April 28, 1952, the Tokyo High Court reduced the sentences to four years for Miyuki and two for Takeshi, and granted pardons under the amnesty that accompanied the Treaty of San Francisco. The Supreme Court of Japan rejected a further appeal on September 15, 1953.
The case is widely credited with pushing the government toward legal abortion; the physician and writer Takashi Hayashi and the politician Tamayo Miyagi argued for it as a way to prevent another. By the end of 1948 eleven other maternity homes in Tokyo had been found to have done something similar, among them Yodobashi San'in, exposed a month after Kotobuki. On July 13, 1948, the Diet passed the Eugenic Protection Law, which also created a national examination system for midwives, and on June 24, 1949, an amendment allowed abortion for economic reasons. Kotobuki was not the first such case in Japan: in 1930 people in Itabashi had been accused of killing forty-one foster children, and in 1933 a man named Hatsutarō Kawamata was arrested for the deaths of at least twenty-five.
She lived for almost forty more years. After her sentence she sold soap, cream and fish, and later ran a real estate office in Tokyo, from the address of the old maternity home. In 1969 she told the weekly Shūkan Shinchō that she was innocent; Takeshi was dead by then, she boasted of the large tomb she had built for herself two years before, and her former lawyer guessed she had made about a hundred million yen. Her name stayed in the Tokyo telephone directory at that address from 1954 to 1987, and on the lists of the real estate trade, as the representative of a firm called Asahi Shōji, until the end of 1986. She died on May 30, 1987, at ninety. Almost nothing is known of the infants whose deaths were never prosecuted beyond the lines in the home's register and the burial permits.