Filicide in the Media: News Coverage of Mothers Who Kill in 1970s Japan

Abstract

Castellini analyses media coverage of cases of maternal filicide in late postwar Japan. Focusing on the Asahi shinbun and Yomiuri shinbun (two of the major Japanese national dailies), he foregrounds the rhetorical, editorial and linguistic strategies by means of which maternal filicide came to be represented as an alarming social phenomenon of historical proportions. Using translation as both a theoretical framework and a methodological tool, Castellini proceeds to examine two major categories under which such cases were represented: kogoroshi (child-killing) and boshi shinjū (mother–child double-suicide), and reflects on the extent to which they allowed a differential treatment and visibility of a maternal potential for violence.