So after giving birth, what do you do with your placenta?
Some people throw it away, some turn it into a smoothie to drink, and some use it to make plasagnas.
This is all fine, I’m not gonna judge, some of my best friends are cannibals.
The placenta had always held a special place in the Japanese, their wombs.
They even had a savage placenta debate, which we’ll talk about later.
They thought it was the guardian of the baby.
While in the womb, the placenta protected the fetus from the mother’s toxins,
because anything having to do with reproduction is ewwie.
After birth, the placenta protected the baby spiritually, like a bloody guardian angel.
We know the Japanese had placenta burial rituals from as early as the Heian Period, likely even before.
Not burying the placenta properly brought bad luck to the child and the family,
but do it right and the child would reap all the placental benefits, such as a vague concept of good luck.
There were 3 basic steps to the rituals: purification, wrapping, and burial.
An old medical text in 984 had these instructions.
First, wash the placenta with pure water, then some sacred sake.
Afterwards, wrap it in silk.
In a jar, place 5 coins, then place the placenta burrito on top of it.
If you want your child to excel in literature and writing, toss in a writing brush.
Put a lid on it and tie it tight so that insects and animals cannot get in.
If the placenta is damaged, then the child may turn ugly or die from illness.
Finally, bury it in a location of good fortune, perhaps in a lucky direction based on the baby’s birth month.
Other Heian Period texts say pretty much the same thing,
sometimes recommending soaking the placenta in vinegar.
By the Muromachi Period, placenta rituals became more complicated.
In some powerful houses, the instructions became official.
You had to follow them.
A document from the Ogasawara family has these instructions.
Wash the placenta with water, then sake, and wrap it in paper.
Put that in a pot and wrap it in blue silk.
Then put that in a bucket, and also toss in a mulberry bow, a lotus arrow, some kelp,
some chestnuts, and a noshi, or a good luck charm made of dried abalone.
Then wrap that placenta bucket with white cloth and put the whole thing in a box.
That’s 3 layers of containers, carefully designed to mess with archaeologists.
Wait, there’s another container inside, and another?
What treasures could lie within-- oh.
The document then says to find a good burial spot in a lucky direction.
If the child is a boy, step on the soil with the left foot 3 times.
If the child is a girl, step twice with the right foot.
This sounds like the stepping techniques of onmyōji, mages of the court.
Bury the whole thing carefully, because if animals break in and eat the tasty treat,
the child will go mad.
If insects eat it, the child would develop a nasty tumor.
Another document, from the Ise family, says this.
Wash it with sake and water, and wrap it in white silk.
Place it in a pine bucket.
An onmyōji should wrap a few coins in paper and place it on the placenta package.
Also, toss in a painting of a pine tree, bamboo, crane, and turtle, because these are symbols
of fortune and longevity.
Pack everything inside with cotton so that things didn’t move around,
you don’t want the gods to give you a bad eBay review for poor shipping.
Now nail a lid on the bucket, put that in a bigger bucket.
Lid that, and wrap it with white and red silk.
Then put that in an even bigger pot.
Again, 3 layers of protection.
Then bury the thing in a lucky direction.
Now in life there are rules that nobody follows, like the rule against seks for monks,
but this wasn’t the case for placenta rituals.
We know people did them because we’ve dug up placenta buckets before.
They’re like treasure chests but for serial killers.
The details of these practices were different depending on time and place,
but the basics were there.
No matter what happened, that placenta was getting shoved in the dirt.
By the Edo Period, this practice of the elites spread like a mother in labor to the common folk.
Commoners made placenta rituals simpler.
A poor farmer didn’t exactly have ceremonial bows and turtle paintings to throw away.
Confucian scholars wrote books about childrearing that included these simpler rituals.
They told people to wash it with water and sake.
Sometimes people washed the placenta and baby together, with the umbilical cord still attached,
probably not with sake.
They may have called it bathing instead of washing, because the placenta was often seen
as part of the baby.
But usually they didn’t wash the baby with the placenta,
letting the bebe stay on the side drinking its breast milk tea with boba or whatever it is bebes do.
Then they wrapped the placenta in cloth and put it in some container.
They normally used a single container instead of the 3 that the elites used.
Buckets didn’t grow on trees, you know.
Many just cupped two bowls together.
They painted symbols on it like crane, turtle, pine, and bamboo.
They also tossed in a bunch of things like coins, a fan, a writing brush, a small knife,
even anchovies and sea cucumbers, all parts of a balanced placenta bowl.
The burial itself was pretty interesting.
You usually bury humans, and treasure chests I guess, so it makes you think that maybe
they did see the placenta as the baby’s partner instead of just a body part.
A proper burial blesses the child with a good life.
So the baby could be sitting there the next morning eating its cereal and breast milk
or whatever it is babies do, and feel confident that its placenta twin is protecting it.
The location was important.
The Imperial Family and high-ranking elites had places in their residences used for placenta burying.
They could call on onmyōji to find the lucky directions or do the rituals.
The common folk didn’t have that luxury, they chose places around their homes,
like the garden, under the floors, the outhouse, under doorways, even on the street for really poor people.
Doorways were popular because a doorway was an in-between thing.
It stood between the inside and the outside.
The Japanese thought in-between things were cool and had supernatural powers.
The placenta was an in-between thing, it stood between the mother and the baby.
There was a big debate among placenta experts, a great debate, a vicious umbilical cord ripping debate.
On one side were the people who thought that the placenta needed to be buried in a place
that people frequently passed by and stepped on.
On the other side were the people who thought that was ridiculous, the placenta had to be
buried in an isolated area, away from foot traffic.
The feet and non-feet people fought on the battlefield of paper and ink.
One foot advocate argued in writing that being stepped on meant receiving love.
Which makes sense, just ask my dominatrix, Lady Bunions.
The feet people also said footsteps on the placenta made the child’s head hard and strong.
One non-feet guy wrote a passage crying over how people kept burying their placentas under doorways.
He simply could not understand such BS. It was disrespectful.
As expected of dirty feet lovers.
Another non-feet guy said it had to be buried in a dry and elevated place,
away from polluting materials, like freaking dirty feet and sandals.
The great placenta debate was never resolved.
They never ate the placenta.
They did a lot of things with it, but never ate it, that I know of.
You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make it eat a placenta--
I don’t know what that means...
There’s no evidence that they ate the placenta, but one can hope.
For more placenta and breast milk talk, check out these videos, maybe.
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Jack Reitman, Chris Hall, wenque,
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Pablo Medina, and AiraAoi.
Alright I love you, and spread the knowledge.