Lead
Have you ever looked up how long you are supposed to keep the Maternal and Child Health Handbook — the boshi techo, Japan's government-issued record of a child's health from birth through early childhood?
Most municipal guidance says roughly this: keep it until the child reaches adulthood, around age 18. After that, almost nothing is written. What happens to it then is left, wordlessly, to the family.
Once a child turns 20, whose is the handbook? Is it acceptable to discard it? Should it be handed over to the child? Should it be kept as part of the family's history?
These questions extend well beyond the boshi techo. The smartphone photos, the parenting logs, the daycare communication notebooks, the records from health checkups — all of this documentation, painstakingly compiled over years of early childhood, still has no designated final destination. This article tries to think through that open question a little early, before it becomes urgent.