Ubasute

Common card · No. 207398

Ubasute (姥捨て, "abandoning an old woman"; also called obasute and sometimes oyasute 親捨て "abandoning a parent") is a mythical practice of senicide in Japan, whereby an infirm or elderly relative was carried to a mountain, or some other remote, desolate place, and left there to die. Kunio Yanagita concluded that the ubasute folklore comes from India's Buddhist mythology. According to the Kodansha Illustrated Encyclopedia of Japan, ubasute "is the subject of legend, but…does not seem ever to have been a common custom."

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