In Japan today over 30,000 children are in the care of the state because their parents or guardians cannot, will not, or are not considered competent to look after them. Drawing on his long-term fieldwork in an institution for such children, Roger Goodman describes what happens to them in a country that has no professional social workers and little tradition of adopting or fostering children in need of care, and explains how, in the 1990s, the convergence of several factors - in particular Japan's rapidly declining birth-rate, its signing of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, and its `discovery' of child abuse - led to a new role for child protection institutions which had otherwise scarcely changed over the past 50 years. In the process, he provides the first full account in English of the development and delivery of child welfare in the world's second largest economy.