Mizuko, water children, is the Japanese term for children lost before birth or shortly after, to miscarriage, stillbirth or abortion, and mizuko kuyo is the memorial rite Buddhist temples across Japan offer to families grieving such a loss. Families commission a service at which a small Jizo statue, a bodhisattva popularly understood in Japanese Buddhism as a guardian of children and travellers, is dedicated in the mizuko's memory, commonly dressed in a red bib or cap and sometimes accompanied by small toys or offerings left at the statue over time, and temple grounds across the country hold rows of such statues, some individually sponsored and others set up collectively for families who prefer a shared memorial.
Scholars date the rite's present form and its widespread popularity chiefly to the 1970s, when a number of temples began actively promoting mizuko kuyo services amid a period of social anxiety, extensive media coverage, and, according to several researchers, some commercial promotion of the rite by certain temples, a history that is part of how the custom is now studied rather than a hidden fact, and one the atlas records as attested academic finding rather than as commentary on any individual family's choice to seek or decline such a memorial.