WHY 'MUSEISHOKU-SHUGI?'
WE ALREADY HAVE THE TERM "HANSHUSSHOU-SHUGI," SO WHY A NEW ONE?
Many antinatalists must wonder why.
Everything you need to know about how we came to use this new term '無生殖主義' (museishoku-shugi) instead of '反出生主義' (hanshusshou-shugi) is here.
Note for non-Japanese users: This page explains why we do not use the Japanese word that is most comonly used to translate the English term 'antinatalism,' and use '無生殖主義' which can be translated into English as 'non-procreationism' or 'anti-procreationism' instead. Some of the content here might apply to the English term 'antinatalism' as well, but we do not mean to argue that it needs to be replaced by another term.
Very often, antinatalism is defined as something that only applies to humans for no particular reason.
We have no time for meaningless discussions of whether non-human animals should be included to the scope of antinatalism, so we use an anti-speciesistly pre-determined term 'museishoku-shugi' to fight against creation of beings that are capable of experiencing pain.
The publication of Professor Masahiro Morioka's book 'Is It Better Never To Have Been Born?' and media coverage of him has made the term 'hanshusshou-shugi' (antinatalism) significantly better known in Japan, while arguably hampering the progress of the movement by spreading a wrong way of defining the term.
In the book, he treats antinatalism as something that consists of "procreation negation" and "birth negation" (p.14) and defines the former as "the idea that we should not give birth to our children," and the latter "the idea that all human beings should not have been born" (p.14).
The former is close to what antinatalism actually is, in the sense that it is at least in the shape of an ethical code, but the latter is, or could be interpreted as, merely a personal grief and clearly far out of the range of what antinatalism possibly could be.
This absurd way of defining antinatalism has made the Google search results for '反出生主義' (hanshusshou-shugi/antinatalism) filled with information that promotes the misunderstanding that antinatalism is only a self-satisfaction project that seeks to overcome one's grief of having been born, and does not deserve any serious treatment.
Now that this has happened long ago, it is not realistic, while entirely justifiable, to request "birth negation" to move out of the term 'antinatalism.'
That is why we use the term 'museishoku-shugi' as a second name for antinatalism as a pure code of ethics.
As much as antinatalism is true and correct, unnecessarily making it seem cult-like, extremist, or terrorist-like should absolutely be avoided for the sake of gaining enough support to make actual changes.
Some antinatalists are concerned about such negative effect that '反' (anti) in '反出生主義' (hanshusshou-shugi/antinatalism) could potentially have, and argue for using an alternative name for it.
'Museishoku-shugi' could be just what they are looking for.