Gabi kindly pointed me to the wonderful and informative post on Sai no
Kawara.

I had heard of the role of kokeshi, and in more detail of Jizu, in
helping to deal with abortions; I did not however know about the
practice of infanticide, which seems almost unendurable.

The fear of twins seems to belong to many cultures. Marie de France
tells a story about a woman who considers killing one of her twin
newborns (though she is given a rational reason for it) in her lai Le
Fresne (12th century). In Chinua Achebe's novel Things Fall Apart
Christian missionaries in Nigeria find converts in women who have had
their newborn twins killed. The ancient Greeks dealt with it by having
a set of twin gods, Castor and Pollux, which presumably authorized
letting twins live. Ancient Greek and Roman comedy is full of twins,
and Shakespeare took up that theme with great vigor, of course. I have
been reading Arundhati Roy's book The God of Small Things which uses
the idea of twinship as a powerful spiritual state.

Anyway, I can contribute to this thread by pointing to the work of the
American anthropologist Ellen Schattschneider, who has investigated
the use of dolls in various contexts in Japan, including the doll
mascots made for the kamikaze pilots of WWII by young women, and the
doll brides who help the souls of dead unmarried children to pass into
the afterlife. These are three articles on these subjects.

Schattschneider, Ellen. "Buy me a Bride: Death and Exchange in
Northern Japanese Bride Doll Marriage." American Ethnologist 28.4
(2001): 854-80.

----. "Family resemblances: Memorial Images and the Face of Kinship."
Japanese Journal of Religious Studies 31.1 (2004): 141-62.

----. "The Bloodstained Doll: Violence and the Gift in Wartime Japan."
Forthcoming in the Journal of Japanese Studies.

See also "The Mystery of the Mascot Dolls"at
http://www.pacificwrecks.com/history/doll/

She also has a website related to her book Immortal Wishes, about the
Akakura Mt. Shinto shrine:
http://people.brandeis.edu/~eschatt/ImmortalWishes/

Judy Shoaf