"The fact that you have murdered someone will be with you all your life -- it will not disappear," said a 27-year-old salesman, whose words prompted a swell of tears from his girlfriend as they stood before a mizuko jizo.

Mostly because they were not married, the couple decided on an abortion.

"We talked about it a lot," said the 24-year-old woman, who declined to give her name. "I'll never tell my family."

Like Miss Sugimoto, these temple worshipers pay a fee to adopt a mizuko and inscribe their names on it. They often regard it as representing their own forsaken baby, who lives at the temple.

They dress up the mizuko figurines like little newborns, wrapping them with bibs, hand-knit sweaters, booties or hats against the cold. And they pour water over the childlike figurines to quench their thirst.

"I pray for its spirit to safely enter the other world, which it can't do easily because it died from my own negligence, my mistakes," said a middle-aged Japanese woman who has been coming for the last 10 years to comfort her mizuko jizo.

"Mizuko jizo" literally means Bodhisattva, or potential Buddha, of the water-babies. In recent decades it has come to refer to aborted fetuses who are stranded on the banks of the river that according to Japanese Buddhist tradition separates the worlds of life and death. Because the fetuses are considered too young to have souls, they need to be guided across to the land of the dead.

The concept of mizuko jizo has developed only in the postwar era, and it has been linked more and more to abortion rather than to miscarriages or stillbirths.