SOUTH KOREA is often chided by adoptee lobby-groups and international observers for having renounced its orphaned and abandoned children for decades. After the Korean war (1950-53) South Korea witnessed perhaps the largest exodus of infants—around 200,000—from a single country into adoption in foreign homes. As recently as 2011 it was the sixth-biggest source of infants for adoption in the world (it dropped to 17th in 2013). Yet South Korea has in fact been caring for an overwhelming majority of its unwanted children—2m, or around 85% of the total—who have grown up in state-run orphanages in the past six decades. Part of the reason for that is that adoption in South Korea is so rare. Why?

South Koreans have taken in just 4% of their unwanted children since the 1950s. In 2013 they adopted fewer orphans domestically than Americans, Chinese, Germans, Russians and Swedes did (see chart). Neighbouring Japan, by contrast, has some of the highest rates of adoption in the world; but there, men in their 20s and 30s accounted for 98% of adoptions in 2008, taken in by sonless families to carry on their names and businesses. Japan’s sagging birth rates have limited the odds that a family has a natural male heir. South Korea’s households are having even fewer babies: under 1.3 per woman, among the lowest rates in the world. As families have fewer of their own, the prospect of raising another’s child is discounted—not least because it remains so taboo. The chairman of LG, a South Korean conglomerate, adopted when his only son died early (he also has two daughters); he took in his brother’s son, the better to keep the business in the family.