senzenwomen | (Reply)

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do you know if there was any existing relationship to Sano, or was there some other reason?
IF the book I have is accurate, Sano was a family friend who had played go with Fumiko's father before his death and stayed in touch with her mother afterward; her birth mother apparently had to be very insistent to get Sano to agree to adopt her, saying that someone with Sano's strength of personality was needed to bring Fumiko up right, while Sano eventually agreed on the basis that Fumiko might be a promising daughter if she had her birth father's intelligence (which in the event she did).

curious about adoption in this period in Japan in general, and how formal it was
I don't know much either, but I think it was probably, if not entirely informal (on account of family registers etc.), less systematized than modern-day, certainly. I had to translate a large prewar family register for work a while back, and noticed that it included first, second, and fourth daughters but not third; eventually it became clear that the third daughter had been adopted by a childless aunt and uncle, so I think relatively casual "evening out" of children like this would have been less of a big deal than nowadays, for instance.