KAMAKURA, Japan— Winding her way among thousands of tiny statuettes in an ancient hillside temple, Yuka Sugimoto finds the one she is seeking and lingers in contemplation of the secret, haunting act that brought her here.

Many Buddhists come to temples to pray for good health, a new husband or a pile of money, but not Miss Sugimoto. Every month she comes to this temple in the ancient Japanese capital of Kamakura to make amends with the fetus that she aborted nearly two years ago as an unmarried student.

It is not that she broods over whether she made the proper decision, given the circumstances. To her it was an act that was necessary, though evil. And like tens of thousands of women throughout the country, Miss Sugimoto regularly visits a Buddhist temple to console a tiny statuette, known as a mizuko jizo, that to her personifies her forgone baby.

"I think I've done something bad enough to be cursed," said Miss Sugimoto, in jeans and a down jacket, who traveled here from Tokyo. "I'll be scared when I have my next baby."

Japan is not sundered by the kind of debates about abortion that are common in the West. In Japan abortion is entirely legal in the first five months of pregnancy and hardly stirs a murmur within society. There are no protests at abortion clinics, no debates about banning abortions and no politicians taking stands on the issue. The last legal restrictions on abortion were removed in 1948.

Even though virtually everyone here believes that abortion is a woman's own business, it is striking how uneasy many of those women are after exercising their right.

It is not the same as the religious belief in other societies that a fetus is a human being who has a right to life. But despite the vast differences among cultures, there is an echo in Japan of that disquiet about a mother choosing to end the life of the fetus in her belly.

The signs of a pervasive but silent mourning over abortions are the tens of thousands of mizuko jizo, or guardians of aborted fetuses, miscarried and stillborn babies and those who died very early in life. In temples across the country, women and sometimes men come to stand before these monuments to express their grief, fears, confusions and hopes of forgiveness.

It is often intimidation that sends young Japanese women into Buddhist temples after an abortion, a superstitious fear that the hush-hush act they have committed might curse their lives or the lives of their future progeny. But there are deeper sentiments as well.

"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.

"When they die early, they feel miserable," said Myoshun Nagata, a priest at the Jikeiin Temple in a western suburb of Tokyo. "People come here to please the other half, the deceased babies, and to relieve the babies from any suffering."

One day 20 years ago, a gynecologist came to Ms. Nagata and explained that over the years he had performed so many abortions and seen so many deformed fetuses that he wanted to be purified. He asked Ms. Nagata to conduct a special Buddhist ceremony for him.

She did, and since then Ms. Nagata has conducted regular memorials in a small gilded room, awash with the scent of incense and adorned with lighted candles and hundreds of tiny statuettes.

Koki Iwakura, a doctor who has performed many abortions over the years, says his patients rarely express sadness or guilt. Most of them have already made their decision by the time they come to him, and many have had two or three abortions without reservations, at least on the surface.

"Many of the women seem very cold and matter-of-fact, even unconcerned about it," said Dr. Iwakura, who runs his own gynecological clinic. "We doctors are also quite businesslike about it all, but when I see the heartbeat of a fetus, I feel very bad. Still, I have to take the patient's decision into consideration."

But Dr. Iwakura is intimately familiar with the need to cleanse the spirit. Once in a while, he and a group of gynecologists who all perform abortions go to a shrine or a temple together to attend a special memorial to purify themselves.

Three decades ago, more than a million Japanese women each year turned to abortion as a form of birth control. Now, partly because of the spread of condoms and other forms of contraception, Japan has only 300,000 to 400,000 abortions a year.

Birth control pills have been virtually banned by the Government for a variety of reasons over the years, the most recent being that their use instead of condoms could contribute to the spread of AIDS. In the past, the Government and medical authorities declared the pills unsafe, said they encouraged promiscuity and expressed fears they might depress a birth rate that the Government already considered too low.

Many doctors say their clients were mostly middle-class, married women in their 30's whose husbands do not like using condoms.

"Their sorrow for babies is surpassed by their desire to maintain a good relationship with their husbands," explained Miyoko Kono, a gynecologist who believes that women should take more control of their sexual lives. "These wives are unable to oppose the desires of their husbands. It is really miserable for them."

About a decade ago, Dr. Kono found herself in the middle of an anti-abortion protest movement led by a small Japanese religious group. Among bagfuls of hate mail, she once received a letter threatening to send to her the dead bodies of dogs and cats.

Soon after, she received a heavy package, but returned it immediately without opening it. The movement fizzled, and there is hardly a spark these days.

Part of the dispassion stems from a tradition in which even newborns were not believed to be full human beings. These days, of course, infanticide is almost unimaginable here, but until a couple of centuries ago it used to be a common form of family planning, for reasons including sex selection.

"In former times, Japanese people never cared about newborn babies, because they were thought not to have any spirit or soul," said Emiko Namihira, an anthropology professor at Kyushu University of Arts and Engineering. "They could only have a relationship with the family after the parents gave the rites of passage. So often, the midwife killed a newborn baby as soon as it came out."

Photo: Mizuko jizo, tiny monuments to aborted fetuses, are dressed and tended to at Buddhist temples in Japan. (Osamu Honda for the New York Times)