Data

This study draws the data from the local population registers called ninbetsu- aratame-cho (NAC) in the villages of Shimomoriya and Niita.¹¹ In both villages, the

NAC was enumerated annually at the beginning of the third lunar month.

Surviving NAC registers in Shimomoriya cover the 154 years from 1716 to 1869 with only 9 years missing (1720, 1729, 1846, 1850, 1858, and 1864—7). In Niita, the surviving NAC registers cover the 151-year period from 1720 to 1870, during which there are only 5 years missing (1742, 1758, 1796, and 1857—8). Thus, in the two villages there exist virtually undisrupted records spanning the latter half of the Tokugawa era. Because the format and contents of the NAC registers are almost identical for the two villages, and also because our preliminary analysis indicated that the patterns and causal structure of demographic responses to rice price fluctuations and household contextual variables were not substantially different between them, this study pools together the records from the two villages.

In addition to the continuity of the existing records, the NAC registers in the two villages have other advantages as demographic data. First, the registers were compiled using the principle of current domicile; thus, the NAC data are all de facto.'² Registers compiled this way give far more exact demographic information than those based on the principle of legal residence although the latter de jure principle seems to have been much more prevalent (Cornell and Hayami 1986).

Second, in the NAC registers of the two villages, the dates (month and year) of births and deaths were annotated as far as these events occurred during the period of observation. The dates of occurrence of these events were not normally given in local population registers in Tokugawa Japan (Smith 1977: 19; Saito 1997), so this is additional evidence of the high quality of the population registers in Shimomoriya and Niita.

One exception is infants who died before the first registration after birth. As was the case elsewhere in pre-industrial East Asia, local population registers of pre-industrial Japanese communities enumerated only those infants who survived from birth to the subsequent registration. Consequently, infants who died before the first registration after birth were excluded and thus never come under observation. This under-registration of infant deaths is probably the most serious shortcoming of our data source, and we have to keep this in mind when we interpret the results of the analysis of infant mortality and marital fertility.

Third, exits from the records for unknown reasons are extremely rare in the NAC registers of the two villages. Such ‘mysterious disappearances’ consisted of merely 0.6% (19 cases) of all exits during the 154 years covered by Shimomoriya's NAC, and only 0.3% (13 cases) of all exits during the 151 years recorded by Niita's register.¹³ Therefore, we can determine, in most cases, the timing of entrance to the ‘universe’ of observation (due to birth or in-migration) as well as the timing of death or other exit, even though the two villages experienced considerable in- and outmigration (Tsuya 2000).

The original annual NAC records (which were organized into one sheet per year for each household) were first linked into time-series data sheets called ‘Basic Data Sheets (BDS)' for all households. The BDS were then entered into machine-readable form, from which a relational database was created (for specifics, see Hayami 1979; Ono 1993). Using this database containing all information available in the NAC, it is not only possible to derive for each individual (and for each

household) indices of demographic and life course events, but also to link all individuals (present in the village) to the records of other household members.

From the relational database, we constructed a rectangular file for our multivariate analyses, using a person-year recorded in the population register as the unit of observation.

Although it is possible to compute chronological age for residents whose births were recorded in the NAC registers, the majority of individuals appearing in the registers were either present at the beginning of the records or had migrated into the villages some time after their birth. Moreover, the NAC information used to construct the covariates of our analyses is organized in terms of the timing of NAC registration. Hence, for the purposes of our analysis, it is necessary and appropriate to use as our measure of individual age the variable indicating the number of NAC registrations each individual went through after birth until his or her exit from the universe of observation due to death or emigration. Therefore, in this chapter, the word ‘age’ refers to the age measured in terms of the timing of the NAC registration (NAC age).’⁴ Measured in this way, the youngest possible NAC age of individuals included in our analysis is one.

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Source: Allen R.C., Bengtsson T., Dribe M.. Living Standards in the Past: New Perspectives on Well-Being in Asia and Europe. Oxford University Press,2005. - 495 p.. 2005

Data

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