Introduction
This study examines the patterns and trends of demographic responses to changes in living standards in two farming villages in northeastern Japan from 1716—1870, using the local population registers called ninbetsu-aratame-cho.
Focusing on four types of demographic outcome—mortality, fertility, first marriage, and migration—we analyse the impact of short-term economic stress on individual behaviour. Adopting the concept developed by Bengtsson (2004), we define short-term economic stress not at the individual level but at the community level, as measured by annual changes in local rice price with various time lags. Given that the setting of this study—two agrarian villages in pre-industrial Japan—depended primarily on rice farming, the use of annual variations in local rice price is appropriate to measure short-term economic stress in the communities.In pre-industrial rural communities in which households were the primary unit of production as well as of consumption, demographic responses to short-term economic stress would also have been influenced by the resources and wealth available within households. We therefore account for the effects of the amount of land owned by each household on the four types of individual demographic behaviours. Since the households in the two villages were almost entirely agricultural, the use of household landholding is appropriate to measure household resources and wealth.
Using the discrete-time event-history analysis model, this study seeks to answer three specific questions. First, among the four demographic behaviours under consideration, how did the nature of their responses to short-term economic stress caused by fluctuations in agricultural output differ? Second, whether these demographic responses to short-term economic stress were affected by household resources, and if so, how? Third, did the patterns of demographic responses to short-term economic stress change over time?
In the next section, we briefly explain the general population trends in Tokugawa Japan,1 the villages examined in this study and changes in their population sizes, and
temporal changes in local socio-economic conditions and policy contexts. We also discuss the nature of rice prices and household landholding in the contexts of agrarian economy and family farming in Tokugawa Japan.
We then explain the data and variables used in the model in this study, and finally examine the patterns and trends of demographic responses to short-term economic stress caused by fluctuations in local rice price, by conducting a series of discretetime event-history analyses of: (1) mortality by sex and life stage; (2) marital fertility; (3) first marriage by sex and marriage type; and (4) out-migration by sex and reasons of migration. The chapter concludes with a summary of the findings and a discussion of their implications.Because Tokugawa Japan was a society with enormous local variations in demographic patterns, family systems, and economic development, evidence from a study based on data from two farming villages is clearly not sufficient to provide a general picture of living standards as measured by demographic responses to short-term economic stress in pre-industrial Japan. Nevertheless, by examining an array of demographic responses to fluctuations in local rice price and household landholding, this study is expected to shed light on the nature of the relationships among demographic behaviour, local economy, and household resources in the Japanese past.
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