A Study in Historical Demography

Abstract

Since the late 1960s the economic historians of Japan have reported various case studies of historical demography that are based on the analyses of the shumon aratame cho (Books of Investigation of Beliefs). This particular field of research was first pioneered by a French demographer, Luois Henry, in the 1950s. Since then it has been widely adopted by the European as well as other scholars.While the main sources of data in Historical Demography are the Parish records and the census materials in the case of Europe and the United States, shumon aratame cho and/or ninzu aratame cho (Books of Household Counts) may be considered an equivalent data set in the Japanese case. Such data enable us to investigate quantitatively the structures and patterns of the household and the family during the pre-industrial Japan. It also makes it possible for us to find out the demegraphic characteristics of a small-scale community with reference to labor forces and their changes.The present paper focuses upon Okago Village, Iwate Prefecture, from 1789 to 1870. Since this period had faced a great famine called Tempo kikin (1833-1836), the study also attempts to analyze its impact on the individual families and the community as a whole.Our major findings include : 1) the average size of households and the number of households greatly declined after the famine. Although the household size eventually recovered to that of the pre-famine period, the number of households remained much less. 2) The composition of households may be divided into two or three dominant types. Those different types of family repeat them-selves with the passing of generations within the stem families. 3) Whereas an average age at marriage at the turn of the 19th century ranged widely for both male and females, it came to be predominantly concentrated on the age between 20 and 25 during the latter half of the 19th century. This tendency goes counter to the findings in other studies (See Figure 8, p. 30) 4) A greater number of children were born to a wealthier household, and a less wealthy household was more likely to become extinct due to the famine. Lastly, 5) upon the death of a head of the household, it turned out that the famine made the age of the grantor of the inheritance younger by about five years.With this case study as a point of departure, we intend to investigate the demographic behavior covering other village of the same prefecturer.