Estimated birth and death rates in the early Meiji period of Japan

Abstract

According to the official vital statistics based on the birth and death registration, birth and death rates in Japan in the last quarter of the nineteenth century were very low when considered in relation to the economic and social circumstances of those days. Moreover, death rates were increasing and this is inconsistent with the medical and public health improvements brought about by the introduction of Western civilization. Obviously these movements are due to the incompleteness of the statistical data.

In the present paper the author has tried to estimate as far as possible, the true trend of birth and death rates as well as a more convincing age structure of the population in the early Meiji period of Japan.

The analysis has revealed that the estimated death rates were higher than the official rates. The estimated rates declined slightly throughout the period, contrary to the movement of the official death rates. Estimated birth rates, too, should have been higher than the official rates, and did not show any perceptible upward movement, at least until the late 1890's.

These and other observations show that the driving force of population growth in the early Meiji period was not the increase in births, as is usually asserted, but the decline in death rates. It is further suggested that the take-off of population growth from the stationary state of the Tokugawa period set in much earlier than was generally believed and had perhaps already begun not later than 1850.

The work of putting this paper into English was supported by the Ford Foundation as part of a project promoting translation of Japanese economic studies.

The work of putting this paper into English was supported by the Ford Foundation as part of a project promoting translation of Japanese economic studies.

Notes

The work of putting this paper into English was supported by the Ford Foundation as part of a project promoting translation of Japanese economic studies.