Fertility, mortality, and life expectancy in pre-modern Japan

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Abstract
This article examines eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Japanese fertility and morality patterns obtained from village population data and constructs estimates of life expectancy using the Coale-Demeny regional model life tables. The population data from scattered villages indicate relatively low birth rates — slightly over 20 per thousand — and death rates which tended to fluctuate around the birth rate. The data suggest that life expectancy in rural areas in western Japan during the nineteenth century was somewhere in the forties and similar to that in western Europe prior to 1850, and not unlike that in Japan in the early twentieth century. If these villages are representative of trends in Japan just prior to industrialization, it seems unlikely that there was any sharp discontinuity in population patterns between the Tokugawa and Meiji periods. The author concludes that a re-evaluation of the demographic changes considered to have occurred during Japan's industrialization is in order.

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