Fertility and mortality regime in the north-eastern Japanese population: 2Oth-early 20th century

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[1] This research project has aimed at two subjects which must be able to enhance its traditional and standard level of the Japanese historical demography. Firstly, we have attempted to use not only population resister but also all kinds of source materials that have important relationship between population listings and all other materials, for examples pregnancy register, death records, landholding registers, and so on Secondly, with relation to research field and to collection of original source materials, we have focused on north-eastern region of the Japanese island where is rich in original source materials. We have gotten as much materials as possible, which ought to merit our project.[2] This project, on the other hand, has gotten four year's research fund as the continued research project from the grant-in-aid for science research, we have expanded its research concept, members and research strategy. This does really means that the "abstracts" has touched only a few aspects of fertility and mortality regime of population who had existed for a hundred years.[3] Japan's mortality crisis in the era of pre-modern and early-modern stage gave serious damage on lay population who lived under the volatile economic circumstances. Especially three notorious famines, Horeki(1756), Tenmei(1784), and Tempo famine(1837), were well known disaster that left scars on the population size of the north-eastern Japanese area. Impacts of three famines, however, have not necessarily been estimated on the basis of statistical method but on qualitative documents written by literate persons who lived the same age. Conclusions are as follows: The first famine resulted in only 3% loss of total population. The second and third one marked respectively, however, 14 and 22% loss compared with each previous year, when no signs of disaster had obviously been observed by residents.