Estimates of Natural Fertility in Rural Tokugawa Japan

Abstract

This paper reconsiders regional and nation-wide marital fertility in rural Tokugawa Japan refering to the framework of natural fertility analysis. Many scholars have touched on the concept of natural fertility (deviced by Louis Henry ,a French demographer) since the decline of fertility in Europe became a central topic of European historical demography. Coale & Trussell's model is a quantitative one by which the level of natural fertility (M) and the degree of parity-specific fertility control (m) are estimated statistically. Since their original model, many corrections have been given by demographers. This paper estimates the value of M and m in rural Tokugawa Japan mainly using this model. What we gained through this analysis is 1) the level of natural fertility (M) in rural Tokugawa Japan was very low comparing to the pre-transition level of England, 2) in spite of this low level fertility, parity-specific fertility control was not practiced as far as refering to the value of m in nation-wide analysis. So we can say that rural Tokugawa Japan since the second half of seventeenth-century was in a "natural fertility regime", but 3) the degree of fertility control (m) contained considerable regional and local differences. These concluding remarks are tentative and intermediate because this analysis contains only eighteen village-based data and the diffusion of them is biased regionally. It is not to say that we can not complete natural fertility analysis only through this estimation. We need to proceed the conversation with micro-demographic researches of marital fertility in order to make these conclusions more reliable.