2022 Volume 58 Pages 51-65
The purpose of this paper was to calculate the average number of live births （ANLB） to women who continued in their first marriage during the birth period and to evaluate complete fertility in Japan during the period between World War I and World War II using the ANLB.
I first calculated the ANLB of the nation, cities and counties based on birth-cohort data for five groups: “before 1890”, “1891–1895”, “1896–1900”, “1901–1905” and “1906–1910”, using the population census of the 1950 special report: “The Fertility of Japanese Women” （Prime Minister's Office Statistics Bureau 1957）. The calculated ANLB of birth cohorts in the “before 1890” and “1906–1915” groups were unreliable. Therefore, I estimated the relevant ANLB.
Next, I estimated the ANLB of women whose husbands worked in a primary industry （ANLB-P） and that of women whose husbands worked in a non-primary industry （ANLB-NP） based on city and county data for ANLB. The national ANLB declined slightly for the birth cohorts from “1891–1895” to “1901–1905” ; live births in the ANLB-P group rose whereas live births in the ANLB-NP group declined. The national ANLB could be calculated as the weighted average of the ANLB-P and ANLB-NP groups if the correct proportions of the two values are known.
I concluded that national marital fertility showed a slight downward trend during the period between World War I and World War II while marital fertility by occupation varied. When ANLB, ANLB-P and ANLB-NP were considered to derive an index of complete fertility, the marital fertility of those whose husbands worked in primary industries rose while that of those whose husbands worked in non-primary industries declined. I also concluded that the slight overall decline in national marital fertility resulted from the decline in the marital fertility of those whose husbands worked in non-primary industries offsetting the increase in the marital fertility of those whose husbands worked in primary industries.
