In this paper, I examine how the pattern of women's labor supply responded to the changing local labor market. I also argue that the shift in the pattern of women's labor supply has led to the changes of some population variables in Asako County. By applying the method of historical demography and using the idea of 'gender' in a broad sense I examine these issues. In recent years, the study of 'gender' is popular in the field of history. But usually historians' main point of view is how to introduce suppressed sex to the main stage. Here, I use the concept of 'gender' because women's labor supply was affected by their status at home, especially when they were married and had their children. The decision for their labor supply was not made by themselves but their whole family or sometimes by household head. My main point is, when married women were forced to work for maintaining their house economy, they preferred the job they could do without leaving their home for a long time, say a year. To prove it, I will use the data from Nimbetsu-Aratame-Cho (NAC), the population register of pre-modern Japan, at Koriyama-Kami-Machi Town from 1729 to 1870. I divide the data into two periods. The first one is from 1729 to 1799 and the second is from 1800 to 1870. In the first period, there were few wage jobs for women in their home village, so they must leave home to work at the nearby town, Koriyama-Kami-Machi. But in the second period, the local wage labor market for women, such as spinning developed at their hometown as well as Koriyama-Kami-Machi, and they preferred staying at their own houses and worked as day laborers. The change was confirmed by multiple regression. To clarify the situation, I also introduce and explain some examples from documents other than NAC. These changes may cause the rise of the birth rate at their home village. On the other hand, the local town, Koriyama-Kami-Machi, gathered work force from farther area. Many migrants came to Koriyama-Kami-Machi together with their family. Some female migrants married after they came. As they bore their own children, the population pyramid of the town changed to have gentle slope (namely 'pyramid'). Moreover, an increase in wage jobs for women may lead to decreasing marriage rates at the town and villages in the Asaka County, through the rise in the mean age at first marriage and delay of entering re-marriage market.

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There are two seemingly conflicting goals in modeling human death: to describe the actual survival curve accurately and to explain mortality in etiological terms. These two goals have never been achieved by a single model (Wood et al., 1992). Here we present a simple model of human death that successfully addresses both of these goals. We apply this model to the survival curves of France, Japan, Sweden and the United States thereby proving the goodness of fit of the model. The calculation results for Japan are shown to be fully explained in relation with the major changes in mortality trends the country has experienced.

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This paper examines the determinants of nest-leaving behavior among young adults in Japan. The research on the timing of nest-leaving has been largely hindered by the data availability and methodologies. Previous studies either used cross-sectional analysis or life table methods. Those studies did not model how the transition rate of nest-leaving is dependent on a broader set of covariates. This study overcomes these methodological weaknesses by applying the event-history analysis to the first available nationally representative data for analyzing nest-leaving behavior in Japan. The data is from the 1998 survey of National Family Research of Japan (NFRJ98). The NFRJ98 data is a retrospective survey of men and women aged 28 to 77. The birth cohorts of 1940-1970 are chosen to analyze nest-leaving behavior from the era of rapid economic growth in the 1950s to recent economic recession in the 1990s. Individuals who left home younger than age 15 are not included in the sample. As a result, 2079 men and 2299 women are the subject of analysis. Explanatory variables used in the models are the following : the number of siblings, birth order, widowed or non-intact family, town size, and parents' socio-economic status and life event variables such as schooling, occupation and marriage. Previous studies showed that late marriage and the concentration of the youth population in metropolitan areas are the major causes for the delay of nest-leaving in recent cohorts. This paper argues that birth order and educational attainment are also the key factors determining the timing of leaving home. The oldest sons, and oldest daughters without male siblings are less likely to leave home than other siblings, even in the cohorts of 1960s. Moreover, highly educated women are less likely to leave for occupational reasons than those less educated. Furthermore, attaining higher education both delays women's initial exposure to the risk of marriage and reduces the hazard of marriage itself. As marriage is the major mechanism of nest-leaving among women, the delay of marriage caused by educational attainment further delays the timing of leaving home. In spite of the tendency of late nest-leaving among women, those women whose parental economic situations are unstable tend to leave home early. Contrary to women, highly educated men tend to leave home for both educational and occupational reasons than less educated men. Although the demographic context of recent cohorts such as fewer siblings and high probability of living in metropolitan areas suggests that young adults are more likely to stay home, there is only a slight delay in the timing of men's nest-leaving in recent cohorts. This is due to the fact that (1) the convention that the oldest son should stay with parents even after marriage has weakened in cohorts born after 1950s, and (2) the probability of leaving for marriage was higher for the 1960-64 cohorts which benefitted from the babble economy of 1980s. In conclusion, the timing of nest-leaving is highly influenced by educational attainment. Also the effects of birth order indicate the traditional stem family norm is still firmly rooted in contemporary Japanese society.

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