Most studies on population and family patterns in early modern Japan have been carried out with three kinds of historical documents: the religious investigation registers, the Buddhist temple death registers, and the household registers. In cases where these handwritten documents have been well preserved, we can obtain a considerable amount of information about the real life of peasants including not only population statistics, but also indices concerning family status. We have been developing a database system to calculate demographic statistics from these documents. With this system, we can improve the following four technical aspects: reduction of data processing to output demographic statistics, reliability of the data processing, preservation of historical documents in digital form, and sharing of data and analysis methods with researchers around the world. We named this system DANJURO. We have also started to develop the Alliance system for kinship and genealogy studies, and the historical GIS for geographic mobility with the database in DANJURO. DANJURO allowed us to find regional differences in the mean age of women at first marriage and the structure of households between Aizu / Ohnuma counties and Muko / Yatabe counties. We were also able to verify long-distance marriages in both regions from the end of the 18th century. It is clear that the reproductive behavior in each village was not limited to nearby villages where peasants could make a round trip in one day. Therefore, it is necessary to collect, store, analyze, and share additional series of historical registers with DANJURO and to find the regional patterns of reproductive behavior as well as the reasons for these regional difference in a nationwide perspective before preparing the national demographic statistics.
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