Regional Distribution of Young Male Height

Without doubt, then, socioeconomic differentials were pronounced toward the close of the era of balanced economic growth. But what about geographic differentials? In light of the fact that Tokugawa period entitlements were balkanized and that socioeconomic differentials appear to be quite pronounced, would we not expect these to be substantial as well? After all, the combination of income per capita and socioeconomic differentials, coupled with the fact that some fiefs had devoted more resources to ensuring their peasants against food crises than other fiefs (which presumably left its mark on the physical growth of children at the beginning of the Meiji period), should generate regional variations in height and weight among young adults during the period of balanced growth.^[9]

We can begin the investigation with regional figures on the percentage of twenty-year-old males examined in military recruitment physicals who are short (defined as 4 shaku or less [1 shaku = 30.3 cm]). As can be seen from map 1, the forty-six prefectures of Japan (excluding prefecture 47, Okinawa) fall into ten regions. And for these ten regions we have data for 1918 on the percentage of males examined for military recruitment examinations who are short. The percentages are given on map 2. There is considerable regional variability in shortness. It is least evident in Hokkaido—where the Ainu population, which once was genetically distinct, resides and has intermarried with the population originating from the remainder of Japan—and in the Kinki region, which includes Osaka, Kyoto, and Hyogo prefectures, which during the Tokugawa period constituted the most economically advanced area of Japan. The regions where shortness is most pronounced are the districts in the northeast of Honshu, the main island, and especially the districts just north of Tokyo. To what extent these differentials are long-standing is, of course, a matter of debate. That they may have been long-standing is suggested by the fact—for which some statistical evidence is offered in the next chapter—that the high income areas of interwar Japan tended to be those that had been heavily urbanized during the late preindustrial period.