Chapter 1
Introduction

"There were giants in the earth in those days," says Genesis, drawing a powerful analogy between secular diminution in physique and degradation in moral fiber.^[1] Linking dramatic change in quality to decisive changes in physique as it does, the quotation is an apt starting point for this work. My two key theses—that improvements in net nutritional intake mainly attributable to a diminution in the demands placed upon it caused by a shift out of labor-intensive work and a decline in the frequency and duration of infection due to more effective medical and public health intervention led to the improvement in population quality interpreted in terms of enhanced capability and work capacity; and that in addition to supply factors like technology, demand factors working both through the market and through entitlements were crucial to this secular trend—are theses about a striking secular change that has rendered Japan's young adult population potentially more productive on a per capita basis and physically taller and heavier than its forbears. Exaggerating somewhat for the sake of emphasis we can say that in quality terms, Japan's population today, in comparison to her population in the past, consists of giants.

Just as the quote from Genesis argues by way of analogy and metaphor, so does the account offered here. But while analogy is important in this work, so is the marshaling and interpretation of historical evidence. In this study I scrutinize a considerable body of evidence, in an eclectic manner. My account is eclectic because it combines both

qualitative and quantitative data and because insofar as it has a quantitative focus it draws on a wide variety of techniques to process and present that data—for instance, regression analysis conventionally employed by economists and cross-classification of data favored by sociologists and anthropologists—in weaving an account that I hope will be comprehensible to historians as well as specialists in various social sciences. That I have adopted an eclectic approach reflects not only my own predilections in analytical matters (in particular, my belief that it is through an interaction of inductive and deductive techniques that progress is secured) but also my desire to communicate my findings to scholars in a wide range of disciplines. I believe this is important because the secular improvement in population quality in Japan was a broad social process going beyond the mere operation of markets as they evolve in response to changes in technology. Institutions at the local and national levels governing the distribution of entitlements over foodstuffs and health-enhancing public health and medical services and the demand for these institutions as voiced through political and social protest play a very important role in my account.

Of the analogies and metaphors central to this volume, the most important are those involving the definition and measurement of population quality and nutritional intake net of the demands placed on it. The remainder of this chapter briefly discusses these key metaphors and some of the thorniest conceptual issues surrounding them and clears the way for more detailed treatment in terms of the historical data for Japan that I analyze in the remainder of this book. I begin with the concept of population quality.

Population Quality and the Standard of Living

By the average quality of a population, I mean the average potential capability and potential work capacity of its members. Capability and work capacity are to be understood in both physical and mental terms. Whether a population of a given average capacity or capability chooses to exercise and develop the potential it has depends on the attitudes toward and the incentives that individuals face concerning the development of these capabilities. From a theoretical viewpoint my concept of average population quality is quite close to the notion put forward by A. Sen et al. (1987) concerning the proper definition of the standard of living. The similarity of my view is briefly discussed in the remainder of

this section. From a practical empirical viewpoint, I choose to use anthropometric measures concerning height, weight, and chest girth for children and young adults at various key ages. That these measures serve as useful proxies for potential capabilities and work capacity is a matter that, to the best of my knowledge, is not discussed by Sen. Discussion of the usefulness of employing these measures as proxies is taken up below.^[2]

Why should we focus on population quality as defined in terms of capabilities and work capacity? There are two lines of reasoning that lead us to this conclusion. The first is the potential feedback of labor productivity on future productivity. That there is a relationship between the productivity of the past and the productivity of the present arises from a variety of potential linkages. For instance, short-run linkages run through the level of nutritional intake or a sense of well-being to work capacity or the eagerness to work in the present period or in the immediate future. Or again this process may take place over several generations. The better fed and the healthier women are in any given period, the more likely they are to give birth to offspring with adequate birth weights and the more nutritious their breast milk is if they elect to breast feed their infants. That feedback appears to have been empirically important in the Japanese case is crucial to the argument I develop in Part II of this book concerning the motivation for and role of population quality-enhancing behavior on the part of households and non-household organizations like enterprises and governments.

The second reason to start with a definition centered on capabilities and work capacity is because it leads to a linkage between the measurement of population quality proposed in this volume and the measurement of the standard of living as proposed by Sen (1987). In my opinion Sen's definition has much to offer when it is contrasted with the more conventional definitions used by economists. For instance, Sen (1987:7 ff.) forcibly argues that the standard subjectivist utilitarian view runs into the objection not only that utility in and of itself cannot be directly measured but that definitions employing it fall short of what most people believe on logical grounds is the standard of living. Thus if we interpret utility in terms of pleasure and happiness, we must address the question of whether persons who are very poor and exploited in material terms may not, by dint of being socially conditioned into lacking ambition and material aspirations, find happiness in their poverty equal to or greater than that experienced by a wealthy individual who commands many more resources in consumption. Again if we think of

utility as defined in terms of the satisfaction of desire, we encounter the same objection raised immediately above that the downtrodden may find their desires so stifled through progressive disappointments that they abandon these desires one by one, retaining only a few modest ones that they are sure of fulfilling. Despite the fact that such a downtrodden individual may well be satisfying the few desires he or she is left with, is it not unreasonable to say that such an individual is well-off? Again if we conceive of utility in terms of choice, we encounter a host of problems: what about choices made by an individual which benefit others and not the individual per se? What about choices involving non-marketed goods like one's own children? Again if two individuals with identical time and income constraints choose different bundles of commodities, can we conclude anything about relative levels of standard of living?

It is theoretically possible to avoid the pitfalls of subjectivist definitions by using consumption, or what Sen (1987: 14 ff.) calls opulence. Now ignoring the question of constructing price indexes so that comparisons between two different economies or within one economy over time can be made, which plagues the actual empirical estimates of relative opulence that are made, there remain conceptual problems with using consumption of goods and services for individuals in the same economy facing identical prices. The two individuals may have different physical needs, for example, different demands for foodstuffs because one individual is ill and the other is not, or because one individual has a higher metabolic rate than the other, or because one lives in a colder climate than the other, and so forth. In practice there is no way to control for all background variables that condition demands placed on consumption so that unambiguous quantitative rankings of individuals can be arrived at. While it is reasonable to suppose that a doubling of income per capita is associated with some improvement in the standard of living, if this gain in income is at least partly purchased at the expense of increased crime or environmental degradation or an increase in stress, it is not at all clear to what extent the overall standard of living has actually improved.

Of course, there are many thoughtful advocates of the conventional approaches using either opulence or opulence taken together with other indicators of quality of life, the nonmaterial components of welfare implicitly being purchased from the resources made available by opulence. For the sake of my ongoing comparison between the measures of population quality that I espouse and the various facets of opulence, specifi-

cally, net nutritional intake, which I will make use of in my empirical analysis as causal factors explaining how levels of population quality are determined, I present some indicators of opulence and associated quality of life measures for Japan over the period 1881-1980 in table 1. Note that while death rates go down and life expectancies go up roughly in tandem with the rise in per capita income and consumption, reported illness rates for middle-aged males also go up. And note that the trend in reported illness has a direct bearing on some of Sen's objections to the conventional subjectivist/utilitarian approaches to measuring the standard of living. Is the trend due to increases in levels of income that allow people to "purchase" more leisure by declaring themselves ill in circumstances that in the past, when income was far lower, would not have served as socially acceptable justification for taking time off? Or are middle-aged men in Japan subject to more stress now than in the past because expectations about work capacity have risen faster than work capacity? Or is the trend a mirror for improved quality of medical care and diagnosis?

In any case, to return to the conceptual issue raised by Sen, he rejects both subjectivistic utilitarianism and opulence as criteria for defining the standard of living. As an alternative he proposes a definition that includes the various "doings" a person achieves; that is, he advocates use of a definition based on achievement or capability (the capacity to achieve). It is not necessary here to go into detail concerning the very interesting distinctions Sen makes between functionings that are achievements and capabilities that are the capacities to achieve and are conditioned, among other things, by freedom. What is relevant to our discussion here is that Sen focuses on what I think many, perhaps most, people mean when they talk about a life "well lived," or "richly lived." People have in mind some concept of the capacity to achieve things, whether it is because they are physically capable of doing things or because they are skilled or well educated or sensitive to opportunities, and so forth. Without taking up the thorny issue of political constraints on freedom to exert oneself, I take a narrow form of this concept of achievement and capacity to achieve and define it as I have done above in terms of population quality. Certainly there is a relationship between population quality as I define it and Sen's concept of the standard of living, but because my definition is narrower than his, populations of identical quality according to my definition may well enjoy quite different levels of the standard of living, say, because of differences in the capital-to-labor ratio or in the political system. For the purposes of this

study a narrow definition will suffice. Moreover, to actually measure the standard of living it is necessary to narrow the scope of our definition even further. Which is the issue to which we will now proceed.

Anthropometric Measures and the Secular Trend in Human Growth

I propose to measure population quality in terms of anthropometric measures for children and young adults, namely, in terms of average levels of height, weight, chest girth, and weight for height indexes, for males and females at various ages up to twenty. To understand why this approach can usefully serve to measure quality, it is necessary to briefly consider three major findings from the field of auxology on which I draw in selecting my measures. These three findings are as follows. (1) There has been a secular trend in the anthropometric measures for adults in all populations that have experienced a pronounced and sustained rise in per capita income, referred to hereafter as the secular trend in levels of human growth. (2) There has also been a secular trend in the tempo or timing of growth in children and youths as they mature toward their terminal adult heights and weights and chest girth. The mean age of maturation has declined; in particular, the mean age when children experience their greatest postinfancy growth has declined over time. This is referred to hereafter as the secular trend in the tempo of human growth. (3) While the gene pool and heredity are important at the individual level and at the average level over a period of many generations, evolution within the gene pool is a minor factor in the secular trend. I take up the third item in the next section and turn to the first two points in the remainder of this section.

Auxology is a field with a venerable tradition reaching back to the Renaissance. J. M. Tanner (1981), one of the leading authorities in the field, has provided us with an engaging account of the evolution of the study of human dimensions from its beginnings in the work of artists like Leonardo da Vinci and Albrecht Dürer to the studies by Montbeillard of his son's growth in the mid-eighteenth century to the anthropological work of Shuttleworth and Franz Boas. Among other findings to emerge from this literature is an appreciation that the process of human growth is quite uniform for each sex taken separately as evidenced by a regular age-specific profile for the growth process and by the simultaneous coordination or coincidence of organ and tissue development for the various components of the body, but that development age and chronolog-

ical age vary individually within populations and over time, in a secular sense, for populations. For instance, Tanner (1961) shows that the development of the brain and the ability to perform well on intelligence tests is related to physical maturation in other areas of the body, like the length of legs and arms and the size and functioning of the sexual organs. Now because of the long history during which auxologists have developed a set of precise measurements for exact calculation of height, weight, and other physical characteristics, and because auxological data is often generated by military and educational institutions as by-products of their examination of physical fitness for the individuals under their command or charge, we can document the secular trend in anthropometric measures for a number of national populations or sub-populations.

And wherever we can document these trends, it appears that they accompany economic and social modernization (see Eveleth and Tanner I990; Tanner 1978, 1994; and the various chapters and preface by Komlos in Komlos 1994). Hence researchers have been given the opportunity to document the secular improvement of living standards by using data on secular movements in anthropometric measures. And this brings us back full circle to the issue of the standard of living and to my position regarding how to interpret secular changes in the level and tempo of human growth.

Note that first of all I do not define or measure the standard of living in terms of the anthropometric measures; rather, I define population quality in terms of capabilities and work capacity, which I measure in terms of the anthropometric measures for children and young adults. By measuring population quality in terms of the properties of children and young persons, many of whom have not yet entered into employment, I explicitly focus on capabilities and capacity for future work as opposed to achievements and accomplishments. Thus population quality in my definition is very close to a narrow version of Sen's concept of the standard of living, which excludes the political and social constraints that may in practice limit the ability of individuals to turn capacities into realized achievements and concentrates on potential adult physical and mental work capacity. Other things being equal, the greater the population quality, the greater the standard of living in Sen's sense. The relationship between population quality and the standard of living defined in other terms—say, in subjective utilitarian terms or in terms of opulence—is complex and far less clear than is the relationship between population quality and Sen's standard of living concept. Suffice it to say

that there is no obvious connection between my concept of population quality and the utilitarian definitions, but that some aspects of the standard of living defined in terms of opulence do play a role in my account as determinants of population quality. It is important to keep in mind that when I refer to the standard of living, I am referring to Sen's concept, and when I refer to the determinants of population quality, I have in mind specific variables that are often incorporated into the opulence definition of the standard of living.

Coevolution

I hope it is by now clear that I do not subscribe to the view that the standard of living, particularly defined in terms of opulence, is equivalent to population quality. While I have already provided a number of grounds for reaching this conclusion, I have not yet considered one of the most compelling, namely, the influence of the gene pool on anthropometric measures. R. Steckel (1994b: 1, 9 ff.) argues that as long as we work with population averages and changes over time or differences between population averages, we can largely control for the influence of the gene pool. He does concede, however, that comparisons between populations of Asian and Western European descent are complicated by genetic factors. For instance, P. Eveleth and J. M. Tanner (1990: chap. 9) provide an abundance of evidence that physical proportions—for example, leg to trunk length as measured by the ratio of sitting to standing height—vary between different gene pools: Individuals of African descent tend to have long legs relative to trunk length; individuals of European descent tend to have moderate leg lengths relative to trunk length; and individuals of Asian descent tend to have short legs relative to trunk length. For this reason, other things being equal, adults of African descent tend to be taller than individuals of Asian descent. That there are observed height differentials does not necessarily speak to the question of whether long-standing or contemporary opulence-based standard of living differentials exist among these groups.^[3] Now it may be thought that while international comparisons are complicated by genetic factors, comparisons within a gene pool or secular changes within a gene pool are free of this problem. Is it not the case, for example, that secular change for, or differentials within, Japan's population (which is often said to be racially homogeneous due to its isolation from the Eurasian landmass) are unambiguously attributable to factors that are not genetic? Unfortunately, as we shall now see, this position cannot be sustained.

First, race itself is a questionable category in anthropological analysis. The prevailing view is that while genetic inheritance is important, there is no such thing as distinct "races." Within the boundaries of Japan live persons of Ainu, Korean, and Chinese descent and/or progeny descended from marriages between persons of different ethnic origin.^[4] For this reason, throughout this book I refer to "Japan's population" rather than to "the Japanese people."

Second, coevolution may exist. By coevolution, I mean the interacting evolution of culture with genes. Imagine that there is random and ongoing genetic change and that most of these genetic changes vanish over time but that some have adaptive or survival value because of the cultural environment in which the phenotypes carrying the genetic coding exist.^[5] The possibility of coevolutionary change has been extensively explored by anthropologists in the last several decades. A number of the arguments in this field are systematically reviewed and tested by W. Durham (1991). Several examples culled from the literature appear in chart 1, below. Note that two major arguments, both of a coevolutionary nature, have been advanced to explain why persons of Asian descent tend to have shorter legs than Africans. One is that because of random genetic changes selected for, because marriage ages were unusually youthful in Asia, or because of diet, Asians go through the adolescent growth spurt approximately a year earlier than non-Asians. Hence, because in the years leading up to the adolescent growth spurt legs are favored in growth, non-Asians have an extra year or more for leg development. The second main coevolutionary argument relates to climatic differences: gene pools that evolved in hot climates require greater heat loss per unit of volume; hence genetic changes that produce longer legs are favored. Insofar as coevolution does occur, does it not occur very slowly, over generations and hence over hundreds or even thousands of years? In the short span of a century or perhaps two centuries is it not reasonable to suppose that there is too little time for coevolution to occur? For instance, is it not reasonable to suppose that the secular gain in standing height that I will document for Japan's population over the period 1900-1985 is due to nongenetic factors?

At first glance the argument appears plausible, but there are problems with it. Taken literally, this thesis means that the typical male living in Japan at the turn of the century had the genetic potential to reach an adult height of, say, on average 170 centimeters but, due to the exertions of physical work, the ravages of infection, and inadequate nutrition, was only able to reach a level of around 160 centimeters. Perhaps this is in fact

the case, and the failure to reach putative genetic potential is a fully satisfactory explanation. But at the present stage of our knowledge of auxology we simply do not know whether coevolution can be totally ruled out, even for analysis covering a period as short as a century. Care must thus be exercised in interpreting statistical associations between secular movements in components of the standard of living defined in opulence terms and secular changes in height, weight, and related anthropometric measures. For simplicity in the analysis of secular trends in chapter 2, I will not explicitly discuss coevolution. I will argue that changes in net nutritional intake are the dominant factor in accounting for changes in population quality in Japan. But I must again warn the reader that we cannot completely simply dismiss the possibility that coevolution may be operating even over a period as short as eight and a half decades.

Gross and Net Nutrition

By net nutritional intake, I mean total (gross) nutritional intake net of the nutrients used to fuel physical and mental work and to fight off disease. In fashioning this definition I ignore the nutritional intake used up in states of pure rest like sleeping (the so-called basal metabolic rate).^[6]

The first of the two key hypotheses of this study is that a major cause of the improvement in population quality in Japan over the 1900-1985 period is a secular improvement in net nutritional intake. To put the hypothesis in simple mathematical terms my claim is that

where f stands for some mathematical function, Q is an indicator of population quality, and N is net nutrition. Now we can write net nutritional intake as gross nutritional intake GN minus the nutritional resources used up in staving off disease and in physical work. Let D stand for an index of the incident of disease and L for the demands placed on nutritional intake by physical labor. Then we can write

where l and d are parameters of negative value. Thus we can rewrite equation (1.1) as

where g is a mathematical function. I will devote chapter 2 to exploring variants of equation (1.3) in terms of a variety of proxy variables for Q , GN , D , and L .

Organization of the Study

We can now, by way of setting the stage for the analysis presented in the remainder of this book, draw together the various themes touched on in this chapter. The view advanced in this study is that population quality has vastly improved in Japan because of improvements in net nutritional intake. When analyzing changes in national aggregate averages, my view is that equation (1.3) (or variants of it) suffices for a quantitative analysis of the relationships involved. This type of analysis is the burden of chapter 2. While the net nutrition hypothesis finds significant support in the analysis presented in chapter 2, it is incomplete because it brushes over the social and economic context within which demand for population quality interacts with supply factors like technological improvements in food production and in medicine level in determining actual outcomes for population quality. To explore demand, we must consider the way demand is voiced both through markets and through nonmarket mechanisms like the demand for entitlements that redistribute demand among various socioeconomic groups. That is, we must undertake cross-sectional analysis comparing regions and socioeconomic groups and we must consider the ways in which various groups and regions voiced their demands for entitlements. Bringing entitlements into the analysis forces us to consider community and government. Governments regulate and set standards for foodstuffs and medicines. Governments also provide public goods and affect the levels of entitlements enjoyed by individual households through various mechanisms of redistribution. But governments are not the only organizational entities that shape the entitlements available to individual households. Enterprises also set standards for their workers and provide entitlements for employees and their household members. In Part III explore the development of the institutions affecting household entitlements over public health and medicine and foodstuffs and in doing so highlight the balkanization of entitlements in prewar Japan. The story I develop is very much the stuff of economic history since it stresses the strength of the market, and it is also the stuff of social history since it stresses social unrest aimed at voicing demand for entitlements. In short, recounting this story that turns on the social history of population quality in Japan underlines the point that we must never neglect the role of political and social factors in the shaping of the great secular trends in population quality evident for the industrialized nations over the last several centuries.