Preferred Citation: Mosk, Carl. Making Health Work: Human Growth in Modern Japan. Berkeley, Calif:  University of California Press,  c1996 1996. http://ark.cdlib.org/ark:/13030/ft867nb5h4/

Making Health Work Human Growth in Modern Japan Carl Mosk UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS Berkeley · Los Angeles · Oxford © 1996 The Regents of the University of California

Preferred Citation: Mosk, Carl. Making Health Work: Human Growth in Modern Japan. Berkeley, Calif:  University of California Press,  c1996 1996. http://ark.cdlib.org/ark:/13030/ft867nb5h4/

to my mother, Mary B. Hanley
and to the memory of my father,
Sanford A. Mosk

PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The subject of this study is population quality in Japan. It is my intention to make a strong case for population quality as a useful variable and one that can be effectively measured by height and weight and chest girth and body mass index for schoolchildren. I also hope to convince the reader that the secular improvement in population evident for Japan over the last several centuries is a result of improvements in net nutritional intake, that is, improvements in gross nutritional intake net of the nutrients burned up in combating disease and in fueling physical work effort. Finally, I hope to firmly establish that while technology and the shift away from agriculture and toward manufacturing matters a great deal to the improvement in net nutritional intake and hence to the enhancement of population quality, demand, as enunciated through the vehicle of political protest movements, also matters as well. Hence I ask the reader of this book to wear two hats, that of the statistician and that of the social historian.

This work arises from my stubborn conviction that enhancing population quality is a key ingredient to successful economic growth in our era. Telling the story for Japan, a country that perhaps better than any other exemplifies the capacity to rapidly industrialize and raise levels of income per capita despite severe natural resource constraints, will, I trust, make convincing the critical importance of population quality.

During the course of the research that underlies this account I have acquired numerous debts and obligations, too many to adequately ac-

knowledge here. However, I would like to single out my debts to three Japanese scholars who have greatly assisted me with my research on Japan's population over the last five years: Hiroshi Kawaguchi of Tezukayama University, Osamu Saito of Hitotsubashi University, and Yasukichi Yasuba of Osaka Gakuin University. In addition, I want to thank Isao Ohashi of Nagoya University for inviting me to spend three months in Nagoya during the spring and summer of 1994 as a visiting scholar and to the staff of the Economic Research Center at Nagoya University for assisting me in my research there. As a result of their invaluable assistance I was able to assemble a large amount of data on anthropometric measures for farmers and factory workers, some of which I discuss here. Seminar participants at talks I gave at Osaka Gakuin University, Ritsumeikan University, and Tezukayama University helped me clarify my thinking on a variety of issues concerning Japanese demographic history, and I am extremely thankful for the comments made by these individuals. My friend Yoshi-fumi Nakata of Doshisha University assisted me in arranging my trips to and within Japan and I am in debt to him for his efforts on my behalf.

At the University of Victoria I have benefited from the comments and criticisms of many colleagues, some made in seminars and some made in private conversation. I would like to offer special thanks here to Kenneth Avio, Judith Giles, David Giles, and Malcolm Rutherford in the Department of Economics; to Daniel Bryant in the Department of Pacific and Asian Studies; and to Eric Roth in the Department of Anthropology. They have contributed to this volume, although in ways they may find surprising. And I wish to acknowledge the assistance of the very professional staff of the Department of Economics at the University of Victoria, especially Pattie Eccleston, Barbara Provan, and Priscilla Shiu. I also wish to express my thanks to Ole Heggen of the Geography Department staff for preparing the three maps and the figure. Finally I want to acknowledge the helpful comments of participants and panelists at a session of the 1994 annual meeting of the Social Science History Association which concerned historical trends in height and at which I presented an early version of some of the arguments advanced in chapter 2 of this work.

By way of closing out my acknowledgment of academic assistance, I would like to mention the great support and assistance of Eugene Hammel of the University of California, Berkeley, who has aided me in countless ways over the course of my academic life, with earlier projects as well as with this one.

The writing of a book places a strain on those one loves. I want to thank Kumiko for bearing with me when I was deeply involved in writing this manuscript and for encouraging me to "put on my thinking cap" and to "get to the point." I hope that she feels I have done so in this book. If she does, it will be my greatest reward.

This book is dedicated to my mother, Mary B. Hanley, and to the memory of my father, Sanford A. Mosk, who was a true gentleman and a scholar. He always emphasized the fact that a book must have a central thesis. I believe this work does have a central thesis and therefore fits his definition of a real book. But that is for the reader to judge.

Victoria, British Columbia

PART I
SECULAR TREND, 1900-1985

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.

Chapter 2
Secular Trends in Anthropometric Measures of Human Growth and Their Relationship to Net Nutritional Intake

Here I take up the twin tasks of measuring and documenting the secular improvement in population quality in Japan over the period 1900-1985 and of examining the causal role played by improvements in net nutritional intake. The primary reason for focusing on this period is the availability of a long-term annual time series on height, weight, and chest girth for schoolchildren assembled by the Ministry of Education. Fortunately it also proved possible to construct time series for a variety of proxies for the factors underlying net nutritional intake over the same historical stretch of time: gross nutritional intake, the incidence of diseases likely to affect young persons, and the flow of child/youth labor services. The findings support the basic hypothesis of this study, that net nutritional intake is a major determinant of population quality.

I wish to stress, however, that I do not claim that the conclusions arrived at in this chapter have been proven in any absolute sense of that word. What I do show is that, using certain techniques and specific proxy variables, the hypothesis that net nutritional intake matters cannot (within reasonable bounds of confidence) be rejected. Thus the tests I use are based on what is usually known as the classical theory of statistical inference (see Maddala 1992; Pindyck and Rubinfeld 1991). By their very nature, the tests and evidence offered here are provisional: their validity and appropriateness depend on the choice of proxy variables, the degree to which the variables are subject to measurement

error, the design of the statistical procedures themselves, and so forth. That I feel my efforts are not in vain flows from my view that empirical work in economic and social history is fundamentally different from that in fields where one can conduct an ongoing, although finite, number of repeated and controlled experiments. Study of a historical process ultimately relies on processing some portion of the extant record left from actual realized experience in the past. One cannot redo the experiment over and over again. Rather, one can find new data from other periods, other countries, or other sources for the particular country or group of countries currently being examined which have not yet been explored, or one can select different ways of processing the data already in the hands of the community of researchers. Therefore, the field proceeds through an inductive process in which rejection, acceptance, or partial acceptance of hypotheses is used to motivate data gathering and to condition future hypothesis testing.

The chapter is organized as follows: first, I document the secular changes in the anthropometric measures for schoolchildren which serve as the measures for various facets of population quality in Japan; second, I discuss series on nutrition, public health and medicine, and child/ youth labor input that will serve as proxies for the factors underlying changes in net nutritional intake; third, I report the fruits of regression analysis using various econometric methods devised for the analysis of time series data. Because the regression techniques I use are probably not well known by all readers of this book and because some explanation must be given as to why I have selected the ones I have chosen, in an appendix to this chapter I discuss technical statistical issues in some detail.

The Secular Improvement in Height, Weight, and Chest Girth, 1901-1985

The anthropometric measures consist of a complex of related measures of physique: height, weight, weight for height (BMI, the body mass index, defined as weight in kilograms divided by the square of height calculated in meters), chest girth, and so forth. The most commonly utilized of the measures is (standing) height.^[1] The widespread use of height as a measure of the standard of living in the field of anthropometric history reflects the fact that for the last several centuries figures on height have been collected and published by and for the use of military organizations in a number of countries (see panel A of table 2). The degree

to which military data is representative of the terminal heights of young adult males is a matter of debate in particular cases (see the special methods developed by Flood, Walter, and Gregory [1990] to handle British data of this sort). But the fact remains that even when one discounts for problems of measurement, there are clear secular trends in adult height for the United States and select European countries. Indeed the estimates marshaled in panel A of table 2 suggest that while heights for males in the United States did not rise appreciably, heights in the Scandinavian countries showed a dramatic increase. Figures for male schoolchildren aged eighteen in Japan show increases that in percentage terms are comparable to those for Scandinavia. For instance, comparing the figures in panel B.1 of table 2 for the years 1981-1985 with those for 1901-1985, it is apparent the percentage gain in height for males is about 6.6 percent, which is roughly equivalent to the percentage gains for Sweden and Norway recorded over a historical period that is almost twice as long.

To a degree the figures on height suggest that the population has "caught up" with Western Europe or at least closed the gap that once existed. However, one must be careful in asserting this. A gap still remains; on average in 1985 males in Japan tended to be shorter than males in most Western European countries. During the 1981-1985 period height for males in Japan averaged about 170 centimeters. These average levels were reached by males in select European countries and the United States at the following dates: United States, 1715; Sweden, 1913; Norway, 1927; Denmark, 1930; Holland, 1950; France, 1960; and Italy, 1977 (Floud, Wachter, and Gregory 1990:26). Whether this increase in heights in Japan will continue and whether the gap will ever be eliminated is, of course, a matter that we cannot resolve here. But one point that was raised in chapter 1 must be kept in mind: the gene pool has a definite effect on standing heights in Japan. Note from the figures in panel B.2 of table 2 that most (but not quite all) of the gain in standing height has been due to a gain in leg length. As can be seen, the ratio of sitting-to-standing height has been declining as legs have become longer.

The other point that can be readily gleaned from a perusal of the figures for Japan in table 2 is the dominance of secular change in tempo over secular change in level. I give figures on ages 6 and 12 as well as on age 18 both to capture the dynamics of the growth spurt and to take advantage of the six-year differences between the ages. Creating a six-year standard interval is of considerable utility to the statistical analysis

taken up in section 2.4, but an additional benefit can be immediately grasped here. We can calculate the gain in average height for persons aged 12 in a given year t and the same cohort of persons aged 6 in year t - 6. That is, we take the average height for persons aged 12 in year t and subtract from that the average height for persons aged 6 in year t - 6 in order to estimate the gain for the cohort in year t - 6. A secular trend toward earlier maturation, that is, a downward drift in the mean age of the growth process and in the adolescent growth spurt in particular, can be seen from the fact that the anthropometric measures at age 6 and age 12 increase disproportionately in comparison to the gains at age 18. For instance, the percentage gains in height over the 1901-1910/1981-1985 period at age 6 is 8.8 percent and at age 12 is 12.2 percent. The fact that mean age of the growth spurt is shifting downward means that the secular trend in the gains in the anthropometric measures between age 6 and 12 is unusually great. For instance, the age 6 to age 12 gain in centimeters averaged over the 1901-1910 period is 27.2 and the gain averaged over the 1971-1980 period is 34.4. In short, the secular trend in the tempo of growth in height up to age 6 dominates over the secular trend in levels of height at age 18. That is to say, the improvement in population quality can be discerned both in the trends in levels and in the trends in tempo.

The dominance of secular trends in tempo over secular trends in levels is even more evident for females than it is for males. Figures are given in table 3. The percentage increases in height levels over the 1901-1910/ 1981-1985 period for girls aged 6, 12, and 18 are 9.3 percent, 12.6 percent, and 6.4 percent, respectively. The percentage gain at age 18 for females is less than that for males at age 18, but the percentage gains at age 6 and at age 12 exceed the gains for males. The difference in secular changes in tempo is surely linked to the fact that females mature at younger ages than do males, which can be easily gleaned by comparing the gains between ages 6 and 12 for females with those for males. Note that the increase in the amount of the gains from ages 6 and 12 between 1901-1910 and 1971-1980 is identical for both sexes (7.2 cm) and that the gains are always larger for females than for males. Note also that gains between ages 12 and 18 are far larger for males than for females. This reflects both earlier maturation for females and the fact that terminal average adult heights for females are less than those for males. The secular decrease in gains in height for females aged 6 and 12 is an unusually dramatic indicator of the secular trend in the tempo of growth.

While the differences between males and females in terms of the tempo of growth in and levels of height are of interest, the main point I wish to stress is the similarity in the secular trends between the sexes. The correlations between levels of male and levels of female height at ages 6, 12, and 18 are very high: over the 1900-1985 period the correlations are +.997, +.99, and +.97, respectively; and over the 1900-1940 period the correlations are +.97, +.98, and +.96, respectively.

That trends in tempo and level differ somewhat in magnitude does not mean that the heights at the various key ages that we focus on here are not highly correlated. For instance, over the 1900-1985 period the correlation between heights for males at age 6 and 12 is +.98; at ages 6 and 18, +.99; and at ages 12 and 18, +.97. For females the correlations over the same period are somewhat lower: +.96, +.90, and +.91, respectively. That correlations are lower for females probably reflects the striking dominance of secular trend of tempo. It is interesting and useful to keep in mind that over the period 1900-1940 the correlations between heights at ages 6 and 12, at ages 6 and 18, and at ages 12 and 18 are lower than over the entire period 1900-1985. For instance, for males the correlations are respectively +.96, +.90, and +.91; and for females the correlations are respectively +.91, +.88, and +.92. A final point to keep in mind in considering both the differences and similarities between secular trends in the tempo and in the levels of human growth is the greater sensitivity of six-year gains in height to changes in nutrition and other components of per capita consumption. To see this consider figure 1, which graphs annual figures on an index for nutrition (described in the next section), heights for females aged 6, and six-year gains in height between ages 6 and 12. Notice that the drop in nutritional intake occurring in the late 1930s and early 1940s due to Japan's growing military involvement is clearly mirrored with a slight lag in the case of six-year gains in height but that the impact on height levels is far less pronounced. In sum, tempo dominates over levels in terms of secular trend; it is also a more sensitive barometer of changes in the factors underlying population quality. To be sure, individuals who are deprived in the short run may "catch up" later on and therefore the overall impact of a short-term diminution in net nutrition may not be long lasting. Nevertheless, insofar as we are interested in ascertaining the causal connection between net nutrition and population quality, the greater sensitivity of gains in height and gains in other anthropometric measures is an important point that must not be forgotten.

Figure 1.
Indexes of Nutrition, Height for Females Age 6 and Growth for Females
from Age 6 to 12

I have begun my discussion of secular trends in the anthropometric measures in Japan with figures on height because height figures are the ones that are most commonly encountered in anthropometric history. While I do make use of some Japanese military conscription data later on in this study and T. Shay (1994) makes extensive use of it in his study, the bulk of my data is for schoolchildren and comes from surveys conducted in schools by the Ministry of Education. Why do I favor the use of this data? First, it is more comprehensive than the military recruitment examination data: it covers both sexes; it includes figures on weight and chest girth; and it is available throughout both the 1900-1940 and postwar periods (the military draft in Japan ended after World War II, although Japan currently maintains a small self-defense force). Second, the data are available for a variety of ages under 18 and hence allow analysis of tempo effects that, as noted above, are far more sensitive to short-run fluctuations in net nutrition than are levels, especially adult levels.

Despite the compelling virtues of the data set analyzed here, there are defects in it which we must confront before proceeding further. Chart 2 provides a summary background for a general discussion of the data used not only in this section but throughout this chapter. At this junc-

ture I will concentrate on the anthropometric measures covered in panels A, B, and C of the chart. As can be seen, the figures are for schoolchildren, and therefore children in the relevant age groups who did not attend school are excluded. Who was attending school? This depends on the period involved. S. B. Levine and H. Kawada (1980: 48-52) note that by 1900 four years of schooling (typically from ages 6 to 10), made compulsory in 1886, was virtually universal in practice. In 1907 it was decreed that compulsory education be extended to six full years, although this requirement was not successfully enforced until 1918. However, the extent of underregistration should not be exaggerated. For instance, in 1910, 98.8 percent of males and 97.4 percent of females of compulsory school age were reported as attending school (Japan Statistical Association 1988: table 22-1, p. 212). It is thus reasonable to suppose that by the early 1900s most children aged 6 and 12 are covered in the Ministry of Education data set. After the war nine years of education was made compulsory (from ages 6 to 15), and by the 1970s most children in Japan were in fact graduating from high school, which means that the coverage of individuals aged 18 in the Ministry of Education data set is by and large universal for all three ages analyzed here. The problem, of course, is the potential bias resulting from the selectivity of enrollment of children over age 12 before that period.

As can be seen from panel A of chart 2, there is a potential upward bias in heights, weights, and chest girth for males and females aged 18; and the earlier the date, the greater the upward bias. The reason is that the earlier the date, the lower the advancement rate past age 12 in the school system, and as a result the greater the selectivity of the population of those examined by the Ministry of Education. It is demonstrated in Part II of this volume that there are socioeconomic differentials in the anthropometric measures: in general the higher the social and economic status one is born into, the greater the height, weight, and chest girth and the higher the probability of advancing past age 12 in the school system. But as advancement rates increased the extent of this upward bias began to fall. It is likely that there is a contrary tendency at work on heights, weights, and chest girths for individuals aged 18, a contrary tendency that may allow us to conclude that this declining upward bias does not present a major problem for our analysis. The reason for the existence of a contrary tendency lies in the declining mean age of maturation. While I use age 18 as my oldest age for analysis (since advancement rates in the educational system after age 18 are so low that we

cannot usefully employ data on persons over 18 as auxological indicators for the population at large), in fact growth does not necessarily terminate at age 18. But as the mean age of maturation declines, the proportion of the population that continues to mature after age 18 declines. Hence it is likely that the secular trend toward earlier maturation, according to which there is a declining downward bias in the anthropometric measures (the earlier the year, the greater the downward bias), does counteract the upward bias due to a decline in the selectivity of the population receiving an education through age 18. For this reason I feel relatively comfortable using data for all three ages, 6, 12, and 18. But I must caution the reader that the problem does exist.

Now to return to a point made earlier about the virtues of using a data set that allows us to measure and analyze a variety of anthropometric characteristics of Japan's population, let us turn to figures on weight and the BMI. Figures for males appear in table 4 and figures for females appear in table 5. The virtues of having data on weights for both males and females (not just males, as is usually the case when one is using military recruitment data) can be seen from a comparison of trends in the BMI for males and for females. For if we calculate percentage gains in weight for the period 1901-1910 to 1981-1985, we get the following figures for percentage increase in weight and the BMI.

Note that the increase in weight for females at age 18, contrary to the increase at ages 6 and 12, is far less than that for males. The reason cannot be physiological: as can be seen from table 5, this is almost entirely a postwar phenomenon. The obvious explanation is dieting, and the reason for dieting is the concept of beauty for women that places strong emphasis on being slender. (The concept of sacrificing potential physical work capacity for beauty is undoubtedly much more typical of the urban nonagricultural population than of the farming population for whom potential for work is a virtue among young women on the

marriage market. Hence it is not surprising that the trend is much more evident during the postwar period when the farming population has been rapidly dwindling than during the prewar era.) Thus the weight and BMIs of young adults were apparently shaped by a cultural rule that does not appear to have been operating for younger children. This is an additional argument in favor of using data for young children as well as adults. It should be noted, however, that height of females at age 18 appears to be unaffected by the practice of dieting. Correlations between measures of height and weight for males and females presented in panels B and C of chart 1 testify to differences between height, on the one hand, and weight and the body mass index, on the other, which must be kept in mind in interpreting the anthropometric measures as measures of population quality.

Trends for a third major auxological measure, chest girth, are explored in table 6. Particularly striking for females is the secular trend in tempo that overshadows the secular trend in levels. For instance, in comparison with 1901-1910 when the six-year gain in chest girth for girls aged 6 is 11.6 centimeters, the average six-year gain during the 1981-1985 period is 18.2 centimeters.

Finally, the figures on anthropometric measures in table 7 illustrate several points about the drawbacks and strengths of the data set for school children on which my analysis in this chapter rests and provide additional background about prewar trends in height.^[2] The following observation supportive of use of the data on schoolchildren leaps out at us. Trends in average height and weight for persons examined for conscription examinations are much less striking—indeed, the trends in averages are almost ambiguous—than are the trends we secured for schoolchildren. To be sure, it may be argued that truth may lie on the side of an ambiguous or uncertain trend and that, therefore, finding this trend in the military recruit data is a virtue and not a deficiency. But there are reasons for thinking that the figures on schoolchildren more accurately represent the true underlying pattern. To see my point, note that the figures on percentages "small" (defined as 150 cm or less) and on percentages "tall" (defined as 170 cm or more) point toward an unfaltering increase in height that is consistent with what—using averages—we have found for male schoolchildren. Indeed, the fact that moments of the distribution of heights other than averages are available for military recruits is one of the most attractive features of the military recruitment data. But the shortness of the time period for which the data on distribution of heights is available (1915-1940), the lack of figures

on females, the absence of any measurements capturing the timing of the growth spurt, and so forth, make sole reliance on these data alone problematic. I do make use of them to a limited degree in Part II of this study.

Indexes of Nutrition, Public Health and Medicine, and Child/Youth Labor Input

The goal underlying construction of the measures discussed here is to secure proxy variable(s) capturing the three main factors underlying levels of net nutritional intake: gross nutritional intake and the uses to which human bodies put that nutritional intake other than in physical growth—physical exertion and work and fighting off diseases, especially infectious disease. The human body must either dip into its reserves of fat and muscle tissue or into flows of new nutritional intake, thereby potentially diverting the body's built-up, or freshly secured, reserves away from physical and mental growth, in generating energy that keeps it healthy and capable of sustaining physical exertion. The basic equation (1.3) decomposing gross nutritional intake into components that are used in human growth, into components that are utilized in fighting off disease, and into components that are consumed in physical work guides us in constructing the proxy variables. The extent to which the proxy variables capture or fail to capture the true factors underlying net nutritional intake for the average young person living in Japan during the 1900-1985 period is a matter that can be debated, but I believe my measures can be usefully employed in the time series analysis described in the next section.

The main assumptions underlying the proxy variables for the three components of gross nutritional intake are reviewed in chart 1. Here I will restrict my remarks concerning the variables to the following points concerning the philosophical approach that guided me in constructing the variables. One of my guiding principles was to construct variables that do not decisively depend on any one type of data or on any one type of assumption. For instance, it has been pointed out to me that there may be a bias in the figures on labor force participation for children and young adults used in the construction of the index of child/youth labor input during the first decade or so of the twentieth century (presumably the bias diminishes with time).^[3] Since the labor force participation rate only receives half of the weight in the overall index, this potential source of bias is reduced, albeit not completely eliminated. Another

guiding principle was, wherever possible, to construct two or more proxy variables for the underlying factor to see to what extent different assumptions about the appropriateness of a given proxy are valid. Hence in the case of gross nutritional intake I offer one series for the prewar period 1900-1940 and three for the postwar period up to 1985. Finally, since I am interested in relative and not absolute levels of the proxy variables, I constructed indexes (typically with the average value for 1900-1904 = 100) for each of the components of each overall index and then, by weighting each component index, calculated the sum of the components to arrive at an overall index. By construction, the resulting variable is a composite index.

Of the many potential problems that reduce the reliability of the series advanced here, one seems to me to be of sufficient concern to mention here: most of the series are per capita averages and hence may not accurately reflect the circumstances specific to children and young adults. This objection is not valid in the case of the proxy variable for child/youth labor input but is valid for the nutritional intake and public health and medicine series. Without doubt we do not know how food and public health and medical services were distributed within families. For instance, a bias in favor of males or eldest male sons among siblings has been extensively discussed in the literature on the Japanese family. Such a bias may exist, but the high correlations between the anthropometric measures for male and female children should be food for thought for those who would argue that such a bias undermines the validity of the measures used here. Moreover, it should be pointed out that experiments with dividing the nutrition series by a consumer unit weighted population—that is, by age- and sex-specific population weighted by numbers giving the relative consumption demand of the group compared to prime age males—did not reveal a significant difference in trends in nutrition between the per capita and the per consumer weighted population estimates.^[4]

A useful summary of the various component indexes underlying the gross nutritional intake variable appears in table 8. Since some data were available only for the postwar period (e.g., estimates of carbohydrate and fat and calcium intake), two nutritional indexes, a composite index with wide coverage (NUTI2) and an index for calcium and fat intake (CALCFATI), are calculated for the postwar years only. The index available for the entire 1900-1985 period, NUTI1, is a composite of indexes for per capita per diem consumption of calories, protein, and four types of vitamins (see panel F of chart 2 and notes to table 8). Underlying

the trends in all three indexes are two factors: increases in consumption of foods traditionally eaten during the preindustrial era before the 1880s, that is, an expansion in the quantity of nutrient intake with a given diet; and a change in the composition of food intake, that is, a structural shift in diet. As far as the composition of diet is concerned, it is important to recognize that the opening up of Japan to trade in the 1850s and the American Occupation after 1945 both left a mark on the dietary intake of the population of Japan. In particular, a shift toward calcium and fat partly because of a growing consumption of dairy products is directly related to internationalization of the Japanese diet after the 1850s and, again with greater force, after 1945.

To grasp the importance of the composition of diet, let us compare the Japanese diet in 1861 with selected years during the period 1874-1940. M. Umemura, N. Takamatsu, and S. Itoh (1983: 35) give the following percentage distribution of the main staples in 1861: rice, 47 percent; barley, 28 percent; assorted grains, 19 percent; and potatoes, 3 percent. Throughout most of Japan at the close of the preindustrial era, rice was the main source for caloric energy and for proteins.^[5] The role of rice declined until the 1930s, when it increased briefly; since the war consumption of rice has been in decline, especially in urban areas.^[6] Consider the calorie and protein intake arising from various sources (Mosk and Pak 1978).

The trend toward growing diversity in diet during the 1877-1920 period is apparent. However, during the interwar years there is a noticeable shift back toward rice, although the contribution of fish to overall protein intake seems to be on the rise during the interwar epoch. Perhaps even more dramatic in terms of a shift in the composition of diet antedating the American Occupation is the pronounced shift toward fruit as a source of vitamin A. The following figures give us important indicators of the impact of shifts in diet on the percentage composition

of vitamin intake by food type for the years 1874 and 1940 (Mosk and Pak 1978).

Of course, these trends in diet may well be overshadowed by the dramatic increase in calcium and fat intake following World War II conditioned by a growing American influence in dietary matters. There was a definite shift toward coffee, cereal, toast, and juice for breakfast and toward lunches based around sandwiches and milk. Moreover, school cafeterias served milk at lunch. But as important as the postwar shift is, the extent of change during the prewar era should not be ignored.

If the linkage between human growth and diet were more accurately understood, it might be possible to focus on more specific indicators of food intake. Lacking this kind of detailed information, my approach is to explore the impact that two composite indexes (NUTI1 and NUTI2) and one more specific index (CALCFATI) have on human growth.

My approach to the construction of an index of public health and medicine is based on slightly different reasoning. The basic indexes underlying the overall composite variable are discussed in panel D of chart 2 and estimates for the 1900-1985 period appear in table 9. My idea was to use two criteria in constructing an index of the impact of public health and medicine on a reduction in the frequency and severity of disease: the level of inputs per capita (a quantity measure) and the efficacy of the inputs (a quality measure). Before the 1940s and the development of antibiotic drugs, the ability of doctors and hospital staffs to effectively treat disease was much more limited than it was after 1905. Hence my approach is to build up an index that recognizes that the ratio of doctors (and by inference other medical personnel like nurses

and pharmacists) to population is important, but so is the effectiveness of the treatments offered. Of course, public health measures designed to stop the spread of microorganisms were also important. Hence I utilize two measures that implicitly take into account the impact of public health programs and the efficacy of therapy and inoculation offered by the medical community: the inverse of the death rate from four major infectious diseases—tuberculosis, pneumonia, bronchitis, and enteritis—which takes into account both incidence of infectious disease and treatment of it when it occurs; and cases per death for four other infectious diseases—cholera, dysentery, typhoid fever, and smallpox—which measures in inverted form the efficacy of the medical community in treating infectious disease when it occurs. I use inverses for death rates and the death-to-case ratio to construct an index that grows in value as efficacy improves and disease incidence declines. And I concentrate on infectious disease since I am mainly interested in children and young adults and it is infection that is the main source of illness for them.

What is striking about the variable measuring public health and medicine is its dramatic increase after the 1950s. This is testimony to the effectiveness of the antibiotic drugs in treating infection.

The last of the three proxy variables, that measuring child/youth labor input, is described in panel E of chart 2. Estimates of the composite variable and its two components for the 1900-1985 period appear in table 10. Two series exist, one covering the entire period and the other beginning after the war. There is little that needs to be said here about this variable. The trends in it are strongly affected by two factors: the growth of the educational system and the secular increase in the length of compulsory education within the system; and the shift from unpaid family work, exemplified by agriculture and forestry, to wage labor. Children were an important source of labor in small shops and on farms. Hence the shift away from this activity had a decided impact on the degree to which children were introduced into constant physical exertion from an early age. The variable is also an indirect indicator of the physical work levels to which mothers were accustomed, which presumably had some effect on birth weights of children.

In sum, in this section I have described the description of three composite variables for gross nutritional intake, for levels of and efficacy of public health and medicine, and for child/youth labor input. What impact these three variables had on net nutritional intake and hence on the levels and the tempo of human growth is the subject of the next section.

Long-Term Determinants of the Anthropometric Measures, 1901-1979

My goal here is to provide some measure of the relative success of the gross nutrition hypothesis in accounting for the secular trend in levels and tempo of human growth. It is important at the outset to be clear about the goals I have set for myself in the analysis that follows. What I show is that using the criterion of classical statistical theory one cannot reject the net nutritional hypothesis for Japan. I also show that given this provisional acceptance of the net nutritional hypothesis, changes in the demands placed on nutritional intake, rather than changes in the levels of gross nutritional intake, appear to be decisive to the secular trend in human growth and population quality.

Is such a modest aim satisfactory? There has been considerable debate on this point over the last two decades. There now seems to be some sort of consensus among scholars in the social sciences that an arbitrary distinction between the methods of science and those of the humanities, which was the pivotal notion of logical positivism, is not possible. Indeed, the prevailing view now seems to be that rhetoric and argument based on a notion of persuasiveness that goes beyond a mechanical recounting of statistical "tests" and "experiments" is the best we can aspire to in the social sciences (see Denton 1988; Klamer, Mc-Closkey, and Solow 1988; McCloskey 1994; Mirowski 1987). To accept this position is not to embrace an extreme version of relativism according to which there is no criterion by which we distinguish between competing hypotheses and viewpoints. But it does lead us to abandon the idea that any given statistical test is absolute and definitive. And it leads us to a pragmatic approach to the choice of statistical methods. In particular, it leads me to a strategy based on two criteria: use of forms for time series analysis, which allows me to estimate elasticity so I can differentiate between stronger and weaker effects, and use of cross-sectional and qualitative data as a supplement to time series analysis. Part II of this volume explores the latter kind of evidence.

In what follows I use log-log regressions to explore the impact of the three major factors underlying trends in net nutritional intake on the secular trend in human growth in Japan over the eight and a half decades between 1900 and 1985. The particular regression formats I employ are presented in chart 3. In the appendix to this chapter I provide a discussion of some of the technical reasons for using the particular functional forms underlying my results.

The results appear in table 11 (for height), table 12 (for weight), table 13 (for the BMI), and table 14. While there are differences between the findings for each of the measures taken separately, their consistency is striking. Indeed, as a practical matter, consistency is important to my pragmatic approach because I do not believe that any one "test" will ever be decisive. What is the main message to emerge from these results? It is twofold. First, the impact of gross nutritional intake as measured here is not great. For instance, results secured with the two broad composite variables for gross nutritional intake, NUTI1 and NUTI2, based on a wide variety of nutrients like calories, proteins, and vitamins, do not seem to have a consistent and positive impact on the levels and six-year gains in the anthropometric measures. And insofar as nutrition does seem to have a consistent statistically significant impact, it does so in terms of fat and calcium intake; it is the CALFATI

variable that gets the best results in this time series analysis. Thus one tentative conclusion that can be drawn from my analysis is that the shift toward dairy product consumption that was especially pronounced after World War II contributed to the secular trend in population quality. Second, secular trends in demands placed on nutritional intake seem to have dominated in the secular trend in population quality, especially during the prewar period. For instance, the elasticities on the proxy for child/youth labor input are especially large in the prewar period. After the war this index appears to be less important and the index of public health and medicine appears to be more important, although its estimated elasticity does not tend to be very large. These results accord with common sense. Before the war and the introduction of antibiotic drugs, the efficacy of public health and medicine was limited; and immediately after World War II, compulsory education was extended through to the end of middle school, which drastically reduced child/youth labor input.

Putting more social detail in these somewhat dry results is my aim in the second part of this book. But the results reported here are of interest and give support to the net nutritional hypothesis basic to this study.

Summary and Conclusions

During the first eight and a half decades of the twentieth century there was a dramatic improvement in population quality as measured by an assortment of anthropometric measures for schoolchildren. I have provided a wide range of data that document this secular trend for both males and females. It is the basis for my assertion at the beginning of this study that the person living in Japan today is in many ways a "giant" in comparison to a person living in Japan a century earlier.

I have also presented estimates for three composite variables—one for gross nutritional intake, one for public health and medicine, and one for child/youth labor input—whose trends over the last eight and a half decades strongly support the inference that net nutritional intake has dramatically improved in Japan. Finally, I have shown that the hypothesis that the trend in population quality is related to (caused by, I might assert) improvements in net nutritional intake cannot be rejected in time series analysis.

In short, I have a story to tell about the secular trend in population quality in Japan and evidence that supports that story. But the story is incomplete. In the real world demand matters as well; and in the give-

and-take of the real world, markets and nonmarket factors shape the way demand is voiced. Hence consideration of our second theme concerning demand brings us down from the realms of abstraction to what, I trust, the reader will find to be a more concrete story. This concrete story concerns the way in which particular social groups go about using the market and entitlements to secure the levels of population quality they demand. In particular, I argue that because the market played a major role in shaping the demand for population quality during the feudal period and because entitlements were balkanized during that era, a legacy was created which played a major role in shaping developments after the 1880s when the nation began industrialization. This is the story I turn to now.

Appendix
Choice of Functional Forms for Regression Analysis

As chart 3 shows, I use first differences of logarithms of my dependent and independent variables in carrying out the time series analysis described above. Why did I use first differences of logarithms? Because I wanted to cope with potential nonlinearities that might plague the analysis and also because I am interested in estimating elasticities. In addition, I found through the use of Dickey-Fuller tests that most of the variables had unit roots (see Maddala 1992: chap. 14; Pindyck and Rubinfeld 1991). The problem here is technical but can be described in a nontechnical manner as follows: do the variables analyzed by regression analysis satisfy the assumptions of classical regression theory? If the variables do not meet the requirements—and in time series analysis many variables do not meet the requirements because of unit roots and other problems—one must take some action to cope with potential difficulties in making inferences using the t -statistics and confidence bands on parameter estimates. In the case of the analysis discussed in section 2.4, I found that most of my variables failed to meet the stipulated requirements because they have unit roots. For this reason I used the standard procedure of taking first differences to cope with the attendant problems.

A more sophisticated approach was suggested to me: the use of vector autoregression (VAR) procedures. I decided to eschew this approach because it is most fruitfully used when one is interested in forecasting. In forecasting one is not very interested in individual parameter esti-

mates but rather in the relative reliability of the entire estimated structure of a set of equations for predicting one or several outcome variables. Forecasting population quality in terms of the anthropometric measures is of no interest to me. As I stated earlier, I have opted for an eclectic approach that does not rely on one particular set of tests and one particular data set. Indeed, it is my view that the critics of logical positivism in social science have established a valid methodological point by demonstrating that any assertion of validity based on a technique, no matter how sophisticated, is really a rhetorical device and therefore subject to debate. At any rate, this belief informs the pragmatic attitude toward statistical analysis employed throughout this study.

PART II
THE MARKET, ENTITLEMENTS, AND HUMAN GROWTH

Chapter 3
The Tokugawa Legacy

Our focus now shifts to demand for population quality and in particular to the way demand was voiced through markets and social movements designed to assert the importance of the community over the market through the call for health-enhancing entitlements. I use the term "market," but to be more accurate I should use the phrase "the interplay of many markets" because my intention is to include labor and capital markets and the market for goods and services. As for the "health-enhancing entitlements," what I have in mind is the legal right to secure resources whether these are foodstuffs or public health and medical services. Buying and selling on markets provides one way of securing entitlements, but as I shall employ the term in what follows my concern is with entitlements determined outside of markets, that is, entitlements determined in the political and social arena.^[1] In all societies the market and entitlements each play some role in determining the actual level of population quality for particular geographic regions and particular socioeconomic groups. What is peculiar to Japan—not unique to Japan, but especially salient in the Japanese case—is both an emphasis on market incentives and the balkanization of entitlements. Why this emphasis on the market and balkanization of entitlements simultaneously developed and the significance of this fact for the relationship between net nutrition and population quality is the focus of my analysis in Part II.

Because entitlement rights are determined at the level of community and government, we must necessarily consider political organization.

Japan's political organization has changed many times over the last four centuries but most dramatically three times: at the beginning of the Tokugawa period around 1600 when feudalism became well established and refined; at the time of the Meiji Restoration and during the Bakamatsu period when the feudal system was collapsing, that is, from around 1850 to 1880; and at the end of World War II and especially during the American Occupation. While the first two periods of political discontinuity may have been more wrenching for the Japanese populace as a whole, it is the third that probably marks the greatest change as far as the central government's role in and specific policies involving entitlements is concerned. For this reason an account of the entire modern period from the 1850s until the present would be a task requiring at least two volumes. And for this reason I focus on only one of the two subperiods of the epoch since 1850: namely, the period up to 1940. However, to understand how the balkanization of entitlements developed from the 1850s until 1940 we must consider the legacy of the feudal system for postfeudal Japan. In this chapter I briefly review the most important social and economic developments during the period from 1600 to the 1850s which shaped the subsequent balkanization of entitlements.

The chapter commences with a discussion of the key political features of early Tokugawa Japan that set in motion the economic and demographic evolution underlying the balkanization of health-enhancing entitlements in late (1720-1850) Tokugawa Japan. The remainder of the chapter concentrates on the role of the market in determining population quality for subpopulations and the role of entitlements in determining population quality for subpopulations.

The Bakuhan System and the Expansion of Rice Cultivation During the Early Tokugawa Period

Fresh from victory over a coalition of rival warlords at the battle of Sekigahara in 1600, Ieyasu Tokugawa and his allied warlords initiated a remarkable experiment in government designed to bring internal peace and harmony to a country that for centuries had been plagued with internecine warfare. The fruit of Tokugawa ingenuity was the bakuhan system, a dual system of government balancing limited devolution of power to fiefs (han ) and limited centralization of authority in the hands of the Tokugawa family and its feudal allies and retainers (the

bakufu , tent government, also known as the shogunate). Directly linked to the setting up and refinement of the dual system of administration over the first half of the seventeenth century were two other policies that had momentous implications for the economic and demographic development of Japan: the partial demilitarization of the country through the forcible relocation of the sword-bearing warrior class, the samurai , from the villages into the administrative center of the fief to which they were attached, the castle town; and a policy of isolationism designed to ensure that the balance of power achieved through the dual administration system and demilitarization was not disturbed by the intrusion and meddling of foreign powers and foreign religions serving as path breakers for foreign ideologies and customs. At its root the Tokugawa system was based on pragmatic divide-and-rule principles designed to keep the country from once again fragmenting, falling into the pit of internal civil war, as it had done so many times in the past. Given the tradition of local military control, complete centralization was impossible but continuation of local military control was out of the question. Hence the bakuhan system emerged and evolved as an ingenious experiment designed to forge a compromise between strong local war-lords and the preeminent warlord and his immediate allies bent on aggrandizing power for themselves. The most dramatic social and economic consequences of the forging of the bakuhan political compromise was a century of expansion in carrying capacity of the Japanese land area as exemplified by population increase and the amount of new land put under rice cultivation, coupled with rapid urbanization and the initial nourishing of a vibrant craft and protoindustrial economy in the region immediate to the Tokkaido route connecting the two most prominent bakufu cities, Edo (now Tokyo) and Osaka.^[2]

Under the system of dual administration developed during the early Tokugawa period the central bakufu authority claimed about a quarter of the land for itself and allowed the remainder to be divided up into roughly 250 fiefs, selecting rulers (daimyo) for these fiefs from the ranks of the warlords who at the battle of Sekigahara were either victorious or defeated. The idea was to create a balance of power through the creation of a crazy quilt pattern of local administrative control in which no major coalition of powerful daimyo, bent on forming a military alliance to defeat the bakufu, could arise. Moreover, to bring the potentially restive lower-level military class, the samurai, under control, the central regime required that samurai loyal to a daimyo take up residence in the administrative capital of the fief assigned to the daimyo, thereby separating

them from their economic and political base in the countryside where they engaged in farming. As a result, as the system became increasingly refined and formalized and samurai attempts at rebellion against loss of power were successfully quelled, the samurai ceased to perform active military duties, although they continued to be trained in military techniques, and they evolved into a bureaucratic class, responsible for managing the finances of the fiefs. In particular, they managed the collection of taxes in the form of volumes of rice from the villages under fief control. The samurai no longer collected rice, but they received rice stipends from the coffers of the fief to which they owed allegiance. And at least in the early Tokugawa period the amounts of these rice stipends depended almost exclusively on the rank of the samurai household within the pecking order established in the fief into which the retainer was born. However, many reform-minded fiefs found this type of ranking system overly rigid and abandoned it in favor of a competitive examination system in the latter Tokugawa (1720-1868) era.

Another act taken by the bakufu to weaken the centripetal force of local fief rule was the establishment of the sankin kotai system, whereby daimyo were obliged to reside in luxurious domiciles within the confines of the bakufu's capital, Edo, on a regular schedule. This policy not only forced the daimyo to make extensive expenditures that were potentially ruinous for his fief's coffers but also subjected the local rulers to scrutiny by the central authority. Because the samurai were paid in rice and the daimyo were pressured to build magnificent estates in Edo and to maintain splendid castles within their castle towns, a market grew up for buying and selling rice and craft products and other goods demanded by the elite. Osaka, which was Japan's traditional merchant center, began to experience explosive growth in demand for its marketing services, and as a result the entire region contiguous to the road connecting Osaka to Edo began to flourish.

The isolationist policy was also aimed at reducing the ability of fiefs to establish independent political and military prowess. In 1639, the bakufu announced a policy of national seclusion (sakoku ) whereby diplomatic relations with foreign powers other than China and Korea were effectively terminated. Contact with Europeans was limited to a tiny island, Dejima, in Nagasaki harbor, on which a small community of Dutch people was allowed to reside. The bakufu was determined to squelch any attempts by daimyo at forming alliances with foreign powers. As part of its sakoku policy the bakufu outlawed Christianity, which it viewed darkly as a vehicle for the foreign policy of powers like

Spain and Portugal, and to ensure that the peasantry did not adopt Christian practices, it forced all peasant households to register at the local Buddhist temple (the shumon-aratame-cho registers from which contemporary historians estimate vital rates for individual village populations are a by-product of this registration policy). One important consequence of isolationism was an end to the periodic outbreaks of epidemic diseases brought by ships from the Eurasian mainland. This worked to reduce mortality and hence stimulated population growth.

The direct consequence of these policies was the extensive development of riparian works bringing water for irrigation into lands that hitherto had been unsuitable for rice cultivation. Before the establishment of the bakuhan system military clashes between local villages over the diversion of water from one to the other and hence over rights to regular use of water at a stipulated time of the year had prevented the spread of rice cultivation to many reaches of the country. A classic example of how bakufu control removed this constraint is the development of the Kiso River basin in the area running across central Japan and into the ocean near Nagoya. After the bakufu brought in military retainers from a remote fief in southern Japan to stop warfare from breaking out at the confluence of three major rivers near the mouth of the Kiso River, the process of developing dikes and irrigation ditches along the river and hence of opening up new fields for rice cultivation (shinden ) gathered momentum.^[3] As the number of rice fields that could sustain households increased, so did the number of villages. As a result the demand for labor increased, and potential costs of having a large number of children were reduced since children who could not as adults be sustained on the lands farmed by the parental household could now find opportunities for branching off and starting their own families in newly established villages. Hence between 1600 and 1720 when this process of expansion in villages seems to have come to a halt at the national level (however, some regions declined and some expanded thereafter), the population expanded at a brisk pace. It is difficult to be precise about population totals in Tokugawa Japan because the samurai were not counted in any of the estimates and counts for the country as a whole are not available before 1721 (see Hanley and Yamamura 1977: 36 ff.), but the most widely accepted figures seem to put the 1600 population at around 18.5 million and the 1720 population at 26.1 million, yielding an annual increase in numbers of about 0.3 percent per annum. In any event, there does not seem to be doubt about the fact that the population expanded at a fairly vigorous pace between the bat-

tie of Sekigahara and 1720 and that it did so in large measure because of the expansion in rice cultivation.

There was an additional factor stimulating population growth during the early Tokugawa period: urbanization. As we have seen, urbanization was stimulated by two bakufu policies: the forcible removal of samurai from the countryside and hence the expansion of castle town populations; and the sankin kotai policy that give a decided fillip to development of Osaka and Edo and to cities like Nagoya along the Tokkaido route between the two great metropolitan areas. ^[4]

In sum, the political solution to stopping internecine strife hammered out at the beginning of the seventeenth century—centered around dual administration, partial demilitarization, and isolationism—set in process economic and demographic developments that were not, and probably could not be, foreseen by the architects of the system. These developments would eventually cause the system to atrophy during the period known as late Tokugawa, that is, from 1720 until the Meiji Restoration in 1868 when the shogunate disappeared. A detailed examination of this process of decay is not of interest here. Rather, our interest is in the development of health-enhancing entitlements and in those market forces that were intimately connected to the maintenance and promotion of the standard of living in terms of work capacities and capabilities during the late Tokugawa period. We now turn to these issues, beginning with the household and the market and then turning to community and entitlements.

Household, Lineage, and the Market During the Tokugawa Period

The household and the family system are at the center of the relationship between the demand and supply of labor embodying either high or low levels of population quality during the late Tokugawa period. The reasons are various but can be summarized in terms of the following considerations: for most individuals work meant work in an enterprise managed by one's family or by the household within which one resided; in cases in which household or family members worked outside the home it was the household head, not the individual, who tended to make contract arrangements concerning remuneration and conditions of work. That household and family are the center of the supply and demand for population quality in late Tokugawa has a crucial corollary: those agents demanding workers of a given level of population quality

were also those investing in those workers and therefore supplying them. The incentive to enhance quality was built in—internalized, so to speak—since the family was simultaneously operating on both sides of the market.

During the late Tokugawa period both changes in the supply of labor conditioned by a decline in fertility among rural households and changes in demand for labor conditioned by an increase in the demand for labor that possessed a wide range of skills or could be quickly trained in the requisite skills encouraged an improvement in population quality. As a result, the role of the market in enhancing population quality was strengthened. This trend occurred in many sectors of the labor market dominated by family-run employment; and it also occurred in segments of the market in which bargaining between households by and large shaped labor contracts. Moreover, in the sectors of the labor market where households played a less pervasive role—for instance, in the market in which the samurai supplied labor services—deterioration in fief finances due to the burden of sankin kotai also tended to encourage a favorable trend in population quality.

Since family and household play a crucial role in this argument we must say something about the stem family system that by the late Tokugawa period provided the basic set of rules within which families and households formed.^[5] What is a stem family system? It is a system characterized by the following rules: (1) a spouse is brought into the family by one and only one offspring in each generation; (2) succession of the family headship falls on the offspring who has married within the family (or to the married couple); (3) inheritance, which is unequal, favors the single heir/successor; and (4) the family's organizational form passes through an alternating cycle of conjugal phases followed by a stem phase (in which the junior and senior conjugal units reside together) followed by a conjugal phase, and so forth. The transition from the stem to the conjugal phase is marked by the death of the last member of the senior couple; the transition from the conjugal to the stem phase is marked by the marriage of the heir.

That demography conditions the actual realization of a stem family system ideal is apparent from condition (4), for adult mortality and the timing of marriage play a critical role in lengthening or shortening the two phases of the alternating cycle. But demography conditions the operation of the family system in other ways. What if a family finds itself unable to biologically produce an heir, or produces an heir who is too young to assume the family headship at the same time the older couple

wishes to "retire" and commence the stem phase of the cycle? ^[6] Had there not been a religious ideology buttressing the family system in Japan, families might have been content to calmly contemplate the possibility of their lines dying out. But because ancestor worship was deeply entrenched in Japan—in part because of Buddhism, in part because of long-standing domestic spiritual traditions—families had a strong aversion to the demise of lines (although lines did die out with some frequency among the poorer landless houses). Under the ideology of ancestor worship the Japanese family was conceived of as dynastic as well as stem, with the lineage extending through past and future generations through the worship of one's ancestors. For this reason securing a successor to assume the headship and attend to the family's relics and religious artifacts was a matter of paramount concern. And hence in securing heirs, families resorted to a variety of fictions. For instance, males not related to the family by blood ties were in-adopted as "sons." In this way family lines could be perpetuated even if biology failed. But in practice biology limited most families simply because relying on the market for in-adoption was risky—because supply might be limited at the time a household found itself searching for an heir; because in-adopted heirs might be less inclined to attend to the religious rites of the ancestor cult than children conditioned to do so from birth; and because an individual brought in to the house through in-adoption was not trained in how to operate the family's enterprise (if it had an enterprise to operate) from an early age.

Still families did employ in-adoption on occasion, even bypassing biologically produced putative heirs on occasion.^[7] Why? Part of the problem was demographic and related to the timing of the transition from conjugal to stem phases of the cycle. But economics played a role as well. For it must be kept in mind that the actual working of the system was constrained by more than demographic probabilities. Most families were both demographic and economic units in the sense that they managed family enterprises like farms or craft production shops. If the biologically produced putative heir could not shoulder the task of managing the household economy in a highly competitive economy in which households vied with one another for land and rank, then the household head might be inclined to pass over his own son in favor of a more competent person unrelated by kinship.

Thus economics and demography constrained the family system in practice, if not in theory. But how actual adjustments were made very much depended on the social status, the class status, of the family. Here

I differentiate between two opposing class types: the peasant and the samurai warrior/bureaucrat. The reasons for differentiating in this way between two extreme types are both economic and ideological: economic, because in the peasant case household and enterprise overlapped and in the samurai case they did not; ideological, because in principle the code of behavior applicable to the representative samurai household was at variance with the code of behavior expected of the typical peasant household. I do not consider here merchant and craft families since they are less sharply opposed than the two types I focus on and since they were less numerous and have less bearing on my general argument.

In the case of the samurai the head of the house was invariably male as it was the male—not the female, who concentrated on the raising of a successor and domestic chores—who performed the tasks and maintained the rank and prestige of the house on which its fortunes rested. And among members of the bureaucrat/warrior class the income enjoyed by the house (ie ) was a function of the rank that that male enjoyed with the domain's elite. K. Yamamura (1974) shows that there were marked differences in family support income allotments (measured in koku of rice allotted to the house) according to the position of the head. And while at the beginning of the Tokugawa period the position of the house was hereditary, financial pressures on fief coffers due to the burdens of sankin kotai increasingly forced fiefs to become more efficient in allocation of scarce resources and therefore to seek out talented administrators among those retainers best qualified as signaled by performance in fief schools designed to train the retainer class. During the latter half of the Tokugawa period in many fiefs samurai were promoted upward and downward on the basis of ability and performance on examinations. As fiefs found their coffers depleted, many samurai, especially those of low rank, found their rice stipends inadequate for main-raining a large family in comparative luxury. And since their real incomes fluctuated with the price of rice on the Osaka market, in periods when rice prices declined the marginal retainers found themselves all the more squeezed. Hence is it surprising that family sizes among the samurai class declined and that many samurai found themselves without biologically produced sons or in need of a talented successor to replace a less competent putative biological heir? For these reasons the proportion of in-adopted family heads (yoshi ) was quite high (Yamamura 1974). In short, there was a long slow secular trend among the retainer class toward reduction in fertility—with an attendant substitution of quality for quantity of children—and an increasing emphasis on

ability and training in fief schools. Both factors tended to enhance population quality among members of this class. And this trend was directly related to changes in product markets like the market for rice and in financial markets where fiefs were forced to borrow from merchants to secure funds for their activities.

By contrast, among the peasant class the typical house served as a unit for organizing domestic activities and as a production unit in which all members regardless of sex, except the very young and the very old, were expected to perform the tasks of physical work on which the incomes of the house as a group depended. There was sexual division of labor—women devoted more time to domestic chores than did men and women were likely to engage in by-employments involving spinning and weaving (see Saito 1991)—but this division concerned differentiation within the categories of potential income-generating activities and did not draw a rigid line between those who restricted their activities exclusively to domestic work and those who engaged in market activities. Hence the de facto status of women depended on the actual activities they engaged in. If she possessed sufficient acumen and physical prowess, the mistress of a peasant ie might command greater authority than her husband. For this reason it is not surprising that the headship of the ie might devolve onto the mistress of the house or onto a daughter. Indeed Y. Hayami (1983) shows that male primogeniture, which is the form of inheritance usually associated with the stem family system in Japan, was not as common as was formerly believed. In some areas, for example, families employed ultimogeniture, and in some villages in the Northeast succession passed to the last born child regardless of sex (ane katoku ). The point can now be made by contrasting peasant and samurai forms of the stem family system: because the peasant house tended to be both a kinship and a production unit, it displayed far more flexibility in gender differentiation and inheritance than did the samurai household.

Now, as with many samurai houses, but for somewhat different reasons, there was a secular trend among the peasant household sector toward an improvement in population quality during the late Tokugawa period. The reasons lie with both supply and demand, and since peasant houses tended to simultaneously operate on both sides of the market the conceptual distinction I make here between supply and demand is somewhat artificial. In any case, in many regions of Japan, especially in rice-producing areas, there was supply side drift as fertility declined, encouraging a substitution of quality for quantity. Why did this occur?

Since the occasional extant Buddhist temple register allows us to reconstruct with considerable accuracy for each village covered in the registers the age-specific pattern of fertility for women, we know that in most cases interbirth intervals were long, overall marital fertility was low, and life expectancies at age one were quite high. Findings on fertility and mortality levels for a sample of late Tokugawa villages appears in table 15. As can be seen, fertility levels, although not low by modern Japanese standards, are modest, and life expectancies tend to be moderate to high although variability is considerable. Moreover, since use of the register data also allows us to reconstruct the sex ratios for surviving offspring, we have evidence suggesting that infanticide (or mabiki , literally winnowing out) was practiced in some villages, especially against girls (although there is some debate on whether infanticide was also systematically used against male issue in order to secure sex balance among sibling sets). Since infanticide is an emotionally charged issue, it is not surprising that the issue of why fertility reached low levels in many districts of late Tokugawa Japan is one that generates heated controversy.^[8] Without attempting to settle the issue here, I will merely note that at least three positions have been staked out as to the development of a low fertility/moderate mortality regime in late Tokugawa Japan. T. Smith (1988: chap. 4) argues that the main factor was the desire to limit competition over who would succeed to the headship; S. Hanley and K. Yamamura (1977) argue that peasants motivated by a desire to emulate the conspicuous consumption prevailing among urban dwellers limited their fertility so as to enhance their standard of living; and C. Mosk (1983) attributes the behavior to a desire to maximize survivorship for each child not eliminated through infanticide, low fertility, and a long interbirth interval strategy to reduce the number of infants requiring care at any one time. In any event, regardless of which explanation or combination of explanations is adopted, it is reasonably clear that there was a shift from a high fertility regime with frequent mortality crises and significant population growth during the early Tokugawa period to a regime of moderate fertility and moderate mortality and virtually no population growth during the late Tokugawa period (see Kalland and Pedersen 1984). Not all the regions of Japan experienced this sea change in demographic regime to the same extent, but the general pattern is clear enough. And from the point of view of this study the most important consequence of this secular change was a substitution of quality for quantity among children, as couples who restricted the overall size of their families were able to

devote more resources, more foodstuffs, and more parental time to those whom they chose to raise and train in the techniques of agriculture.

The argument involving fertility concerns the supply of population quality, but secular drift in demand was also important. On the demand side two forces were active: technological changes in agriculture that increased the importance of skill formation, especially in rice cultivation; and the expansion of by-employment opportunities in rural districts. For instance, in rice production new seed varieties were developed especially in the Southwest where experimentation with fresh strains was encouraged by the relatively benevolent climate, making double-cropping of rice possible and hence the risk of total crop failure minuscule. Moreover, the market for soil-enhancing fertilizers like fish cakes and dried sardines and the like expanded as rice cultivation spread and increased fertilizer usage improved the inherent productivity of land. And new threshing machinery like the bamboo semba-koki was introduced. Most of these innovations did not save on labor as did the mechanization of agriculture in nineteenth- and twentieth-century North America. Rather, they increased the demand for skilled labor that could efficiently choose from among a growing variety of seed varieties, fertilizers, and harvesting techniques (Smith 1959, 1988). Care and knowledge increasingly commanded a premium as is attested by the growing prevalence of the practice of transplanting the rice plants to the fields in even rows to maximize absorption of the sun's energy. Moreover, since rice was taxed by fiefs but industrial crops were not, wealthier farmers began to divert their activities to a more diverse set of crops and even to craft production aimed at distant urban markets. The result was a growth in by-employments. Especially common in late Tokugawa was the practice of dekasegi (temporary) migration to a small silk filature, or the like, for a period of a year or two. Girls with a knowledge of silk raising and spinning techniques were especially in demand in regions like Gifu and Nagano prefectures in central Japan where the growing of mulberry leaves on which silk-generating cocoons were fed was common. In short, changes on the demand side of the labor market in late Tokugawa Japan increased the demand for population quality and hence proceeded in tandem with supply changes associated with the secular drift toward moderate fertility. Indeed, A. Hayami has argued that the increase in demand for female labor in by-employments actually worked to depress fertility by raising mean ages of first marriage in many late Tokugawa villages (see Mosk 1995a, 1995b). But as a perusal

of table 15 makes clear, there was substantial regional variability in demographic regimes.

The issue of regional variability brings us to the question of the national and regional standard of living defined in terms of opulence. There has been a long-standing debate about the standard of living that was originally fueled by the question of how Japan was able to become the first country outside of the European cultural zone to successfully industrialize. One answer has been that her preindustrial income level was comparable to that of preindustrial Europe; as we have seen, recent research on late Tokugawa period village demography has suggested that fertility and mortality levels were moderate and some scholars have argued that this demographic regime was either a cause or a consequence (or both) of a reasonably good preindustrial level of income per capita. Backward projection of estimates of income per capita with real income growth rates has been commonly used as a method of coming up with figures for per capita income in the late Tokugawa and early Meiji period. Using this basic approach, S. Kuznets (1971) came up with a figure of $74 in 1965 U.S. dollars; K. Ohkawa, with $172 and $251 in 1970 U.S. dollars, the latter figure adjusted for purchasing power parity; and Y. Yasuba (1987), with $268 in 1970 U.S. dollars. By comparison, N. Crafts (1983) estimates the following for per capita income in 1970 U.S. dollars for various European countries on the verge of industrializing and having reasonably reliable data (date for estimate in parentheses): Great Britain (1760), $399; France (1830), $343; Germany (1850), $418; Italy (1860), $451; and Russia (1890), $276. With the exception of Russia, it can be seen that even the optimistic estimates for Japan like those of Yasuba (1986, 1987) put Japan below European countries in the decade before they began to industrialize. In my opinion this is not as surprising as one might think. For income per capita is an opulence measure of the standard of living, and my thesis is that if we were to measure Japan's income in the 1850s in terms of capabilities or in terms of population quality it would be considerable and that population quality, rather than the standard of living defined in opulence terms, is relevant for successful industrialization. But there is an additional consideration: the regional distribution of income. By establishing fief barriers to the diffusion of best practice technique, the bakuhan system kept pent up in the Southwest a variety of rice production techniques. Had the farmers in the remainder of the country known about these techniques, the national level of per capita income might have been considerably higher.

And of course climate played a role at the regional level both in terms of average levels of per capita output and in terms of the willingness to experiment with new seed varieties and fertilizers.

Hard data on the regional distribution of income are not easily obtained. But it is possible to come up with a few rough indicators. Hanley and Yamamura (1977) provide figures on rice output (in koku) and population for sixty-eight regions (kuni ) of Japan around 1700 and 1870. They are skeptical about the reliability of these figures, especially for the latter year, but it is worth exploring what the figures reveal about variation in output per head. I ranked the kuni by the koku per head figures and then grouped the regions into seven classes, for each of which I calculated the average koku per head. (There are 10 kuni in each group except in that with the lowest level of income for which there are eight regions; the index given over on the far right column below was secured by setting the figure ca. 1700 at 100 and then calculating the 1870 figure relative to it. Kuni in both years are grouped on the basis of the 1700 figures.)

Substantial cross-sectional variation in agricultural productivity is evident from these figures. For what they are worth, the data also suggest that the differentials did not close substantially during the Tokugawa period. However, Hanley and Yamamura (1977) warn that the koku figures for the kuni were not revised frequently so it is possible that labor productivity increased more than we have estimated in the less productive regions. But there is no reason to believe convergence occurred during the late Tokugawa period.

By contrast, rapid convergence took place during the Meiji era (1868-1912). To see this consider the following figures for rice yield per hectare in Saga prefecture in southwestern Kyushu and for rice yield per 10 hectares in Tochigi prefecture, which lies in the northeast of the main island, Honshu, of Japan (Tsuchiya 1976: 60).

How typical the Saga and Tochigi figures given here are for the regions in which they lie, Southwest and Northeast, respectively, is open to debate, but the picture of convergence drawn with these data accords with the descriptive literature on government and landlord promotion of the diffusion of best practice technique during the Meiji era.

That regional variation in climate, soil quality, and methods of farming generated substantial geographic variation in yields can also be demonstrated by examining the capacity of different regions to sustain population increase during the late Tokugawa period. Hence while for the country as a whole population growth over the 1721-1846 period was virtually nonexistent, there was considerable regional variation in growth rates. H. Kito (1983: 17 if.) gives figures for the fourteen major regions of Japan over the period 1721-1746 and I have taken these data and calculated simple unweighted averages of population group rates in percentage terms for groups of these regions classified by an overall index of the warmth of weather (there are five regions in the first two groups and four in the third group, and the northeastern regions rank low in terms of the index while the southwestern districts rank high).

The term "crisis years" refers to the periods of food shortages, especially to the major famine era, including the Kyoho (1732-1733), Tenmei (1783-1786), and Tempo (1836-1838) famines. Note that regional variation in population growth rates is substantial during crisis periods but not during normal years. Thus whatever is checking population growth is related to a realized or potential threat of food shortage. That

this appears to be the case makes one a bit skeptical of explanations for low fertility that emphasize a positive linkage between the level of income per capita and the willingness to restrict fertility.

In sum, the family lay at the center of the adjustment of population quality to changes in labor markets: it was the unit that determined supply, and for the great mass of the people who were peasant producers it was also the unit determining demand for skills, work capacity, and capabilities. In the regions of the country where technological progress in rice farming or the expansion in the demand for by-employments was especially vigorous, there seems to have been a secular trend toward improvement in population quality. This improvement was driven by a decline in fertility and an increase in the amount and quality of training accorded offspring. That the market was as effective as it was in enhancing population quality is one reason why entitlements played a more circumscribed role. However, as we shall now see, entitlements did play a role, especially in the fiefs where food crises occurred throughout the late Tokugawa period.

Community and Entitlements During the Late Tokugawa Period

As pervasive as the market was in promoting improvements in population quality during the late Tokugawa period, entitlements supplemented the market. During this time the most important entitlements were those that provided insurance of sufficient food to eat in times of dearth for individual households and villages. Because entitlement insurance in the late Tokugawa period tended to be spread out among fairly small numbers of households—at the level of the village the number of households was of course small, but even at the level of the fief, which was the largest unit involved, population size typically ran into the low 100,00s—I refer to the "balkanization of entitlements." By this term I mean to highlight the local nature of the guarantee and distribution of entitlements in feudal Japan.

The most salient of the entitlements over foodstuffs were those offered by the fief. Villages paid taxes in the form of rice. What did they get in return? Certainly the fief provided protection and quelled local uprisings that might spill over from village to village. They also organized the creation of ditches, dams, and other riparian works. But most important, fiefs provided rice and other foodstuffs in times of dearth. S. Vlastos (1986) characterizes many of the three thousand or so peasant

rebellions (ikki ) that broke out during the Tokugawa period as political movements on the part of the peasantry, serving to remind the fief that it had an obligation to extend "benevolence" down to the villages when harvests were poor. It must be kept in mind that the peasants had leverage in their relationship with the fief and that organizing ikki was one way of sending a signal to the daimyo —households could steal across fief boundaries and attempt to settle in the villages of neighboring fiefs if local conditions were unbearable, thereby reducing the tax-producing capacity of their home fief—or of putting pressure on the daimyo whose subjects were becoming too restive. Typically the villages wanted either lower taxes or outright supplies of grains. Vlastos (1986) argues that during the early Tokugawa period ikki were mainly organized by village headmen, but that by the later Tokugawa period village landowners often organized rebellions to demand a redress of grievances against the headman or other groups of landowners. For instance, he argues that one reason ikki tended to break out in silk-raising areas toward the close of the Tokugawa period was that silk-producing families often devoted little land to rice cultivation and hence they were unusually adversely affected when rice prices rose in times of dearth since they had to purchase most of the rice they consumed. In short, groups of peasants did not want to abolish or negate the operation of the market with entitlements, but they did want the fief to provide them with insurance in the form of a backup in times of dearth, especially in times when demand outstripped supply on the rice market.^[9]

The fief was not the only organization providing entitlement insurance to peasant households. At the village level poorer households often sought the protective benevolence of more economically prosperous households and formed dozoku units—that is, extended households often bound together in fictive kinship terms—within which the economically inferior parts supplied labor services in exchange for access to land for production and for foodstuffs in time of need. C. Nakane (1967) argues that these dozoku, which have been extensively studied by anthropologists, are usually not groups tied together by true bonds of kinship but rather are economic organizations that in effect exchange labor services for use of land and insurance services. Moreover, even in areas of Japan where dozoku were absent, landlord-tenant relations that were well developed by the later Tokugawa period, especially in the commercially oriented region contiguous to Osaka and to the Tokkaido route leading from Osaka to Edo, often involved insurance entitle-

ments. For instance, A. Waswo (1977: 29 ff.) notes that landlords often assumed fictive roles as "parents" of tenants, or as "grandparents" (of tenants of tenants), and in exchange for the rent that they extracted from their tenants were expected to provide rent reductions or even outright grants of food in times of dearth.

The Legacy: The Strength of the Market and the Balkanization of Entitlements

For two and a half centuries, from the early seventeenth century until the Meiji Restoration in 1868, the bakuhan system guaranteed a high level of internal peace and stability to Japanese peasants. As a result rice cultivation and population spread rapidly during the first century or so of Tokugawa rule. At this point, around 1720, population growth at the national level seems to have stopped, although at the regional level the pattern is more complex and variegated. Why population growth stopped is a matter of debate, but there seems to be considerable evidence that it slowed down because fertility declined, perhaps in response to a growing scarcity of land that could be readily brought into cultivation, perhaps because households found themselves increasingly pressed and therefore concerned about economizing on scarce resources by maximizing the survivorship of children through the lengthening of interbirth intervals, and so forth. In any event the decline in fertility tended to improve population quality on the supply side. And on the demand side the same households who by limiting supply enhanced quality also demanded greater work capacity and capabilities from their offspring. For agriculture grew increasingly sophisticated in terms of labor requirements. And the expanding market for by-employments demanded flexible and ready skill development. For these reasons market forces played a central role in the development of population quality and the standard of living defined in terms of capabilities during the late Tokugawa period.

Entitlements that supplemented the market were less pivotal but were still important. The most important of these were insurance entitlements over foodstuffs and were provided at a fairly local level by fief governments. And at an even more local level dozoku and landlords provided insurance entitlements in time of dearth. In short, balkanization of entitlements was a fact of life under the system of bakuhan dual administration.

Thus strong market orientation and balkanized entitlements were the

legacy that late Tokugawa Japan offered to a country that, after the Meiji Restoration, rapidly moved down the path of industrialization. The profound imprint of this legacy on the relationship between economic development and population quality during an era when, as Western technology poured into the country, labor markets only gradually took on a complexion differing from that characteristic of the late Tokugawa period is the subject of the next chapter.

Chapter 4
Population Quality in an Era of Balanced Economic Growth, 1880-1920

During the first half century of industrialization following the Meiji Restoration, economic growth was balanced in the sense that levels and growth rates in wages and labor productivity were roughly equal in agriculture and other sectors employing traditional Japanese technology and in the new industries utilizing a combination of imported Western techniques and traditional Japanese methods. As a result, labor moved smoothly back and forth between the two sectors of the economy. Discontinuity introduced with Western machinery and production methods was largely mitigated by the continuity of labor recruitment practices inherited from the late Tokugawa period when by-employments flourished in many rural districts and young women went out for several years of dekasegi work; indeed, it was females who predominated in the labor forces of the new textile plants using British-style ring spinning devices and mules, just as women had predominated in dekasegi migration streams during the late Tokugawa period. But the nature of contracts and work conditions changed as the large impersonal factory with constant turnover and a nebulous connection to the households supplying short-term labor to it supplanted the smaller operations of the Tokugawa period. Employers in large concerns did not have the incentives to preserve the health of their workers. For this reason, as the locus of employment gradually shifted away from the family-managed enterprise, there was a slow but inexorable breakdown in

the market institutions that had favored an enhancement of population quality during the late Tokugawa period.

Moreover, there was a breakdown in the balkanized system of entitlements developed during the late Tokugawa period. In part, this occurred because of administrative changes as the fief governments and the villages under them were abolished or restructured and a system of prefectural, city (shi ), and rural county (gun ) governments—with town (machi ) and village (mura ) governments underneath county administration—was brought in to replace the feudal structure. Political decision making became more centralized, and the structure of balkanized insurance entitlements was significantly weakened in concept as well as in practice. Lacking a domestic model for how to reorganize entitlements, the central government shied away from demand for population quality policies, its innovations taking on a supply side bias favoring the importation of Western medical and public health technology. The breakdown in entitlements also resulted from the reshaping of landlord-tenant relations that had been a cornerstone of balkanized entitlements during the late Tokugawa period. Productivity gain in agriculture associated with a diffusion and refinement of best-practice Tokugawa technique diminished variance in harvest yields, thereby largely eliminating the dependence of tenants on landlords; and at the same time, to the degree that the return on agricultural investments fell relative to the return on investments in industry, innovating landlords began to lose interest in agricultural activities, thereby surrendering their roles as spearheads of improvement in rural Japan.

Three factors kept this breakdown in health-enhancing market and entitlement institutions from generating political and social unrest sufficient to force the government and large employers to drastically revamp their practices and establish a set of market- and entitlement-based substitutes for those that had previously served households and communities. The first factor was the legacy of the Tokugawa period and the implicit assumption that employers would naturally look after the health of their employees. It was widely believed in many circles that government coercion was likely to be unfairly enforced and might even be counterproductive. Governmental responsibility—insofar as it extended beyond its own employees—was best left to taking care of food crises and the like. And because of improvements in agricultural productivity, these crises were infrequent. The second factor was the nature of labor markets in the nascent large industrial sector, in particular, the high turnover and the predominance of female workers employed on

short-term contracts. Unlike a farm household that invested in its own family members with the expectation of securing years of productive service, or invested in its members because when they left the household for marriage a long-lasting bond might be established between the household losing the child and the household gaining the child, the owners and managers of large spinning and weaving companies lacked a clear imperative to actively protect the health of their employees. Moreover, the mills tended to recruit workers from the ranks of small-scale tenant households, the least healthy and physically robust segment of the rural population, which further discouraged active investment in worker health. Village entrepreneurs who operated small spinning filatures and risked losing a good reputation if a girl's health was ruined might have a strong incentive to develop aggressive health-enhancing practices. But for the large spinning and weaving companies, whose female workers moved in and out of the labor force, the situation was different. And since the girls themselves did not expect to stay with the industry for a sustained length of time, they lacked the drive to actively organize unions or other employee-based organizations aimed at voicing a demand for better conditions. The third factor was that most employment continued to be located within the world of household-managed enterprises like farms and small shops, although there was a clear drift away from this sector over time. To some extent the problem was restricted to a relatively small portion of the population during the early Meiji period. As long as those experiencing the dirt and noise of mill work, the inadequate ventilation, the related outbreaks of pneumonia and bronchitis, and the possibility of succumbing to the ravages of tuberculosis were almost invisible, society at large took scant interest.

In short, those factors that had sustained and encouraged an improvement in population quality during the late Tokugawa period now acted as an impediment to further improvements. As the breakdown in entitlements occurred, differentials between groups favored and not favored by the market tended to widen. Unfortunately, systematic evidence on this breakdown and divergence in population quality is at best fragmentary. Therefore, in sifting through the various strands of evidence I will range widely. My discussion begins with a description of balanced economic growth during the Meiji Restoration, turns to the technological bias in government policy, moves on to the issue of the health and physical well-being of female factory workers, and closes with an analysis of regional differentials in population quality. To fully understand the significance of the evidence assembled here, it is neces-

sary to compare the findings in this chapter with those in the next chapter, which deals with the interwar period when a new set of market and entitlement institutions began to emerge and take shape.

The Economics and Demography of Balanced Growth

During the period from the Meiji Restoration until World War I productivity in agriculture grew, as did productivity in the nonagricultural sector, and while growth in manufacturing outstripped growth in farming and fishing, differentials in growth were not large. At the time of the Meiji Restoration a common labor pool moved back and forth on a regular basis between farming and by-employment, including small-scale light industry, and the forces of supply and demand tended to equalize earnings and marginal labor productivity in the agricultural and nonagricultural sectors. Because differential labor productivity growth after the 1870s did not unduly favor the nonagricultural sector and because the vast majority of the newly created industrial jobs were in textiles and food processing, which made extensive use of short-term female labor that did not require long periods of training, employers had little incentive to offer premium wages to keep workers who by dint of job experience were especially skilled. As a result, marginal productivity of labor in agriculture set a wage floor for manufacturing and there was almost no divergence in earnings between manufacturing and agriculture.^[1]

One of the reasons growth was balanced was because productivity of farmworkers increased as population quality improved. Consider the figures in panel A of table 16. While the number of farm families remained virtually unchanged throughout the 1880-1920 period, the number of workers per farm family gradually declined, mainly because the number of female workers per farm household was dropping. For example, the ratio of female farm household workers to male farm household workers, always less than 1.00 throughout the period, declines somewhat over the four decades. Now one reason why farm households could increasingly afford to release workers for dekasegi employment in factories is apparent from the figures on workdays per worker and on labor productivity: both days worked and productivity per workday go up. As each worker became potentially more efficient, the household was better able to "lend" some of its members to industry without much sacrifice in output. With the steady improvement in

population quality and with the lengthening in number of years mandated under the compulsory education requirement, the physical and mental capacity of those who entered into agricultural pursuits was enhanced. Moreover, as can be seen from the figures on fertilizer and machinery inputs, the worker also benefited from more fixed (machinery) and variable (fertilizer) capital. In this context it is useful to keep in mind that increasing the application of fertilizer not only improves the inherent quality of the soil but also, by curtailing the amount of time devoted to weeding, reduces labor requirements (see Brandt 1993). Indeed as farm children, who often did the weeding, were withdrawn from regular work to attend school, presumably the demand for fertilizers increased. In short, the secular improvement in population quality commenced during the late Tokugawa period and continued into the Meiji period as traditional best-practice techniques (the so-called rono gijutsu , technology of veteran farmers) diffused throughout the country under the active promotion of the government. This diffusion raised per capita agricultural output, and in its wake per capita gross nutrition also improved. And the effect of these trends was to free up workers for manufacturing, thereby encouraging the continuance of a balanced growth process begun during the late Tokugawa period.

Hence under conditions of balanced growth the agricultural sector and the legacy of techniques built up in the more productive fiefs made a major contribution to economic growth both in terms of generating output growth and in terms of elastically freeing up labor for manufacturing activities. Some indicators of the quickening pace of growth in nonagricultural activities and of its implications for urbanization and income growth can be seen in panel B of table 16. Note that the proportion of the population living in the six big cities where industrial production tended to be concentrated—five of the six big cities were either in the Tokyo (formerly Edo) or Osaka region or lay along the Tokkaido where by-employments had most vigorously flourished during the late Tokugawa period—grows rapidly and the proportion in primary industry declines. With the shift out of agriculture into the manufacturing sector, which enjoyed labor productivity growth rates somewhat in excess of those experienced by agriculture, real income and consumption per capita grew slowly but steadily (see panel B of table 16). It is important to keep in mind that this growth in manufacturing production during the 1880-1920 era was mainly restricted to light industry and that in light industry female workers predominated. Consider the figures on percentage of hours in cotton spinning supplied

by females. As can be seen from panel B over 75 percent of the hours were supplied by females and this proportion actually grew during the period 1890-1900. Moreover, wages for the factory girls actually fell short of wages paid females in farming; being a seasonal activity, farming could not provide the regularity of work offered by many textile enterprises.^[2]

What about male workers for whom—as panel B of table 16 demonstrates—manufacturing wages usually exceeded agricultural wages, albeit not by a large margin? Why does the wage pattern vary between the sexes? The critical differences were the skill levels required and the nature of the labor contract. Male employment was largely concentrated in government-managed military arsenals, mines, and a few heavy industrial facilities (some of which were later sold off to the private sector) and in a relatively small number of privately operated heavy industrial concerns that manufactured ships and the like. During the Meiji period when labor capable of employing the techniques necessary for using Western machinery was in short supply, a typical pattern was for these factories to contract out work with labor bosses who brought in with them to the shop floor their crews of subordinate workers. The labor boss trained these subordinate workers and allocated wages to them from the overall payment negotiated between him (it was always a male) and the firm. In fact, the labor boss system was a carryover from the Tokugawa period and is one more example of balkanized entitlement insurance as the labor boss "took care" of the basic subsistence needs of his subordinates in good times or bad. Fearing that the labor bosses could and would use their oligopoly position to extract excessively high rents out of the enterprise, corporations attempted to establish direct control over their workers, replacing the free-floating labor boss with the co-opted labor boss or internally promoted foreman whose fate was more closely linked to the company. Increasingly, as heavy industry grew and established direct managerial control over the shop floor, special status within companies was accorded professional workers graduating from the higher educational system and co-opted labor bosses. These favored workers were called shain (literally company workers), and as an elite they earned high wages, wages the enterprises tied to seniority and age in order to reduce turnover. Corporate paternalism in Japan initially developed around this elite and was associated with wage payments that, in comparison with agriculture, were generous^[3]

The vast majority of male industrial workers, however, were not given shain status. Until the slowdown in growth of the nascent heavy

industrial sector, coupled with an expansion in the number of graduates from industrially oriented vocational schools during the 1920s, spelled the end of excess demand conditions for skilled labor, most highly trained blue-collar workers moved about with considerable frequency. Some moved with labor bosses and some moved on their own initiative. Consider, for instance, figures for the Shibaura and Ishikawajima engineering works in 1902 (Gordon 1985: 35):

Not only did blue-collar workers leave plants with frequency, employers often complained of poor work habits and lax work discipline among their ranks and as a result often resorted to firing these workers who were denied shain status and were known as koin , which implies hired worker/outsider status. For these workers wage levels were not especially generous, although the more skilled they were, the greater the premium. At the time the typical heavy industrial enterprise saw no incentive in offering a generous seniority-based wage package as a vehicle for eliciting loyalty and effort.

As it had during the late Tokugawa period, female dekasegi labor continued to be the backbone of the industrial labor force. In other words, despite the great advances being made in importing and adapting American and European technology in Japan, continuity in the labor market remained strong in the sense that high turnover and the short-term labor contract prevailed. What was new was the fact that large plants operating with central power sources like steam engines or with electricity began to supplant the small rural workshop of late Tokugawa. And what was new within the large confines of textile plants or in the depths of coal mines was the danger of industrial contamination and exposure to airborne infections that had not been prevalent in the small shops of the late Tokugawa period. In short, as the large enterprise employing the bulk of its workers on a short-term basis increased its share of the total labor force, the proportion of employers with an active incentive to protect the health and physical well-being of their workers declined. And at the same time the health of the industrial work environment deteriorated. Slowly but steadily the health-

enhancing nature of the Japanese market was breaking down. And this was taking place in an environment in which the government was reluctant to intervene for reasons to which we shall now turn.

Community and Government Policy

During the Tokugawa period, the strength of the market and the balkanization of entitlements under the dual administrative system of bakuhan rule kept the nominal bakufu government of Japan out of entitlement programs aimed at the mass of its populace. For this reason the new Meiji government was reluctant to pursue an activist entitlement policy. But as Japan opened herself up to trade and to contact with the West, it became apparent to the former samurai who, as the educated elite, assumed responsibility for guiding the country along the path to industrialization that foreign models could be profitably and efficiently studied and adapted in many areas outside of that involving industrial machinery. As a rational borrower Japan could pick and choose the countries it wanted to imitate depending on the type of institution involved: thus the Meiji government designed its new police system along French lines, its military along German lines, its higher academic system along German lines, and so forth. But two factors constrained the government in its eagerness to follow Western guidelines: financial and resource limitations and potential resistance to social engineering, namely, the extent to which Tokugawa institutions were so deeply rooted that new institutions were unlikely to be accepted, or accepted only at the expense of social unrest. Financial constraints and the Tokugawa legacy of balkanized entitlements and reliance on the market must be given pride of place in attempting to explain why the Japanese government exhibited a strong "supply side" technological bias in its health/population quality maintenance and enhancement programs, eschewing social engineering in the entitlement field in favor of importing Western medical and public health methods and knowledge.

Not surprisingly, the technological bias was already evident during the later Tokugawa period and especially at the close of the Tokugawa era—known as the bakumatsu period—when Western ideas and goods starting streaming into Japan as isolationism collapsed under American pressure in the early 1950s. Dutch treatises concerning anatomy and surgical and other medical treatments had made their way into Japan through the small Dutch population residing on Dejima in Nagasaki harbor, Tokugawa Japan's sole window onto the West.^[4] For instance, in

1774 Gempaku Sugita published Kaitai Shinsho , which describes Western concepts of anatomy. While the bakufu sponsored a special academy for the study of Chinese medicine (kanpo ), over fifty individual fiefs set up schools to teach medicine, in some of which Dutch methods—so-called rangaku —were espoused (Sugaya 1976: 51 ff.). This espousal of Western methods, however, was opposed by the kanpo doctors, who managed to get the bakufu to require that all books be reviewed by the Igakuin (Academy of Medicine) before publication. Thus, while it is not untrue that the mainstream Tokugawa tradition of medicine inherited by the Meiji government was that distilled from Chinese medical theory, Western ideas had some currency during the bakumatsu period, when the bakuhan system was steadily collapsing. Indeed H. Hirota (1957) estimates that at the inception of the Meiji period around 19 percent of the doctors practiced Western medicine. In short, it was far easier for the central authorities to swing the country toward Western technical concepts of public health and medicine than toward a restructuring of the system of entitlements, which, even more than medical theory, was tied up with deeply held cultural traditions. But even in the area of medicine a strong opposition campaign was mounted by the defenders of Tokugawa traditional practice.

The new Meiji government took up the challenge laid down by the kanpo school and carried through the struggle by decisively tilting in favor of the Western school. But the issue was not quickly settled. The Meiji oligarchs proceeded on a variety of fronts, at first placing the Inuka (Medical Affairs Section) under the control of the Ministry of Education, but later renaming it the Eisikyoku (Sanitary Bureau) and placing it under the Ministry of Interior. To this agency was delegated the authority and responsibility for issuing guidelines on the standards expected of medical and public health personnel, the formulation of regulations for dealing with epidemics (with the opening up of the country to international trade after the mid-1850s epidemics became a problem), and the control over and testing of drugs. After systematic comparison between the efficacy of Western and Chinese medical practices, the Inuka bureaucrats decreed that Western concepts were to be given preference in the examination tests required of those seeking certification as doctors and in the licensing of schools offering programs in medicine (see Sugaya 1976:45 ff.). However, since most doctors already practicing during the early Meiji period used Chinese methods, kanpo practices continued to dominate throughout the late nineteenth century, a fact that increasingly ran counter to the posture of the government.

Within the government a growing belief in the efficacy of Western medical practices—especially German practices, on which Dutch rangaku medical theory was based—led the government to not only tilt in favor of Western medical concepts in examining and training doctors but also to enthusiastically embrace the new field of bacteriology. For example, the bacteriologist Shibasaburo Kitasato, who was the first to isolate the tetanus bacillus, was sent at government expense to work with Robert Koch in Germany.

In short, the Meiji government actively exploited Western imports in the area of technological improvements—what I call supply side improvements as opposed to demand side factors such as the organization of national entitlement programs like those developed in Germany under Bismarck—to enhance population quality. In particular, through its power to impose regulations the central authorities actively pursued a policy of raising standards for medical and public health personnel. Doctors were required to register with the government, and it was decreed that examinations for certification of doctors were to follow nationally imposed guidelines (although a fully standardized national test was not introduced until after World War II). In 1899 midwives were brought under regulation and in 1915 regulations for nursing were promulgated. One of the consequences of this policy of standardizing around Western medical principles was a temporary reduction in doctors per person. The kanpo doctors aged and eventually either died in active service or retired. Due to inevitable delays in the establishment and staffing of educational and medical institutions designed to train young personnel in Western methods, replacements to the ranks of the medical profession were outpaced by the older generations of kanpo doctors. This explains why, as we see in the lefthand column of table 9, the number of doctors per capita decline between the decade 1911-1920 and the decade 1921-1930, before increasing thereafter. Even in the area of medical personnel the legacy of the Tokugawa period lingered far into the Meiji period. And because of the tradition of balkanization of entitlements central to Tokugawa government policy, gradually gathering momentum toward centralization was slowed.

But the long-run trend definitely favored centralization, and one of the most important agents of that change was the military. A case in point is the military's innovations in preventing the spread of disease in military camps due to waterborne microorganisms. During the Sino-Japanese War in the 1890s, the number of Japanese soldiers dying from infections far exceeded the number dying from war-related wounds.

Because of this the Japanese military authorities began a systematic study of why epidemics broke out in military encampments: they dispatched a research team abroad to study methods of preventing infection in foreign military organizations, finally settling on American practices, which they then methodically implemented. Henceforth they equipped all base and field hospitals with bacteriological laboratories; they made certain that every division included a sanitary detachment that carried water-testing kits; they made compulsory the boiling of water; and so forth. Thus during the Russo-Japanese War at the beginning of the twentieth century, the ratio of those dying from infection to those dying from wounds dropped to one to four. And of course, since military service was compulsory—although exemptions to military service were granted—the military innovations diffused down to the village level both through government regulation and through word of mouth.

In contrast to its assertive role in promoting the importation and dissemination of German medical and public health knowledge, the Japanese government showed remarkably little interest in adopting German innovations in the field of entitlements, for example, health and disability insurance, legislation regulating contamination in factories, and so forth.^[5] The reason has already been stated: the legacy of the Tokugawa period carried with it an assumption that voluntary agreements between employer and employee lay at the center of health enhancement and that insofar as governments felt compelled to intervene, responsibility was to be exercised at the local community level. A telling illustration of this point is the protracted length of time required for passage and implementation of national mining and factory acts setting minimum safety standards, restricting the amount of overtime work, and outlawing child labor: over a half century of debate and study went into this effort. The lethargic speed at which legislation was adopted could hardly be said to be due to lack of knowledge of Western practice: during the early Meiji period the government had passed legislation assuming responsibility for the factories it directly managed. For instance, it hired French doctors in the Ikuno branch of the Government Mining Bureau to look after the health of the French technicians and miners who worked in the pits. By the 1910s mining injuries were in excess of 150,000 a year, many stemming from accidental explosions of inflammable gases, and yet stiff regulations were limited to government-managed operations. Moreover, the central bureaucracy had actually tried to draft and get Diet passage for a mining law as early as

the 1880s. Finally in 1905 a mining law passed the Diet. And even more time was required to pass a factory act: even when the Kogyoho (Factory Act) finally reached the floor of the Diet in 1910, resistance to the legislation remained widespread among the ranks of organized business who argued the "beautiful Japanese traditions" governing the relationship between employer and employee should not be subject to government intervention and regulation. And the law that was finally passed in 1911—whose twenty-five articles included banning employment of minors; stipulating that a certain number of minutes should be set aside each workday for rest; requiring that factory owners compensate employees disabled by dint of their duties in the factory; and appointing a small number of factory inspectors to investigate conditions in factories above a minimum size—was not actually implemented until 1916, almost fifty years after the Meiji Restoration.

Given the central government's bias toward supply side—technological—solutions to health enhancement and away from demand side—entitlement—approaches, the responsibility for organizing and financing public health and medical activities and for policing factories largely fell to local authorities. For this reason we should not be surprised that there is a fairly close relationship between per capita income and size and density of communities—the larger a community, the greater the economies of scale in the provision of clean water, removal of sewage, and the dispensing of medical knowledge—and per capita levels of investment in public health and medicine. In regard to this point see table 17, which gives figures for the forty-seven prefectures of Japan classified by levels of urbanization and per capita levels of medical personnel, hospitals, and hospital capacity during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century.^[6] There are certainly exceptions—see the figures on maximum levels for group D—but in general the greater the level of urbanization, the greater the per capita resources devoted to enhancing health. Balkanization of health-enhancing entitlements was continuing. Now, however, the force of per capita income and the tax base and scale economies were dictating the geographic pattern, not the dual administrative bakuhan system. And that local areas, not the central authority, were carrying the main fiscal burden for these programs helps us to make sense of the very low levels of national government expenditure on social security (including public health and medicine) evident in table 16.^[7] In short, many aspects of the Tokugawa heritage in entitlements were, under a new guise, being perpetuated in the Meiji period, even four decades after the bakuhan system lay in ruins.