Historical demography of East Asia from household registers

Kyoto had been the capital city and the residential place of emperor from its establishment in 794 until the end of Tokugawa period in 19th century. Though it lost the status of political center in the beginning of 17th century, Kyoto continued to become one of the economic centers in Japan and have a monopoly on highly skilled industrial manufactures such as silk and cotton textiles. We have collected series of population register listings compiled by 30 neighborhoods in Kyoto to study the urban demographic profile of a large city in the Tokugawa period. This study analyzes the listings of the Koromonotana-cho neighborhood registers, a neighborhood in the commercial center of the city. Koromonotana-cho population registers cover 80 years almost continuously in late Tokugawa period with around 200 people listed each year. This study shows the demographic profile of the big mercantile businesses in late Tokugawa period including the period of political conflict and natural disasters in the 1860s.

Regional variation is an integral part of Japanese historical demography. At least three different patterns of population and family are suggested to have coexisted in three geographic boundaries in early modern Japan: northeast, central, and southeast. However, the evidence for the three patterns are either based on macro level studies or on micro level studies of a few villages in each region. This paper challenges this general categorization and tries to examine "northeastern" pattern of marriage and family using household registers 1716-1870 from diverse economic settings: two rice farming villages, one village enriched by cash crop agriculture, and one booming local post town. We apply the event history analysis model proposed by the Eurasia project for examining marriage responses to economic stress and household context. The results of this study should provide more careful examination of the northeastern pattern and marriage in its relation to household socioeconomic status and context at various stages of local economic and population development.

In the past, many people were ‘unfree’ in the sense that their movement was restricted, and out-migration without permission was recorded as an ‘escape’ on the official population registers. Such ‘escape’ behavior strikingly confronted individual departure with dependency of other family members because, being treated as illegal, people who had ‘escaped’ usually would not come back or at least stay out for years. This paper compares such ‘escapes’ and examines the role played by household context in shaping such behavior, taking advantage of large-scale individual panel datasets of three adjacent ‘unfree’ populations from northeast China, southeast Korea and northeast Japan in 18th and 19th century. We not only find similar temporal, spatial, and age patterns of ‘escape’, but also find similar patterns of associations between individual ‘escape’ behavior and certain aspects of household context. In particular, dependency of child and the elderly makes individual more likely to stay than to escape. This is especially true for females and even holds when kin ties are absent. Despite significant differences in political regimes, populations, communities, and social identities of these three East Asian populations, such empirical findings depict a certain universality of human behavior that is bounded to serve certain others.

Taiwanese family history during the Japanese colonial time has been studied with various aspects. The relationship between marriage and social mobility is one of them and faced a technical perplexity for a long time. The occupational information was mixed trades and occupations on household registers. Moreover, the transformation between occupation and social class was simply divided into three classes in the past studies. In this paper, we utilize the information from household registers and Taiwanese Historical Information of Social Class and Occupations Database (THISCO) which is established based on LinShi Taiwan HuKou DiaoCha ZhiYe MingZiHui (臨時臺灣戶口調查職業名字彙, Collection of occupational titles from the 1905 Provisional Household Census of Taiwan) and referred to HISCO (Historical international classification of occupations) and HISCOM (World Historical Class Scheme). In this case, we can analyze the people behavior by individual and universal social class standard.

This paper analyzes longitudinal demographic data from 120 villages in northeast China for 108,020 resettled immigrants and their descendants based on 1,346,829 individual annual observations from 1866 to 1914. The 120 villages were established through government-planned migration during the early nineteenth century. In this paper, we examine the long-term pattern of immigrants’ mortality in relation to the pattern of settlement. We especially focus on two aspects of the pattern of settlement: the geographical condition of immigrant villages and the level of heterogeneity of village communities measured by immigrants’ place of origin. Based on our previous studies of a subset of this population, we identify prominent mortality variations depending on geographic origins among urban immigrants from Beijing and rural immigrants from Liaoning and Jilin and their descendants. In this paper, we extend our analysis to the complete dataset and to the village level. We expect to find mortality variations among immigrant villages based on their population composition and geographical condition.

Comparison and comparability lie at the heart of any global social science. But, precise comparison is virtually impossible without similar methods and similar data. Comparable datasets are scarce in particular for historical periods. This paper introduces and compares four new historical panel datasets from East Asia: the China Multi-Generational Panel Dataset-Liaoning (CMGPD-LN), the China Multi-Generational Dataset-Shuangcheng (CMGPD-SC), the Korean Multi-Generational Dataset-Tansong (KMGPD-TS) and Taiwan Colonial Household Register Database . It discusses the key features of these datasets; the historical institutions which produced the original data; the subsequent processes by which the data were reconstructed into individual level panels; the completeness of recording and problems of missing registers; and their potential for important social science research. The paper shows how these data are important to identify and differentiate what are particular and different among these populations and what are general and similar. It also shows how the comparative method applied to these datasets can illuminate the local as well as the global, or at least regional. Such comparison should give us a much more nuanced comparative understanding of East Asian historical sociology and global social science in general.

In this study, we examine age patterns of migration among adults who resided in Seoul in the early 20th century. We use information, obtained from the Seoul household registers, on the length of time these adults lived in their current residences to estimate age-specific migration rates and construct migration life tables. Our findings point to the following: First, Seoul residents were quite mobile. On average, during the early 20th century, Seoul residents moved approximately four times between their primary working ages of 15 and 64. Second, upper-class individuals were more mobile than lower-class individuals. While the upper-class individuals moved approximately five times between ages 15 and 65, the lower-class individuals moved less than three times. This class differential can be explained because Korean bureaucrats experienced frequent duty changes during this period. Third, household composition also affected migration rates. We compare our results with European migration studies and discuss the implications of these finding on urbanization that occurred in early 20th-century Seoul.

This study examines the demographic responses of men and women in preindustrial rural Japan to economic stress—both acute upheaval caused by large-scale famines and smaller-scale local economic downturns—and to household context, using data drawn from the local household registers of three northeastern villages from 1708–1870. Modeling death and out-migration as competing risks, we compare two villages totally agricultural and one near a growing market town in their responses to acute stress caused by three widespread famines—the Horeki famine in the 1750s, the Tenmei famine in the 1780s, and the Tenpo famine in the 1830s—and to annual local economic fluctuations, simultaneously accounting for the effects of household context including landholding, coresident kin, and relationship to household head.

Most research on intergenerational processes focuses on two generation connections between individuals and their children or parents. This research ignores grandparent influences and longer legacy effects. Mare’s 2010 PAA Presidential Address suggested mechanisms through which multigenerational effects may occur and are most likely to be strongest. This paper examines various types of multigenerational influence: (1) effects of socioeconomic positions of grandparent and even more remote ancestors on the standing of individuals; (2) legacy effects of extreme advantage and disadvantage many generations in the past; (3) multigenerational effects on demographic behavior itself; (4) heterogeneous multigenerational effects in populations that contain more than one social mobility regime; and (5) long run multigenerational effects that result from mobility-fertility interactions in population dynamics. We illustrate these effects through analyses of genealogical data from the Qing Dynasty Imperial Lineage and from population registry data for Liaoning, China over the past several centuries. Our results suggest that multigenerational influence is much more multi-faceted than previous speculations and empirical investigations have implied.