Irene B. Taeuber

Japan's demographic transition re-examined

Abstract The variations in the initiation, course, speed and terminations of demographic transitions may involve cultural and temporal specificities as well as historic incidents. In this article t...

The changing fertility of the Japanese

Abstract The Japan of the middle of the nineteenth century was a backward agrarian state of perhaps 35 million people. Three-quarters of a century later, the 75 million people of an industrialized and urbanized Japan had challenged the industrial and military power of the West itself in a daring attempt to achieve economic and political control over eastern Asia and the islands of Oceania. Population growth had stimulated economic and political expansion, but in 1940 when the Planning Board of the Cabinet reported to the Imperial Japanese Government that the country would need perhaps 200 million people to maintain the hegemony of the East, population growth was already slowing. Japanese projections of the trends of the interwar period indicated that the maximum population would be reached by the end of the twentieth century, and that it would be slightly less than 125 million.2

Demographic modernization: Continuities and transitions

ResumenEl tiempo, tipo de la modernizatión y el sector del movimiento de esa modernizatión, se supone deben ser la dimensiones de la diferenciatióy transitión demográfica. En los paises desarrollados, industrializatión, urbanizatión, educatión avanzada, transitión demografica hacia bajas ratas vitales y eventualmente declinantes ratas de crecimiento de poblatión, son procesos asociados. Si esta asotiación de desarrollo social y economico y fertilidad declinante es escencial, la declinatión de la fertilidad en áreas menos desarrollados puede retardar cuando no impedir la modernizatión.Los avances en cientia y tecnología, mejores comunicationes, planeamiento national y las aspiraciones populares, pueden permitir asociaciones alternadas o mutuas. Por consiguiente, el análisis de la relatión de variables en la transitión demográfica ahora en proceso, tiene relevancia politica y teórica.Dos procesos de modernización demográfica son analizados: Portoriqueños y personas de apellido españo en los Estados Unidos y los Chinos modernos y pueblos del pacífico oeste emparentados con China, excluyendo la China propiamente dicha. Entre estos grupos, el desarrollo economico y social y la modernizatión demográfica, fueron procesos interrelacionados cuando no integrados. La cultura aparece como un factor dinámico y condicionante, pero cuando la economía y la sotiedad moderna intervienen, disminuye la fertilidad. Esta disminución es más explicable en terminos de dinámica y status economicosotial, que en relatión a la región, cultura, religión o forma politica.Los aspectos de investigation en paises desarrollados no son solamente asociaciones a priori sino estimulos para avanzar ya sea en el campo economico, social o demográfico. Existe tambien el aspecto de las barreras al desarrollo, ya sean estas inherentes en la cultura y en la dinámica psicológica de los grupos o productos de las barreras en una gran sociedad. Entonces, si el analisis ha de ser incisivo y general mas que simplemente comparativo, deben determinate los puntos críticos y las proporcionadas relaciones de cambio en las variables demográficas y asociadas.

Overview of Demographic Trends and Characteristics by Color

The current social revolution in the United States may be related in a more significant sense than is generally recognized to demographic trends and characteristics of black Americans. These trends and characteristics-which include population growth, mobility and geographic distribution, and other social or economic characteristicshave important implications for the educational, economic and political development of the Negro population. An attempt will be made in this paper to sketch the highlights of these trends and characteristics, paying special attention to those not covered by other presentations at this conference.

Recent Population Developments in Japan: Some Facts and Reflections

U NTIL RECENT YEARS demographers had what they thought were large stores of knowledge concerning Asian populations. Death rates were high, although in most areas they appeared to be declining slowly as economic development and social advances brought improved nutrition, better public health, and some knowledge of modern hygiene. Birth rates reflected the prevailing social and religious attitudes and the widespread importance attached to perpetuating the family from generation to generation; these rates were high in all cultures, and in no agrarian society had they declined appreciably. Populations were growing, and the rates of growth were increasing as the gaps widened between slowly declining death rates and relatively stable birth rates. In this situation population trends were dependent variables, products of the economic and social changes which increased means of subsistence and altered social institutions. That demographic world vanished with the development of chemical insecticides and antibiotics. Ceylon was only the first of the Asian countries to show that death rates could be decreased rapidly without increases in economic productivity or changes in village social organization. With birth rates remaining at something over 40 per i,0oo total population and death rates reduced to 12 or less per i,ooo total population, rates of natural increase that approached or exceeded three percent per year were not exceptional. Since populations increasing at rates such as these double in less than twenty-five years, the dimensions of the future population problems inherent in the situation began to appear formidable. Modern mortality control in the densely peopled lands of Asia has created a new demographic revolution. We have as yet no perspective on the long-term significance of this revolution in all its manifestations.

A western assessment of prerevolutionary Chinas demographic prospects.

Excerpts from a 1948 Rockefeller Foundation report on Public Health and Demography in the Far East. The analysis of the demographic situation and its expected demographic developments in China has proven remarkably accurate. The enormous growth potential implicit in the prerevolutionary Chinese birth and death rates is clearly identified as are the socioeconomic forces supporting fertility in a predominantly peasant population. The report foresaw that due to ideological orthodoxy the response of the postrevolutionary government to the challenge of demographic growth would be hesitant and predicted that under the Communist regime the rapid corrosion of the social institutions supporting high fertility would have a more powerful influence on the birth rate than any action western societies could bring to bear.

Fertility, Diversity and Policy

The interrelationships of the changes and transformations in the development of the American population are examined. It is noted that the levels variations and spatial distributions of fertility influence environment resources use economy social structure group relations and political functioning. Economic transformation educational advance and demographic transition took place in the nineteenth century. Fertility declined earlier and more swiftly than mortality. The birthrate was 50-55 in 1800 and was 32 in 1900. The age of marriage began moving upward in the nineteenth century but it started a downward trend in 1890. In 1910 the cumulative fertility of women was related inversely to the urbanization of the state of residence. The decline in fertility continued in the 1930s. The thrust of government activities in the population field was migration and redistribution along with increasing concerns about health and welfare. In the 1950s a rising fertility occurred along with increasing migrations of women in the reproductive ages. All demographic processes have been influenced profoundly by complex metropolitan development. In the 1960s there was metropolitan concentration with geographic and subcultural diversities accentuated by migrations. Declining fertility characterized almost all groups in almost all areas.

J. MAYONE STYCOS. Human Fertility in Latin America: Sociological Perspectives. Pp. xiii, 318. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1968.

J. Mayone Stycos was introduced to the study of fertility in Latin America in 1947. Such study has been career, intellectual stimulant, and sympathetic identification in more than two decades of intensive, imaginative, and creative work. The unified volume reviewed here includes papers published over the years since 1955. It is thus more than the sociological perspectives that its title promises. The swift pace of population growth and the perception of it, the advancing plans and programs in private and public sectors, the ongoing scientific and technological revolutions in knowledge of and means for control-this history emerges in the reading of the studies in the successive years. That which has been learned is immense

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perimeter a non-Western people have achieved economic and demographic modernization. The development is receiving increasing attention from economists, sociologists, and demographers. Professor Wilkinson’s interest lies in the transition from the peasant-agrarian to the urbanindustrial society and population. The goal is the quantitative analysis of city growth as a movement from agrarian to industrial employment structure. An occupational typology of the labor force thus becomes a differentiating variable in the structure and growth of urban populations. The Urbanization of Japanese Labor, 1868-1955, presents the conventional population bases in a sociological approach to urbanism and change. The six chapters following the Introduction consider preindustrial urbanization, urban growth since 1868, the sources of urban growth, the regional pattern of city growth, and the demographic characteristics of the urban population. The distinctive contributions are in chapters viii to x: a functional classification of Japanese cities; urban growth and demographic differentials by functional classification; and metropolitan development in Japan. For each city in 1920, 1930, 1950, and 1955, ratios of the percentages of the economically active male population in major industrial categories

Thomas O. Wilkinson. The Urbanization of Japanese Labor, 1868-1955. Pp. xiii, 243. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1965.

The population of Asia today is five times what it was three centuries ago. In 1950 the world population was 2.5 billion people and that of Asia 1.4 billion people. Rates of growth have been high. Factors in this growth have been many and varied: administrative control which brought peace to cer tain areas, particularly when it also brought agricultural im provements ; the introduction of new foods; improved sanita tion; increased production and movement of foods; and recent Western scientific and technical advances. However while Asias population was growing, its economic change was partial and its social change muted. Rates of growth are increasing because birth rates remain at their ancient levels while death rates decline. Continuation of this situation to the end of the century would increase the population from 1.5 billion of the year 1955 to 4.2 billion in the year 2000. The decisions of the governments of great Asian countries to slow population in crease through encouraging planned parenthood indicate that resolution of the problem of growth may come through reduced fertility rather than increased mortality. The case of Japan is given as an example.