記録されなかった出生 : 人口人類学におけるシミュレーション研究

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  • Uncounted Births : Estimating the Fertility of Tokugawa Peasants from Shumon Aratame cho
  • キロクサレナカッタ シュッショウ ジンコウ ジンルイガク ニ オケル シミュレ

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Reflecting recent developments in demographic studies, the first partof this paper emphasizes the importance of the role cultural anthropologistscan play in this field. The results of major demographicstudies of recent years, such as the Princeton Fertility Project, the WorldFertility Survey and those by the Cambridge Group for the History ofPopulation and Social Structure, throw doubts on the validity of thedemographic transition theory which has been the single dominanttheory in demography for almost half a century. Drawing upon themodernization theory, the demographic transition theory postulates thatdemographic behavior, particularly fertility, is strongly influenced bysocio-economic factors such as industrialization, urbanization andliteracy rates. Recent empirical studies, however, fail to find such a relationship.Instead, they find that demographic behavior is determinedmore by cultural factors such as religion and ethnicity. It is in this contextthat I emphasize the role of cultural anthropologists in demographicstudies which have been long dominated by sociologists and economists.The second part of the paper examines a somewhat specific, butcrucial, issue to Japanese historical demography. This is the issue ofthe underregistration of births recorded in shumon aratame-cho (SAC) ,population registers most frequently utilized by researchers. This hasbeen a serious problem since it prevents accurate estimates of basicdemographic indices such as fertility and infant mortality. In solvingthis, this paper employs a microsimulation approach. This approachhas several advantages over macrosimulation. The most important isthat with microsimulation, we can consider relatively easily in our modelsuch critical factors as seasonal fluctuation of births and monthly deathrates of infants.The model for reproductive process used in this paper and its computerprogram are based on studies by the Institute of Population Problemsand those by Bongaarts and Potter. For input data for the simulation,data from the Tokugawa period is used wherever information isavailable; otherwise, I use data of the Meiji and the Taisho periods.The result of the simulation reveals that the degree of underregistrationof births in SAC ranges from 82 to 88 per cent, depending on infantmortality levels, and thus 12 to 18 per cent of births were never recorded.This leads us to conclude that birth rates calculated directly fromSAC need to be multiplied by 1.15 to 1.22 in order to obtain accurate fertilityestimates of Tokugawa peasants.Another important finding from the simulation concerns the rangeof random fluctuation in fertility due to a small population size. With acohort size of 25 persons, the simulation yields a standard deviation of0.25 births in total marital fertility rate (TMFR) between five runs. Thecomparable figure goes up to 0.7 births with a cohort size of 10 persons.This will give us a measure of variance when dealing with the fertility of asmall village population in the Tokugawa period.

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