Second Part

0:05:07 In Japan the PhD at that time was taken some twenty years later; my interest in historical demography developed gradually; my first topic of study at Keio was a land survey of Japan around 1600; Hideyoshi had unified Japan and started a survey similar to the Domesday Book; I am just publishing a book about it; after writing some initial papers I lost my way as there was no subject that I was following; fortunately, in Keio, there was a system that allowed for study abroad; after the War it was difficult for professors to study abroad, but a new president of Keio decided later to establish a system whereby younger scholars could to so; he established the Fukuzawa Foundation and I was fortunate in being the second to go under this scheme; I left Japan in 1963 and spent a year and a half abroad; I went to Europe; at the time Japan was not rich and this might be my only chance to see the outside world; I stopped in Teheran, Damascus, Beirut, Cairo, Athens etc.; I climbed a pyramid when it was still possible to do so; at the top an idea struck me about the success of the ancient civilisation of Egypt; in Japan at that time there was the idea of progression from ancient, medieval, capitalist and, maybe, socialist history; at the top of the pyramid, this idea seemed totally incorrect; I thought of the several roots of development; an ancient civilisation can disappear; my intention had been to go to Portugal and to do research on the Portuguese-Japanese relations, particularly in trade in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries; I went to the overseas archive but I found that, although I spoke a little Portuguese, I could not read the early documents; I realized that I would need at least five years to do something there, but in one year I could do nothing; I was very confused but was introduced in a bookshop to a Portuguese scholar, V. M. Godinho,; he had a French PhD but had been purged by Salazar; he understood my English and we discussed Portuguese expansion, but it was useless to stay if I could not read documents; before I left Japan I had learnt a little Portuguese from a Portuguese diplomat; one day he took me to a diplomatic party and introduced me to several diplomats; one Belgian diplomat was very kind and we became friends; I wrote a letter to this person about my dilemma and said I would like to study in Belgium; I had bought a book in Lisbon written by a Belgian economic historian, Charles Verlinden, who taught at Ghent University; also the Dutch historian Huizinga had the inspiration there to write the ‘Waning of the Middle Ages’; I drove from Lisbon to Ghent through the Pyrenees in November 1963; unfortunately, when I arrived at the university I found that Professor Verlinden was on sabbatical and was abroad; however, I became friends with another Belgian historian Craebeckx who introduced me to the demographic work of Louis Henri in France; I read his book with the help of a dictionary and instantly realized that this was a revolutionary book on population history; at that time in Japan nobody knew about historical demography; the Belgian diplomat that I had met in Tokyo was able to get a scholarship for me so that I could stay in Europe for a further six months so I returned to Japan in summer 1964, just before the Tokyo Olympic; I then began collecting materials for a population history; I knew about the ‘Shumon Aratame-Cho’·through Professor Nomura; he had already published two books of basic data on Tokugawa Japan and had planned a third book on population data; I had assisted him on that so had been made aware of the materials; I then started to write articles but got no reaction to them in Japan, so translated them into English and sent them to Thomas C. Smith in the United States; in 1968 I received a letter from the International Economic History Association about its fourth conference in Indiana inviting me to give a paper and offering to pay my travel costs; this was my debut at an international conference and I was so nervous that I was shaking; I lost my place in my paper and afterward felt very depressed; however, after the session a person came and asked me if he could publish my paper; it was Le Roy Ladurie and he published my paper in Annales·in 1969; it produced many correspondents, and in 1969 Peter Laslett invited me to his conference on households so my world was expanding

21:12:11 At that conference the two Japanese contributors were Chie Nakane and myself; our views on household were quite different; Nakane believed that family structure had not changed and was always a stem family society; my empirical studies showed that in the early days of the Tokugawa, Japanese families were extended and during the Tokugawa period they changed to stem families; my view proved correct; my idea is that human beings first lived in joint family systems and in some parts became stem families and in others, nuclear families; there are still places where the joint and stem families remain

24:25:10 I think my most important work, which is just being published, is a chapter: 'Migration: The Intersection of Interclass Mobility and Geographical Mobility'; migration is normally from rural to urban for the lower classes; for the higher classes, several migrations happened but a core of them remained rural; those lower classes who went to urban areas died sooner; if they went back to their village the age at marriage was delayed so that the number of children was limited and several families died out; for the upper class as few migrated, the branch family developed; this has its own hierarchy so that the lower branch is poorer; this meant that the lower class was kept going by downward migration within the village rather than by those returning from urban areas; this is an eighteenth to nineteenth century pattern

28:46:12 The work done by the group in Kyoto was based on three areas of Japan North-east, Central and South-west; we analysed the micro data and showed the areas of depopulation and increase in population between 1721-1846; it showed that population in Japan is very varied; I have always said that Japan is not one – it varied in size of household, number of couples in a household, age at marriage; I made some simulation for three areas on household size, generations within a household, number of couples per household, and most recently on the productive percentage of persons per household; the findings show that in northeast Japan there was a low age at marriage and early end of childbearing; this is contradictory; if a population is to be limited, marriage must be delayed; the fluctuation in the centre were much greater between population growth and decline; how can people survive in such circumstances?; in central Japan there are mutual banking systems which developed in the Kyoto-Osaka area; those who became very poor were supported by this mutual system and when they recovered they could pay back what had been loaned

39:41:15 My next plan is to study the long span of migration patterns to Japan; we should study the DNA; in Japan there are nine kinds of mitochondrial DNA whereas in Europe there are seven; this indicates wide migration patterns; there are still strong localities, dialects, facial differences; I do wish to make a big project with DNA scholars to unite the observations through the historical documents and the results of analyses in behavioral genetics.

42:36:04 In Japan the goal of raising living standard was realized by working hard; in the West, particularly in England, it was realized through the use of machinery; Japanese agriculture was not easily adaptable to the use of machines and rice is planted in small, level, fields; wheat can be grown in large fields and does not require flat land; the “Industrious Revolution” is the key phrase for Japan since the seventeenth century.