by Paul Morland
This was not how it was supposed to be. The Europeans were surely the masters of the globe, able to exert their will and expand their empires where they chose. True, the Boers had proved difficult for the British to suppress a few years earlier, but they were, after all, of European extraction albeit established in Africa for generations. Non-European peoples were not supposed to fight back, and certainly not supposed to win. Tsar Nicholas II’s cousin Kaiser Wilhelm II had urged him to take on Japan in defence of Christianity and the White Race; instead, the outcome of the war fuelled the paranoia of the kaiser and others at the ‘Yellow Peril’.
The Russo-Japanese War was a shock not just to the Russians but to all Europeans who thought that their inherent superiority would give them eternal world domination. Japan’s triumph was not significantly demographic–Russia had a much larger population than Japan–but rather strategic. Nevertheless, there was a demographic component, and it was this: Japan was on the rise, its people the first non-Europeans to escape the Malthusian trap. Along with the modernisation of the military and the navy came a modernisation of industry which allowed Japan to construct a Russia-beating fleet. Along with Japan’s entry into the modern world came precisely the kind of demographic take-off and population expansion which had accompanied similar developments in the heart of Europe. It is no coincidence that the first non-European people to escape pre-modern demography were the first in modern times to give a European great power a bloody nose.
Japan, China and east and south-east Asia make up an area which today holds almost one-third of the world’s population, and comprise a region which has in large part successively undergone the same transformation experienced by Europe and North America–a transformation pioneered by Japan. Beyond this familiar tale, in Japan and China the region contains two countries which are unprecedented from a demographic point of view: Japan because it was the first non-European country to break through the Malthusian bonds into demographic transition and now has the world’s oldest population; China because it has a larger population than any other country in the world’s history. Both countries had ancient histories, long-established institutions and complex societies before they were forced into close contact with the West, and that contact was bound to be transformational for both, not least demographically.
The Sun Rises: Japan’s Ascent
How it was that Japan came to challenge the West is the source of much dispute. It has been suggested that speaking of a ‘demographic transition’ is to foist a Eurocentric model on non-European peoples.2 To do so, it is claimed, is to argue that nothing much of interest occurred in demography (or, by implication, in anything else) until the adoption of European models of economic and social organisation. To some extent this is a fair criticism, although it applies as much to Europe as to the rest of the world. Europe had its own demographic ups and downs well before the nineteenth century, not least the Black Death, which set the continent’s population back for centuries. The point, however, is not that nothing happened until the demographic transition, but rather that only when modernisation, however defined, commenced did populations follow a more or less uniform and predictable path, at least for a period. The Japan that suddenly, in the middle of the nineteenth century, re-engaged with the rest of the world was the product of a long, complex historical process, and the same can be said of its population. This need not distract us, however, from the fact that what happened in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when Japan was swept by a wave of urbanisation and industrialisation, was truly revolutionary in terms of the country’s history.
Part of the difficulty in grasping Japanese demography in an earlier period is the problem of data. As in most places before the industrial era, the demographic data for Japan before the early twentieth century is patchy. Many aspects are contested. Nevertheless, some broad outlines are clear. The population of Japan increased initially during the period of political stability and agricultural innovation during the Tokugawa period from the start of the seventeenth century3–indeed, it may have grown by around 1% per annum for much of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. At this time much of the rest of the world was suffering demographic setbacks: China was experiencing disruption caused by the transition from the Ming to the Qing dynasty, Europe was experiencing the horrors of the Thirty Years’ War, and the British Isles was embroiled in civil war, whilst England’s American colonies were only just starting to establish themselves and were still demographically feeble. Japan’s seventeenth century was by contrast serene and prosperous, and as a result population rose. However, it then stagnated at somewhere between 26 and 33 million from the middle of the seventeenth century.4 Even taking the lowest opening and highest closing estimates from 1721 to 1846, Japan’s population appears to have grown by no more than 5% in over a century.5
One interpretation of the long plateau in Japan’s population is that internal stability and the absence of war simply made more space for the other Malthusian terrors of scarcity and disease and that Japan was operating at the edge of its maximum population frontier by the early eighteenth century. According to this interpretation, the country had simply expanded to its productive frontier, at which its people lived in a state of Malthusian misery. Another interpretation is that the population lived above the level of the Malthusian frontier of subsistence and misery–in other words, that more could have been supported at a lower level of subsistence–but that social institutions kept the population in check, predominantly through means of infanticide and abortion.6 (These are hardly the checks of which the Reverend Malthus would have approved; he acknowledged the possibility of communities avoiding expanding to the edge of starvation and misery, but thought the only morally acceptable way for them to do so was through the sexual restraint which comes with chastity and late marriage.) At times, infanticide might have accounted for as much as 10% of births or even 20%, in part evidenced by the male–female population imbalance in an age before the possibility of sex-selective abortion. In parts of eastern Japan in the eighteenth century, infanticide was referred to as mabiki, that is, the uprooting or thinning out of rice seedlings. In some circumstances it was considered virtually an obligation, with parents of large families branded as anti-social for breeding like dogs. The diary of a prosperous rural merchant records how he undertook infanticides himself, determining through means of divination which infants should live and which should die.7
Under the circumstances, and given the availability of the data, it is hard to disaggregate infanticide from lowered fertility. Abortion was also a common method for controlling population until it was criminalised progressively from 1870 and particularly from 1882:8 how common it remained thereafter is uncertain. Apart from abortion and infanticide, abstinence and marital separation appear to have played a role in creating in late seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Japan what has been called a ‘culture of low fertility’. It is difficult to know whether what really prevailed was fertility suppressed by sexual abstinence and contraceptive techniques or by abortion or infanticide. In any case, if this interpretation is right and by one means or another the Japanese were avoiding producing as many people as they could, and if they thereby enjoyed the opportunity to live a little better and conserve some capital, then in this respect Japan bore a similarity to eighteenth-century England.
The end of isolation and the restoration of the Meiji dynasty in 1868 was accompanied by what can broadly be termed the end of feudalism and the birth of the modern state. At first industrial and demographic progress (that is, progress through the demographic transition) was slow, but both accelerated in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Official figures for this period suggest rising birth rates, from 25.4 to 35.7 per thousand between 1875 and 1920. Other sources suggest that the birth rate was already over thirty, or even over thirty-six per thousand in 1875. Conversely, while the official sources suggest rising mortality, other sources suggest it was dropping, which would be more in line w
ith what would be expected in the early stages of demographic transition.9 The latter does indeed seem more likely: however basic conditions were in the cities of early industrial Japan, conditions for the peasant were probably worse and it is likely that as the Japanese came increasingly to live in towns and cities, they started living longer.
Although the picture of what underlay the rise in population is confusing, at least to 1920, there is no confusion around the fact that the population was indeed growing after its long plateau of between 26 and 33 million. By 1914 the population had risen to 52 million and by 1924 to over 58 million.10 In the late nineteenth century, Japanese population growth exceeded 1% per annum, as the UK’s had at its time of industrial take-off, and in 1915 annual population growth was not much under 1.5%.11 This rate, which rivalled that achieved by Russia a few years earlier, reached a level of more than 1.5% per annum in the late 1920s.12
Memoirs and letters of Western travellers and expatriates in the decades before the First World War are revealing both for what they cover and what they do not. Diplomats’ wives and missionaries, frequent authors of such works, depict Japanese flower-arranging and Japanese shrines, waxing lyrical about temples and mountain landscapes. Few, however, seemed to notice that what was going on in Japan was akin to what the UK had experienced a couple of generations earlier. Such writings are, of course, replete with jarring racist stereotyping. Basil Hall Chamberlain, Emeritus Professor of Japanese and Philology at the Japanese Imperial University–and therefore better informed than most writers on the topic–noted in 1891 that Japanese tradesmen, despite thirty years of acquaintance with the West, still had much to learn. The ‘average native dealer’, he observed,
is still very backward in such matters as punctuality, a strict regard for the truth, the keeping of a promise, however trivial. He is a bad loser even of the smallest sums, and will not consider it derogatory to endeavour to get out of a contract, the fulfilment of which would entail a loss.13
(Perhaps Chamberlain’s racism should come as no surprise: his younger brother was Houston Stewart Chamberlain, Richard Wagner’s son-in-law and a man who in his final years hailed Hitler as the coming man after a transformative personal encounter with him.) However, unlike most of his competitors vying for readers with a taste for tales of lacquered vases and geisha girls, Chamberlain did at least comment on the country’s economic and industrial development, noting that
the chief progress made during the past thirty years has been in industrial development. Mines have been opened, mills erected, and new manufactures started. Japanese coal is now well-known throughout the East; copper and antimony are largely exported… Many articles that were formerly imported are now manufactured in the country.
Given its low cost and skilled labour, ‘which requires only to be directed by competent men of business, the industrial future of Japan should be bright’.14
Another exception to Western commentators who overlooked Japan’s rapid modernisation was Stafford Ransome, an engineer as well as a journalist, who noted in 1899: ‘No more striking illustration of the wonderful adaptability of the Japanese character is to be found than that afforded by the readiness with which they have taken up Western methods of manufacturing.’ Ransome observed how
the modern industries of Japan are now dotting themselves about all over the country… Osaka now may be said to be fast developing into an industrial city pure and simple; and this is no doubt why I have heard Englishmen call it the Manchester, and Scotsmen the Glasgow, and Frenchmen the Lille, and Germans the Hamburg and Americans the Chicago of Japan.15
Industry and power are inextricably linked with the rise in size of Japan’s population. Just as the demographic rise of the Anglo-Saxons gave the UK and US huge advantages in dominating large parts of the globe, so Japan’s combination of demographic and industrial strength–the latter not sustainable without the former–propelled it into the position of being considered by Europe (especially after the Russo-Japanese War) as ‘a power’, a status not shared by any other Asian country. Modernisation and transformation underpinned Japan’s remarkable victory against Russia in the war of 1904–5, showing that what might have been mistaken as inherent Anglo-Saxon or then European advantages were in fact simply the advantages not of race, but of a combination of population size and economic and industrial weight. Without these factors, Japan would not have been able to pursue the aggressive expansionism that would defeat Russia, overwhelm China and much of south-east Asia, take on the British Empire and the USA and expand its imperial power (albeit briefly) from the borders of India to deep into the Pacific. Japan’s ability to conquer and dominate large parts of China shows that demography alone was not sufficient–China, after all, always had more people–but that a combination of Japanese demographic and industrial dynamism could defeat the Chinese demographic giant.
After the institution of the first modern census and improved data gathering from 1920, the picture developed of a gradually falling birth rate accompanying increasing urbanisation, a sharply falling mortality rate and therefore, in line with demographic transition theory, a fast rise in the population.16 Although the growth in population was driven by improving economic circumstances, the discourse in Japan showed an alarmist concern about overpopulation. Japan was the most densely populated country in the world relative to its arable land.17 This concern perhaps motivated and was certainly used to justify the imperial expansion of the 1930s.18 Yet Japanese emigration–whether within the widening imperial bounds or beyond it–was on a small scale. Admittedly it was not helped by North American and Australasian immigration restrictions which remained in place right up to the 1960s, but even within areas conquered by Japan such as Manchukuo in China, emigration by Japanese made no material difference to the overall size of the population at home.19 Emigration out of Japan was rarely above 10,000 a year, paltry compared to population growth (and of course utterly paltry when compared with European emigration rates in the period before the First World War), and by the 1930s there were more Koreans living in Japan than vice versa.20 Manchukuo, it turned out, was not to be Japan’s Canada. It was not to be heavily settled by Japanese nor to serve as an overflow for surplus population nor to serve as a breadbasket for the mother country.
In many ways the dilemma, the rhetoric and the policy of imperial Japan resembled that of Nazi Germany. Population expansion had been made possible by industrialisation, with a growing industrial population increasingly fed by imports of agricultural goods paid for by industrial exports. By the late 1920s, Japan was relying on imports for around one seventh of its rice consumption.21 This was a situation which involved reliance on international trade and which nationalists disliked because it was seen as dependent rather than self-reliant. Nationalists both in Japan and Germany then claimed the need for additional space to feed their populations in a self-reliant manner. Both Japan’s ambassador to London and its ambassador to Washington justified imperial expansion to their host countries on the basis of population growth, the latter arguing that the people of the US should recognise, in the light of the increasing number of Japan’s people, ‘the absolute necessity for more territory for their existence’.22
Yet when the Japanese imperialists conquered that space, like their German counterparts, they found it hard to fill with migrants from the supposedly overcrowded homeland. For all Hitler’s desire to turn Ukraine into a German prairie and for all the appeals to the Americans that Japan needed its own ‘Wild West’ into which to expand, the Anglo-Saxon model of demographic expansion going hand in hand with territorial expansion was simply not workable. On the one hand they were citing the exigencies of population pressures at home to justify expansion abroad, and at the same time they were stoking those population pressures through pro-natalist policies. In Japan, explicit pro-natalist policies were launched in 1941 when the government set a goal to boost the population to 100 million by the early 1960s, offering financial incentives:23 two years later the prime minister said t
he goal was necessary for Japan’s successful continued existence.24
Japan’s industrial, demographic and imperial rise had already provoked reactions among the established powers. As early as 1895 Kaiser Wilhelm II had taken up the term ‘Yellow Peril’, while three years later Russia’s minister of war had worried about Japan and China in terms of the armies they could field25 and in Britain the Spectator fretted about ‘a Japanese military caste controlling China and organising its army and navy’: the same year the British prime minister expressed concern about ‘great countries of enormous power, growing every year’.26 None of this was exclusively demographic in tone and it tended to conflate Chinese scale with Japanese growth, but all of it recognised that at root it was the population dynamic of east Asia which made it seem threatening. The British response was to sign a treaty with Japan, developing its navy and using it against its rival Russia. The Russian response, determined by being closer than the British and by clashing ambitions on the mainland of the Far East, was to oppose Japan, fight it and lose. In any case, the demographic rise of Japan and the perception of the threat it posed, combined with industrial and military advance, shaped the international relations of east Asia and the Pacific from 1900 to 1945.
Japan’s industrial and population expansion, like that of its European counterparts, was linked, and Japan’s imperial expansion and subsequent wars were inconceivable without both the push and the resources which an expanded population offered. Japan’s wartime losses of around 3 million people represent personal and historical tragedy, but in demographic terms they corresponded to no more than three or four years of peak population growth. Thus while Japan in 1945 was industrially and morally devastated, its population was still one of the world’s largest. Like Russia–itself admittedly on the winning side, but having sustained huge human and material losses–Japan ended the Second World War with at least one crucial advantage: the strong demographic momentum which goes with recent rapid population expansion.