Rjrasva (द्रष्टुं नोद्यम्)
In Edo era, Eastern Japan had low TFR(or more accurately infant survival) rates due to infanticide& abortion. Depop was serious so by late Edo there was pregnancy surveillance, subsidies, & immigration (from domains without this issue)
Which is y it makes me laugh when people just project current trends linearly abt some “human or Japanese or Korean extinction” while confusing correlation with causation &
underlying all this is the assumption that industrial civ will last forever because as Julian Simon taught us: “there may well be other suns elsewhere” & human ingenuity will help turn copper into lead or as most people believe: there is infinite coal, oil, gas, copper on earth because why wouldn’t there be?
Beyond the question of its moral status, infanticide permitted a range of interpretations.
Administrators worried about dwindling populations and falling revenues, and often thought that it was a love of luxury that prompted people to kill their children.+++(5)+++
Villagers complained that poverty left them no other resort, and sometimes helpfully suggested that lower taxes would do wonders for the safety of their newborns.
Men of learning often believed that moral education could convince villagers to give up infanticide,
but some thinkers argued that it would take a fundamental reform of the political system to achieve that goal.
Men of substance who were content to work within the established order, meanwhile,
reinvented themselves as moral leaders of their communities
and wrote to their governments with offers to finance the eradication of infanticide.
Most domains in Eastern Japan built expensive systems of welfare and surveillance.
By 1850, the majority of women north and east of Edo were obliged to report their pregnancies to the authorities,
and the majority of the poor could apply for subsidies to rear their children.+++(5)+++
Over the same years, a demographic revolution was set in motion.
In the eighteenth century, the consensus of many villages in Eastern Japan was that parents could, and under many circumstances should,
kill some of their newborns.
Perhaps every third life ended in an infanticide,
and the people of Eastern Japan brought up so few children
that each generation was smaller than the one that went before it.
By 1850, in contrast, a typical couple in the same region raised four or five children,
and a long period of population growth began.
By the 1920s, the average woman brought six children into the world,
and in Eastern Japan, as elsewhere in the nation, overpopulation at home
became an argument for expansion abroad.2
Eastern Japan, in other words, had experienced a reverse fertility transition.
While infanticide became less frequent,
it nonetheless persisted.
With the overthrow of the Tokugawa order in 1868,
the elaborate countermeasures vanished together with the old regimes that had devised them.
Around 1870, the first generation of governors of the new Meiji state announced ambitious eradication schemes,
but their programs were short-lived.
After about 1880, infanticide does not seem to have attracted much public notice,
even though it continued to claim many newborn lives.
At the beginning of the twentieth century, entire prefectures reported stillbirth rates so absurdly high as to suggest that
in some of them up to one child in five died in an infanticide or a late-term abortion.
Although these numbers decreased rapidly after about 1910,
the traces of infanticides are visible even in the statistics of the 1930s.
In 1949, finally, the legalization of abortion …