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Remarriage in a stem family system in early modern Japan

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 December 2007

SATOMI KUROSU
SATOMI KUROSU
Affiliation:
College of Foreign Studies, Reitaku University.
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Abstract

Drawing data from the local population registers in two northeastern Japanese agricultural villages in the period 1716–1870, this study examines the patterns and covariates of remarriage in a rural community with strong adherence to a stem family organization. Event history analysis is applied separately for males and females, and for two types of previous marriage (uxorilocal and virilocal). Controlling for demographic and economic factors, coresiding parents and children had differential impacts on remarriage for these subgroups. Men and women were tightly bound to the fates of their natal and marital households within the larger context of local economic conditions.

Type
Research Article
Information
Continuity and Change , Volume 22 , Issue 3 , December 2007 , pp. 429 - 458
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2007

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References

ENDNOTES

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2  Saito and Hamano, ‘Tokugawa noson ni okeru’.

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7  Succession by the eldest son was preferred and was practised in general. However, this region is also known for the eldest child's succession (i.e. first child regardless of sex). See Okada, Aoi and Kurosu, Satomi, ‘Succession and the death of the household head in early modern Japan: a case from a northeastern village, 1720–1870’, Continuity and Change 13, 1 (1988), 143–66CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Tsuya, Noriko O. and Kurosu, Satomi, ‘Mortality and household in two Ou villages, 1716–1870’, in Bengtsson, Tommy, Campbell, Cameron, Lee, James et al., Life under pressure: mortality and living standard in Europe and Asia, 1700–1900 (Cambridge, MA, 2004), 253–92Google Scholar.

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13  See Smith, Nakahara; Kito, ‘Remarriage and reproduction’; Kurosu, ‘Marriage in a stem family system’; Kurosu, Satomi, Tsuya, Noriko O. and Hamano, Kiyoshi, ‘Regional differentials in the patterns of first marriage in the latter half of Tokugawa Japan’, Keio Economic Studies 36, 1 (1999), 13–38Google Scholar.

14  Taxes were imposed on an entire village, and the households of peasants who had title to land were responsible for shouldering these village-based taxes according to the expected yields of the land they held (see Tsuya and Kurosu, ‘Mortality and household’).

15  For example, see Grigg, Susan, ‘Towards a theory of remarriage: a case study of Newburyport at the beginning of the nineteenth century’, Journal of Interdisciplinary History 2 (1977), 183–220CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Dupâquier, J., Helin, E., Laslett, P., Livi-Bacci, M. and Sogner, S. eds., Marriage and remarriage in populations of the past (London, 1981)Google Scholar; Mitterauer, Michael and Sieder, Reinhard, The European family (Oxford, 1982)Google ScholarPubMed; Knodel and Lynch, ‘The decline of remarriage’; Poppel, Frans van, ‘Widows, widowers and remarriage in nineteenth-century Netherlands’, Population Studies 49, 3 (1995), 421–41CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and ‘Nineteenth-century remarriage patterns in the Netherlands’, Journal of Interdisciplinary History 28, 3 (1998), 343–83; and Lundh, Christer, ‘Remarriages in Sweden in the 18–19th centuries’, The History of the Family 7 (2002), 423–49CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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17  Smith, Nakahara; Kito, ‘Remarriage and reproduction’; Kurosu, ‘Marriage in a stem family system’.

18  Saito and Hamano, ‘Tokugawa noson ni okeru’; Kurosu, ‘Marriage in a stem family system’.

19  Kito, ‘Remarriage and reproduction’.

20  Saito and Hamano, ‘Tokugawa noson ni okeru’.

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22  The history of population registers, their reliability, their compilation and the computerization of the data sets are described in detail elsewhere: see Hayami, Akira, ‘Thank you Francisco Xavier: an essay in the use of micro-data for historical demography of Tokugawa Japan’, Keio Economic Studies 16 (1979), 65–81Google Scholar; Cornell and Hayami, ‘The Shumon-aratame-cho’; Ono, Yoshihiko, ‘Bunkakei no keisanki-riyo II: deita nyuryoku no yuzaa intaafeisu (Rekishi-jinkogaku no baai) (‘Computer utilization for humanities II: User interface for data entry, the case of historical demography’), Nihon Kenkyu (Bulletin of International Research Center for Japanese Studies) 8 (1993), 165–82Google Scholar

23  Koriyama-shi, Koriyama-shi shi dai-2-kan kinsei jo (The history of Koriyama city, volume 2: The early modern period) (Tokyo, 1981), 340–1.

24  Tsuya and Kurosu, ‘Economic and household covariates’.

25  Tsuya and Kurosu, ‘Economic and household covariates’.

26  Service migration included longer-term live-in servants and short-term contract labourers in neighbouring villages and towns. The destination and reasons for migration were clearly noted in the registers.

27  The examination of these competing risks is found in Satomi Kurosu, ‘Family breakdown or family re-composition? Marriage dissolution and remarriage in early modern Japan’, paper presented at the annual meeting of the Social Science History Association, Portland (2005).

28  The ‘age’ refers to the age measured in terms of the timing of NAC registration (i.e. the number of annual registrations each individual went through after birth) rather than chronological age (age according to Gregorian calendar). Provided that the information used to construct the covariates for multivariate analysis is all organized in terms of the timing of annual population registration, it is appropriate to use NAC age, rather than chronological age. Tsuya and Kurosu discuss the specifics of the procedures for the construction of the machine-readable data files used in the analysis; see Tsuya, Noriko O. and Kurosu, Satomi, ‘Mortality responses to short-term economic stress and household context in eighteenth and nineteenth century rural Japan’, in Bengtsson, Tommy and Saito, Osamu eds., Population and economy: from hunger to modern economic growth (Oxford, 2000), 421–55Google Scholar.

29  The youngest recorded age at first marriage in these villages was 3 for females and 6 for males. But such very young marriages were rare.

30  The numbers of men and women are not the same because the observation is based on individuals. Some individuals came back (in-migration) to the two villages upon marital dissolution elsewhere and are included in the risk population of remarriage. Some others left the two villages (out-migration) upon marital dissolution and therefore are not included in the risk population.

31  Kurosu, Tsuya and Hamano, ‘Regional differentials’.

32  Hayami, ‘Thank you Francisco Xavier’, 209.

33  Saito (‘The third pattern of marriage’) discusses and examines the link between mortality and remarriage in a comparative perspective.

34  Tsuya and Kurosu, ‘Mortality and household’, 267.

35  Most of them are thought to have absconded to evade taxes. These cases are included with divorce in the following analysis for two reasons. First, those who absconded were alive and therefore can be considered with those who divorced. Second, an earlier study suggests that the demographic behaviours of these people were similar to those of divorced people (see Tsuya and Kurosu, ‘Mortality and household’).

36  As described above, if a husband absconded and did not return for ten months, his wife might legally remarry. The ten-month waiting period explains why remarriages of females whose marriage ended due to spousal absconding occurred later than when the previous marriage had ended for other reasons. However, the ten-month wait does not seem to have applied when it was wives who absconded.

37  The mean ages at first marriage among females in Nishijo, in central Japan, and Nomo, in the southwestern part of Japan, were 22.5 and 24.9, respectively (see Kurosu, Tsuya and Hamano, ‘Regional differentials’).

38  Tsuya and Kurosu, ‘Mortality and household’, 275.

39  Marco Breschi, Matteo Manfredini and Alessio Fornasin, ‘The second choice: pattern and features of remarriage in a rural community of mid-nineteenth-century Italy’, paper presented at the annual meeting of the Social Science History Association (Portland, 2005), and Christer Lundh, ‘Remarriage in Sweden 1766–1894’, paper presented at the annual meeting of the Social Science History Association (Portland, 2005). Reworked versions of these papers are included in this issue of Continuity and Change.

40  Kurosu, ‘Divorce and stem family’; Saito and Hamano, ‘Tokugawa noson ni okeru’; Saito, ‘The third pattern of marriage’, 182.

41  It is not as noticeable as in the case of women but it is interesting to note the temporal rise in remarriage for divorced men and the fall and later rise for male uxorilocal and virilocal marriage types.

42  Tsuya and Kurosu, ‘Economic and household covariates’.

43  Kurosu, Tsuya and Hamano (‘Regional differentials’) contrast age at first marriage among natives, immigrants, and emigrants: 19.5, 23.8, and 22.2 for males, and 14.7, 19.1, and 15.1 for females, respectively.

44  Noriko O. Tsuya and Satomi Kurosu, ‘Reproduction and family building strategies in 18th and 19th century rural Japan: evidence from two northeastern villages’, paper presented at the annual meeting of the Population Association of America (New York, 1999).

45  For the first comparative work of the Eurasia Project, see Bengtsson, Campbell, Lee et al., Life under pressure.

46  Tsuya and Kurosu, ‘Economic and household covariates’.

47  Kurosu, ‘Divorce and stem family’.

48  Tsuya and Kurosu, ‘Mortality responses’, ‘Mortality and household’, ‘Reproduction and family building’ and ‘Economic and household covariates’.

49  Paul D. Allison, Event history analysis: regression for longitudinal event data (Quantitative Applications in the Social Sciences, 46) (Newbury Park, 1984). In view of the fact that the data for the analysis are constructed with a person-year as the unit of observation, individuals are likely to contribute more than one observation. In order to take the effects of inter-correlation among observations into account, the logistic regression is estimated with robust standard errors using Huber's formula (Huber, P. J., ‘The behavior of maximum likelihood estimates under non-standard conditions’, Proceedings of the Fifth Berkeley Symposium on Mathematical Statistics and Probability 1 (1967), 221–3Google Scholar. See Tsuya and Kurosu, ‘Mortality responses’, for details on methodology.

50  Because the discrete-time event history model employed here does not have a built-in function to account for the duration of exposure as the hazard model does, it is statistically necessary to control for this effect.

51  Since the NAC record only the information about the year of marital dissolution (i.e. no exact dates were given), this variable is categorical and not continuous.

52  See Kurosu, ‘Family breakdown’.

53  Tsuya and Kurosu, ‘Mortality responses’.

54  See Tsuya and Kurosu, ‘Mortality responses’, ‘Mortality and household’, ‘Reproduction and family building’, and ‘Economic and household covariates’.

55  One koku is equivalent to around 5 bushels of rice, or 180 litres. One koku is often considered as the annual average consumption per capita.

56  Tsuya and Kurosu, ‘Economic and household covariates’.

57  Kurosu, , ‘Divorce and stem family’, and ‘Who leaves home and why? Daughters and sons in two northeastern villages, 1716–1870’, in Poppel, Frans van, Oris, Michel and Lee, James eds., The road to independence: leaving home in western and eastern societies, 16th–20th centuries (Bern, 2004), 243–71Google Scholar.

58  Tsuya and Kurosu, ‘Reproduction and family building’.

59  Kurosu, ‘Family breakdown’; Satomi Kurosu, Christer Lundh, and Marco Breschi, ‘Economic and household factors of remarriage in Eurasian perspective’, paper presented at the biannual meeting of European Social Science History Commission (Amsterdam, 2006).

60  Kurosu, ‘Family breakdown’.

61  Tsuya and Kurosu, ‘Household and economic covariates’; Kurosu, ‘Divorce and stem family’.

62  Although it is only speculative, this might account in part for the puzzling positive effect of landholding on female mortality found in an earlier study (see Tsuya and Kurosu, ‘Mortality and household’).

63  Goode, William J., World revolution and family patterns (New York, 1963)Google Scholar, and World changes in divorce patterns (New Haven, CN, 1993).

64  Tsuya and Kurosu, ‘Economic and household covariates’.

65  The mortality analysis suggests that adult males in the two villages may have suffered uncommonly high death tolls during the period of serious local famine (Tsuya and Kurosu, ‘Mortality and household’, 284).

66  Tsuya and Kurosu, ‘Economic and household covariates’.

67  Tsuya and Kurosu, ‘Economic and household covariates’.

68  Tsuya and Kurosu, ‘Economic and household covariates’, and Kurosu ‘Divorce and stem family’.

69  With the development of sericulture and general improvement of standard of living, women's status is thought to have improved. This is observed in the improved balance of the sex ratio and the decline of female infant and child mortality.

70  Coale, A. J., ‘Introduction to part III,’ in Helin, Dupâquier, Livi-Bacci, Laslett and Sogner, eds., Marriage and remarriage, 151–6Google Scholar.