Fabian Drixler. Mabiki

Mabiki is a fabulous piece of historical scholarship on an important topic that until now had been relegated to the realm of traditional Japanese folktales. Fabian Drixler shocks with the provocative claim that the Tokugawa peace facilitated millions of deliberate deaths through a prevalent culture of infanticide and abortion. This demographic regime, he convincingly shows, neither was static nor were the changes predictable and progressive. Contrary to the theories we have of an inevitable fertility decline in modernizing societies, Japan in the nineteenth century saw a substantial population increase, “a reverse fertility transition,” before the birthrate dropped precipitously after the state effectively legalized abortions in 1949. Japan today, as we know, is obsessed with its aging society and shrinking population, while some pundits are counting the years until the Japanese race becomes extinct. The key strength of the book is its bold macro-regional demographic approach, paired with an astute sense of cultural history in all its multiple dimensions. It has been a long time since a Western historian was excited about the quantitative demography of Japan. Drixler has resurrected a dormant discipline with new technology that enables a fresh perspective. While most such previous work was on small social units such as villages or on rather broad national statistics, he has assembled a sample of 15,000 villages covering a larger culturally coherent region in eastern Japan, transgressing political boundaries of earlier domains or later prefectures. The conceptual challenge was to revive a prevalent practice without direct statistical evidence. Drixler does so by using various models to calculate the expected and recorded number of births in various locations, and he also looks at the suspiciously high international rates of “stillbirth.” Moreover, suspicious sex ratios of live-born children suggest patterns of parity control by parents. After considering alternative interpretations for the statistical evidence he unearthed, such as diseases, malnutrition, and work patterns, he concludes that during the Edo period, up to 40 percent of pregnancies in eastern Japan were ended through either abortion or infanticide.

Abortion · Development economics · Economic history · Economics · Fertility · Political economy · Political science · Politics · Population · Population growth · Realm · Scholarship · Social science · Sociology · State (computer science) · Chinese history and philosophy · Demography · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · History · Law · Vietnamese History and Culture Studies