Abstract
This paper aims to show the trends and fluctuations of mean age at menarche from the 1880s to 1980s by using two kinds of menarche data collected by hospitals, volunteer organizations, private companies and so on: one is primary research data and the other are cited data in journals and books. Three findings emerge. (1) The long-term trend in the mean age at menarche was relatively stable at around the latter half of age 14 until the 1940s and afterward steadily declined to 12 years old in the 1980s. (2) The mean age at menarche showed a statistically significant decline even during the 1920s and 1930s in the case of students and mill workers; and (3) the velocity of height growth of both boys and girls was mostly increasing until the 1930s, and was at its maximum during the 1920s. These findings enable us to reconsider the conventional view of living standards and economic recession during the interwar period in Japan by analyzing not only economic but also anthropometric indices.
This chapter is a translation of an article that originally appeared in Shakai Keizai Shigaku 72(6) (March 2007), pp. 47–69.
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Notes
- 1.
We need to test the hypothesis in its specific historical context. For example, it is believed that the Japanese household formation system (ie) had a very skewed system of distributing food between males and females, but recently several historical studies have tried to test the primary status of eldest male children in the rural Japanese ie system.
- 2.
To think properly of the standard of living shared in the economies of early modern Japan’s peasant households, we must bear in mind that household members were engaged in various earning activities based on gender and age divisions of labor, including cultivation, by-employment, and casual labor. When the next household head was decided upon, other household members in principal left the household.
- 3.
Recently, many social historians of Japan have started working on this issue. For example, a local Eisei-kai [Hygiene Society] in Nagano Prefecture offered important activities from the 1900s to the 1940s, including (1) screenings and discussions of hygiene films, (2) simple education/skills for midwifery, (3) epidemic/local disease prevention, (4) distribution of pamphlets on hygiene and so on.
- 4.
Regressions based on time tend to yield larger t-values because more values on the Y-axis overlap on the same value of the X-axis.
- 5.
Most of menarche data used in the paper cannot be classified by birth cohort because they contain information only on the year the research was conducted. This means that the data on students are more reliable in terms of the precision of age at menarche age than the data in other categories, because student age is much closer to the age at menarche.
- 6.
The reason we chose height here is that, for physiological reasons, menarche frequently happens within a few years after the age of Peak Height Velocity.
- 7.
This careful treatment of data does not necessarily eliminate certain problems in menarche data that result from people’s inability to recollect accurately their age at menarche.
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Acknowledgements
Both the Grant-in-Aid for scientific research of “the anthropometric history of school boys and girls and its historical analysis of socio-economic factors in modern rural Japan”, (2016–2019, Hitotsubashi University, Ken’ichi Tomobe, No. 16K03775) and the Grant-in-Aid for scientific research of “Historical Changes in the Standard of Living and Socioeconomic Structures in Japan: Perspectives from Household Financial Diaries”, (2019–2022, Hitotsubashi University, Yukinobu Kitamura, No. 19H00593) offered financial support for this research. I would like to convey my special thanks to Dr. Tsutomu Hirayama of Shōnan Institute of Technology who contributed significantly to making the database and revising some of the complicated tables and figures used in this paper. Needless to say, all errors remaining in the paper are my responsibility.
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Tomobe, K. (2019). Changes in Female Height and Age of Menarche in Modern Japan, 1870s–1980s: Reconsideration of Living Standards During the Interwar Period. In: Okuda, N., Takai, T. (eds) Gender and Family in Japan. Monograph Series of the Socio-Economic History Society, Japan. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-9909-1_4
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