Abstract
In all three East Asian countries under study, the initial fertility decline was precipitous and dramatic with the levels of fertility cut by one half or more in around one decade. From shortly after World War II to the late 1950s, Japan experienced a sharp downturn in its fertility.
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- 1.
An exception is 1966, a year of hinoe-uma (fire horse), in which the TFR dropped temporarily to 1.58 per woman, followed by an upturn to 2.23 in 1967. Many Japanese couples likely avoided to have a child in this fire-horse year and waited until the next year. For specifics of a year of hinoe-uma, see Footnote 4 of Chap. 2.
- 2.
Because of the lack of reliable fertility statistics for the 1950–1970s, we use the estimates by Coale and Chen (1987) for the period before 1975.
- 3.
- 4.
Because an achievement of below-replacement fertility seemed extraordinary at that time in a country at China’s (relatively low) level of economic development and probably because of its large population size, this attracted a good deal of attention and analyses (e.g., Feeney and Yuan 1994; Yu and Yuan 1996; Zeng 1996). Nevertheless, in all surveys conducted in the 1990s, China’s fertility during the decade has never been found to be above the replacement level (Guo and Chen 2007).
- 5.
The TFR figures on China that this monograph draws on are not totally adjusted for this considerable underreporting. Since it is almost impossible to completely account for underreporting, however, this study draws on the data estimated by the NBSC and the East-West Center (2007) for the period 1975–2000. As for the period 2001–2004, we interpolated the estimate of 2000 and an estimate for 2005, which is provided personally by Jiajian Chen. This estimate by Chen is derived by the birth history reconstruction method. For specifics of the method, see Retherford et al. (2005).
- 6.
The rate for urban China in 1990 is the weighted average of the rates of cities and towns, which are estimated by the National Bureau of Statistics of China and the East-West Center (2007), using the birth history reconstruction method.
- 7.
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Tsuya, N.O., Choe, M.K., Wang, F. (2019). Paths to Low Fertility. In: Convergence to Very Low Fertility in East Asia: Processes, Causes, and Implications. SpringerBriefs in Population Studies(). Springer, Tokyo. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-4-431-55781-4_3
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