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East Asia: A Region of Shared Cultural Backgrounds and Divergent Economic and Policy Contexts

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Convergence to Very Low Fertility in East Asia: Processes, Causes, and Implications

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Abstract

The three countries in our study are not only located in the same geographical region of East Asia, they also share many fundamental cultural and social characteristics that make a comparative study of their low fertility interesting and appealing. The cultural backgrounds shared by these East Asian countries can all be traced to the so-called Confucian teachings.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    According to a large-scale international comparative study of reproduction in East Asia and Europe during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the total marital fertility rates (TMFRs) for married women age 20 and above were 3.2 births in northeastern rural Japan and 4.6 births in northeastern rural China, adjusting for under-registration of births. On the other hand, the corresponding TMFRs in rural communities in southern Sweden and eastern Belgium were 6.9 births and 8.2 births per married woman, respectively. For specifics, see Chaps. 3, 7, 8, 10, and 11 in Tsuya et al. (2010).

  2. 2.

    The law, that became effective in January 1949, repealed the 1940 National Eugenic Law that had strictly prohibited induced abortion. Studies indicated that the government at that time was alarmed by the rapidly increasing incidence of illegal abortion as well as by acute overpopulation and accelerating population growth, which were caused by the postwar baby boom and repatriation of Japanese civilians and military personnel from the former colonies in the mid of the postwar food shortage and economic jeopardy (Coyle 1959; Muramatsu 1974; Taeuber 1958: 343–350).

  3. 3.

    Responding to rising public awareness of human rights issues, in particular the problematic nature of eugenics thoughts, the government amended the law in 1996 and renamed it to the Botai Hogo Ho (Maternal Protection Law) (Kosei-rodo-sho 1996).

  4. 4.

    Occurring every 60 years according to the Chinese zodiacal calendar, a year of hinoe-uma was traditionally regarded as an unlucky year to give birth to a girl, because girls born in such a year were believed to be stubborn and thus would find it difficult to attract a husband. When the 1989 TFR was revealed in the following year as lower than that in a fire-horse year of 1966 without any discernable reasons, the news spread quickly and the populace was alarmed, thereby making this incident known widely in Japan as the “1.57 Shock”.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Faculty of Economics, Keio University, Minato-ku, Tokyo, Japan

    Noriko O. Tsuya

  2. East-West Center, Honolulu, HI, USA

    Minja Kim Choe

  3. Department of Sociology, University of California, Irvine, Irvine, CA, USA

    Feng Wang

Authors
  1. Noriko O. Tsuya
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Correspondence to Noriko O. Tsuya .

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Tsuya, N.O., Choe, M.K., Wang, F. (2019). East Asia: A Region of Shared Cultural Backgrounds and Divergent Economic and Policy Contexts. 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_2

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