Heights and Economic Development in Modern Japan: From the Anthropometric Analysis of School Registers of a Primary School, ca.1880s-1910s

• In Event: Japan in Motion: A Panel Exploration of Understanding Japan’s Social and Economic Changes through Historical Horizons (Late-19th Century to Mid-20th Century).

Abstract

Generally economic and social historians, so far, have been talking about the standard of living of one nation either from the viewpoint of the aggregate term of per capita income or GDP or from the individual performance of height, BMI and so on. But truly there is big difference of evaluation of living standard between them. At the case of shedding light on the unequal distribution of resource in the household, we need the detailed information of physical growth of children by which we can describe their shapes of height or weight growth and think about the inequality of them among households due to their socio-economic status. The school register of primary pupils used in our analysis seems like ideal for the purpose. The ministry of Education of Japan ordered each master of primary school to make the register since the construction of the school to record the information of educational performance, the condition of household, and the physical growth of pupil attended there. The Nagano prefecture primary school of our research has been keeping the register for more than 100 years and gives us the invaluable information needed for our anthropometric research. The primary purpose of our analysis knows whether there were gaps of physical growth such as height and weight between school boys and girls through the analysis of the registers. Our data have the birth order of pupils in their each household, which is an individual data adequate for the panel analysis.

Author

• Kimura Takako, Osaka University