Japan's Medieval Population: Famine, Fertility, and Warfare in a Transformative Age (Choice Outstanding Academic Books)

For some reason that I don't understand, I have a deep fascination with Japanese history. This book sounds dull and parts of it are as the author explains how he got his data and how reliable it is. But when he gets into the meat of a subject like family structure or plagues and famines it is really interesting. Most books are about the daymos and samurai. This book is about the vast majority of the population who farmed the land. I was surprised at the looseness of the family and the how they moved around. The landowners had to be careful about how hard they pressed their "peasants" because they could soon find themselves without any workers to till the land.

The book was missing the first 25 pages and was warped

I initially purchased this book because I wanted to learn about the common person's experience during Kamakura period Japan. This book exceeded my expectations using demography to paint a vivid portrayal of what was really happening. Politics and law is one story, but social movements impacted by innovations, climate change, disease and other factors also shape and direct the trends of history in ways I never considered. Not only did I get a better idea of what life was like at the time, it gave my own research project new life and offered me new tools for approaching my work. I love this book.

This book provides an excellent insight into the drivers of medieval Japan,i.e. the weather, famines, agricultuaral advances, etc that underlay the dates, battles and regime changes in the regular history books.

On the one hand, the rather blandly straightforward title of this book is pretty much accurate. The author tenaciously mines data from various and sundry fragmentary sources to crunch the numbers and propose tentative but plausible population trends and fluctuations for the period in question, showing his homework as he goes. On the other hand, the title doesn't quite do the book justice. With a wealth of specific detail, a vividly realistic image of the texture of everyday ordinary life with its ups and downs is portrayed, with the gradual changes of that texture tracked through the centuries. For my own purposes there were a great many relevant passages on the rites and activities regarding epidemics and famines on the part of religious institutions, shrine associations and village life, women's changing status and the rise of nunneries, and such, but somewhere in these pages there's probably something here for everyone as well. Altogether an indispensable resource, and an eerily appropriate read during a shelter-in-place furlough.