Household Structure and Labor Markets in Postwar Japan

While cultural rules are important in determining the structure and size of households in populations, economic and demographic constraints are of equal, if not of greater, importance in determining household characteristics. This paper argues that the demand for labor having certain characteristics (related to skilling, monitoring costs, and the capacity to signal trainability to prospective employers) has played an important role in shaping household structure and size in prewar Japan both through its indirect impact upon the vital rates and through its direct impact on who stays in the household and who goes out on a temporary and/or permanent basis. The diffusion of rice cultivation agriculture and by-employments during the Tokugawa period changed the demand for farm household labor and led to a regime of moderate sized stem family households. Analysis of a data set with economic and demographic data for approximately 1,000 towns and villages circa 1930 bears out the importance of the demand for labor in conditioning household size and structure in prewar Japan.