Demography

In the dry form of textbooks and government statistics, demography is 'just' lots of little numbers describing the growth and distribution of populations. Behind the digits are the fascinating stories of how and why populations wax and wane via the births, deaths and marriages of individuals, the push and pull forces behind migration, and dramas of individual and collective fates. Anthropologists have turned their hands to demography to illuminate problems in the study of larger social units than the face-to-face villages which were once the discipline's specialty. Stevan Harrell's Chinese Historical Microdemography (SCIENCE HB3654 .A3 C4858 1995) is a wonderful example, collecting papers from a conference which explored the use of genealogies and household registers "to bring the detailed examination of particular cases to bear on the general problems of China's population history... (and) consider detailed evidence for small populations in order to observe trends in the regional history of populations..." (pg. 3 [emphasis added]).

The classic source on Chinese demographic history is Ho Ping-ti's Studies on the Population of China, 1368-1953 (1959) [HB3637 .H6], which drew on gazetteers (fang chih, local histories) and other documents (including household registers, encyclopedias, land-tax handbooks), spoor of many centuries of bureaucratic order. Periods of political disorder make for gaps in official statistics, so the overall pattern (let alone the specific details of any locality or region or province) can't help but be conjectural. Here's a bit of Ho's Conclusion:

In conclusion, it may be guessed that China's population, which was probably at least 65,000,000 around 1400, slightly more than doubled by 1600, when it was probably about 150,000,000. During the second quarter of the seventeenth century the nation suffered severe losses in population, the exact extent of which cannot be determined. It would appear that the second half of the seventeenth century was a period of slow recovery, althrogh the tempo of population growth was increased between 1683 and 1700. The seventeenth century as a whole probably failed to register any net gain in population. Owing to the combination of favorable economic conditions and kindly government, China's population increased from about 150,000,000 around 1700 to perhaps 313,000,000 in 1794, more than doubling in one century. Because of later growth and the lack of further economic opportunities, the population reached about 430,000,000 in 1850 and the nation became increasingly impoverished. The great social upheavals of the third quarter of the nineteenth century gave China a breathing spell to make some regional economic readjustments, but the basic population-land relation in the country as a whole remained little changed. Owing to the enormous size of the nineteenth-century Chinese population, even a much lowered average rate of growth has brought it to its reported 583,000,000 by 1953. (pp. 277-278)

There is reason to doubt the details of this model --on grounds of data accuracy, and/or demographic process details, and/or "incompleteness and oversimplification", based as it is on "aggregate figures compiled by governments for taxation and land-registration purposes rather than any kind of population records built on the life histories of individuals" (Harrell 1995:2)-- and Skinner's 1985 The Structure of Chinese History (Presidential Address) exemplifies the grand sweep and makes the whole picture much more interesting.

Japan presents a very different demographic picture: Japanese families have generally followed the 'stem' model (in which siblings leave the family unit at marriage), where the Chinese ideal (perhaps enjoyed only by the wealthy) was the 'grand' family (which retains marrying siblings, and thus is awash in daughters-in-law). Japanese have generally married late (while Chinese preference has been for earlier marriage, especially for women), and Japanese have a long history of controlling population via infanticide and abortion (female infanticide was [and see Stephen Mosher] common in some parts of China, especially in difficult times, but the more sons, the better). China's "One Child" policy (see a summary by Maria Nadeau) is an example of political intervention in what might be considered "family affairs" in the West.

Fertility is a fascinating demographic variable because it is a population phenomenon susceptible to fluctuations that originate in various sectors of culture, society, economy and polity. Consider this pasage:

The persistent low fertility in Japan, wehre the total fertility rate dropped to 1.43 [children per woman] in 1996, has been caused mostly by delayed marriages among single men and women... This shifting marriage pattern among the Japanese suggests that their perception of the values and functions of a family is changing in important ways... the increasing frequency of cohabitation outside of legal marriage both in the United States and Japan is casting doubt on the durability of traditional family systems...
Shunichi Inoue "Family formation in Japan, South Korea, and the United States: an overview" in Mason et al. The Changing Family in Comparative Perspective: Asia and the United States [HQ663 .C52 1998]
Low fertility rates are common in advanced economies, and portend depopulation over the next century --evidently "one third of never-married young adults in Japan are uncertain about whether they ever want to ahve children" (Mason et al. 1998:245).

JSTOR offers a number of Population Studies journals, and more than 160 articles have (Japan OR China OR Korea) AND (fertility) in their abstracts. There's LOTS to explore here...

Population Index has a searchable web interface for 1986-2000, adding the years that JSTOR doesn't include (1997-).