[jjotto]

Probably something to do with the Tokugawa Period, when ag reforms allowed the population to grow rapidly. It is known there were successful efforts to limit the increase in population from around 1700 to the late 1800s.

[chajin]

Probably something to do with the Tokugawa Period, when ag reforms allowed the population to grow rapidly. It is known there were successful efforts to limit the increase in population from around 1700 to the late 1800s.

You sure you didn't mean the Meiji era (1868-1915)? From what remember of my Jpn history studies, the population was stable at 30,000,000 throughout most of the Tokugawa Shogunate (1600-1868), mostly through a combination of periodic famines, and infanticide. A confluence of Meiji era industrialization and Christian missionaries preaching against infanticide led to the population taking its normal course and doubling within two generations. Part of the pressure to take over Manchuria in the early 1930s was the Japanese equivalent of lebensraum, that the Japanese mostly-farming population needed more arable land to feed itself, the military, and the workers in armament factories, and Japan saw Manchuria as low-hanging fruit for imperialism.

P.S. The population doubled again in the two generations after the war, so that it was around 120,000,000 by the 1990s, but it has stagnated since then, because of a combination of very late marriages and rampant abortion, so that without a turnaround, the Japanese population is set for a rapid decline in the next generation.

[PeterPrinciple]

A code of laws was established to regulate the daimyo houses. The code encompassed private conduct, marriage, dress, types of weapons and numbers of troops allowed; required feudal lords to reside in Edo every other year (the sankin kōtai system); prohibited the construction of ocean-going ships; proscribed Christianity; restricted castles to one per domain (han) and stipulated that bakufu regulations were the national law http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edo_period ------------------- I guess what I found interesting is that there appears to be a law regulating population, would appear to be political power. But what is also interesting is that it appeared in the article, and was known to the military planners. will have to reread the article.