Property, Power, and Mobility: Household Context and Migration in Early Modern Northeastern Japan

Satomi Kurosu, Reitaku University
Hao Dong, Peking University

Despite Tokugawa restrictions on travel, migration was a common feature of everyday life in early modern Japan. This paper examines how household socioeconomic status and intra-household hierarchy structured migration decisions in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century northeastern Japan. Building on the Eurasian comparative framework that emphasizes the roles of property and power, the study analyzes mobility within the stem-family system, in which household continuity depended on retaining a single heir, while other members often left the household. The analysis draws on longitudinal population registers (1708–1870) from one town, Koriyama, and three nearby villages. These records provide detailed demographic information on household composition, landholdings, and documented reasons for migration, including marriage, service, adoption, and absconding. Using discrete-time event history models based on person-year observations, we estimate the probability of out-migration by household socioeconomic status, relationship to the household head, and marital status while controlling for demographic characteristics and economic stress. The results reveal a clear household hierarchy in migration: individuals more distantly related to the household head were significantly more likely to migrate, whereas members of wealthier or larger households were less likely to migrate. These patterns appear consistently in both rural villages and the town of Koriyama, suggesting that stem-family organization strongly structured migration behavior across community contexts in early modern Japan.

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 Presented in Session 152. Understanding Kinship and Family Dynamics