Page 224 - Changing Living Spaces

Satoshi Murayama, Hiroko Nakamura, Noboru Higashi and Toru Terao

Figure 3 Rainfall in Asian Monsoon Areas
Sources and notes (a) annual, (c) summer (June to August), and (d) winter (December
to February) precipitation amounts were based on the CPC Merged Analysis of
Precipitation (CMAP in Xie and Arkin 1997), averaged from 2007 to 2016. Units are
millimetres. (b) Tracks of tropical cyclones were based on the best track data from the
Joint Typhoon Warning Center (JtwC), US Naval (Chu et al. 2002).

crises due to war during the Tokugawa period. Japan had no army during
the two and a half centuries of Tokugawa rule, and this shaped the ma-
jor mortality trends of traditional Japan. In stark contrast, early modern
Europe experienced a population decline triggered by countless wars such
as the Thirty Years’ War, the Seven Years’ War, the Great Northern War,
the Napoleonic Wars and Wars of Independence, and the Franco-Prussian
War. However, these wars were not the main cause of mortality, for even
more threatening were ‘the major epidemics that even small armies spread
in their wake. The plague marched alongside the armies in the Thirty Years’
War, together with typhus carried by lice in their clothing. More victims
fell to these epidemics than to the small bands of soldiers with their prim-
itive cut and thrust weapons, their unreliable and complicated guns, or
even their actions of burning everything in sight’ (Imhof 1990, 39).
Not war, but epidemics – especially smallpox – and famine were the ma-
jor mortality factors in early modern Japan. Takahama in the Amakusa
Islands is located directly on the sea and does not have sufficient arable

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