Noriko Tsuya - Retiring in AY2019

The Faculty of Economics at Keio University can be said to have the longest history and tradition of demographic education in Japan, as Professor Takuma Terao was appointed as a professor in the Faculty of Economics in 1934 and dedicated many years to its teaching as a leading authority on demography. Currently, "Demography" is one of the basic subjects in the Faculty of Economics, and I began teaching this course as a part-time lecturer in 1996. Two years later, in 1998, I joined the Faculty of Economics at Keio University as a professor and have continued to teach this course until this academic year.

Since the "1.57 shock" of 1990, the declining birthrate—the continued fall and stagnation of the birthrate below the population replacement level—and its direct consequence, population aging, as well as the population decline that has been accelerating since 2010, have attracted widespread social interest. Amid growing concerns about their negative impacts, the significance and importance of demographic change for society and the economy have been reaffirmed in recent years. I believe the foresight of the Faculty of Economics at Keio University is particularly noteworthy, as it introduced demography—systematized through demographic statistical analysis, population theory, and population policy—as a field of economics and has continued to offer courses in it for many years, long before the declining birthrate, aging population, and population decline became major topics of concern in Japanese society. Benefiting from this, I am pleased to have had the opportunity to do rewarding work as an educator.

My journey as a demography researcher began with studying demographic statistics and quantitative analysis methods at the University of Chicago in the United States. Since receiving my doctorate (Ph.D.) from the university in 1986, I have continued to research contemporary populations, focusing primarily on empirical analysis of fertility and the family in developed countries. In recent years, I have particularly focused on comparative research into the patterns and factors of declining birthrates and rising non-marriage in East Asia, including Japan. From a life-course perspective, I have been engaged in empirical research on the relationship between economic behavior, centered on education and employment, and family formation, which consists of marriage and childbirth. As one culmination of this work, I was able to publish the results this year (2019) as an English-language monograph, which was a collaborative international comparative study with Korean-American and Chinese-American researchers on the decline in birthrates in Japan, South Korea, and China, along with their socioeconomic backgrounds and policy implications. I am grateful for this achievement, which was made possible by the free research environment provided by Keio University.

Furthermore, what broadened my horizons as a demography researcher was meeting Professor Akira Hayami, a leading authority in Japanese historical demography, in the mid-1990s. I began to seriously engage in historical demographic research by participating in the "Eurasia Population and Family History Project" (commonly known as EAP), which he was leading at the time. The EAP project was a multinational study aimed at comparatively analyzing demographic change and families in pre-industrial northeastern Japan, northeastern China, northern Italy, southern Sweden, and eastern Belgium. It involved building a vast historical demographic and economic database and conducting comparative analysis using identical multivariate analysis models. I joined this project as one of the leaders of the Japanese team and, in particular, served as the lead author for the English-language book on population reproduction, compiling the overall research findings.

The book was published by MIT Press in 2010, and it received the 13th Population Association of Japan Award in 2012 and the Keio Award in 2014. Professor Hayami was a Professor Emeritus of this university, also served as the Dean of the Faculty of Economics, and was awarded the Order of Culture in 2009 as a leading figure in Japan's historical demographic research. Professor Hayami passed away this month (December 2019), but I hope to repay his kindness by continuing my research using the valuable historical demographic data he collected and organized for over half a century, and by continuing to disseminate the results both in Japan and abroad.

(Interview conducted in December 2019)