| Abstract: | ![]()
The Japan of the middle of the nineteenth century was a backward agrarian state of perhaps 35 million people. Three-quarters of a century later, the 75 million people of an industrialized and urbanized Japan had challenged the industrial and military power of the West itself in a daring attempt to achieve economic and political control over eastern Asia and the islands of Oceania. Population growth had stimulated economic and political expansion, but in 1940 when the Planning Board of the Cabinet reported to the Imperial Japanese Government that the country would need perhaps 200 million people to maintain the hegemony of the East, population growth was already slowing. Japanese projections of the trends of the interwar period indicated that the maximum population would be reached by the end of the twentieth century, and that it would be slightly less than 125 million.2 |
