ABSTRACT
This chapter considers the period in ranges from the Paleolithic Era (35,000 bp) to about 1700. Beginning with the Yayoi period, about 900 bce, Japan's population must have entered a long phase of growth. In 1983, Kitō Hiroshi propounded an overarching theory to describe population fluctuations in Japan from the origins of human habitation through the twenty-first century. Kitō inferred a mammoth population for Japan in 1700: over 31 million. Fourth, Kito left the date for the transition from the end of cycle two to the start of cycle three unclear at 1300–1500. And fifth, Kito never explained how the violent and famine-ridden Warring States' period could have been a period of rapid growth, to as many as 15 million. Notwithstanding these considerable doubts, however, Kitō's theory of the four cycles remains the most widely accepted interpretation of Japan's demographic history.
