Japan's Medieval Population: Famine, Fertility, and Warfare in a Transformative Age by William Wayne Farris

This volume charts a course through never-before-surveyed historical territory: Japan's medieval population, a topic so challenging that neither Japanese nor foreign scholars have investigated it in a comprehensive way. And yet, demography is an invaluable approach to the past because it provides a way - often the only way - to study the mass of people who did not belong to the political or religious elite.