Akira Hayami

Akira Hayami (速水融; 1929–2019) was an emeritus professor of Keio University and the first to introduce historical demography in Japan.

Professor Hayami is also famous for coining the concept called "Industrious Revolution", which points out the socio-economic change from capital-intensive to labor-intensive one.

[1] Source[2] In the 1960s, Hayami generated a household micro-database called Basic Data Sheet (BDS), based on Tokugawa-period religious inquisition registration (宗門改帳).

Hayami also pointed out that people’s life expectancy improved during the same time span.

[5] These facts imply that the quantity of human labor input without livestock must have increased with aggregate output constant; he named this phenomenon “Industrious Revolution.”[6] In this way, Hayami pioneered research to describe population dynamics before the Industrial Revolution with statistical methods in Japan.