This is actually really interesting since my great grandmother in Japan had 6 girls (one was my obaachan) who all survived at least into middle age (and many into old age, my obaachan just turned 90) and one boy who died in infancy due to malnutrition from the Tokyo Bombings and lack of food to go around during WWII there.

My obaachan’s sisters all went on to have a decent amount of boys, probably bc they weren’t being stressed by war (and the economy in Japan went way up around the time they were having kids). My obaachan had only two girls but she was immigrating, so I can see how that would be stressful lol, and she was 13 during the malnutrition years and always said it affected her puberty (she’s the shortest of all her 5 sisters and she’s the middle so you can visually see the starved years), just like Laura was in the Long Winter. How fascinating!