These mortality crises were transient and direct consequences of wars or civil wars. In 1944-45, male life expectancy at birth in Japan was under 25 years, yet three decades later, Japan reported one of the highest male life expectancies in the world. Death rates from CVD are nearly twice as high for modern Russians as they were for postwar Japanese; death rates for injury and poisoning, over three times higher. Recent estimates by demographers also suggest that the effect of World War II on Western German women, born in 1920, was an average of only about six months of life expectancy (Eberstadt, 1999).