부산대학교 도서관

Between the “rice riots” of 1918 and the end of World War II, Japanese fermentation scientists came to understand microbes as a nutritional resource. The interwar period saw the invention of new food technologies including synthetic sake, chemical soy sauce, yeast preparations, and vitamin synthesis that scientists believed would help to distribute agricultural reserves more efficiently. A constellation of statist concerns in nutrition science that bound together Malthusian anxieties of agricultural resource scarcity with autarkic designs for national strength and war was not unique to Japan. But the close connection between fermentation and nutrition science in industrializing Japan led to a distinctive focus on the role of microbes in mediating the national-level relationships between resources and everyday consumption. By exploring the design of new products both synthetic and fermented, this chapter traces some of the major attempts of fermentation scientists to intervene in political economy through material culture, suggesting that scientism in modern Japan lies in these everyday technologies. As novel “economizing,” “rationalizing” technologies became widespread during the Asia-Pacific War, fermentation scientists went beyond traditional brewing to transform key approaches at the core of Japan’s food and drug industries, creating a knowledge of microbes as methods of national resource management.