The Arts of the Microbial World

Fermentation Science in Twentieth-Century Japan

Victoria Lee

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780226812885
• Topic: Biological Sciences
• Subtopic: Science General
• Index: Biological Sciences

The first in-depth study of Japanese fermentation science in the twentieth century. The Arts of the Microbial World explores the significance of fermentation phenomena, both as life processes and as technologies, in Japanese scientific culture. Victoria Lee's careful study documents how Japanese scientists and skilled workers sought to use the microbe's natural processes to create new products, from soy-sauce mold starters to MSG, vitamins to statins. In traditional brewing houses as well as in the food, fine chemical, and pharmaceutical industries across Japan, they showcased their ability to deal with the enormous sensitivity and variety of the microbial world.Charting developments in fermentation science from the turn of the twentieth century, when Japan was an industrializing country on the periphery of the world economy, to 1980 when it had emerged as a global technological and economic power, Lee highlights the role of indigenous techniques in modern science as it took shape in Japan. In doing so, she reveals how knowledge of microbes lay at the heart of some of Japan's most prominent technological breakthroughs in the global economy.At a moment when twenty-first-century developments in the fields of antibiotic resistance, the microbiome, and green chemistry suggest that the traditional eradication-based approach to the microbial world is unsustainable, twentieth-century Japanese microbiology provides a new, broader vantage for understanding and managing microbial interactions with society.

1

Sake and Shōyu

REMAKING MOLD CULTURES

Whether Eastern or Western, whether old or new—where human culture flourishes, one finds the technological operations and skills of fermentation. Yet only in Asia, molds are used to turn starch into sugar before using yeast to ferment, and these molds create the special properties of the wine of each brewing region.

—Saitō Kendō, “Higashi Ajia no yūyō hakkōkin” (Useful Fermentation Microbes of East Asia), 507

Fermentation phenomena, both as life processes and as technologies, hold special significance in Japanese scientific culture. They take pride of place as an area of expertise where the country leads in contemporary biotechnology, are prominent in daily life in producing commonplace foods such as miso (fermented soybean paste) and nattō (fermented soybeans) in people’s homes, and have been a field of industrial specialization since medieval times in sake and other brewing houses. This chapter illuminates an early period in the creation of this scientific culture by looking at how Japanese scientists in universities, technical colleges, and government research institutes, as well as expert workers in the brewing industry, studied microbes at the turn of the twentieth century in the context of widespread and state-supported campaigns to modernize the indigenous brewing industries.

Japanese workers did not have the concept of “microbes” before the late nineteenth century. However, they had ways of understanding and handling microorganisms—visible en masse as mold formations—as part of essential steps in brewing not only sake and other liquors but also soy sauce and miso. The making of the rice mold kōji was the first step in brewing these products, and kōji making had been a lucrative monopoly industry since the thirteenth century. By the end of the nineteenth century, the preparation of dried mold spores to seed rice for making kōji had become a sector distinct from kōji making. These preparations were known as moyashi or tanekōji, and would be sold either to kōji makers or directly to those sake or soy sauce houses that made their own kōji. Around the same time in Europe, while bacteriologists developed new techniques for isolating and culturing microorganisms and rarefying their products to make vaccines, experts in brewing developed similar methods that would allow brewers to increase their control.1 The novel techniques of pure culture were equally important to scientists, allowing them to preserve, collect, and classify individual microbial strains. This chapter focuses on the introduction of the technique of pure culture to the Japanese brewing industries at the turn of the century, and explores its implications for how both brewers—particularly tanekōji makers—and scientists worked with microbes.

How experts implemented pure culture in the Japanese fermentation industries opens a window onto the relationship between the modernization of traditional industry and the institutionalization of Western science in the Meiji period. The emergence of a new set of institutional structures for scientific research was driven by the combined efforts of local industrial leaders, prefectural government officials, and the Meiji state to improve Japanese industries, in order to increase their competitiveness both domestically and for the purpose of export.2 Those industries that had existed in Japan before the Meiji period and continued to exist since—such as textiles, dyes, and pottery, to name a few—are some of the most important and most overlooked areas in modern Japanese science.3 Among them, brewing contributed by far the highest values of production among the entire manufacturing sector at the end of the nineteenth century, as well as providing the government with its largest source of tax revenue and consuming a sixth of the rice harvested annually.4 Through pure culture, this chapter traces one aspect of how in the late Meiji period, Japanese experts imported and adapted Western science to take a more systematic approach to processes of manufacturing. As the raison d’être that gave science its rationale in Meiji Japan, this practical application of foreign ideas to Japanese industries underlay the expansion and dynamism of institutions of agricultural and engineering science in the country.5

The new categories of “microbe” and “scientist” both relied on a notion of “nature” that had no Japanese-language equivalent in the Tokugawa period—a word that referred to the whole of material reality as something universal, as well as something distinct from “society.”6 As an object of knowledge, the microbe reflected a novel ontological division between cellular life and the environment, which the conception of nature allowed. As an institution of authority, the scientist was a new kind of expert who specialized in nature. Yet both categories were not only linked to European categories by a self-consciously Western refashioning of Japan’s political economy in the Meiji period; they were also shaped significantly by conceptions that had emerged amid the vibrant protocapitalism of the Tokugawa era. The procedures and assumptions of commercial brewers that had been developing over several centuries and the pure-culture techniques of academic microbe scientists in turn-of-the-century Japan display a striking, suggestive convergence.7 Likewise, the role of the microbe scientist within the modern Japanese state was not like that of the early modern intellectual, but was built instead on that of the technical specialist within the brewery: a manager of material production for capital accumulation, now on a national level.

The underexplored narrative of the significance of traditional industry exposes a different side to the formation of modern Japanese science than that seen in the dominant historiographical approach, which portrays the institutionalization of science in Japan primarily as a story of rapid transfer from the West, under the policies of a strong state and constituting an abrupt break from the past.8 In this chapter, I suggest that local industry helped to shape a relatively autonomous tradition of seeing microbes as living workers as much as pathogens in Japan: a view that, through large and lasting institutions, remained powerful far into the twentieth century.

LANDSCAPES OF EXPERTISE

Brewers in Tokugawa Japan had handled kōji molds with specialist skill, understanding them to be essential raw materials in the brewing process, like water or rice. In the first decade of the twentieth century, brewers faced a new landscape of microbe species that scientists had divided into “useful ones” (yūeki naru mono) and “harmful ones” (yūgai naru mono) (figs. 1.1 and 1.2).9 Within a species, microbe varieties were characterized by their physiological as well as morphological differences, which corresponded to their role in different industries: the fungi used in the sake industry formed more sugars, whereas the fungi used in the soy sauce and tamari industries formed more amino acids, chemicals associated with protein breakdown and flavor.10

By the close of the Tokugawa period, soy sauce, miso, and especially sake brewing accounted for the highest values of production by far in the entire nonagricultural manufacturing sector in Japan, easily surpassing weaving and raw silk. At the beginning of the twentieth century, among those wealthiest people who came by their riches through industrial manufacturing, there were more brewers than any other occupation, and their numbers rivaled those in rising modern industries such as cotton spinning.11 The largest brewers had emerged in the second half of the Tokugawa period in Nada (near Kobe, west of Kyoto and Osaka) in the Kansai region of western Japan for sake, and in Noda and Chōshi (east of Tokyo) in eastern Japan for soy sauce. Those breweries, which were located in rural areas, employed dozens of workers from the surrounding vicinities and had become increasingly mechanized.

Fig. 1.1. The brewing industry and mold species, in Takahashi Teizō, Jōzō bairon (1903), 3–4. Right to left: the category “useful ones” lists ten species beginning with Aspergillus oryzae, followed by “harmful ones,” which includes four species.

Fig. 1.2. Title page (right), and illustration of the kōji mold used in sake and soy sauce brewing (left), in Takahashi Teizō, Jōzō bairon (1903), front matter, 249.

In the late Tokugawa period, Japan was one of the most highly urbanized societies in the world, with numerous large cities and castle towns that formed part of a national network of consumption and distribution.12 The leading breweries competed with each other on scale as well as quality to ship their goods to major urban markets, particularly the biggest cities of Edo (renamed Tokyo after the Meiji Restoration), Osaka, and Kyoto. National markets grew first for sake, while the use of commercial rather than homemade soy sauce was initially more common in eastern than western Japan, and miso production was dominated by the home kitchen into the twentieth century.13 However, brewing was a multilayered industry: outside urban areas, village residents bought mainly from small- or medium-scale local producers. In rural areas there was also widespread home brewing of unrefined sake (nigorizake or doburoku), drunk early to fuel a day’s heavy labor on the farm.14

The brewing of rice into liquor, involving the kōji mold that grew on the rice, had been known in Japan for perhaps two millennia. The specific origins of kōji brewing were not known, though there were clear connections with mold brewing of grains on the Asian continent. In the medieval period, specialist rice wine brewers emerged in Kyoto to supply the aristocracy for ceremonial or medicinal purposes; and by the fourteenth century, commercial sake was also produced in the countryside for public drinking on market days and special occasions.15 Sake breweries developed especially in urban areas with access to rice, such as port cities in the Kansai region that saw large commercial rice transactions, or nearby temple towns that could sell their products in Kyoto. In the seventeenth century, the establishment of the Tokugawa shogunate based in Edo brought the growth of cities across the country, as samurai were required to live in castle towns to serve their domain lord. Though officially political authorities encouraged commoners merely to farm in order to produce taxes for their lords, over time the domains came to be chronically dependent on prominent merchants for loans and contributions, in return offering privileges such as the recognition of trade monopolies for certain commodities within regional markets. Thus the commerce that flourished in the Tokugawa period came to be dominated by merchants with ties to domain officials, initially wholesalers based in the cities.

By the mid-eighteenth century, the economy experienced a host of changes that historians have documented as a distinctively rural-centered, protoindustrial, protocapitalist transformation.16 Around the country, there was a dramatic growth in the number of rural households that produced goods for sale in distant markets, typically while engaging in side industries alongside agriculture. Through such small-scale manufacturing activities, as well as moneylending and experimentation with farming techniques, a number of rural elites began to amass substantial wealth. Major urban centers declined or stagnated as “country places” rose in their outskirts, challenged the hold of city merchants, and became centers of vibrant consumption as well as production. Many domain authorities by this time had come to tolerate and even promote commercial growth, since they were increasingly dependent on commoner elites for funds and trading services. As interregional competition for national markets intensified, domain authorities could turn a blind eye when rural elites usurped urban monopolies, or could encou...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• INTRODUCTION   Microbe History
• 1   SAKE AND SHŌYU
• 2   NUTRITION
• 3   NATION
• 4   ALCOHOL
• 5   ANTIBIOTICS
• 6   FLAVOR
• CONCLUSION   The Science of Modern Life
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index