Paper short abstract:

Focusing on the Imperial Government Institute for Nutrition (1920-40), I argue that interwar Japan's national nutrition campaign (eiyō rikkoku) simultaneously embodied Japan's modern quest for national strength and, through engagement with the League of Nations, etc., persistent internationalism.

Paper long abstract:

One characteristic of modern nations has been concerted interest in disciplining, improving, and mobilizing the bodies of the populace. This reflects not only the rise of modern governmentality and increased attention to projects of visual, spectacular civilization such as hygienic modernity, but also a distinctly modern biopolitics predicated on the linkage of individual health and national cultural, economic, and military vitality. Biopower promised to maximize the efficiency of individuals, families, communities, corporations, etc., by apprehending, quantifying, and optimizing the population's energies. By this alchemy, food increasingly became nutrition, and nutrition science emerged as a critical technology for documenting, monitoring, and intervening in public health. Similarly, the components of society―individuals, families, communities, corporations, etc.—became the objects of quantifiable technologies of knowledge, subject to the exercise of biopower to maximize output efficiencies.

In this context, this paper explores the early history of nutrition science and nutritional activism in interwar Japan, focusing on the role of the Imperial Government Institute for Nutrition (IGIN). I argue that the IGIN, the world's first government-sponsored nutrition institute, was a manifestation and key instrument of Japan's state-led programs of national strengthening and national nutrition as civilization, but also of internationalism (or at least internationalist nationalism). The IGIN led Japan's interwar program of national nutrition (eiyō rikkoku). The IGIN's successes in science and dietary reform were viewed as a triumph, an indication that Japan had surpassed the West in the most fundamentally modern and rational of pursuits, science—and specifically nutrition, the science of building a better human, and therefore nation. Simultaneously, especially through involvement with the League of Nations, the IGIN was a major contributor to the international development of nutrition science, and went beyond the "international minimum" described by Jessamyn Abel even after Japan left the League in 1933.