- Convenors:
-
Paul Kreitman
(Columbia University)
Lillian Tsay (University of Montreal)
Timothy Yang (University of Georgia)
Narusa Yamato (Stanford University)
Send message to Convenors
- Discussant:
-
Jordan Sand
(Georgetown University)
- Format:
- Panel
- Section:
- History
Short Abstract
This panel explores how material, technological and sensory systems shaped modern Japan’s food distribution from the Meiji to high growth eras, from Tokyo cattle barns and the empire-wide manufacture of confectionery to postwar famine-optimised rice cultivars and refrigerated distribution networks.
Long Abstract
This panel examines the material, technological, and sensory infrastructures that shaped Japan’s food distribution systems from the late nineteenth century through the high-growth era. Together, the papers trace how producers, policymakers, and consumers navigated shifting landscapes of scarcity and abundance, and how changing food technologies—from dairy barns to sugar refineries, rice laboratories, and supermarket cold chains—reconfigured everyday life. In doing so, the panel highlights food consumerism not simply as an economic trend but as a political, technological, and logistical project at the heart of modern Japanese history.
Paper A explores the emergence of Tokyo as a “bovinopolis” in the late nineteenth century, when the extraction of dairy products and smallpox vaccines from cattle developed in tandem. By following the movement of cows, milk, and vaccines through the expanding city, she shows how bovine bodies and their care regimes underpinned Meiji Japan’s public health campaigns. Her paper reveals the urban infrastructures—delivery routes, hygiene protocols, and animal-management systems—that enabled milk and vaccines to circulate widely, laying foundations for new hygienic forms of bodily consumption.
Paper B traces the manufacture of sweetness across the Japanese empire by following sugar from colonial Taiwan to refineries and confectionery factories in Japan and Manchuria. She examines the sensory and industrial techniques that converted raw sugar into mass-produced confections, showing how taste was engineered through imperial supply chains and factory-standardized processes. Tsay highlights how the expansion of confectionery culture fostered new forms of consumer desire rooted in color, aroma, refinement, and novelty.
Paper C analyzes the early postwar career of Fujisaka No. 5, a rice cultivar central to efforts to overcome wartime famine. Initially prized for its hardiness and high yields, the variety was later rejected for its poor flavor once scarcity receded. Yang uses this trajectory to illuminate shifting agricultural priorities and the growing power of consumer preference in shaping postwar food policy.
Finally, Paper D examines the transformation of Japan’s distribution networks through the rise of supermarkets and the first convenience stores. He argues that postwar consumerism depended on new infrastructural systems—from cold-chain logistics to regulatory shifts—that reorganized urban space and everyday relationships to food.
| Abstract in Japanese (if needed) |
Accepted papers
Paper short abstract
Japan’s postwar refrigeration revolution transformed food distribution, leading to the rise of the convenience store. Cold-chain logistics reshaped shopping habits, undermined neighborhood economies, and opened space for new retail forms that blended corporate-scale distribution with local presence.
Paper long abstract
This paper traces how Japan’s postwar “refrigeration revolution” transformed food distribution and retail structures, culminating in the rise of the convenience store. It argues that the spread of cold-chain logistics—from refrigerated trucks to household fridges—reshaped shopping habits, weakened traditional neighborhood economies, and opened space for new retail forms that blended corporate-scale distribution with local presence.
In the 1950s and early 60s, Japanese consumers still shopped in highly localized, relational economies. With limited refrigeration in homes or stores, housewives made multiple daily trips to specialized merchants, often buying on credit and negotiating prices. This system depended on dense, gendered social ties and on a high frequency of face-to-face exchange. The rapid rise of supermarkets in the 1960s challenged this world. Chains such as Daiei and Ito-Yokado introduced self-service, bulk buying, and American-style cold-chain logistics that allowed them to sell a wide range of remotely processed food products, undercutting butchers, greengrocers and dairy distributors while redrawing patterns of urban mobility.
Supermarkets’ expansion sparked intense political and economic resistance. Small retailer associations, agricultural cooperatives, and housewives’ groups denounced supermarkets as threats to local livelihoods, price stability, and food safety. Their campaigns—framed variously as anti-monopoly, anti-Americanization, and pro-neighborhood—coincided with wider protest cultures of the late 1960s. These groups successfully pressured the Liberal Democratic Party, itself reliant on small-business votes, to pass the 1974 Large Store Law and its 1978 revision, which imposed lengthy consultation processes on any new large-format store. These regulations slowed supermarket growth and created opportunities for alternative models of expansion.
It was in this environment that franchised convenience stores emerged. Unable to build large outlets, supermarket companies turned to the dense fabric of family-run shops. By licensing American brands such as Lawson and 7-Eleven and offering small shopkeepers access to modern logistics, refrigeration, and standardized inventory, these firms created a hybrid retail form: locally embedded yet supply-chain driven. For struggling mom-and-pop retailers, franchising promised survival amid shifting consumer habits. But it made them dependent on the supply chains of their competitors and further eroded the credit networks that had knit local neighborhoods together.
Paper short abstract
This presentation examines the imperial commodity chain through which sugar from colonial Taiwan was shipped to Japan for refining and then transformed into confectionery using new technologies such as color dyes and aromas to enhance market appeal.
Paper long abstract
Sugar has long been one of the most debated commodities in global history, yet little scholarship has examined the process through which sugar is extracted from cane and transformed into the products we consume every day. This paper articulates how sugar in the Japanese Empire was manufactured into alluring confectionery goods that represented nutrition and modernity. Since sugarcane could only be cultivated in tropical climates, Japan relied heavily on sugar production in Taiwan, its first colony. After harvest, cane was milled in Taiwan into raw sugar, which was then exported to refineries in Japan—where most consumers were located. Once refined, sugar became a key raw material for confectionery factories, where it was transformed into popular products such as candy drops, caramels, and chocolate.
By analyzing manufacturing manuals and corporate archives, I demonstrate that transforming sugar into confectionery was not merely a technological process enabled by modern machinery and transimperial knowledge exchange. The introduction of new techniques—such as artificial colorants, fragrances, and standardized packaging materials—also helped establish new norms of food hygiene and sensory consumption practices in interwar Japan. Moreover, these practices unfolded not only in the metropolitan center but also along the empire’s margins—most notably in Meiji Confectionery’s factory in Manchuria, where industrial expansion accompanied Japan’s growing territorial control. By examining how sugar was transformed into confectionery goods such as caramels and chocolate, this presentation underscores the centrality of supply chains and standardized production to the development of the imperial economy.
Paper short abstract
In the late nineteenth century, Tokyo rapidly transformed into Japan’s milk capital—a milkopolis. This presentation examines a business model that enabled dairymen to supply fresh milk to the expanding capital while adapting to increasingly stringent hygiene standards.
Paper long abstract
Since the city’s first dairy enterprise opened in 1871, Tokyo rapidly transformed into Japan’s milk capital—a milkopolis. Within a decade, the city supported the country’s largest population of dairy cattle, accounting for approximately 28% of the national total. Yet milk was not the only bovine business flourishing in the capital. Vaccine farms also emerged, raising calves to harvest lesions used to protect humans from smallpox. The sheer concentration of cattle bred for both nourishment and immunity rendered Tokyo more than a milkopolis—it became a bovinopolis.
Cattle stood at the center of Meiji Japan’s efforts to safeguard national sovereignty in the face of encroaching Western empires. On the one hand, bovine vaccines reduced smallpox mortality and bolstered population growth. On the other, state officials promoted cow’s milk to fortify what they perceived as the “meager” bodies of the Japanese race and help establish a formidable military. As dairy historians working in different regional contexts have shown, milk enterprises initially emerged in major cities such as New York, London, and Tokyo. Yet as urbanization intensified, bringing cows and humans into ever closer proximity, public health anxieties mounted. These concerns gradually displaced urban dairies to the city’s hinterlands, where refrigeration and sterilization technologies enabled long-distance distribution.
This presentation examines the transitional moment before Tokyo’s dairies fully relocated. It focuses on a business model rooted in the cow’s reproductive cycle that allowed dairymen to continue supplying fresh milk to the rapidly expanding capital while adapting to increasingly stringent hygiene standards. By tracing how this model took shape, the presentation reveals the material and spatial entanglements between the bovine vaccine and milk industries.
Paper short abstract
This paper examines the rise and fall of the rice cultivar Fujisaka No. 5 in Japan’s early postwar food supply. It uses the case of Fujisaka No. 5 to explore broader changes in agriculture and food policy as well as peoples’ food pathways in Japan’s transition from postwar recovery to high growth.
Paper long abstract
In 1935, the Ministry of Agricultural and Forestry established the Fujisaka Agricultural Experiment Station in Towada City of Aomori Prefecture, with the goal of how breed cold-resistant varieties of rice. In 1949, nearly fifteen years later, the team of scientists led by director Tanaka Minoru finally achieved a breakthrough with the rice cultivar, Fujisaka No. 5. Fujisaka No. 5 would become arguably the most important and popular rice variety of the early postwar era, prized for its high yield and cold-resistant properties at a time when Japan was trying to recover from near famine in the aftermath of World War II. Yet, as rice shortages transformed to surplus in the 1960s, Fujisaka No. 5 would slowly fall out of favor due to its poor flavor. Taste mattered more in times of plenty. Fujisaka No. 5 nevertheless continued to have an important impact after its heyday, as a parent of more than 18 rice varieties. This paper examines the rise and fall of the rice cultivar Fujisaka No. 5 in Japan’s early postwar food supply. It uses the case of Fujisaka No. 5 to explore broader changes in agriculture and food policy as well as peoples’ food pathways in Japan’s transition from postwar recovery to high growth.