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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.