This is the second in a planned series of posts on nutrition science and government-sanctioned recipes in imperial Japan.
Imagine a national cookbook. What would that look like? What would it say about the values and ideology of the society in which it was produced and the individuals and governmental organizations involved? Well, Japan gave us at least one answer to this almost a century ago, in 1924.
The first post in this series examined the “Nutrition Song,” a 1922 Japanese song with lyrics by the founding director of Japan’s Government Institution for Nutrition (IGIN). This song was part of an extensive and diverse media strategy that included early adoption of radio as a medium; IGIN-approved recipes were broadcast daily beginning in 1926 and printed the following day in the major newspapers. More remarkable as a manifesto than as a musical achievement, this song articulated a program for a rational, economical, modern diet. The lyrics encapsulate the IGIN’s advocacy of nutrition science as a win-win tool to improve individual quality of life and national strength.
In fact, the Institute began publishing daily “cheap, delicious recipes” on May 29, 1922 (figure 1), calling for a “kitchen revolution” to realize “an economical life and increased health for the Japanese.” Radio was a tantalizingly novel, fashionable, quintessentially modern medium rapidly adopted in urban Japan. Along with popular programs like radio calisthenics, the IGIN’s menus du jour, which carried the imprimatur of a premier government science laboratory and its celebrity chief, “modernized and ‘rationalized’ conceptions of the body, health, physical fitness, and exercise.” The appeal of both calisthenics and the Institute’s meal plans was both positive and negative, personal and patriotic. On the one hand, there was the possibility of personal betterment. On the other, many Japanese were plagued by “a nagging sense of physical inferiority vis-à-vis” the Western imperial powers.[1]
But even before its foray into radio, in 1924 the IGIN compiled a year’s worth of recipes originally published in newspapers into a cookbook called Daily Recipes for Home Cooking. A few columns explaining basic facts about nutrition, hygiene, etc., are sprinkled throughout, but otherwise Daily Recipes is a straightforward day-by-day guide to preparing “nutritious, delicious, and economical” breakfast, lunch, and dinner for a middle-class family of three.
When I picked up a copy of this book, I was delighted to find that the May 29 menu is in fact the same as that for the Institute’s memorable 1922 newspaper debut: shellfish simmered in soy sauce and mirin (tsukudani) and miso soup with cabbage for breakfast, fried bamboo shoots and salted salmon sashimi for lunch, and a pork and vegetable curry accompanied by spicy pickled bamboo shoots and wakame for dinner.
There are two marked differences between the 1922 Asahi article and the Daily Recipes version. First, the former explicitly lists rice as the main course, while the latter does not. (Conversely, the cookbook includes seasonings like soy sauce and sugar, not listed in the 1922 version.) The inclusion of rice is significant because, despite the IGIN’s open antagonism to white rice as wasteful and even a threat to national security (teaser!), the Institute expected a family of three to consume almost two liters of cooked rice daily. Second, the newspaper itemizes nutritional information, while the cookbook does not. This speaks to a difference in context. Cookbook buyers were likely to be converts to the IGIN’s ideology of “economical nutrition” and believers in the Institute’s bona fides and its scientized menu based on the principles of quantification and substitution. If the newspaper recipes were proselytization for the New Nutrition-style IGIN diet, the cookbook was more “preaching to the choir.”
Table 1 Nutrition information for IGIN’s May 29, 1922/1924 daily recipes (serves 3)
| Ingredients | Amount (g) | Protein (g) | Calories | Price (sen) |
| Rice | 1.9 (liters) | 100.4 | 4814.4 | 54 |
| Cabbage | 75 | 2.2 | 35.2 | 2 |
| Miso | 112.5 | 13.8 | 177.9 | 3 |
| Shellfish | 75 | 13.6 | 57 | 10 |
| Salted salmon | 225 | 58.7 | 306 | 9 |
| Daikon | 150 | 1.1 | 27 | 2 |
| Bamboo shoots | 300 | 7.8 | 90 | 1 |
| Sesame oil | 56 | 0 | 506.3 | 4.5 |
| Wheat flour | 75 | 8.8 | 274.2 | 2 |
| Beef | 187.5 | 28.7 | 598.1 | 15 |
| Carrot | 56 | 0.7 | 21.9 | 2 |
| Potato | 112.5 | 1.7 | 96.8 | 2 |
| Wakame | 19 | 2.2 | 38.4 | 2 |
| Suet | 45 | 0.2 | 411.7 | 3.5 |
| Total | 240 | 7455 | 112 | |
| Total/person | 80 | 2485 | 37.3 |
*Amounts approximate; calculated from Japanese Imperial units
**Sen = ¥1/100
To return to my original question, as exemplified by this
daily menu plan from Daily Recipes, the
IGIN relentlessly backed a national dietary reform program couched in the Fordist/Taylorist
logic of quantification and substitution. In doing so, the Institute appealed
to the self-interest of the new professionalizing housewife, who was increasingly
expected to mobilize modern science to improve the efficiency and quality of life
of her family—and by extension, the nation.
[1] Kerim Yasar, Electrified Voices: How the Telephone, Phonograph, and Radio Shaped Modern Japan, 1868-1945 (Columbia University Press, 2018), 120.
Nathan Hopson is an associate professor of Japanese and East Asian history at Nagoya University, Japan. His first book, Ennobling Japan’s Savage Northeast: Tōhoku as Postwar Thought, 1945-2011 (Harvard University Asia Center, 2017) treated the place of Tōhoku (northeast Honshu) in modern Japanese national history. He is currently researching the history of school lunches in Japan and their relationship to the development and application of nutrition science as a technology of national strengthening, focusing on the history of governmental “nutritional activism” and the school lunch program, 1920-present.
