Abstract
This chapter traces the development and adoption of pure culture in the Japanese fermentation industries as a window onto the relationship between the modernization of the traditional brewing industries and the institutionalization of Western microbiology in the later part of the Meiji period (1868–1912). It argues that skilled workers in the brewing industry—especially the tanekōji makers who specialized in selling dried spore preparations to seed the making of kōji, the rice mold used in sake and soy sauce brewing—shared concerns with academic scientists for isolating, identifying, and preserving microbial strains and investigating their properties. Both the adaptation of foreign technology and the expansion of microbiological research in Japan relied on the close exchange between the two. It further suggests that local industry helped to shape a relatively autonomous and lasting scientific tradition of seeing microbes as living workers as much as pathogens in Japan.
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Notes
- 1.
Japanese names in this chapter are written in conventional order with the surname first, but the reference list uses English-language word order. On the development of pure yeast culture and the introduction of the technique to the German beer industry, see Ceccatti (2001).
- 2.
After the 1880s, the national government shifted the focus of their policies from transplanting Western industries to supporting the “traditional” sectors that constituted the bulk of the economy. See Morris-Suzuki (1994, pp. 98–103).
- 3.
- 4.
- 5.
In the history of technology and science, as well as in the economic literature, Japan has often been accorded “exceptional” status in East Asia for breaking rapidly with a traditional past or possessing traditions that were closer to European than Asian countries. On rapid science and technology transfer under state promotion by the Meiji government and then under Ministry of International Trade and Industry (MITI) in the postwar period, the authoritative works remain Bartholomew (1989), and Johnson (1982). On Western-style traditions in early modern Japan, there is a large literature on rangaku (“Dutch studies,” or studies of Western science and medicine based on translations of Dutch texts); for one example, see Jannetta (2007).
- 6.
The lecture is published as Kozai (1901a).
- 7.
The tōji was part of a seasonal labor force that would come to the brewing house in the winter months.
- 8.
On the German context, see Ceccatti (2001).
- 9.
For a detailed account, see Fujiwara (1999, pp. 148–255).
- 10.
Among the most prominent in the field of brewing was British chemist Robert Atkinson, who taught applied chemistry at the Kaisei Gakkō (the predecessor of Tokyo Imperial University) and who described the technological processes of sake brewing at length, publishing his descriptions in a well-known pamphlet The Chemistry of Sake Brewing in 1881. Others who researched on sake included German bacteriologist Oskar Korschelt who worked with the Kaitakushi Brewery to help produce Sapporo Lager, and German botanist Hermann Ahlburg who like Korschelt taught at the Tokyo Medical School. For details, see Hasegawa (2001, pp. 71–100); Fujiwara (1999, pp. 49–85). Furukawa Yasu, Dentō sangyō kara kindai sangyō e. Meiji no kagaku to kagaku kōgyō (From traditional industry to modern industry. Meiji-period chemistry and chemical industry; Unpublished lecture, Hokkaido University, July 27, 2000) notes that the first generation of Japanese chemists continued to invest heavily in problems related to traditional industry. Of all the articles published in the first 10 years (1880–1890) of the Journal of the Tokyo Chemical Society, roughly half were on traditional products; Furukawa counts 42 of 88.
- 11.
The list of industries is from Furukawa, “Dentō sangyō kara kindai sangyō e.”
- 12.
- 13.
Brewing was a complex and layered industry: a number of wealthy brewers (among the nouveau riche of the early modern era) and large factories had established themselves over the course of the Tokugawa period (1603–1868), especially in the Nada region west of Kyoto and Osaka for sake and Noda and Chōshi east of Tokyo for soy sauce, who served urban markets. However, many breweries were small, recently founded and sold to local markets. Beyond commercial goods, a substantial amount of sake consumed was unrefined, home-brewed nigorizake drunk to ease a day’s heavy labor at the farm. See Tanimoto (2006b, pp. 301–305).
- 14.
Outside of the specialist brewing districts, the tōji employed in the multitude of small, new brewing houses were of mixed quality in terms of skills. Fujiwara (1999, p. 165).
- 15.
Fujiwara (1999, pp. 194–199, 312–313.)
- 16.
Kozai (1901b).
- 17.
Fujiwara (1999, p. 350).
- 18.
Fujiwara (1999, pp. 202–205).
- 19.
Morris-Suzuki (1994, pp. 100–103).
- 20.
Kimoto (1902).
- 21.
Sawamura (1903).
- 22.
Takayama (1902).
- 23.
Fujiwara (1999, pp. 20–48).
- 24.
Ono (1902).
- 25.
Yamagata (1902).
- 26.
Kimoto (1903).
- 27.
Ōtsuka (1979, p. 1).
- 28.
Konno Eiichi (nephew of Konno Seiji), Konno Hiroshi (president of Akita Konno Shōten and grandnephew of Konno Seiji) and Konno Kenji (former president of Akita Konno Shōten and nephew of Konno Seiji), interview by author, Kariwano, Daisen-shi, Akita-ken, February 20, 2012.
- 29.
Akita Konno shōten kabushiki kaisha (2011, pp. 26–27).
- 30.
Hyakushūnen kinen jigyōkai (1996, pp. 10–13).
- 31.
Tsuboi (1903).
- 32.
[1902] Advertisements, Jōkai 10.
- 33.
Akita Konno shōten (2011, pp. 27–28).
- 34.
Akita Konno shōten (2011, pp. 28–29).
- 35.
Kawamata kabushiki kaisha (2000, p. 90).
- 36.
- 37.
- 38.
- 39.
Yamazaki (1974, p. 2).
- 40.
Murai (1989, p. 40).
- 41.
One such incident occurred in Kyoto in the mid-fifteenth century, when the shogunate attempted to revoke the monopoly law in response to wider discontent, and the struggle with Kitano Tenmangu Shrine, which dominated kōji making in and around the capital, resulted in most of the shrine burning down. Koizumi (1984, p. 105).
- 42.
Murakami (1986, p. 35).
- 43.
Murakami (1986, p. 34).
- 44.
Kawamata kabushiki kaisha (2000, pp. 86–88).
- 45.
Murai (1989, p. 42).
- 46.
Figures are for the year 1985. Murakami (1986, p. 36).
- 47.
Konno Eiichi, Konno Hiroshi and Konno Kenji, interview by author.
- 48.
Konno Eiichi, Konno Hiroshi and Konno Kenji, interview by author.
- 49.
Murakami (1986, pp. 42–43).
- 50.
Murakami (1986, p. 35).
- 51.
Murakami (1986, pp. 32–33).
- 52.
Tsuboi (1903, p. 47).
- 53.
Gradually, it also became clear that one of the materials they studied, kōji, was specific to Japanese breweries and did not appear to be similar to anything in the wild. The classification of kōji microbes has at times been a site of intense debate among microbiologists. The origins of kōji microbes are not clearly known.
- 54.
Saitō (1949, p. 224). Saitō recounts the date as 1901, slightly earlier than the date given by accounts from the Brewing Experiment Station.
- 55.
Saitō (1949, p. 224).
- 56.
Saitō (1905, pp. 1–24;)
- 57.
Saitō Kendō discovered and named Saccharomyces soja. Yabe Kikuji named Saccharomyces sake. As for Aspergillus oryzae, Hermann Ahlburg working at the Tokyo Medical School isolated a microbe from rice kōji which he judged was different from the known Aspergillus flavus Link in 1876 and named it Eurotium oryzae; its classification was soon changed to A. oryzae (Ahlburg) Cohn. A decade later Oskar Kellner, working at the Komaba Agricultural College (later the College of Agriculture, Tokyo Imperial University), sent a sample of Japanese kōji to microbiologist Carl Wehmer working at the University of Hannover, who isolated a strain from it and gave the strain the same name as Ahlburg’s. Later, Wehmer sent his strain to be preserved in the Netherlands as CBS No. 102.07, and in the USA as Thom No.113. But Ahlburg’s original strain went instead to the tanekōji specialists Nihon Jōzō Kōgyō in Bunkyō-ku, where it was sold under their moyashi brand Marufuku Yukijirushi. Brewers in Japan tended to use a different system, dividing the strains into what were commonly called “yellow” kōji microbes for sake, soy sauce, and vinegar and “black” kōji microbes for shōchū, alcohol, and awamori, and then subdividing them into species including Aspergillus sojae that were not necessarily internationally or nationally recognized by scientists. The common Japanese name for the kōji microbe became kōji kin after about 1895 when Kozai Yoshinao and his student Yabe Kikuji first used the term. See Murakami (1977); Murakami (1986, pp. 47–48, 57–58).
- 58.
Saitō (1905, pp. 25–39).
- 59.
Saitō (1909).
- 60.
Saitō Kendō (1906).
- 61.
Saitō (1905, pp. 41–47).
- 62.
Hasegawa (1996, p. 5).
- 63.
For example, see Saitō’s contributions in Lodder and Kreger-Van Rij (1952).
- 64.
Saitō (1949, pp. 76–80).
- 65.
In 1956, the Institute for Fermentation, Osaka (IFO) was the largest culture collection in Japan, and held 1303 molds, 754 yeasts, 239 bacteria, 81 actinomycetes, and 14 protozoa. The figures are from Foster (1961, p. 444). The IFO collection included substantial contributions from the Manchuria collection, as well as from the Government Research Institute of Formosa collection supervised by agricultural chemist Nakazawa Ryōji, formerly Saitō’s colleague at the Brewing Experiment Station in the 1910s. See Hasegawa (1996, pp. 5–6); Higher Education & Science Bureau, Ministry of Education, Japan (1953).
- 66.
See Hasegawa (1996, p. 5).
- 67.
- 68.
Hasegawa (1996, p. 7).
- 69.
The two departments had been set up separately in the 1870s, and when the two departments separated again after briefly uniting in 1886, basic soil science with geology as its foundation was taught in agricultural science, while soil science similar to that envisioned by Justus von Liebig was taught in agricultural chemistry. Plant nutrition was subsumed under the agricultural chemistry department’s seminars in fertilizer science and plant physiology. As a result of the splitting of the two departments, topics directly related to agricultural production, such as soils, fertilizers, plant nutrition, and animal feed, came to take a marginal place within agricultural chemistry. Agricultural chemistry became a broad, heterogeneous discipline embracing chemistry, biology, and microbiology. Kumazawa (2003).
- 70.
Initially, agricultural chemistry at the College of Agriculture as taught by oyatoi gaikokujin had been based on Justus von Liebig’s original vision centered on fertilizers and soil science, expanding into plant and animal physiology. One oyatoi gaikokujin Oscar Leow introduced the teaching of bacteriology and fermentation science, and subsequently Kozai Yoshinao was intrigued by the development of bacteriology under Pasteur in France while he studied in Berlin; through their teaching, agricultural chemistry came to include microbiology as well. Kumazawa (2003).
- 71.
- 72.
Takahashi and Sakaguchi (1958, p. 8, item 30).
- 73.
- 74.
Nihon Jōzō Kyōkai (1975, p. 3, 107–111).
- 75.
- 76.
- 77.
Akiyama (1977, pp. 396–397).
- 78.
Akiyama (1977, p. 403).
- 79.
See Takahashi and Sakaguchi (1958).
- 80.
Sakaguchi (1998, p. 198).
- 81.
Beppu (1987).
- 82.
Sakaguchi (1998, p. 195).
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Lee, V. (2015). Mold Cultures: Traditional Industry and Microbial Studies in Early Twentieth-Century Japan. In: Phillips, D., Kingsland, S. (eds) New Perspectives on the History of Life Sciences and Agriculture. Archimedes, vol 40. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-12185-7_12
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