Japan’s Dietary Transition and Its Impacts

244 Pages·2012·28.039 MB·English

by  Vaclav Smil, Kazuhiko Kobayashi

Japan ’ s Dietary Transition and Its Impacts
Food, Health, and the Environment
Series Editor: Robert Gottlieb, Henry R. Luce Professor of Urban and
Environmental Policy, Occidental College
Keith Douglass Warner, Agroecology in Action: Extending Alternative
Agriculture through Social Networks
Christopher M. Bacon, V. Ernesto M é ndez, Stephen R. Gliessman, David
Goodman, and Jonathan A. Fox, eds., Confronting the Coffee Crisis: Fair
Trade, Sustainable Livelihoods and Ecosystems in Mexico and Central
America
Thomas A. Lyson, G. W. Stevenson, and Rick Welsh, eds., Food and the
Mid-Level Farm: Renewing an Agriculture of the Middle
Jennifer Clapp and Doris Fuchs, eds., Corporate Power in Global
Agrifood Governance
Robert Gottlieb and Anupama Joshi, Food Justice
Jill Lindsey Harrison, Pesticide Drift and the Pursuit of Environmental
Justice
Alison Alkon and Julian Agyeman, eds., Cultivating Food Justice: Race,
Class, and Sustainability
Abby J. Kinchy, Genes Out of Place: Science, Activism, and the Global
Politics of Genetically Engineered Crops
Vaclav Smil and Kazuhiko Kobayashi, Japan ’ s Dietary Transition and Its
Impacts
Japan ’ s Dietary Transition and Its Impacts
Vaclav Smil and Kazuhiko Kobayashi
The MIT Press
Cambridge, Massachusetts
London, England
© 2012 Massachusetts Institute of Technology
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form by any electronic
or mechanical means (including photocopying, recording, or information storage and
retrieval) without permission in writing from the publisher.

MIT Press books may be purchased at special quantity discounts for business or sales
promotional use. For information, please email [email protected] or write to
Special Sales Department, The MIT Press, 55 Hayward Street, Cambridge, MA 02142.

This book was set in Sabon by Toppan Best-set Premedia Limited. Printed and bound in
the United States of America.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Smil, Vaclav.
Japan’ s dietary transition and its impacts / Vaclav Smil and Kazuhiko Kobayashi.
p. cm. — (Food, health, and the environment)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-262-01782-4 (hardcover : alk. paper)
1. Diet — Japan— Longitudinal studies. 2. Food habits— Japan — Longitudinal studies.
3. Diet — Health aspects — Japan. 4. Food consumption forecasting— Japan. 5. Agricultural
ecology — Japan. I. Kobayashi, Kazuhiko, 1946– II. Title
TX360.J3S65 2012
641.5 ′ 630952 — dc23
2011053214

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Contents
Series Foreword vii

Preface ix

List of Abbreviations xiii

1 Japanese Diet, 1900 – 2010: From Subsistence to Affluence 1

2 Old and New Foodstuffs: A Century of Transitions 7

3 Food Consumption: Continuity and Change 71

4 Diets and Well-being: Health and Longevity 109

5 Environmental Impacts: Land, Water, Nitrogen, and Ocean 131

6 Japanese Diet: Retrospect and Prospect 191

References 203

Index 225

Series Foreword
I am pleased to present the ninth book in the Food, Health, and the
Environment series. This series explores the global and local dimensions
of food systems and examines issues of access, justice, and environmental
and community well-being. It includes books that focus on the way food
is grown, processed, manufactured, distributed, sold, and consumed.
Among the matters addressed are what foods are available to communi-
ties and individuals, how those foods are obtained, and what health and
environmental factors are embedded in food system choices and out-
comes. The series focuses not only on food security and well-being but
also on regional, state, national, and international policy decisions and
economic and cultural forces. Food, Health, and the Environment books
provide a window into the public debates, theoretical considerations, and
multidisciplinary perspectives that have made food systems and their
connections to health and environment important subjects of study.

Robert Gottlieb, Occidental College
Series editor

Preface
This book is about long-term dietary change and its consequences for
agricultural production, trade, food consumption, environment, and
health. Its scope dictates interdisciplinary coverage and precludes any
simple categorization: the book draws on findings from historical and
economic studies, agronomic and agricultural analyses, and the fields of
nutrition, public health, demography, and environmental science. The
intent has been to present a multifaceted evaluation of a process whose
nature and impact can be truly appreciated only through a broad-based
inquiry. At the same time, this means that the book will disappoint if it
is judged from narrow perspectives of specific expertise: it is not an
exercise in economic history, nutritional science, or agricultural
development.
Dietary transition— a gradual shift from traditional, preindustrial
diets dominated by plant foods to a new pattern of intakes that includes
more animal foodstuffs, more fats, more sugar, and a greater variety of
processed foods— has been a universal phenomenon, but Japan offers a
particularly interesting illustration of the process with several unique
characteristics. The country’ s dietary transition was a key ingredient of
its modernization that made it the world’ s second largest economic
power of the second half of the twentieth century. Although the transition
began slowly during the Meiji era (1868– 1912), it proceeded at remark-
ably rapid rates once the country repaired the massive wartime damage
by the mid-1950s, and most of it was subsequently accomplished in just
a single generation, a tempo that has been rivaled only recently in urban
China.
But perhaps its most remarkable attribute has been its saturation at
levels well below the spending potential of such an affluent society. After