Sweetness and Empire: Sugar Consumption in Imperial Japan

Sugar has featured strongly in analyses of the consumer revolutions in Europe and North America, with a growing literature looking at the ways in which industrialisation and the consequent changes in social and working lives conditioned the growth of sugar consumption (Mintz 1985; Mazumdar 1998; Akesaka 2002; Woloson 2002). In Japan, too, sugar consumption grew significantly over the course of industrialisation, and this chapter will consider some of the ways in which the sweetness of sugar increasingly came to be incorporated into the everyday lives of Japanese people, as an indicator of rising levels of ‘modernity’, and as a harbinger of Japan’s arrival on the international imperial stage. Japan’s mounting consumption of sweet things, from the Meiji era through to the post-war period, depended in part on technological progress in food manufacturing, but must also be explained as the result of the advertising of new treats processed with sugar, and the expansion of imperial possessions to be developed according to an ‘industrial’ agricultural policy. All these changes galvanised the gustatory interest in what were frequently deemed ‘foreign’ flavours and tastes.