Bean There: Toward a Soy-Based History of Northeast Asia

And the most eloquent part of the story of the soya bean is that not half—not one hundreth—has ever yet been told.

—Kinnosuke Adachi, Manchuria: A Survey

As the twentieth century began, Northeast Asia joined the mainstream of world history. As a consequence this region’s center of gravity, the Manchurian wilderness, experienced profound change. China, Japan, and Russia competed for influence in their shared borderlands, while the United States waited and worked from the wings. Although the geopolitical interaction of these four powers explains the regular recurrence of armed conflict, the rise of the soybean as an international commodity clarifies the source of the steady stream of financial resources that made China’s least-developed province into its much-contested vanguard of industrial transformation.

In the first half of the century the range of products made from the soybean expanded greatly. Although the deepest consumer impact probably fell upon Japan, different countries adapted the new resource quite creatively, guaranteeing seemingly inexhaustible demand. The most inventive ideas went beyond dollars and yen to plumb the soybean’s potential to make a better world. Only later in the century would U.S. emergence as the world’s premier producer of soybeans signal the shift from Northeast Asia to Asia-Pacific as the primary unit of regional analysis, not only in economic but in political terms as well.¹

In this article I present a brief theoretical introduction followed by an analysis of the dynamic that led to the dramatic expansion of soybean exports in the first decade of the nineteenth century. The contribution of each country to the Manchurian international division of labor will be emphasized. The following decades saw deepening involvement, intensified competition, and increased trade volume on all sides. Finally, I discuss the rise of the United States as the dominant force in the soybean industry in parallel with its climb to superpower status. Analogous to U.S. political and military force taking the place of Japan in the East Asian security calculus, U.S. soybeans have replaced those of Manchurian provenance in the daily diet of the Japanese, one more important niche in which the United States reaffirms its place in the Pacific.

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Since the classics of nineteenth-century sociology written by Karl Marx, Max Weber, and Georg Simmel, money has been both lauded and castigated as the ultimate solvent, turning all things of substance and quality into matters of quantity. Recent trends in economic sociology, however, have reintroduced an emphasis on the social contexts in which money is used as crucial to an understanding of what any given purchase means for those who make it.² Here money becomes a social construction rather than a mathematical absolute. Mutatis mutandum, as the goods that function most like money, commodities also have homogenous, universal values but cultural meanings that vary widely among consumer markets.

Commodity history has also taken a lesson from anthropology. Sidney Mintz has told the story of sugar’s path from luxury item to daily usage, while reminding us of the centrality of food. “Nutrition as a biological process is more fundamental than sex. In the life of the individual organism it is the more primary and recurrent want, while in the wider sphere of human society it determines, more largely than any other physiological function, the nature of social groupings, and the form their activities take.” The anthropological emphasis on the local has also produced fascinating comparative studies that play down multinational production in favor of “multi-local” consumption practices.³ In Northeast Asia, where dominant powers have succeeded one another several times during the twentieth century, local practice has proved more enduring than regional hierarchy. This fact directs my focus.

Nonetheless, the phenomenon under analysis here is essentially one of globalization. As such, the creation of a world market in soybeans corresponds, more or less, to a world systems perspective in which central...