Japan's Dietary Transition and Its Impacts

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

1 During the 1970s, Junichi Saga began recording the memories of his patients, who were born mostly during the last decade of the nineteenth and the first decade of the twentieth century and lived in, or near, Tsuchiura, in the Lake Kasumigaura region. Almost uniformly, those testimonies depict diets that were at or barely above basic subsistence level, with rice scarce, with high consumption of less preferred barley, and with animal protein almost entirely absent. Here are the recollections of Ihara Orinosuke, born in 1904 (Saga 1987, 187): “In our village a meal of a mixture of rice and barley, with six parts barley to four parts rice, would’ve been considered above average. . . . Fresh river fish we almost never had up in the mountain where I lived. . . . We never saw any fresh sea fish, either, from one year to the next. But at New Year most families bought one salted salmon, though only after an awful fuss.” And even when the relatively better-off townspeople needed animal protein for a sick person, they had little choice but to go to outcasts (sanka) who used to kill and eat wild dogs (Saga 1987, 51): “In those days even low-class meat such as horse or rabbit was almost impossible to get hold of, so when, for instance, someone was ill and needed extra protein, even townspeople would be forced to go along and buy some dogmeat from the sanka.” And this was half a century after Japan began its determined modernization drive, and in an area only some 60 km northeast of downtown Tokyo and 40 km from the nearest Pacific shoreline. Prevalence of poor subsistence diets reported by Saga’s patients is confirmed by Japan’s historical statistics (Statistics Bureau 2011a). Even on a nationwide scale, rice production in 1900 was only about Japanese Diet, 1900–2010: From Subsistence to Affluence 2 Chapter 1 three times the amount of harvested barley, but then the ratio began to rise, and by 2010, it reached roughly 40:1. In 1900 nationwide pork production prorated to a minuscule amount of less than 30 grams a year per capita, which means that in reality, most people never ate any pork. Virtually no poultry was produced for meat, a heritage of medieval shintō taboos that saw fowl as announcers of dawn rather than a source of food (Ishige 2000). Egg production averaged only one egg per person every month, and the country, which had no tradition of consuming dairy products, produced annually less than half a teaspoon of milk per capita: more than 99 percent of Japanese population never drank any milk. A century later, few countries can rival Japan in the quality of its diet (FAO 2011a). At the beginning of the twenty-first century, Japan was producing annually about 20 kg of meat per capita and importing even more than that for a total annual per capita supply of about 45 kg; its per capita milk production reached 65 liters, and imports of dairy products boosted the total supply in terms of fluid milk to some 85 liters, while seafood availability came close to 60 kg per capita (about half of it imported), the highest consumption of marine food worldwide. All of these rates represent huge gains—in relative terms, far higher than comparable twentieth-century gains in the United States and Europe, where consumption of animal foods was fairly high as early as 1900. The growth of Japan’s food supply is no less impressive in absolute terms, especially when taking into account the intervening population increase, from fewer than 44 million in 1900 to more than 126 million by the year 2000, or nearly a tripling of the nationwide count in a century. The food balance sheets of the Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO 2011a) show that in the year 2000, average per capita availability of food was significantly lower in Japan (about 2,800 kcal per day) than in the major economies of the European Union (about 3,500 kcal per day) or the United States (nearly 3,800 kcal per day) but those differences were not a sign of any inferior diet, merely of a less wasteful consumption . As far as the actual food consumption was concerned, Japan’s annual dietary surveys—whose detail and continuity have no counterpart in any other affluent economy—indicated daily average of about 1,950 Japanese Diet, 1900–2010 3...