The Arts of the Microbial World: Fermentation Science in Twentieth-Century Japan

 

In this talk, Victoria Lee discusses her book The Arts of the Microbial World (University of Chicago Press, 2021), which explores the significance of fermentation phenomena, both as life processes and as technologies, in Japanese scientific culture. It documents how Japanese scientists and skilled workers sought to use the microbe’s natural processes to create new products, from soy-sauce mold starters to MSG, vitamins to statins. In traditional brewing houses as well as in the food, fine chemical, and pharmaceutical industries across Japan, they showcased their ability to deal with the enormous sensitivity and variety of the microbial world.

 

Charting developments in fermentation science from the turn of the twentieth century, when Japan was an industrializing country on the periphery of the world economy, to 1980 when it had emerged as a global technological and economic power, the talk highlights the role of indigenous techniques in modern science as it took shape in Japan. In doing so, it reveals how knowledge of microbes lay at the heart of some of Japan’s most prominent technological breakthroughs in the global economy.

 

 At a moment when twenty-first-century developments in the fields of antibiotic resistance, the microbiome, and green chemistry suggest that the traditional eradication-based approach to the microbial world is unsustainable, twentieth-century Japanese microbiology provides a new, broader vantage for understanding and managing microbial interactions with society.

 

 

Victoria Lee is an Associate Professor of History at Ohio University. She is a science and technology historian with a focus on the role of Japan in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Her book, The Arts of the Microbial World: Fermentation Science in Twentieth-Century Japan (Chicago 2021), was awarded the 2023 International Convention of Asia Scholars Book Prize for the Best Book in the Humanities. She has held fellowships at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin and the Institut d’études avancées de Paris, and received her PhD from Princeton University. Her ongoing work seeks to connect twentieth-century microbial history with twenty-first-century issues in sustainability.