People and Nations are Built on Food (School Meals as/and National Defense in Prewar Japan)

Nathan Hopson, professeur invité au Centre Japon, interviendra dans le cadre du séminaire de Frédéric Obringer Médecine, entretien de la vie et produits aromatiques sous les Ming et les Qing avec un présentation intitulée: People and Nations are Built on Food (School Meals as/and National Defense in Prewar Japan). Son intervention aura lieu en anglais.

Abstract

This lecture explores interwar Japan’s state-supported program of scientific national nutrition (kokumin eiyō). I focus on the Imperial Government Institute of Nutrition (IGIN), the world’s first government-sponsored nutrition institute, and its charismatic founding director, Yale-educated doctor Tadasu Saiki (1876-1959, né Saeki Tadasu). The institute was the cornerstone of government-sponsored, government-led “nutritional activism.” In 1926, Saiki wrote, “People and nations are built on food.” National nutrition was national defense. Food, as Saiki and the IGIN preached, was neither a matter of calorie intake on the one hand or hedonism on the other, but of nutrition. And nutrition was a matter for both the individual and the nation. The institute promoted national nutrition to improve the physique and constitution (taikaku taii) of the Japanese as vital to nation building and national defense. One of its most lasting contributions was roots of contemporary school lunches (gakkō kyūshoku), which quietly became, and remains, the face of national nutrition in Japan and a central tool for building the Japanese national body and mind.

Date

• Jeudi 2 mars 2017, 11h-13h

Lieu

• Salle 681 (6e étage) – EHESS, bât. Le France, 190-198 av de France 75013 Paris