The first in-depth study of Japanese fermentation science in the
twentieth century.
The Arts of the Microbial World explores the significance of
fermentation phenomena, both as life processes and as technologies, in
Japanese scientific culture. Victoria Lee's careful study 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, Lee highlights the role of indigenous
techniques in modern science as it took shape in Japan. In doing so, she
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.
