The Microbial Production of Expertise in Meiji Japan

Abstract

Microbes as an object of knowledge and the scientist as an institution of authority did not exist in Japan before the nineteenth century. This essay considers the formation of these two modern categories by looking at their boundaries in late Meiji Japan (1868–1912). Charting transformations in the landscape of brewing expertise, the processes that brewing technicians used to produce molds as commodities, and finally the critical reaction of the slime-mold naturalist Minakata Kumagusu who opposed the philosophical foundations of disciplinary science, it argues that the co-production of the microbe and the scientist as new categories reveals a convergence between imported European ideas and earlier Tokugawa-era (1603–1868) commercial developments. Their convergence in turn-of-the-century Japan is highly suggestive of the ways in which the modernity of scientific institutions is entangled with industrial capitalism.