Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2014, c2013. xii, 303 pp. (Figures, tables.) US$30.00, paper. ISBN 978-0-8248-3953-6.
The history of beer in Japan dovetails perfectly with the history of Japan’s “modern” period, as the first cases were brewed just before the Meiji Restoration and as the history of the industry’s major players cuts through the Fifteen-Year War into the historical present. Beer as both a consumer product and an industrial enterprise thus intersects a wide range of historical moments: the installation of industrial capitalism, Japanese imperial expansion, the economic and social effects of total war, post-war economic recovery, and the rise and transformation(s) of a consumer culture in both the pre- and post-war social landscapes. Jeffrey Alexander’s industry history of beer in Japan surveys the entire width of this expanse while remaining focused on the development of beer as a manufactured product and a consumer good. Despite the breadth of this study, it is both rich and highly detailed. Drawing heavily on the self-generated company histories of several major brewers, Alexander explicates the microscopic details of the creation, expansion and transformation of Japan’s major beer companies.
His central narrative traces beer’s evolution from an expensive, “European” product to the radical shifts in the composition of both the product and industry during the Second World War, resulting in the subsequent, total domestication of it in the post-war years (2, 87, 109, 170). It is this history of domestication that forms the core of his argument. Early chapters deal with the difficulties encountered by brewers within the process of industrialization, and explore beer’s expansion as a consumer product domestically and within Japan’s colonial possessions. With Japan’s invasion of China, the initiation of the wartime economy also fundamentally altered the nature of Japanese beer itself. Until then, beer in Japan was generally brewed in a heavy German style and thus thought of as a European product. However, wartime restrictions on imports and ingredients brought about a lighter beer that would become the mainstay of the post-war years. Through advertising and the rise in beer consumption, it was radically recast as a “Japanese” product, completing the domestication of beer as it eclipsed sake as the staple of bars and homes alike.
Beyond this broader narrative of industry growth and development, Alexander’s work touches upon a number of important themes in Japanese modernity. For example, his first two chapters interweave the early history of the brewing industry with the development of industrial capitalism within Japan. The particularity of the brewing industry, which experienced a number of different setbacks and difficulties related to lack of experience and infrastructure, qualifies narratives that see Japan’s industrialization as “rapid” and smooth as the early brewers often times utilized non-industrial techniques in brewing or transportation, and were only able to reach a limited base of consumers due to geography and the price of the product (53–54, 104–106). Over the last thirty years, traditional narratives of the Meiji era as a smooth and efficient period of “industrialization” or “modernization” have been shown to be too reductive and moreover, ignorant of the unevenness and contingency involved in the shift to industrial capitalism and a nation-state. As a very recent example of this, Robert Stolz’s Bad Water (Duke, 2014) looks at the pollution surrounding the Ashio Copper mine during the late Meiji shift to industrial capitalism circa the 1890s and early 1900s. He shows how the logic of the state and the process of industrialization allowed for “national sacrifice zones,” whereby the population and natural environment of places like Ashio were destroyed for the greater common good seen in industrialization. Rather than a smooth development, the attempt to reterritorialize both land and worker to the needs of industry was difficult, violent and often a destructive process (Robert Stolz, Bad Water). While Alexander in some sense adds to the critique of Meiji industrialization, it may be more productive to think about the relation of the beer industry to the uneven and variable process of industrial development in terms starker than simply “qualifying” the narrative of smooth development.
It is precisely when Brewed in Japan touches upon issues like the above that one wishes that Alexander would push past the narrowness of an industrial history and dig deeper into some of these important themes. This was particularly the case with his discussion of imperialism. Some of Japan’s first brewers were deeply connected to the colonization of Hokkaidō where the government tried to engineer a “second little Japan” by converting local inhabitants into Japanese subjects. As Alexander shows, the brewing industry was part of both the industrial development and the institution of agriculture in Hokkaidō, which were essential to converting the local population into wage labourers and agricultural workers (32). Here would be a perfect opportunity to explore how an industry like beer was interconnected to this colonization process and how the particularities of the colonization process may or may not have been an important part of the history of the industry. His discussion of Japanese imperial expansion in the thirties and forties warrants a similar call for more analysis. While he historicizes the spread of breweries to Japan’s colonies, one is left wondering about the interconnection of the industry with colonial policy and exploitation (132–137). For example he discusses how the post-war industry suffered from the loss of Japanese employees due to conscription in the war, but the issue of colonial labour—did they employ local Korean and Manchuria factor workers and how did that process work?—is left under-addressed (163). That is not to say that Alexander should have forced a long discussion of imperialism or a colonial critique, but rather that his gesturing to the connection to imperialism leaves a number of questions and concerns unanswered.
Overall, as an industry history, Brewed in Japan is well done and bursting with excellent details and well-researched scholarship. For anyone interested in a history of beer in Japan this is an excellent and comprehensive account of it.
Kevin Richardson
University of California, Los Angeles, USA
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