Can food determine your fate? Could indulging in delicacies bring calamity to your community? This talk reevaluates the history of Japanese food culture by examining how ideas of healthy eating became both a popular phenomenon and a matter of grave concern among trained medical experts and amateur culinary enthusiasts alike. It explores whyordinary people ate what they did, how these ideas on proper eating came to be, and what social, economic, and moral concerns propelled their rise. Guidance on dietetics conveyed priorities about how well-nourished bodies were meant to act in the world, whether as agricultural workers, samurai bureaucrats, or merchant consumers. Failure to keep a proper diet carried life or death consequences, according to these guides, that could bring not just disease to oneself but financial and moral ruin to one’s household, domain, or even society at large. This study of historical nourishment modes in Japan thus reveals an early modern dietetic revolution in the making, which disrupted older forms of expertise and provided a venue to critique official policies on eating and living right before the introduction of modern scientific nutrition.

Joshua Schlachet is an Assistant Professor in the Department of East Asian Studies at the University of Arizona. He is a historian of Japan, specializing in the cultural history of nourishment in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. His book project, Nourishing Life: Cultures of Food and Health in Early Modern Japan (U Hawaii Press, Forthcoming 2026), examines how the emergence of a dietary common knowledge expanded concepts of a well-nourished body to encompass economic productivity, status hierarchy, and moral cultivation. Schlachet is co-editor of Interdisciplinary Edo: Towards an Integrated Approach to Early Modern Japan (Routledge, 2024), a collected volume of innovative humanistic research on society and culture in the Tokugawa era.

Sponsor(s): Terasaki Center for Japanese Studies