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The Role Of Bread In Japanese Economic History

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“Food of Efficiency”: The Role of Bread in Japanese Economic History from the 1910s to the 1960s The history of bread in Japan began in the early Meiji Period, when Kimuraya Sohonten, a Tokyo bread store, opened and invented Anpan, a popular sweet bread with red bean paste inside. Approximately one hundred and fifty years have passed since then. In these 150 years, Japan’s numerous social changes have shifted and redefined the role of bread in the Japanese diet. Frist, bread was “a popular novelty food” and “a status symbol” until the beginning of the 20th century . Between the 1910s and the 1960s, bread functioned as a “food of efficiency” and eventually became one of the main staple foods in Japan. Form the 1970s to the present, bread has reformed into a form of snack in the Japanese daily diet . While appreciating the delicate contemporary “bread snacks”, one might also notice the contrast between bread’s role as snack now and its role as a food of efficiency before. How did bread become a food of efficiency, and what was the significance of this part of the history of bread in Japan? From the beginning of World War I in the 1910s to Japan’s Economy Miracle in the 1960s, bread served as a food of efficiency and the history of bread in Japan closely reflected the country’s industrialization and economy growth. Bread started its transformation into one staple food of Japan in the 1910s. Japan had won the First Sino-Japanese War and the Russo-Japanese War in the

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