Everyone in every Asian country has an affection for rice. Each civilization in the continent, based on social systems adapted for rice culture, has developed its own myths and legends of gods and goddesses of rice and paddy field. The diversity of rice cultivars and farming practice which evolved over time was also remarkable. Nonetheless, the diversity now seems to be replaced by oligopoly of a number of high-yielding varieties (HYVs), based on modern genetic science and sustained by chemical, mechanical, civil engineering, logistic, and other related technologies. In the past century, rice farming in Asia has changed more than over the previous millennia. When, and how, did this change happen? Who led this change? How did this change affect people's everyday life and mentality? How did this change influence nature and the environment? How was this change interpreted?
Tatsushi Fujihara's book seeks answers to these questions by focusing on the emergence of scientific rice breeding and farming in modern Japan and neighboring countries, in the context of its territorial and ideological expansion in the early twentieth century. The title “Great East-Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere of Rice” is not just a metaphor, especially in that Japanese scientists actually used that expression, and identified the propagation of Japanese rice cultivars and farming techniques with the prosperity of Japanese civilization itself.
Improvement in agriculture is achieved by coordinating a myriad of different elements. Among them, seed is usually considered to be the most important, because changes brought by adoption of new seeds is the most visible, the most obvious, and the most easily transportable – albeit not the most significant as people usually assume – change in agriculture. Compared with other key elements that can account for higher yield, improving seed is the quickest and the most affordable way: while improvement in irrigation requires massive mobilization of capital and labor, and the use of chemical fertilizer costs farmers greater monetary investment, adopting a new seed is a relatively easy choice for farmers. Especially in rice farming countries in East Asia, where multinational grain traders have not exerted such great power over rice farmers due to extensive intervention by the states, new seed does not necessarily mean greater expense. Thus scientists and policymakers have promoted new “scientific” seeds to allegedly “conservative” farmers, with the expectation that they would be in the vanguard of scientific farming by manifesting the power and values of modern science embedded in it.
A specific seed embodies a specific set of values, in response to the needs of the times. For example, fertilizer-resistance (the capacity to survive excessive doses of nitrogen fertilizer) became the major goal of plant improvement since the early twentieth century, along with the growth of the chemical fertilizer industry and the growing prospect of a drastic increase in crop yield by overdosing with chemical fertilizer. A farmer who adopts the seed also embraces the embedded values without realizing it, and eventually identifies them with his personal goals. In addition, if the new seed proves to be successful, the paddy of the new rice becomes, in itself, a showcase that invites more farmers to opt into scientific agriculture. In the end, once the majority of farmers become a part of the wider modern and scientific agricultural network, it would not be possible to return to old varieties with a smaller application of chemicals, even though it could be more sustainable in the local environment (p. 85). In that sense, the author succinctly points out that the modern state indirectly controls individual farmers' rice farming practice by “programming” genetic information (p. 83).
Fujihara's book well illustrates the state's domination of farming knowledge and practice via seeds, which he sums up with the term “scientific conquest.” According to the author, this scientific conquest occurred in Japan and its former colonies – Taiwan and Korea – in the early twentieth century, along with the expansion of the influence of modern science and the modern state to an unprecedented extent. While the notion of “conquest” could be rather metaphorical in the cases of provinces within Japan proper, it was more substantial with those of Korea, Taiwan, and Manchukuo. Armed with modern science and technology, Japanese policymakers implemented various measures to boost rice production both in Japan proper and the colonies, without serious consideration or acknowledgement of local knowledge, practice, belief, or social orders. In some sense, they employed modern science to undermine – whether they intended to or not – those belief systems and social orders.
The book begins with a case study in Hokkaido, which was integrated with modern Japan in the late nineteenth century. Japanese scientists strove to develop cold-resistant rice varieties for this new frontier. One of those new varieties, “Fukoku,” became the new star of Hokkaido agriculture when the Japanese emperor ate it on his visit, and later was transplanted to Manchukuo, another semi-colony of Japan. The expansion of the northernmost frontier of rice farming fits perfectly into the author's frame of the “scientific conquest.”
Fujihara proceeds to the cases of northern Japan and colonial Korea. The new varieties, collectively referred to as the “second-generation unified varieties,” were developed through the application of Mendelian genetics, toward the explicit goal of better responsiveness to nitrogen fertilizer. Those new seeds exhibited superior productivity and soon were propagated throughout Japanese territory. Transplantation of modern Japanese rice into the Korean Peninsula was in effect the iteration of the “scientific conquest” that had occurred in Japan proper. Japanese seeds eventually swept away indigenous Korean varieties by the early 1930s and remained dominant even after the independence of Korea, until the late 1960s.
The next case study is the “Ponlai [Formosa]” rice in Taiwan. Japanese agricultural scientists in colonial Taiwan distinguished themselves by developing a new group of Japonica rice adapted for the Taiwanese climate. Ponlai rice, like other new varieties in Japan and its colonies, also forced changes in local peasants' agricultural practice in accordance with the modern high-input–high-return agricultural system. In that sense, the author concludes the book by pointing out the similarities between the agricultural projects in the Japanese empire and the postwar Green Revolution initiated by the United States.
Throughout the volume, the author distances himself from triumphant and teleological narratives of scientific progress. He repeatedly points out that the “scientific conquest” was, in fact, not as smooth and thorough as expected. In Japan proper and its colonies, peasants always oscillated between the rosy promises of higher productivity and the uncertainties of higher risk. While the state, obsessed with macroscopic increases in crop yields, could dismiss local tensions and failures, the peasants had to figure out how to secure their subsistence by minimizing uncertainties. Moreover, especially in the colonies, the profits from the increased yield were usually transferred to landlords and industrial capitals – producers of chemical fertilizer that led the wartime Japanese economy since the 1920s (p. 120).
One important point for the author is that science is not value-neutral and its impact is not universal. Science is a part of larger network and thus situated differently in different societies. For instance, the goal of genetics cannot be the same in a society that stresses quantitative growth and in another society that values environmental balance and stability. In that sense, Fujihara successfully emphasizes that Japanese rice as it was developed in the early twentieth century embodied the colonial modernism and expansionism of Japan, and thus symbolized the dream of the “Great East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere of Rice.”
This is not just a story of the past; political and social imaginaries are still embedded in grains. For more case studies in current Asia and beyond, I would recommend special issues of East Asian Science, Technology, and Society: an International Journal (volume 5, issue 2 and issue 4).
