Picky Eaters in Modernizing Japan: The Effects of Improper Diet on Children’s Ill Health from the Eighteenth to Early Twentieth Century

• In Event: Diet and Health in Pre-Modern East Asia

Abstract

This paper examines changing ideas about the effects of improper diet on children’s predisposition in Japan from the eighteenth to early twentieth century. Many Edo-period paediatric texts, which were originally derived from China, warned that children’s predisposition was largely determined by the quality of breast milk which reflected the physical and moral health status of the provider.
However, along with Japan’s social and medical modernization initiated by the Meiji government after 1868, the relationships between diet and children’s health and illness became more entangled within a complex environment encompassing biomedicine, moral values and the social system. Within this context, I will focus on the case of autointoxication (jika-chūdoku) which came to indicate a new psychosomatic disease by the 1930s. Japanese paediatricians explained that autointoxication, presenting such symptoms as cyclic vomiting and headache, was a constitutional disorder unique to Japanese children, especially those who were 'picky eaters' and from families considered the intelligentsia of Japan society living in urban cities.
By interpreting autointoxication as a disease of civilization, the association of children’s dietary habits with their propensity for a particular disorder will be contextualized in terms of the interaction between new concepts of medical theory and the human body, and the urbanization of communities in which they were living. In so doing, this paper re-examines the ongoing debates inquiring into the effects of dietary habits on the formation of constitutional disorders as well as how the idea of ‘predisposition’ is used in understanding of health and illness.

Author

• Keiko Daidoji, Keio University