“Sweetness and Empire: Sugar Consumption in Imperial Japan”
This work is a chapter in the the edited volume, Janet Hunter and Penelope Francks, eds.,
The Historical Consumer: Consumption and Everyday Life in Japan, 1850-2000, London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), p. 127-150.
I argue that although sugar was consumed as a luxury item in early-modern Japan, in the early decades of the twentieth century, and especially during the war years, the consumption of sweets became inseparable from the idea of Japanese modernity, linked to the act of consumption within the sphere of Japanese empire.