Abstract

"The Making of a Japanese Milkopolis: Milk, Vaccines, and Public Health in Late Nineteenth-Century Tokyo"

Narusa Yamato, Stanford University (narusay@stanford.edu)

Since the city’s first dairy enterprise opened in 1871, Tokyo rapidly transformed into Japan’s milk capital—a milkopolis. Within a decade, the city hosted the country’s largest dairy cattle population, accounting for roughly 28 percent of the national total. Yet milk was not the only bovine business thriving in the capital. Vaccine farms also emerged, raising calves to extract lesions that protected humans from smallpox. The sheer number of cattle, bred for nourishment and immunity, rendered Tokyo more than a milkopolis—it was a bovinopolis.
Cattle stood at the center of Meiji Japan’s biopolitical agenda to safeguard national sovereignty against encroaching Western empires. Bovine vaccines helped boost the Japanese population by minimizing smallpox deaths, while cow’s milk was believed to strengthen what officials described as the “meager” bodies of the Japanese race. As dairy historians have shown, milk businesses first flourished in major cities like New York and London. However, as urbanization accelerated and public health concerns mounted, these enterprises were gradually pushed to the hinterlands, with refrigeration and sterilization technologies enabling long-distance delivery.
This presentation focuses on the transitional moment. It examines a business model rooted in the cow’s reproductive cycle that enabled Tokyo’s dairymen to keep supplying the growing city while adapting to increasingly stringent hygiene standards. By analyzing how this model was devised, the presentation highlights the material and spatial entanglements between the bovine vaccine and milk industries.