SILKWORMS, SCIENCE, AND NATION: A SERICULTURAL HISTORY OF GENETICS IN MODERN JAPAN A Dissertation Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of Cornell University in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy by Lisa Aiko Onaga January 2012 © 2012 Lisa Aiko Onaga SILKWORMS, SCIENCE, AND NATION: A SERICULTURAL HISTORY OF GENETICS IN MODERN JAPAN Lisa Aiko Onaga, Ph.D. Cornell University 2012 This dissertation describes how and why the source of raw silk, the domesticated silkworm (Bombyx mori), emerged as an organism that scientists in Japan researched intensively during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. People invested in and exploited the lucrative silkworm in order to produce a delicate fiber, as well as to help impart universal claims and ideas about the governing patterns of inheritance at a time when uncertainties abounded about the principles of what we today call genetics. Silkworm inheritance studies such as those by scientists Toyama Kametarō (1867– 1918) and Tanaka Yoshimarō (1884–1972) contributed to ideas developing among geneticists internationally about the biological commonalities of different living organisms. Silkworm studies also interacted with the registration of silkworm varieties in and beyond East Asia at a time when the rising Imperial agenda intertwined with the silk industry. Different motivations drove silkworm science, apparent in the growth of Japanese understandings of natural order alongside the scientific pursuits of universality. Tōitsu, a “unification” movement around 1910, notably involved discussions about improving silk and decisions about the use of particular silkworms to generate export-bound Japanese silk. I show why the reasons for classifying silkworms within Japan had as much to do with the connection between textiles, power, and social order as it did with the turn toward experiment-based biological articulations of inheritance, which together interacted with ideas about Japanese nationhood. BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH Lisa Aiko Onaga was born Lisa Yen-Chen in Brookfield, Connecticut, USA, in 1978. She grew up in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and Kobe, Japan, where she attended the Canadian Academy for three years. She graduated from Brown University in 2000 with a Sc.B. in biology with honors, where she conducted research in marine ecology and evolution and cultivated her interests in science writing. She worked at the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Washington, D.C., for three years as a communications officer for Science. She has also been a freelance science writer and worked as a media relations contractor for Burness Communications, representing major international nonprofit organizations. At Cornell University, Lisa was in the first cohort of recipients of the Cornell Presidential Genomics (now Life Sciences) Fellowship. Since returning from her dissertation fieldwork in Japan, Lisa has resided in the Bay Area, California, and was been a visiting researcher of the Office for History of Science and Technology at the University of California, Berkeley, from 2009 to 2011. While completing her dissertation, Lisa co-founded Teach 3.11, a participant-powered digital resource that helps educators and scholars locate and share information related to the history of science and technology concerning the triple earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear disasters in Japan. After receiving her Ph.D., she will join the Center for Society and Genetics at University of California, Los Angeles, as a lecturer and postdoctoral fellow with support from the D. Kim Foundation for History of Science and Technology in East Asia. She will join Nanyang Technological University in Singapore as an assistant professor in the history division. iii DEDICATION To Yoko and Eimei / Xiurong and Yung-Ming iv ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Many have been instrumental to the completion of this dissertation. That I had not imagined one iota that I would work on the history of the science of silkworms before entering graduate school makes this particularly so. I first owe deep thanks to my committee members. My advisor, Bruce Lewenstein, helped me transition from the world of popular science writing to academia. With incredible patience and understanding, he coaxed out of me a cogent academic project that continued to relate to core questions I had about the production and communication of science across cultures and international borders. I know that his guidance and teaching will continue to inform my work for years to come. Suman Seth’s graduate course on the relationships among science, race, and colonialism played a critical role in spurring my exploration of the history of Mendelism in Japan; I am also grateful for conversations that have continued since then that have helped me sharpen the questions that this project asks and strives to answer. I thank Will Provine for granting generous access to his library and reprints collection, for his demand for specificity and conciseness in my writing, and for treating me as if I had already met his high expectations, which continues to make me only more appreciative of the learning that lies before me. I am grateful to Vic Koschmann for introducing me to a new literature and for helping me articulate how biology in Japan relates to concepts and developments important to modern Japanese history. Serving as my field-appointed reader, Margaret Rossiter shared key insights and remarks that have helped improve the quality of the dissertation, especially its readability. The language study and research for this project, conducted from 2006 to 2009, was made possible with generous support from the U.S. National Science Foundation Dissertation Improvement Grant (#0646370), a Social Sciences Research Council–International Dissertation Research Fellowship, a Cornell East Asia Program v research travel grant, and a Fulbright/YKK Graduate Research Fellowship, for which I especially thank Mizuho Iwata and Miyuki Ito, who coordinated many of my logistics at the Japan–U.S. Educational Commission. A Foreign Language and Area Studies fellowship also made it possible for me to study Japanese intensively at the Inter- University Center for Japanese Studies. The Max Planck Institute for the History of Science generously funded some final months of dissertation writing in Berlin. At the University of Tokyo, I owe great thanks to Miwao Matsumoto and the Graduate School of Humanities and Sociology for generously hosting my 2007–2009 research sojourn. Opportunities to present research in the Matsumoto zemi and at a colloquium of the Japan Association for Science, Technology, & Society generated much useful feedback for my project. Special thanks is granted to Kohta Juraku, who went beyond the call of duty as a tutor in helping me gain reading familiarity with Meiji Japanese and assisting with an important field trip to key locations in Gunma Prefecture. I have deeply appreciated the opportunity to continue to discuss research with Kohta and Etsuko Juraku at U.C. Berkeley during the 2010–2011 academic year. I also thank Naomi Kaida for tutorial help and Yuji Tateishi for thoughtful sociological discussions. I am greatly indebted to Michihiro Kobayashi of the Japanese Society of Sericultural Science for his support of my project and for introducing me to key people in the field. Toru Shimada of the Laboratory of Insect Genetics and Bioscience on the Yayoi campus of the University of Tokyo has been instrumental to the success of this project for providing much-appreciated office space, access to historical texts, and stimulating conversations, in addition to orienting me in the field of silkworm science. I have benefited tremendously from conversations with the students, professors, and postdocs in the lab, who always made me feel welcome as I tagged along with them to learn about silkworms. Office manager Munetaka Kawamoto made vi sure that all went smoothly. I am incredibly indebted to Professor Shimada for the introduction to IGB alumnus Amornrat Promboon of Kasetsart University, who, along with her graduate students Netnapa Chingkitti and Warangkana Narksen, hosted me during my research visit to the National Archives in Bangkok, Thailand. I also thank Pornpinee Boonbundal, Prateep Meesilpa, and Wiroje Kaewruang of the Queen Sirikit Institute of Sericulture and colleagues for making it possible for me to visit the Khorat region where Japanese sericulturists worked. Praveen Anansongvit coordinated translation assistance. Research on Tanaka Yoshimarō was made possible through the kindness of scientists who have worked in his former laboratory spaces. Yutaka Banno, at the University of Kyushu, made it possible for me to research primary source materials. Emeritus professor Bungo Sakaguchi also kindly permitted access to his former laboratory. The family of Tanaka Katsumi, especially Tanaka Yasuko, has been very kind to permit my viewing of a selection of the diaries of Tanaka Yoshimarō. I am hugely indebted to the late Yatarō Tazima for meeting with me on multiple occasions to explain his research, for lending me key texts, for serving as a willing resource to discuss Tanaka Yoshimarō’s work, and for key introductions to his former laboratory at the Institute of Sericulture–Dainippon Silk Association. I am grateful to director Hajimu Inoue for permitting me to conduct research at the Institute’s library and for access to primary source materials in the former Tazima lab. I thank silkworm breeders and researchers Akio Ohnuma, Yoko Takemura,