Apart from its colonial dimensions, the historiography of natural sciences in modern Japan has primarily been limited to narratives of the adoption and extension of Western regimes of expertise. While works on early modern Japanese science have pointed to unique systems for knowledge, such as time and scientific objectivity, historians have mostly treated the development of modern scientific research programs in Japan as one of import, adaptation, and universalism. Victoria Lee’s The Arts of the Microbial World: Fermentation Science in Twentieth-Century Japan offers a fresh perspective on the history of modern science in Japan by drawing attention to an original research tradition of chemistry that used microscopic life as the producer of an envisioned chemical modernity. In addition to synthesizing organic compounds by hand like their European and American peers and studying the pathological properties of microbes, Japanese scientists deployed their metabolisms to tackle problems of medicinal and nutritional shortage and produce a national scientific identity. They mobilized microbes as immensely beneficial forces for human welfare instead of simply pathogens, under what Lee describes as the “complementary science” formulated by Hasok Chang (Citation2004).
