Weaving Genetics with Silk in Japan – Lisa Onaga
Abstract
When the history of raw silk is traced by following the thread of commodity formation and trade, our capacity to fully grasp the interactions among the insects, plants, and humans responsible for silk-making can become limited. The enormous economic significance of export-bound raw silk manufactured and directly traded from Japan mainly to US American consumers since the mid-1800s until its peak in the 1930s is a case in point. The volume of raw silk unraveled from the cocoons of silk moths had peaked just before the Pacific War to over 40,000 tonnes per year (around 400 times the mass of a blue whale!). On the one hand, the low barrier to participation in sericulture—cocoon cultivation––spurred this scale of production in Japan, which enabled experts, bureaucrats, and industry leaders to organize an unruly multiplicity of cocoon-spinners strains and nationally reform sericultural practices. On the other hand, another negotation was taking place at the site of cocoon-spinners’ bodies. In this talk, I highlight key scientific and technological developments that took place as biologists and sericulturists strove to control the reproduction and diversity of kaiko (蚕 / Bombyx mori) at every stage of their metamorphosis—egg, larvae, pupae, moth. Tracing how sericulturists and scientists sought to improve the material properties of cocoons and silk, and importantly, the means to rear kaiko more than once a year, sheds light upon the new forms of value ascribed to cocoon spinners’ hereditary information. Archival materials and scientific papers are analyzed in this reconstruction of the institutional development of genetic research in Japan, enabled through attentiveness to a range of sericultural improvement efforts. Ultimately, diverse forms of kaiko represented more than problems to solve; they had become tools and above all, biological resources for the archipelagic nation to protect.
Speaker
Lisa Onaga is a Senior Research Scholar at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, where she leads the “Proteins and Fibers: Scaffolding History with Molecular Signatures” Working Group.