Activities of Colonial Korea Branch of Yanguhoe under the Japanese Wartime Food Policies

초록

This study examines activities of Yanguhoe’s colonial Korea branch. In Japan, the fundamental concepts and knowledge of nutrition science diffused in relation to the development of military diet. Yanguhoe was an extra-governmental body of Army Provision Depot in charge of military catering under Japanese Army Ministry. In the first place, the main objectives of Japan's Yanguhoe were research and education activities in order to development institutional food service including military diet based on the concepts of nutritional science which focused on economic effectiveness and efficiency. In fact, it played an important role in diffusing the concept of economic nourishment in Japanese society since the 1920s. Yanguhoe branch in colonial Korea stayed active in many ways conducting food-related research and providing nutrition education to the public to overcome food shortage while it was supporting the wartime food policies of the colonial government until 1945 since its establishment in 1938. Consequently, the activities of Yanguhoe branch in the colonial Korea influenced on the spread of the concept of diet under the special circumstance, the wartime food scarcity, which was based on the perspective of modern nutrition science accrued by improvement of Japanese military diet at the time.