What to eat and how much: the rule of three (colours) in modern Japanese nutrition education.

Introduction

This article examines one of the most enduring nutrition education systems in postwar Japan, the three-colour nutrition (eiyō sanshoku) model first developed in 1952 and still used today in public elementary schools. Almost three-quarters of a century after its introduction, the three-colour model remains the default for explaining ‘proper’ (nozomashii) eating to children. Nutritionists and government agencies have devised other ways to categorise and communicate nutrition, and nutrition education is more than just a typology or schematic, as discussed below. As I will show, however, the three-colour system has remained the de facto decoder ring for subsequent models, including the current government food guide, the Spinning Top, introduced in 2005.
 
The first section of this article examines the content and context of the Japanese Food Guide Spinning Top, adopted in 2005, showing that it is the product of a political and scientific compromise between the agendas of the three government ministries responsible for public health. This affects its content and presentation. Section two traces the history of the three-colour nutrition education system from its origins in the early days of Japan’s post-Occupation rebuilding, with emphasis on the contributions of nutritionist Kondō Toshiko (1913-2008). The three-colour model always prioritised both simplicity and application, viz., ease of learning and ease of use. It was also integrated into a program of active, participative learning for ‘housewives’ (shufu or sengyō shufu), many with children in tow. It has also been picked up in educational materials for public schools as the primary way to teach the fundamentals of healthy, balanced eating. Kondō is one in a long line of Japanese nutrition professionals to see women and children as the most important for shaping national eating habits (Hopson, 2019, 2024, forthcoming). She also saw women as essentially incapable of internalising and enacting more complicated versions of nutritional knowledge. The third section briefly examines alternate models of nutritional knowledge categorisation and communication developed by nutritionists Kagawa Aya (1899-1997) and Adachi Miyuki (1936-). Ultimately, neither caught on because they were impractical for daily use.
 
Given this, I argue that the continued―sometimes implicit or semi-obscured―use of the three-colour rubric today even in nutrition education materials intended to promote the Spinning Top is symptomatic of 1) the tension between specialist and lay health and nutrition knowledge, and 2) the difficulties inherent in devising a system that satisfies the desire for rigour and accuracy on the one hand and one that is easily learned and flexible enough to be practical for everyday use on the other. In short, the long-term durability and success of the three-colour nutrition education model is a paradigmatic example of the power of not letting the perfect be the enemy of the good.

Nutrition Education
Contento (2011, p. 14) defines nutrition education as ‘any combination of educational strategies, accompanied by environmental supports, designed to facilitate voluntary adoption of food choices and other food- and nutrition-related behaviors conducive to health and well-being and delivered through multiple venues.’ Nutrition education is considered valuable at all stages of life, but especially in childhood because dietary practices established in childhood tend to have long-term effects, influencing adult dietary patterns (Murimi et al., 2017, 2018).
 
Nutrition education, as Smith and Nicolson (1995, p. 290) have shown, has been a matter ‘of great political and ideological importance’ in modern nations as a way to promote public health and efficient resource management. Japan was precocious and deliberate in its efforts, beginning with public outreach by the Imperial Government Institute for Nutrition (IGIN) in the early 1920s (Hopson, 2019). Pioneering efforts, some in concert with the League of Nations, continued in the 1930s (Barona, 2021; Hopson, forthcoming). Nutrition education devolved during wartime (Hopson, 2021), but when Japan regained its sovereignty in 1952, ‘nutrition improvement’ (eiyō kaizen) was made an immediate national priority. Nutrition education has remained central to public health policy ever since. One measure of this is that nutritionists and nutrition education are integrated into the public health and education systems as well as daily life in Japan to a degree not seen in peer nations (Hopson, 2024).
 
For my analysis of systems of nutrition education in postwar Japan, I have adapted and expanded Adachi’s (1984, pp. 71–72) taxonomy of the systems used to classify and communicate nutritional knowledge as nutrient-based, ingredient-based, or foods-based by considering the relative complexity and visual mnemonics employed by each system. The row labelled ‘Basis’ in table 1, which overviews the primary characteristics of influential postwar Japanese nutrition education models, derives from Adachi’s preferred nomenclature of ‘nutrient-choice-type’ (eiyōso sentakugata), ‘ingredient-choice-type’ (shokuzai sentakugata), and ‘food-choice-type’ (ryōri sentakugata). Foods-based nutrition schemata such as the Japanese Spinning Top are explicitly created with so-called ‘ordinary people’ in mind. For this reason, they tend to prioritise simplicity and utility for nonexperts rather than the quantitative rigour of nutrient-based systems. Ingredient-based models lie somewhere in between, often having characteristics of both. Though an example is included in table 1 for clarity, this article does not address nutrient-based models such as Dietary Reference Intakes (DRIs), Dietary Reference Values (DRVs), and other nutrient-based systems intended to function primarily as tools for manufacturers, health professionals, policymakers, etc., rather than for the education of consumers, especially children (see, for example, U.S. Department of Agriculture and U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, 2020, p. vii). Instead, I focus on the public-facing communication tools represented by Adachi’s ingredient- and foods-based categories of nutrition education materials.

Table 1. Comparison of the primary characteristics of influential postwar Japanese nutrition education models

The Japanese Food Guide Spinning Top

The Japanese Food Guide Spinning Top (figure 1) illustrates Japan’s ‘foods-based dietary guidelines’ (FBDG). The Food Guide is a nutrition education tool jointly created in 2005 by the education, health, and agriculture ministries, the three ministries most directly responsible for public health. Like the USDA’s Food Pyramid or the UK’s MyPlate, the Food Guide distills specialist nutritional knowledge and principles into a simple graphic for lay audiences. The Spinning Top communicates the 2000 ‘Dietary Guidelines for Japanese’ [sic] (Shokuseikatsu shishin; figure 2), which were in turn the qualitative expression of the quantitative (nutrient-based) Recommended Dietary Allowance for Japanese (RDA-J) (Monbushō, Kōseishō, and Nōrinsuisanshō, 2016).[1] Its Japanese name is more literally ‘food balance guide’ (shokuji baransu gaido).

Figure 1. The Japanese Food Guide Spinning-Top Model.

Figure 2. English translation of the 2016 ‘Dietary Guidelines for Japanese’ [sic], updated from original release in 2000.

The Japanese Food Guide is a foods-based model. Foods-based models are consumer-based models. The Spinning Top lists customary serving sizes of foods as the basis for its dietary advice. This is a move away from ingredient-based models intended more for producers and preparers of food and toward the perspective of eaters. While ingredient-based nutrition education systems often explicitly included a small number of prepared staples such as bread in their guides, this was within a larger context that listed the ingredients of a salad separately rather than as a salad and the ingredients of ice cream in place of ice cream. Foods-based communication is the least technically rigorous, but its proponents argue that it is the most representative of consumer perspectives. For example, a ‘serving’ of rice is defined as a small bowl of white rice or a commercially available rice ball rather than in grams, and a rice ball with filling is still treated as rice for the purposes of determining ‘what to eat and how much.’ This is a substantial concession to the idea that for nutrition education to be motivating and actionable, it has to be understandable and usable even if it takes some shortcuts that make experts cringe. The imprecision of the Food Guide is evident in the uncharacteristically casual and imprecise language that the nutritionists on the MHLW’s public information site use to describe its application: ‘Once you have memorised the five food groups and are more or less (nantonaku) able to count servings, it is time to move on to thinking about the content’ (Ōkubo and Takemi, no date emphasis added).

For this reason, the Japanese Food Guide Spinning Top has been hailed by some as a transformative effort, a paradigm shift in the Japanese government’s strategies to communicate nutrition information (Yoshiike and Hayashi, 2006; Yoshiike et al., 2007). Predictably, this was a point of contention between the specialist and nonspecialist members of the Daily Guidelines committee, according to Tanaka Heizō (2000, p. 45). In the end, though, simplicity and a degree of flexibility were prioritised over the most accurate taxonomy. Ordinary consumers experience food as ‘actual dishes eaten at the table’ rather than as carriers of abstract ‘nutrients’ or ingredients for large-scale, industrial food production. Increasingly, changing consumption patterns also mean that many meals are bought rather than prepared. This also makes a nutrient-based or ingredient-based model inutile.
 
The Spinning Top is also a political document, shaped by the political moment as much as the nutrition science. The Food Guide’s purpose is described by its creators as, ‘To promote the health of the people, improve their quality of life, and ensure a stable food supply.’ The Spinning Top addresses what the planning committee described as a ‘lack of proper information, disordered eating habits, foreign food dependence, increased leftovers and food waste, etc.’ This situation, continued the committee, had ‘led to problems including imbalanced nutrition, increasing lifestyle-related diseases, declining food self-sufficiency, and food resource waste’ (Fūdo Gaido (kashō) Kentōkai, 2005, pp. 52–53). In other words, as Sugita Kōichi (2000, p. 515) observed, it was a byproduct of the three ministries’ priorities, i.e., the health ministry’s emphasis on improving national health and nutrition to tamp down healthcare costs, the agriculture ministry’s concern with improving food self-sufficiency and promoting ‘traditional’ foodways, and the education ministry’s insistence on further integrating school lunches (gakkō kyūshoku) into the curriculum as an educational opportunity.
 
Healthcare and food security anxieties are particularly salient features. The Food Guide was rolled out in conjunction with the ‘Basic Act on Shokuiku (Food and Nutrition Education).’ The shokuiku law was a landmark in the food politics of modern Japan. Its profound implications for nutrition education have yet fully to play out, but are widely considered part of the neoliberalisation―or, for those who give it a more positive spin, ‘individualisation’―of public health in Japan (Adachi, 2008; Mah, 2010; Ehara, 2011; Kojima, 2011; Reiher, 2012; Assmann, 2017; Kubota, 2018). The law seems to represent a sea change in the ‘social contract of health’ which emerged in modern states during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, defining the responsibilities of both state and individual vis-à-vis personal and public health (Porter, 1999, 2008), and the Food Guide accompanies and embodies this policy turn. The agriculture ministry’s anxieties about Japan’s low food self-sufficiency rate and struggling farmers, fishers, and other food producers are also prominent. This is both a callback to older Malthusian panics about population carrying capacity (jinkō-shokuryō mondai) and a reflection of changes in Japan’s food supply chain and socioeconomic structures since the 1960s (Hopson, 2019; Lee, 2023, pp. 2–13). In short, the Food Guide is a nutrition education tool suffused with government anxieties about matters such as food security and healthcare costs.

The Three-Colour System

Okada Masami

The tricolour nutrition system (eiyō sanshoku) has been used most consistently in postwar Japan for nutrition education. In contrast to the nutrient-based models and full meal and recipe plans that had dominated previous nutrition education efforts in modern Japan (Hopson, 2019, forthcoming), the three-colour model is an ingredient-based, functional system. It divides ingredients by their primary metabolic functions or effects: providing energy, regulating the body, and building muscle and bone. These categories roughly correspond to fats and carbohydrates, (water-soluble) vitamins and most minerals, and sources of protein and calcium, respectively, but function is prioritised over the macro- or micronutrient responsible. The three groups are assigned colours: yellow, green, and red. In the form popularised around Japan and still used today, serving sizes are given in metric as opposed to customary units (grams). While this adds a complication to the system, standardised units were seen as a necessary concession to make recipes reproducible in individual homes. This was consistent with the zeitgeist of the times as well as the work of Kagawa Aya, a sometimes employer, colleague, and mentor to the three-colour system’s chief proselytiser, Kondō Toshiko. Nevertheless, the overall ratio (6:3:1) of each colour group is prioritised. The result is a system that is, on the surface at least, surpassingly simple: in the course of a day, eat a 6:3:1 ratio of yellow, green, and red foods for optimal health.
 
Kondō Toshiko did not invent the tricolour nutrition system that is associated today with her name. It was Hiroshima prefectural office nutritionist Okada Masami (dates unknown) in 1952 who first came up with a three-colour nutrition model and implemented it as part of the postwar rebuilding of Hiroshima (figure 3). This figure is a three-by-three grid of colour, category, and example ingredients on the horizontal axis and red, yellow, and green on the vertical axis. Red ingredients ‘make blood and muscle.’ There are five ingredient categories listed here, including beans, fish, and dairy. Yellow ingredients provide energy and maintain body temperature. There are five subcategories under this grouping. They include cereals and grains, sugar, and fats. Green ingredients provide vitamins and minerals to keep the body running smoothly. This grouping comprises seven subcategories. Among them are carotene-rich vegetables, citrus, seaweed, and both pickled and dried vegetables. Alcohol, for example, is notably absent. Serving sizes are not prescribed. The ideal consumption ratio for the three group is indicated in percentages. Instead of a visual representation, in other words, all are of equal size with labels of 10%, 60%, and 30%, respectively. Okada encouraged shops to hang out flags in the three easily recognisable signal colours corresponding to their primary wares: rice retailers had yellow flags, greengrocers green flags, and butchers red flags, for example. Given the colour’s association with newly legal communism and socialism, the red flag is rumoured to have caused some confusion, but otherwise Okada’s campaign was considered a success (Asahi Shinbun, 1952; Kamimura and Morita, 2016, p. 141).

Figure 3. The Three-Colour Nutritional Model.
 
Okada’s model was promoted around Hiroshima via pilot programs in the village of Shinsaka and the cities of Fuchū and Hatsukaichi. Its theme song played on the radio, too. Records of the pilot programs indicate that Okada’s three-colour division was intended as part of a more comprehensive, hands-on, practical program of nutrition improvement via education rather than as a standalone model for dietary guidance. In Fuchū, lectures for schoolteachers and staff and local women’s groups were the core of the movement. Additionally, the industry and commerce association helped sponsor evening trainings for the food industry. Local markets labeled their food with red, yellow, and green tags according to the tricolour system. The public health center held a ‘nutrition festival’ in September 1953 that was later recognised by the health ministry. In Shinsaka, public servants, the local women’s group, and members of the farming improvement society collaborated on activities planning, while the public health centre nutritionist had counseling sessions in local schools and farmhouses. Cooking classes for 10-12 students were held around the village using leftover local produce and handmade kitchen equipment. A proactive proposal to raise carp for additional protein is one indication, wrote Shioiri Terue (2016, p. 70), of the positive and proactive response the three-colour nutrition education model received. In August 1954, the village was awarded as a ‘model region’ for the ‘new lifestyle movement’ by one of Japan’s major newspapers. By this point, however, Okada’s campaign had concluded.

Kondō Toshiko and the NIA

As Shioiri (2016, p. 70) observed, the tricolour nutrition movement ‘was subsequently spread nationwide by the Nutrition Improvement Association’s Kondō Toshiko.’ The NIA is a nominally private organisation with strong ties to the health ministry (Zenkoku Kakushu Dantai Rengōkai, 1966, p. 433). Kondō’s tricolour model (figure 4) has been the organisation’s raison d’être from its founding in 1953, not a time-limited campaign like that led by Okada Masami in Hiroshima. As shown in table 2, there are two other noteworthy differences between the two models. On the one hand, Kondō simplified the food listings for each colour category. This is particularly obvious for the green group, for which she eliminated separate designations for citrus fruits and dried and pickled vegetables. On the other hand, instead of the percentage used by Okada, Kondō complicated the recommended consumption amounts by designating a gram amount for each ingredient category within the colour groups. The same 6:3:1 ratio is visually represented, though the addition of serving sizes measured in mass rather than volume is a source of potential confusion. The NIA’s later addition of a callout box at the bottom left of its poster that specified the need to balance the diet by eating a main course plus nine ingredient categories (soy, seeds, eggs, dairy, seaweed, fruits and vegetables, fish and meat, mushrooms, and potatoes), indicated by the mnemonic magotachi wa yasashii (‘the grandchildren are kind’), fails to specify what constitutes a ‘main course.’ However, potatoes, sugars, and fats, though in the yellow category with grains and cereals, are evidently excluded. This inconsistency is indicative of the insolubility of attempting to align a functional model with actual eating habits.

Table 2. Comparison of Okada and Kondō’s three-colour nutrition systems.

Figure 4. Kondō’s tricolour model.
 
It is also noteworthy that the NIA’s three-colour model and Kagawa Aya’s four-group system, discussed below, share several important characteristics. The first of these is that both the contents and descriptions of groups 2-4 in the latter are nearly identical to the three groups defined by the former. Other than Kagawa’s separation of eggs and dairy into their own category (group 1) and unusual characterisation of potatoes as vegetables (group 2), the content differences are minor. The differences in the description of each group are even smaller, as shown below in table 3.

Table 3.  Comparison of the NIA’s three-colour and Kagawa Aya’s four-group nutrition education models (1977 version).
 
The simplicity and accessibility of the three-colour system was consistent with Kondō’s values. As a young woman, Kondō was arrested three times as a communist agitator, but she was also elite and elitist and believed that ordinary people (especially women) were too busy and too simple to understand and use complicated nutrition and meal planning systems (Hopson, 2025). They were also too busy and too simple to be trusted to eat properly without expert advice. ‘When it comes to eating, people have vices,’ she wrote. ‘If we are to fix these, we must be as easily understood as possible to everyone from children to the elderly’ (quoted in Watanabe, 2009, p. 137). For Kondō (1956, p. 52), the accepted strategies of either mandating set daily macro- and micronutrient intakes and/or prescribing specific, inflexible recipes did not fit the bill. The vast majority of people remained ignorant of both how to plan and prepare a properly scientific diet, and why. They did not understand the benefits of nutrition science to both health and the family ledger. What was needed instead of these ineffective older methods was a system ‘designed to be easily internalised by housewives absorbed in the daily grind.’ The three-colour nutrition system was her solution to this problem, and as I argue in this article, it has been successful precisely due to its intuitive and memorable scheme. However, that simplicity and ease of use were simultaneously symptomatic of the deeply ingrained elitism and misogyny of Kondō, the NIA, and the health and nutrition establishment, which manifested as a kind of saviour complex; as Shioiri (2016, p. 71) observes, both the NIA’s in-house publication and the health ministry’s official magazine touted the successes of the three-colour nutrition system as an educational tool, but did so in a way that belittled rural Japan as ‘generally of a low intellectual level’ and described the villages as areas of ‘low knowledge and interest.’

The Three-Colour School

The NIA’s proximity to the health ministry has facilitated informal networking and relatively close coordination. With the ministry’s imprimatur, the NIA publicised the three-colour system in newspaper and magazine articles and set up what Kondō called the ‘three-colour school’ (sanshoku sukūru), a traveling series of workshops in a mix of rented public and private spaces with sufficient kitchen facilities, including public schools. Kondō (1964, pp. 55–56) noted that despite the NIA’s government connections, the tricolour school initially received no public funding and used only materials made by the NIA for ‘regular housewives,’ many of whom attended with children in tow.
 
Classes had a hundred or so students, each divided into small working groups of five to six and Kondō (1964, p. 72) assigned each participant a ten-day family food diary. This record was to be completed at home with a full, person-by-person accounting of everything eaten according to colour category and subcategory. For instance, if your live-in mother-in-law ate bacon and you ate cheese, both counted as ‘red foods’ but were further subcategorised as meat and dairy, respectively, to encourage variety within the red group. To minimise complexity and user burden, participants checked the appropriate subcategories rather than selecting or filling in the actual ingredient or food consumed. All of this was intended to push students toward the more exhaustively formulated ‘good-eating pattern’ Kondō (1964, pp. 81–84) had developed. The school focused on application and reinforcement of the lessons learned. Students were encouraged to retake any of the individual sessions they felt uncertain that they had mastered, and to reflect on how their home cooking had changed in a final essay.
 
For Kondō (1964, pp. 64–74), the ‘three-colour nutrition system’ was the basis of a larger ‘popular movement’ (taishū undō) whose appeal was in its simplicity and its colourful, memorable appearance. Other materials, such as colouring quizzes, shopping games, and a jaunty ‘tricolour nutrition movement song’ (figure 5) with didactic lyrics sung at each workshop hint at the sense of playfulness and accessibility  for which Kondō’s school aimed. Ease of use was both the three-colour system’s number one priority and what distinguished it from other models. Kondō emphasised that the simplicity and colourful, graphic teaching materials of the three-colour method were intended as a daily tool for the downscale, unsophisticated regular housewife, not the ‘nutrition madams’ who had no trouble mastering the ministry’s preferred Basic Six foods model or even the USDA’s 1958 Basic Four (on which, see Nestle, 2007, p. 37 fig. 6), which Kondō dismissed as unfit for ordinary people, especially Japanese. The contrast between these systems is clearest in a pie graph (figure 6, left) composed of three concentric circles mapping the Basic Four (innermost) and Basic Six (middle) groups onto the three-colour model―and conspicuously rejecting the USDA’s placement of potatoes in the ‘vegetable’ group.

Figure 5. The "tricolour nutrition movement song."

Figure 6. A comparison between USDA's Basic Six Model the Tri-Colour System.

The irony in Kondō’s rejection of the Basic Six is that she was one of its creators. According to Kondō, in 1948, the GHQ’s nutrition section had provided her with posters and literature describing the USDA’s Basic Four food groups: milk, meat, bread, and vegetables. Kondō was, she continues, tasked by the GHQ with developing a Japanese equivalent. Impressed by this systematisation of nutrition education information but unconvinced that these groups were appropriate for the Japanese diet, she returned to the health ministry. After some debate, the ministry’s nutrition section settled on the Basic Six. As a system, ‘this was neither smart not easy to use,’ she recalled (1979, 110), but orders from the GHQ were orders. Given that the Basic Four was adopted in 1955, that this six-part typology appears to have been in use since at least 1947 (e.g., Nihon Eiyōshikai, 1947, fig. 1), and that in 1948 the USDA was still advocating the Basic Seven, it seems likely that Kondō misremembered or deliberately fudged some details. This would be consistent with other distortions in her recollections (Nishikawa, 2020; Hopson, 2025). For instance, Kondō credited herself and not Okada as the three-colour system’s creator. This was not true. Nor was she ignorant of this; in a 1952 interview, when still a bureaucrat in the health ministry’s nutrition section, Kondō praised Hiroshima’s efforts at simplifying nutrition information into three colour-coded groups (Asahi Shinbun, 1952). Kondō’s boss at the time, Ōiso Toshio (1959, pp. 19–26), identified the American Basic Seven as the inspiration for the Japanese Basic Six. In any case, Kondō’s embrace of the three-colour model may stem from her recognition that it was a perfect 2:1 mapping of the ministry’s Basic Six, and that a more ecumenical and flexible approach was appropriate in the field regardless of what elite Tokyo bureaucrats believed. ‘It is fine to use the Basic Six for the government to standardise its guidelines. It is fine for nutritionists at public health centres and food reform officers at local offices, too,’ wrote Kondō (1964, pp. 68–69). As long as they are not disseminating misinformation, ‘if people in the private sector are doing things differently―whether that is four, six, or three groups―nobody has a right to complain.’
 
The overlap of the three-colour and six-group systems is often illustrated not only in educational materials for schoolchildren and the public at large, but also for nutrition educators. For example, as shown in figure 6, the education ministry’s (2021, p. 6) in-house educational materials for upper secondary school (middle school) is a nested double pie graph, with the Basic Six food groups on the inner ring and the three-colour classification as the outer ring. Groups 1 and 2 of the Basic Six are red (protein and calcium), groups 3 and 4 are green (vitamins and other minerals), and 5 and 6 are yellow (energy, i.e., carbohydrates and fats). The even division of the pie graph robs it of the sense of proportionality in the three-colour and core foods schemata, for example, though the same issue can be seen in Kondō’s three-ringed pie graph comparing the NIA’s three-colour system to the American Basic Four and Japanese Basic Six (figure 7). In other words, serving sizes are not indicated in any units, metric or customary. The order of groups has changed, but otherwise the content is mostly unaltered since 1952 (Aoki, 1952, p. 357). The ministry-endorsed manual for nutrition educators uses the same formula to convert the Basic Six into the three colours, albeit in text rather than visual format (figure 8) (Yoshita, 2021, tbl. III-1–2).

Figure 7. The Relation between the USDA Basic Four and the Japanese Basic Six.

Figure 8. Converting between the Japanese Basic Six and the Tri-Colour System.
 
Nevertheless, it is clear that in practice the NIA’s three-colour nutrition system struggled to balance simplicity, rigour, and authority. For example, a one-page handout for Kondō’s nutrition school explains with simple graphics how the system’s colours and functions corresponded to certain foods. It concludes with a fifteen-question quiz asking students to place each food in its proper group. A parenthetical warning below the quiz showcases one of the frequently noted shortcomings of the three-colour model: the colours of the system and actual foods are often mismatched: students had to be reminded that ‘carrots and apples have red faces but are not ‘red foods’’ because their function was not to become blood and muscle. This difficulty is further highlighted by a table providing a detailed breakdown of each category. Half of the table is dedicated to ‘easily confused’ foods, such as cheese, which is yellow but ‘red’ (Kondō, 1964, pp. 58–60). The difficulties encountered when attempting to simplify nutrition advice are equally clear in the consumption ratio chart (Kondō, 1964, p. 86 and see 87-88) which students were to use when figuring out how much to serve to each family member. Indexed with the ‘adult male’ as the standard―standard practice in Japan from the interwar period (Hopson, forthcoming)―this chart determined the ratio of food each member of the family should receive by age and sex, with some adjustments for factors such as more or less demanding physical labour, pregnancy, etc. ‘When apportioning the food you make,’ wrote Kondō, ‘the most rational way is the one reliant on this ratio rather than on instinct or convention.’

Core Foods, Four Groups, Twenty Points

It is useful to compare this method of organising and communicating nutrition knowledge to other influential efforts in the postwar. Two of the most important have been the unit-based systems developed by Kagawa Aya (1899-1997) and Adachi Miyuki (1936-). These are the ‘four-food-group point method’ (yongun tensū hō) and ‘core foods’ (kaku ryōri), respectively. Adachi and Kagawa both struggled with the same balance of expert knowledge and lay utility, but their solutions diverged in illustrative ways. Kagawa, a pioneer of nutrition science and nutrition science education in Japan, ultimately chose to make rigour and reproducibility her top priorities. This resulted in a very detailed, modular system with precisely measured interchangeable ingredients divided into twenty groups and requiring several pages of tables to implement. It was also a system rooted in the implicit assumption that users would mostly be enjoying three home-prepared meals per day. Kagawa’s model was, in the final assessment, a bit of an anachronism and a cul-de-sac. In contrast, Adachi was one of the first influential nutritionists to abandon both nutrient-based and ingredient-based nutrition education models. Like the three-colour system, Adachi’s core foods were designed to be as simple to understand and use as possible; this is particularly evident in her addition of a bento version using customary rather than metric measurements. Adachi created a guide that combines the rule-of-three simplicity of the three-colour system with the foods-based practicality that the government ministries only latched onto decades later in 2005. Hers is also the only major food and nutrition guide in postwar Japan defined per meal as opposed to per day. This is both a throwback to the ‘each-meal perfect’ (maikai shoku kanzen) and ‘unit-system menu’ (tan’i shiki kondate) systems developed in the 1920s by Saiki Tadasu (1876-1959), founding director of Japan’s Imperial Government Institute for Nutrition, but also of new FBDGs such as the UK’s 2007 Eatwell Guide, the USDA’s 2011 MyPlate, and Harvard’s Healthy Eating Plate riposte (Saiki, 1936; Hopson, 2019; Tatsumi, 2024).
 
Kagawa Aya

Kagawa Aya, the ‘mother of nutrition science’ in Japan, first studied medicine at Tokyo Women’s Medical University (TWMU). After graduating in 1926, she became an internist. Kagawa turned to nutrition as a form of preventive medicine (Nishikawa, 2022, p. 102). [2] Kagawa was particularly interested in reproducibility, a legacy of her time in the laboratory as a medical student. In the postwar, this led her to invent custom measuring cups and spoons. In 1933, Kagawa and her husband, Shōzō (also a medical doctor), established the study group that would in 1937 become the first iteration of Kagawa Nutrition University. In 1938 with Japan moving toward a more all-encompassing war footing, Kagawa saw an opportunity to advance her agenda of national nutrition improvement through proactive participation in groups such as the Federation of Japanese Women’s Organisations (Nippon Fujin Dantai Renmei) and its white-rice abolition movement. In 1940, Kagawa joined the Imperial Rule Association (Taisei Yokusankai), which offered additional opportunities to influence food and nutrition policy. Kagawa enthusiastically supported the ‘national diet’ (kokuminshoku) devised by the Food Patriotic Union (Shokuryō Hōkoku Renmei, 1941). However, Kagawa’s prescriptions as a member of the Federation were quite different from kokuminshoku. Kagawa recommended ‘one fish (one meat), one bean, and four vegetable dishes’ daily to accompany semi-polished rice (haigamai), which removed the bran but preserved the thiamine-rich germ (Hopson, 2021, pp. 27–28). In contrast, kokuminshoku was a nutrient-based system focused on minimum nutrient intake (calories, protein, vitamins, and minerals).
 
Kagawa’s units-based proposal was an early version of what became her four-food-group point method. She had begun to develop this idea a decade earlier in response to the prevalence of beriberi (see Bay, 2012). It would not take its final form until 1973, though by 1968―forty years after her first iteration―Kagawa’s points-based system was essentially complete. The first version adopted a 1-1-4 ratio for the dishes to accompany haigamai. In 1948, Kagawa added dairy (including eggs) as a fifth group. This was in response to the immediate improvement in children’s health when milk was instituted as the centre of the postwar school lunch program introduced by the GHQ in 1947. Kagawa revised this system every five years until 1973. First, in 1953, five categories ballooned to seven. Kagawa divided vegetables into two groups by carotene content (high and low) and added fats as a separate group. The former addressed stubbornly low vitamin and mineral levels in the diet, while the latter promoted more calorically dense foods. In 1958, in response to complaints that her seven-group system was overly complicated and to continued overreliance on white rice as the preferred staple, Kagawa pared her model down to four food groups: protein-rich fish, meat, and beans; vegetables and tubers; dairy and eggs; grains, cereals, fats, and sugars. This was the same year that the USDA recommended its Basic Four food groups. The most important changes to Kagawa’s system in 1963 reflected growing concerns that the most important nutritional challenge facing Japan was overabundance rather than undernourishment. Kagawa specified daily recommended consumption amounts in grams for each of her four categories and explicitly added fruit to the vegetable group: fish, meat, and beans (200g); vegetables, fruit, and potatoes (500g); dairy and eggs (250g); grains, cereals, fats, and sugars (400g). At this point, the ‘four food groups’ were complete, and the subsequent 1973 revision was primarily a rebranding from ‘Kagawa-style diet method’ (Kagawa-shiki shokuji hō) to the current ‘four-food-group point method’ (Watanabe, 2010, p. 51; see also Kagawa Eiyō Gakuen Kōhōbu, no date).
 
In its final form (figure 9), the point method was based on a 1600-calorie daily base. Kagawa calculated that the average daily consumption should be three ‘units’ (servings) from each of the first three groups and eleven units from the fourth. Each unit was equal to 80 calories. In other words, Kagawa specified that the standard diet should consist of three 80-calorie units (points) from the dairy, protein, and vegetable and fruits groups (total 720 calories), and eleven points (880 calories) plus additional servings as needed from the fourth group. Each group was marked with a playing card suit (spades, hearts, clubs, and diamonds), presumably as a mnemonic device not unlike the three colours preferred by the NIA (tables 3 and 4). They were also further broken down into subcategories, each of which was assigned a recommended number of 80g servings. For example, group 1 (spades) was subdivided into milk and dairy (two servings) and eggs (one). While the overall structure and layout of the four-group method was firmed up in the 1970s, these serving numbers have been continually adjusted in the intervening years in response to growing concerns about ‘lifestyle-related diseases’ (seikatsu shūkan byō) correlated with dietary imbalances and overeating such as diabetes, overweight, cardiovascular disorders, and some cancers. The original suggestion of eight servings of grains and cereals, two of fats, and one of sugars in group four (diamonds) has, for instance, been replaced with a 9:1.5:0.5 ratio. This brings the point method in line with 2020 updates to the government’s nutrition guidelines (Health Service Bureau, Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare, 2019; ‘Nihonjin no Shokuji Sesshu Kijun’ Sakutei Kentōkai, 2019).

Figure 9. The Nutriotional Point Method.

Table 4. Comparison of the NIA’s three-colour and Kagawa Aya’s four-group nutrition education models (1997 description).
 
Kagawa’s system has, for now at least, failed to gain popularity outside specialist circles. It is extraordinarily cumbersome. When the completed four-food-group point method was originally introduced in her university’s in-house journal, three pages of diagrams and serving-size tables accompanied the description (Yanagida, 1977). One, charting the ratio of serving sizes for different family members depending on their age, sex, and caloric expenditure, is seen in figure 9. The updated version (figure 10) is hardly better. With its twenty subgroups and complex conversions, this is not a method for the masses. It is a method for mastery. It is the product of Kagawa’s own prioritisation of scientific rigour. It also embodies her normative vision of highly professionalised and accomplished women as household managers, i.e., the ‘professional housewife’ (sengyō shufu) that had become a corporate priority in the 1950s and a mainstream ideology by the 1970s (Goldstein-Gidoni, 2012, chap. 2). Though the two worked closely together for a number of years, Kagawa’s high estimation of the capacities of ‘ordinary’ women and their ability to impact national eating habits contrasts with the underlying assumptions of the three-colour model’s number one promoter, Kondō Toshiko.

Figure 10. An Updated Nutritional Point Method.
 
Adachi Miyuki

In the 1960s, Adachi Miyuki developed a model of four core foods. This was a meal-based system centred on foods/dishes as served rather than on the nutrients or ingredients they contained. It was based on the ‘one soup, three dishes’ (ichijū sansai) meal held up as the epitome and standard of the ‘traditional Japanese diet’ despite the fact that it only became anything like the norm for the majority of Japanese around this time of rapid economic growth (see also Stalker, 2018, p. 7; Cwiertka and Yasuhara, 2020, chap. 1). Adachi’s attempted to replicate this composition, with one staple food, three sides (one primary and two secondary), and one soup. She later adapted this to bento as the ‘3-1-2 Lunch Box Magic Method’ (3-1-2 bentōbako hō). However, like Kagawa Aya’s four-group point method, it never gained as much traction as Kondō’s three-colour system, which is simple enough to have become the favourite nutrition education model even in elementary schools. Watanabe Shō (2009, p. 136) has suggested, reasonably, that this is because both models are difficult for ordinary consumers to implement in practice.
 
The core foods model was intended as a solution to shortcomings of existing diet and nutrition guidance. One problem, wrote Adachi, was the use of nutrients and ingredients , abstractions that failed realistically to intersect with how ordinary people prepared or chose and ate food. Put differently, the lexicon of these models revealed their biases and inutility: nutrients and ingredients are the language of bureaucrats, scientists, and industry, while ‘dishes’ or just ‘foods’ are the language of ordinary cooks and consumers. A second problem Adachi identified was that nutrient- and ingredient-based models generally assume two or more home-cooked meals per day. To frame good eating in terms of nutrients and ingredients in an age when so many people ate food prepared outside the home―at restaurants, markets, etc.—was the unrealistic imposition of a domestic ideology that did not match the lives of at least a plurality of Japanese people. This was increasingly true as time went on, making her core foods ‘food-choice-type’ (ryōri sentakugata) model more relevant than ever, she argued. After all, ‘since the so-called high-growth period and the urbanisation of the 1970s,’ observed Adachi (1984, pp. 71–72), looking back two decades after her first forays into the ‘core foods’ model, ‘the diet of the Japanese has changed dramatically, with the number of opportunities to make food in the home decreasing drastically.’ Finally, the older nutrition education models were developed in times of nutritional crisis and want. Their focus on minima made them inappropriate for the new world of excess (hōshoku no jidai). Without clearly defined upper limits, these older ways of communicating nutrition information were licenses for overeating and imbalance. Moreover, these existing systems presented daily requirements rather than per meal requirements, making them difficult to translate to individual meals.
 
An ideal meal based around the core foods, as Adachi (1984, p. 101) defined them, would consist of a grain or cereal staple (shushoku), a protein-source main dish (shusai), and two servings of side dishes (fukusai) to supplement the nutrition (vitamins and minerals) lacking in the other two dishes. The serving size for each of these dishes was 50g per meal―or ‘approximately the size of a single chicken egg,’ as Adachi put it―except in the case of the staple, which could be ‘50-60g or more.’ In other words, Adachi’s core foods system imagined small servings of diverse foods at each meal. These were defined in metric units, with customary references. The final product was not significantly different than other nutritional advice. The big difference was that Adachi worked backward from the final product to its parts. She later adapted this to bento as the ‘3-1-2 Lunch Box Magic Method’ (3-1-2 bentōbako hō). Here, the 3:1:2 ratio of dishes was forefronted, obviating the need for metric units to define each serving, as shown in figure 11 (Adachi, 2008, fig. 5, 2017, fig. 1).

Figure 11. The 3:1:2 Food Ratio.
 
Several things are noteworthy about these representations of Adachi’s system. First, the English and Japanese texts differ. The English includes several clarifications not present in the Japanese, such as definitions of shushoku, shusai, and fukusai; and a supplementary explanation of the polysemous adverb shikkari (properly, fully, etc.) in point 4. Additionally, perhaps in part because the Japanese text is from 2017 and the English from 2008, and at least reflecting the difference in intended audiences (domestic versus international), the Japanese references the government’s goals of improving food self-sufficiency also expressed in the 2005 Basic Law of Food Education (Shokuiku Kihon Hō), Food Guide, etc. Second, the first guideline, ‘choose an appropriate box size,’ references the fact that Adachi produces a line of bento boxes from 400 to 900ml in volume to be compatible with this ‘magic’ method (Ballam, 2009).
 
Overall, Adachi’s approach might be considered ‘democratising’ (or perhaps ‘populist’) to the extent that it attempts to move away from systems requiring the sort of specialised knowledge required to calculate nutrient contents in prepared foods. Adachi wanted a model that was firmly rooted in the everyday practices of preparing and eating foods both in the home and out. Any successful nutrition education system, she argued (1984, pp. 100–101), had to be ‘1) comprehensible to people not directly involved in food preparation, 2) easily usable in everyday and eating situations, and 3) understandable and compatible with knowledge about nutrient and ingredient balance that forms the framework of the existing models,’ i.e., the eiyōso sentakugata and shokuzai sentakugata systems. This meant that a high degree of flexibility had to be built into nutrition education. Her ‘core foods’ system referenced the idealised Japanese-style meal of ‘one soup and three side dishes’ (ichiju sansai) in its structure (see Cwiertka and Yasuhara, 2020, chap. 1), but broke from this prescription by resisting requiring soup or eliminating foods characterised as ‘non-Japanese.’ She (1984, p. 74) objected to such limitations, noting that doing so would threaten the diversity and creativity of cooking and eating. On the other hand, despite Adachi’s critique of ‘nutrient-choice-type’ and ‘ingredient-choice-type’ guides as out of touch with the actual eating habits of ordinary Japanese people, her emphasis on whole meals is curiously blind to snacking and other forms of informal eating, not to mention desserts.

Conclusion

Despite being modeled explicitly on a traditional child’s toy, even twenty years after its introduction, the Spinning Top is not the preferred method for teaching nutrition to children in elementary and preschool. That is still the province of the three-colour method, which is introduced as early as four years old in public preschools (c.f. Tobashi, 2012, p. 12; Bifukachō, 2022; Tōonshi, 2022), remains dominant in elementary education (c.f. Watashitachi no kateika 5-6, 2015, p. 110; Hamajima and Oka, 2019), and is even used in the education ministry’s (2021, p. 6) own in-house educational materials for middle school to explain more complex nutritional models. The two most striking examples of this come from the ministries’ own promotional materials. Figure 12 is from the front cover of the MHLW’s own Food Guide pamphlet. Though the image is foods-based and uses customary servings, the Spinning Top is nowhere to be seen. Instead, what is shown is the three-colour division applied to Adachi’s meal-based foundation. From left to right, Adachi’s fukusai-shushoku-shusai is mapped onto Kondō’s green, yellow, and red colour groups. Figure 13, on the other hand, is taken from MAFF’s most recent shokuiku pamphlet, which uses the three-colour scheme to describe the structure and content of the ideal meal. The picture is, in essence, of the so-called ‘Japanese-style dietary life’ (Nihongata shokuseikatsu, JSDL), which is in turn more or less identical to the popular definition of washoku used in domestic and international contexts as part of Japan’s national branding strategy (Kumakura, 2012, 2014; Cang, 2019; Cwiertka and Yasuhara, 2020).

Figure 12. The MHLW’s Food Guide pamphlet.

Figure 13. The Contemporary MAFF’s Three-Colour Guide.
 
In other words, more than seven decades after its introduction, the three-colour nutrition education model, which categorises foods based on easily understood functionality, remains―perhaps grudgingly―the accepted best methodology for communicating knowledge about nutrition and proper eating to laypersons of all ages and in diverse contexts. Being ‘good enough’ has been good enough. This is an instructive example of effective science communication, of how effectively to balance specialist knowledge with the needs of nonspecialist users and consumers of that data.

Notes

1. The unwieldy official names of each ministry are the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (MEXT, Monbukagakushō); Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare (MHLW, Kōseirōdōshō); and Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries (MAFF, Nōrinsuisanshō). The names and scope of duties of each ministry change during the time studies. Herein, with brevity and clarity in mind, the three agencies are referred to as the education, health, and agriculture ministries or by their current acronyms.

2. Kagawa was particularly interested in reproducibility, a legacy of her time in the laboratory as a medical student. In other words, she wanted to systematise cooking so that anyone with the correct manual could reliably create tasty and nutritious meals every time. In the postwar, this led her to invent custom measuring cups and spoons.

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Article copyright Nathan Hopson.

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