Shokuiku: How Sagen Ishizuka Coined “Food Education”

Today almost every Japanese schoolchild knows the word 食育 (shokuiku, “food education”). It names a national law, a government programme, a monthly “food education day” and the lessons that come with the school lunch. Few people know that the word was invented more than a century ago by one man, the army pharmacist and food-cure physician Sagen Ishizuka (石塚左玄), who used it in his books of 1896 and 1898 to say that the way a child is fed is the foundation of every other kind of upbringing.

This page follows the word from its birth to the present: the sentence in which Ishizuka first wrote it, what he meant by it and why his version names a different set of “educations” from the one used today, its spread through a best-selling novel of 1903, its long disappearance, its revival in the early 2000s, the 2005 Shokuiku Basic Law and what that law actually says, the way Fukui, his home city, honours him as “the father of food education”, and the place of shokuiku in Japanese school lunches today. Ishizuka’s own words are reported as he wrote them, from his books as quoted by Japanese historians.

Table of Contents

  1. The Word 食育 and Its First Appearance
  2. The Sentence: “Body, Intellect and Ability Are Food Education”
  3. Why His Third Term Is 才育, Not 徳育
  4. What He Meant: Food Shapes Body, Mind and Character
  5. A Duty for Parents at Home
  6. Murai Gensai and the 1903 Novel Kuidōraku
  7. A Forgotten Word and Its Revival
  8. The 2005 Shokuiku Basic Law: What It Says
  9. Does the Law Name Him? Credit from Fukui and the Scholars
  10. Fukui, “Home of the Word Shokuiku”
  11. Shokuiku in Japanese School Lunches Today
  12. Key Research Papers
  13. Connections
  14. Featured Videos

1. The Word 食育 and Its First Appearance

The word is built from two characters: 食 (shoku, food or eating) and 育 (iku, raising or education), the same 育 found in 教育 (kyōiku, education) and 体育 (taiiku, physical education). Ishizuka made it on the pattern of the educational words of his day, which divided the upbringing of a child into kinds of 育, and he added a new kind at the base of them all.

The Japanese reference literature places its first appearance in print in his two main books. The first is 『化学的食養長寿論』 (Kagakuteki Shokuyō Chōjuron, “A Chemical Theory of Food-Cure for Long Life”), published in June 1896, where the sentence containing the word stands on page 276. The second is 『通俗食物養生法』 (Tsūzoku Shokumotsu Yōjōhō, “A Popular Guide to Food for Health”), the popular version of his theory, published in January 1898, where the word appears in the book’s introduction and again later in the text. (Japanese Wikipedia cites page 5 and page 178 of the 1898 book in its two articles; the historian Namimatsu Nobuhisa gives page 276 of the 1896 book and page 5 of the 1898 book.)

So the word was born inside Ishizuka’s 食養 (shokuyō, “food cure”), his system of healing and keeping health through diet. Shokuyō was the treatment; shokuiku was the same knowledge applied to raising children. Fukui Prefecture’s history series sums up his view: food education is the most important part of a child’s upbringing and the base of all education. The full food-cure system is described on Shokuyō: Sagen Ishizuka’s Food Cure.

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2. The Sentence: “Body, Intellect and Ability Are Food Education”

The sentence in which the word first appears is short. In modern characters it reads:

「体育智育才育は即ち食育なり」 — “Physical education, intellectual education and the education of ability are, in truth, food education.”

In the original Meiji orthography the first character is written 躰 or 體 instead of 体, giving 躰育智育才育は即ち食育なり. The three terms are 体育 (taiiku, the raising of the body), 智育 (chiiku, the raising of the intellect or wisdom) and 才育 (saiiku, the raising of ability or talent). The word 即ち (sunawachi) means “that is to say” or “in other words”: Ishizuka was not adding food education as a fourth subject beside the other three but saying that all three come down to, and rest on, how a child is fed.

In the introduction to the 1898 book the sentence sits inside a longer statement of the book’s purpose, which the historian Fujii Yoshihiro quotes in full. In outline, Ishizuka wrote that the book gave an easy chemical explanation of the cause and effect that allows one to state with confidence that body, intellect and ability education are food education, and that it was a practical guide to 食育食養法 (shokuiku shokuyō hō, “the method of food education and food cure”), which the people of a warm island nation in the East should put into practice without delay, beginning with how they combine their dishes. The scholar Yamamoto Hinako adds the sentence that follows: the book was meant to help readers judge how much to increase or reduce the vegetable and meat foods they ate every day, and which foods did good or harm.

Fukui City gives a modern paraphrase of the same idea aimed squarely at families: 「学童を持つ人は、躰育も智育も才育もすべて食育にあると考えるべきである」, “those who have school-age children should regard physical, intellectual and ability education as all lying in food education.”

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3. Why His Third Term Is 才育, Not 徳育

Readers who know Japanese education often “correct” Ishizuka’s sentence without noticing. The standard triad of modern Japanese schooling, then and now, is 知育・徳育・体育 (chiiku, tokuiku, taiiku): intellectual, moral and physical education. That is the triad used by the novelist Murai Gensai in 1903 (section 6) and by the 2005 law (section 8). Ishizuka’s triad is different. Where the standard list has 徳育, moral education, he wrote 才育, the education of ability; and for the intellect he used 智 (wisdom) rather than 知 (knowledge).

The choice fits his own theory of character. In the 1898 book (pages 160–171, as summarised by Japanese Wikipedia and by Namimatsu) Ishizuka taught that food builds two different mental faculties. Potassium-rich, low-sodium food, the food of the plant world, builds 智 (chi), wisdom and knowledge, together with patience, thoughtfulness and perseverance. Sodium-rich food, the food of the animal world and of salt, builds 才 (sai), quick talent and drive, along with physical strength. He summed it up as 「智は本にして才は末なり」, “wisdom is the root, talent the branch”. Body, wisdom and ability were therefore exactly the three things he believed food shaped directly through its balance of sodium and potassium, and his sentence lists them. Yamamoto notes that Ishizuka described the 1898 book as an extract of the 1896 book’s food-cure teaching chiefly on 無病健康と智才能力, “health without disease and the powers of wisdom and ability”.

Moral character was not missing from his thought; he simply did not put it in this sentence. In 1904 he published a book on food cure and moral character, 『礼義廉耻の食養論』 (“Food Cure for Courtesy, Righteousness, Integrity and Shame”). The sodium–potassium theory behind his triad is explained on The Husband-and-Wife Alkali Theory: Sodium and Potassium in Food.

The difference matters for accuracy. The law’s phrase “the basis of intellectual, moral and physical education” is often quoted as if it were Ishizuka’s. It is not: his words are 体育・智育・才育, body, wisdom and ability.

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4. What He Meant: Food Shapes Body, Mind and Character

Behind the word stands the central principle of his food cure, stated on the first page of the 1909 edition of the 1898 book:

「食は本なり、体は末なり、心はまたその末なり」 — “Food is the root; the body is the branch; and the mind is the branch of that.”

If food is the root and the body and mind grow from it, then educating the body and mind must start with food. Ishizuka put the same idea in other forms. Food, he wrote, is “the visible cause of the mind” and the mind “the invisible result of food” (as quoted by Namimatsu). To purify the mind, purify the blood; to purify the blood, purify the food (Japanese Wikipedia, citing the 1898 book, page 182).

For children this meant a particular diet. Ishizuka taught that children should eat more of the potassium-rich foods that build wisdom and patience, and that adults could move gradually towards more sodium as their work demanded, but that too much sodium shortened life, the body and wisdom alike. The rule throughout was 中庸 (chūyō), the middle way. His other teachings fed into the same education: that humans are by nature grain eaters and should make whole grain, above all brown rice, their staple; that food should be eaten whole; and that people should eat the food of the land and season where they live, a principle he called 入郷従郷 (nyūgō jūgō, “on entering a district, follow its ways”). These are set out on Humans as Grain Eaters: Ishizuka on Teeth, Brown Rice and Whole Foods.

Yamamoto, writing on the significance of his work for nutrition education, describes his books as an attempt to explain the old wisdom of eating for health in the new language of chemistry, in terms ordinary people could understand and put into practice, which she calls an educational strategy in its own right.

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5. A Duty for Parents at Home

Ishizuka addressed shokuiku first of all to parents. Fukui Prefecture’s account says he wrote that food education is the most important part of a child’s upbringing, the base of all education, and a task to be carried out by parents in the home. Fukui City lists it as the first of his “six teachings on food”: 「食育は家庭教育」, “food education is home education”. In the city’s wording, in a child’s education the food education that concerns health and life matters most, and it is the education that parents give at home.

Fukui City’s summary of the six teachings is a convenient short form of the whole system, as the city presents it:

  1. Food education is home education: parents are responsible for it.
  2. Life lies in food (食養道, shokuyō-dō, the way of food cure): body and mind are made from food.
  3. Humans are grain-eating animals, as the number of molars and the shape of the jaw show, and the Japanese are a people who eat rice as their staple.
  4. Eat foods whole (一物全体食, ichibutsu zentai shoku), because nourishment lies in the whole food, not in a part of it.
  5. Eat fresh, local, seasonal food (入郷従郷 and 身土不二).
  6. Keep balance (平衡, heikō): eat a little of everything, without bias.

Two of the labels in this list were not Ishizuka’s own. The name 一物全体 for eating foods whole is what his followers called the idea, and 身土不二 (shindo fuji, “body and soil are not two”) is a Buddhist term that Nishibata Manabu of the Shokuyō-kai adopted around 1912, after Ishizuka’s death. Ishizuka’s own phrase for eating the food of one’s land was 入郷従郷. Fukui City itself notes that it was his disciples who used 身土不二 to pass on his teaching.

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6. Murai Gensai and the 1903 Novel Kuidōraku

Ishizuka’s books sold well, but the word shokuiku reached its largest Meiji audience through a novel. Murai Gensai (村井弦斎, 1864–1927) was a writer and the editor-in-chief of the Tokyo newspaper 報知新聞 (Hōchi Shinbun) from 1895. According to Japanese Wikipedia, he had read Ishizuka’s books and agreed with them. From January to December 1903 he serialised in his paper a series of didactic novels, and the most famous of them, 『食道楽』 (Kuidōraku, roughly “The Gourmet” or “The Pleasures of Eating”), became one of the most widely read books of the Meiji era, weaving more than six hundred seasonal dishes and food topics into its story. It was then published in book form in several volumes.

In the autumn volume, in a chapter numbered 252 and titled 「食育論」 (“On Food Education”), one of Murai’s characters says:

「小児には徳育よりも、智育よりも、体育よりも、食育がさき。体育、徳育の根元も食育にある」 — “For a small child, food education comes before moral education, before intellectual education, before physical education. The root of physical and moral education, too, lies in food education.”

Murai’s version uses the standard triad, with 徳育 (moral education), rather than Ishizuka’s body, wisdom and ability. It is Murai’s sentence, not Ishizuka’s, that is closest to the wording later used in the 2005 law. Murai’s wife, the cookery writer Murai Takako, also wrote on the importance of food education. Later in life Murai himself turned to the study of brown rice as a treatment for beriberi, and to fasting and natural foods.

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7. A Forgotten Word and Its Revival

For a short time the word had a home in organised groups. In 1905 a society called the 帝国食育会 (Teikoku Shokuiku-kai, Imperial Food Education Society), led by Uji Haruchiyo, was founded to put Ishizuka’s teaching into practice; it had about three hundred members and was inactive by 1907. Members of the 食養会 (Shokuyō-kai, Food Cure Society), founded in 1907 around Ishizuka and his teaching, also spoke of shokuiku. Outside these circles, however, Japanese Wikipedia notes that the word was almost unknown.

After Ishizuka’s death in 1909 and the end of Murai’s best-seller years, the word faded almost completely. Fujii reports a survey that found 食育 in none of twenty-eight Taishō- and Shōwa-era Japanese dictionaries held by the National Diet Library. Ishizuka’s ideas lived on under other names, carried forward by the Shokuyō-kai, by brown-rice health movements and, through his disciple Sakurazawa Yukikazu (George Ohsawa), by macrobiotics, as told on From Shokuyō to Macrobiotics: Ishizuka’s Disciples and Legacy.

The word returned in the 1990s and early 2000s. Japanese Wikipedia records a 1993 book from the Ministry of Health and Welfare’s nutrition section titled 『食育時代の食を考える』 (“Thinking about Food in the Age of Food Education”), books by food writers with shokuiku in their titles from the late 1990s, and, on November 21, 2002, the creation of a shokuiku study council within the ruling party’s policy research organisation. In 2003 Prime Minister Koizumi Jun’ichirō spoke of shokuiku in his policy speech, and the word entered everyday language. As people looked for its origin, Ishizuka and Murai, long buried in history, came back to light.

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8. The 2005 Shokuiku Basic Law: What It Says

The 食育基本法 (Shokuiku Kihon Hō, Shokuiku Basic Law) is Act No. 63 of 2005 (平成十七年法律第六十三号). It was passed on June 10, 2005, promulgated on June 17, 2005, and took effect in July 2005. Researchers at Japan’s National Institute of Health and Nutrition describe it as the first law that regulates people’s diets and eating habits. Its full current text is published on the Japanese government’s e-Gov law database, from which the points below are taken.

The heart of the preamble is the sentence that echoes, in standard form, the idea Ishizuka and Murai had put into words a century earlier:

「食育を、生きる上での基本であって、知育、徳育及び体育の基礎となるべきものと位置付けるとともに、様々な経験を通じて「食」に関する知識と「食」を選択する力を習得し、健全な食生活を実践することができる人間を育てる食育を推進することが求められている。」 — “Food education should be placed as the foundation of living and the basis of intellectual, moral and physical education; and food education should be promoted that, through varied experience, raises people who have the knowledge of food and the ability to choose food, and who can practise a healthy diet.”

The preamble also says that, for children to grow in humanity and gain the strength to live, “food matters above all”, and that food education for children has a great influence on the growth of body and mind and on the formation of character. It names the problems the law was written to meet: unbalanced nutrition, irregular meals, rising obesity and lifestyle diseases, excessive desire for thinness, the waste of food that could still be eaten, new food-safety problems, dependence on imported food, and the danger that Japan’s regional food culture would be lost.

The articles then set out its principles and duties:

The law’s fifth article echoes Ishizuka’s first teaching that food education begins at home, and its seventh echoes his call to eat the food of one’s own land and tradition. The words are the law’s, not his.

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9. Does the Law Name Him? Credit from Fukui and the Scholars

The law does not mention Ishizuka. A search of its full text on e-Gov finds no occurrence of his name (石塚). Nor does it use his triad: it speaks of intellectual, moral and physical education (知育、徳育及び体育), the standard formula, where he wrote body, wisdom and ability.

The credit comes from others. Fukui City writes that the idea of food education Ishizuka left behind in the Meiji era has come back to life and “can be said to have become the cornerstone of the Shokuiku Basic Law” (「『食育基本法』の礎になったといえます」). The city’s food-education plan goes further and calls him, in that sense, “the parent of the Shokuiku Basic Law” (「食育基本法の生みの親」). Yamamoto, writing in 2025, says that the origin of shokuiku is traced to Ishizuka’s first use of the word in 1896 and that “its idea is reflected in the Shokuiku Basic Law” (「食育基本法にもその理念が反映されている」), linking his purpose directly to the preamble’s description of food education as the basis of the other educations. Fujii notes that the government’s Second Basic Programme for shokuiku speaks of re-evaluating traditional 食養生 (shokuyōjō, eating for health), a tradition that includes Ishizuka’s view.

The fair summary is therefore: the 2005 law does not name him, but Fukui City and Japanese scholars regard his idea as its root.

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10. Fukui, “Home of the Word Shokuiku”

Ishizuka was born in 1851 in the castle town of Fukui, in the district then called Koyasu-chō, today Hōei 4-chōme in Fukui City. His home city and prefecture have made him the face of their food-education work.

Sources for this section: Fukui City’s introduction to Ishizuka Sagen and its Fourth Shokuiku Promotion Plan (PDF); Fukui Prefecture’s history story no. 47 (PDF), its June 2007 newsletter (PDF) and its food-education exhibit sheet (PDF); and the Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries’ reports of the Eiheiji Ishizuka Sagen lunch and the 2018 Fukui City school lesson (PDFs).

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11. Shokuiku in Japanese School Lunches Today

The place where most Japanese people meet shokuiku is the school lunch, 給食 (kyūshoku). Tanaka and Miyoshi of the national education ministry and the National Institute of Health and Nutrition describe the system in a 2012 paper. The present programme rests on the School Lunch Act of 1954, whose main purpose was the healthy development of children’s minds and bodies. In 2008 the Act was revised and its aim changed to “promoting shokuiku”. As of May 2009 about ten million schoolchildren took part. The lunch is itself treated as a lesson: the children serve the food and clear the dishes, learn table manners by eating together with their classmates, and learn about balanced diets and food culture through each day’s menu.

To strengthen school food education, the ministry created the 栄養教諭 (diet and nutrition teacher) system in April 2007, the post named in Article 20 of the Basic Law. Tanaka and Miyoshi report that schools with diet and nutrition teachers have seen greater awareness of diet among teachers and parents and fewer children skipping breakfast. Nakamura, writing in 2008, describes how the role of school dietitians shifted from planning and supervising meals to teaching as well. He also recalls the history behind it: after the Second World War the school lunch programme was built on imported flour and skimmed milk, and dietitians were trained to encourage Western eating habits, which by the 1980s were linked to overeating and obesity.

Miyoshi, Tsuboyama-Kasaoka and Nishi (2012) note that the concept of shokuiku reaches further than nutrition education in the usual international sense. Beyond improving intake and preventing obesity and lifestyle diseases, it sets out to preserve food culture, especially through the schools, and to improve the food environment, and they propose it as a model for other Asian countries.

Research has followed the programme’s results. Kuwahara and Eum (2022), analysing a 2019 national survey of attitudes to shokuiku, found that adults who had received food education in elementary and junior high school tended to view it more positively, and that family conversation about food during the elementary-school years was linked to more nutritionally balanced eating in adult life. Takimoto and colleagues (2015) examined how “family meals”, 共食 (kyōshoku, eating together), one of the few numerical goals of the national programme, should be defined and measured. Kurotani and colleagues (2019) analysed the specific goals that Japan’s 47 prefectures set in their own shokuiku programmes, as the law requires. Adachi (2008) discusses the theory of nutrition education behind the law, with examples from Japanese schools.

Much of this would have been familiar to Ishizuka: food taught as the base of a child’s development, a duty shared by home and school, local and seasonal ingredients, and whole foods on the lunch tray, as in Fukui’s “whole-food lunches”. The traditional Japanese diet that school lunches are meant to pass on has itself become a subject of research, as reviewed by Gabriel and colleagues (2018).

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Key Research Papers

  1. Ishizuka S. 人類ハ穀食動物ナリ [Humankind is a grain-eating animal]. Yakugaku Zasshi. 1894;(148):532-8. — DOI: 10.1248/yakushi1881.1894.148_532
  2. Ishizuka S. 第三章 食物中夫婦亞兒加里ノ性質論 [On the properties of the husband-and-wife alkalis in food]. Yakugaku Zasshi. 1895;(155):48-58. — DOI: 10.1248/yakushi1881.1895.155_48
  3. 山本妃奈子. 石塚左玄の「食養道」における栄養教育的意義：健康食の思想と栄養教育との関連から [The significance for nutrition education of Ishizuka Sagen’s way of food cure]. Hiroshima Bunkyo Daigaku Kiyo. 2025;60:34-47. — DOI: 10.51095/kiyo.60.04
  4. 河野公子. 食育 [Food education]. Nippon Shokuhin Kagaku Kogaku Kaishi. 2007;54(4):204. — DOI: 10.3136/nskkk.54.204
  5. Adachi M. Theories of nutrition education and promotion in Japan: enactment of the “Food Education Basic Law”. Asia Pac J Clin Nutr. 2008;17 Suppl 1:180-4. — PubMed PMID: 18296332
  6. Nakamura T. The integration of school nutrition program into health promotion and prevention of lifestyle-related diseases in Japan. Asia Pac J Clin Nutr. 2008;17 Suppl 1:349-51. — PubMed PMID: 18296376
  7. Tanaka N, Miyoshi M. School lunch program for health promotion among children in Japan. Asia Pac J Clin Nutr. 2012;21(1):155-8. — PubMed PMID: 22374573
  8. Miyoshi M, Tsuboyama-Kasaoka N, Nishi N. School-based “Shokuiku” program in Japan: application to nutrition education in Asian countries. Asia Pac J Clin Nutr. 2012;21(1):159-62. — PubMed PMID: 22374574
  9. Takimoto H, Sarukura N, Ishikawa-Takata K. How to define family meals in “Shokuiku” (food and nutrition education). J Nutr Sci Vitaminol (Tokyo). 2015;61 Suppl:S10-2. — PubMed PMID: 26598813
  10. Kurotani K, Kaneda Y, Oobuchi T, Takimoto H. [Promotion of Shokuiku in 47 prefectures of Japan: an analysis of specific goals of basic Shokuiku programs]. Nihon Koshu Eisei Zasshi. 2019;66(12):756-66. — PubMed PMID: 31875626
  11. Kuwahara M, Eum W. Effects of childhood nutrition education from school and family on eating habits of Japanese adults. Nutrients. 2022;14(12):2517. — PubMed PMID: 35745246
  12. Gabriel AS, Ninomiya K, Uneyama H. The role of the Japanese traditional diet in healthy and sustainable dietary patterns around the world. Nutrients. 2018;10(2):173. — PubMed PMID: 29401650

PubMed Topic Searches

  1. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/?term=shokuiku
  2. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/?term=school+lunch+Japan
  3. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/?term=food+education+basic+law+Japan
  4. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/?term=macrobiotic+diet

Further Reading

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Connections

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