Milk and the Making of Modern Japan is the first English-language monograph on the cultural history of milk in Japan. Horiguchi’s research uncovers the complex intersectional relations between cow’s milk and human milk. The meanings attached to milk in Japan play a major role in modern Japanese notions of health and healing, imperial strength and postwar democratic reform, and the overlapping medical, material, and spiritual aspects of motherhood. Horiguchi’s innovative approach to the multifaceted interplay between mundane cow’s milk (gyū-nyū) and essentialized “mother’s milk” (bo-nyū) in Japan deepens readers’ understanding of overarching narratives of nation, health, and modernity—and the challenges these narratives face. Drawing on diverse sources, from textbooks and government policy statements to works of literature and visual representations of healthy Japanese bodies—and the national body—this study of cow’s milk as a supplement to and replacement for human milk tells the intricate and self-contradictory story of a seemingly unified, peaceful, and beautiful Japan that safeguards its racial and ethnic exceptionalism, male privilege, and control of female bodies. This project compels readers to think about the remaking of modern Japan both (1) through the lens of cow’s milk as a national drink and symbol in the Cold War era that functioned not only as part of the renewed nationalist discourse on recovery, growth, and strength, but also as “white liquid” that symbolically washed away colonial violence; and (2) through the use of “white ink” (breastmilk) by contemporary Japanese women writers whose works expose Japan’s postcolonial legacy and reclaim women’s agency.