From raw brown sugar to refined white sugar, Japanese people have demonstrated a preference for modern commercial products in their consumption of sugar in the 19th century. To make such transformation possible, the Japanese colonial empire refined imported sugar in domestic Japan to serve the ever-increasing sugar demand. From depending on brown sugar import from Ryukyu and yellow sugar import from Taiwan to exporting white sugar to its colonies, Japan’s industrilization and colonial expansion have made this nation modernized which is also reflected in people’s taste for refined white sugar and the notion of “civilization” that the commodity symbolizes.