Indigenous and Introduced: How Beef-eating Acceptance Affected the Cattle Industry in Modern Japan

Abstract

The intention of this paper is to describe how the cattle industry in Japan had changed with the introduction of beef eating habits. Before the Japanese Meiji Restoration, meat-eating had been formally prohibited. In practice, some people had opportunities to eat game, although livestock had been severely tabooed. In the Civilization and Enlightenment period of Japan, beef eating spread rapidly. It was mainly eaten in an indigenous cooking method called a beef “hot pot.” This cooking method influenced the development of beef fattening. In the pre-war period, farmers kept only a single cow for plowing, transporting, and collecting fertilizer, but the process of fattening was added later introduced to satisfy people''s appetites for better-tasting beef. The goal of fattening had consistently been fatty meat. With the development of fattening technology, the ideal meat in the 1920s was fatty meat with intramuscular marbling. This beef-eating culture is inextricably linked with the fact that beef was first accepted as a hot pot dish in the modern era. Cattle fattening in developed areas took place within the conventional system of cattle rearing, which involved single cattle rearing system combined with arable agriculture. The fact that multiple cattle rearing based on the Western model did not take root is not seen as a delay in the modernization of Japanese livestock breeding, but rather as a technical and managerial rationale for combining single-head rearing practices with the utilization of that cattle for arable agriculture. Even though the indigenous cattle rearing system remained, the introduction of live cattle from colonial Korea brought complexities to the Japanese cattle industry. The importation of Korean cattle brought about a qualitative diversity as well as a quantitative expansion in terms of the supply of cheaper and leaner beef, and contributed to the change in consumption that has been termed the “popularization of meat eating.”