From ‘Sacred Cow’ to Kobe Beef: Japan’s Bovine Revolution · From ‘Sacred Cow’ to Kobe Beef: Japan’s Bovine Revolution ... Subcontinent to the “Far East ... one of the

From ‘Sacred Cow’ to Kobe Beef: Japan’s Bovine Revolution Daniel Botsman (Department of History, Yale University) Agrarian Studies Colloquium Series, Yale University, Spring 2014 WORK IN PROGRESS. PLEASE DO NOT CITE OR CIRCULATE WITHOUT PERMISSION. “Kobe beef” today is, of course, a well-known luxury food brand, recognized all over the

world, and especially popular in the United States. A full history of the emergence of

this global brand would undoubtedly require close examination of developments in the

decades after World War II, when Japan’s agrarian economy was transformed, and when

the massive and ongoing U.S. military presence in North East Asia, in addition to

growing corporate and other elite connections, helped facilitate the creation and spread of

new kinds of “Japanese” culinary culture around the world.1 This paper focuses on an

earlier moment of cross-cultural interaction, in the middle decades of the 19th century,

and seeks to explain how and why the port city of Kobe first came to be associated with

the production of beef. In order to do this it will examine aspects of the agrarian history

of the Japanese islands, especially during the Tokugawa period (1600-1867), and will

consider the relevance to our understanding of the history of human-animal interaction in

the archipelago of two phenomenon that are more (stereo) typically associated with South

Asia: the “sacred cow” and “untouchability”. While keenly aware of the dangers of

positing any simplistic notion of a unitary “Oriental” culture stretching from the

Subcontinent to the “Far East”, it is nevertheless hoped that the paper might, in this

1 Events such as the establishment of the “Japanese steakhouse” chain, Benihana of Tokyo, in 1964, by the Japanese-American entrepreneur Hiroaki “Rocky” Aoki, would no doubt form a key part of such a history. 2 The point here, of course, is not to exclude Europe from the comparative frame, but simply to decenter or, to use Dipesh Chakrabarty’s memorable formulation, “provincialize” it. On the foundational importance of comparisions between Japan and

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regard, help suggest the potential value of comparative histories that consider different

regions of Asia, and do not focus solely on identifying parallels with Western Europe, as

has typically been the case for Japan since the late nineteenth century.2

What is today the Kobe metropolitan area has been home to a significant port since at

least the 8th century, when Ōwada-no-tomari served as a key point of connection between

the Yamato state and the Asian continent. By the end of the 12th century the main

settlement in the area had come to be known as Hyōgo, and during the “great peace” of

the Tokugawa period it was to emerge as one of the most important centers of commerce

on the busy waterways of the Inland Sea. Little wonder, then, that in the 1850s, after

Commodore Perry’s gunboats had taken the lead in “opening” Japan to the West, that

Hyōgo was chosen to become one of the country’s new “treaty ports.” Because of the

political tumult fomented by the signing of the treaties, the Western powers eventually

agreed to delay the official opening of the new foreign concession at Hyōgo, which was

to be built on land at the edge of the neighboring fishing village of Kōbe. In the end,

therefore, it was in 1868, just as Japan’s old regime was being toppled by a regional

alliance from the South West acting in the name of the boy Emperor, Meiji, that the first

2 The point here, of course, is not to exclude Europe from the comparative frame, but simply to decenter or, to use Dipesh Chakrabarty’s memorable formulation, “provincialize” it. On the foundational importance of comparisions between Japan and Europe for the field of Japanese history see, Thomas Keirstead, “Inventing Medieval Japan: The History and Politics of National Identity”, The Medieval History Journal 1:1 (Jan-Jun 1998): 47-71. My thoughts on the potential value of comparisons with South Asia, particularly in relation to the question of caste, have been shaped by the recent work of Japanese medievalist, Ōyama Kyōhei. For a critical appraisal of his contributions, see Daniel Botsman, “Kaasuto seido to mibun seido, hikaku rekishigaku no kanōsei ni tsuite,” Buraku Mondai Kenkyū 195 (Jan 2011): 29-46. (“Caste and status: On the possibilities of comparative history”).

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Western traders, missionaries and diplomats arrived to take up residence. A year later,

the acting British Consul in Hyōgo, as it was still officially known, submitted a report on

the outlook for “Foreign Trade” in the newly opened port, which included the following

passage:

It is estimated that during the summer months 60 head, and during the winter months 100 head of cattle are killed daily within this district for foreign consumption. The cattle are raised principally in the province of Bizen and at a place called Ikeda, near Osaka. They are fed on barley and rice-straw, and their superiority over cattle of other parts of Japan is attributed to the better quality of food procurable. Great attention is now being paid to the breeding and rearing of cattle at the places above-mentioned, so that there is little fear of a failure in supply. It is computed that the demand will average 150 head per diem.3

What this, of course, makes clear is that from the very beginning of Western residence in

the area, Kobe was associated with the production of beef. Not only that, but “Kobe beef”

already seems to have been a kind of proto-brand--recognized for its “superiority” to the

beef available in “other parts of Japan”. If this early association with quality is striking,

the quantity of cattle described here as having been put to the slaughter is also worth

noting: Taken at face value, the estimate of 60 head a day in the summer months, and 100

head a day in the winter would give us an annual total of between 20 and 30,000 cattle

slaughtered in Kobe in its first year of operation as a “treaty port”. By the standards of

today’s industrialized slaughter this may not seem especially high –as Timothy Patchirat

reminds us in his powerful book, Every Twelve Seconds, at the beginning of the 21st

century more than 33 million cattle are killed for their meat each year in the United

3 Kōbe shiyaku sho, ed., Kōbe-‐shi shi (Kyōto: Naigai shuppan, 1924), Shiryo 3: 30.

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States.4 In 1868, however, the slaughter of cattle had not yet been mechanized: As

contemporary Japanese observers noted, killing a cow meant first immobilizing it by

binding it to a wooden frame and then swinging an axe at its head—a method known as

“pole axing” [IMAGE 1]. This, of course, made it hard to kill large numbers of animals

quickly. Yet, the understanding that significant numbers of cattle were being killed in

Kobe in the years immediately following the arrival of the first Western residents was

hardly limited to the acting British consul: At the end of 1869, The Hiogo and Osaka

Herald, one of the new English-language newspapers established in Kobe, estimated that

in the two years following the port’s “opening” to foreign residence, “about 500,000 head

of cattle have been purchased by foreign dealers” at the local cattle yards for the purpose

of “beef eating.”5 This number was without question a gross exaggeration, but the fact

that such a claim could be made is surely suggestive of the general sense that the

slaughter of cattle had become commonplace. Further evidence still of the strong early

association between Kobe and beef is also provided by the large number of

advertisements for Western butcher shops that appear in the pages of the same newspaper

in this period [IMAGE 2].

What makes this early connection to beef surprising is the simple fact that for centuries

prior to the Meiji Restoration the eating of beef and, more fundamentally, the killing of

cattle had been strongly proscribed. We may not typically associate Japan with the idea

of the “sacred cow” but there is plenty of evidence to suggest that something very similar

to that notion formed a significant and enduring strand of the culture the archipelago.

4 Timothy Patchirat, Every Twelve Seconds: Industrialized Slaughter and the Politics of Sight (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011), Kindle edition: Location 151. 5 Hiogo & Osaka Herald 104 (December 24th, 1869), 403-4

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The earliest formal bans on meat eating were issued by the Imperial court in the 7th

century and in the middle of the 8th century, Emperor Shōmu, a strong supporter of

Image 1 Woodblock print of an American Butcher in Yokohama

(Print by Yoshiiku with text by Kanagaki Robun)

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Image 2

The Hiogo & Osaka Herald (Note the advertisements for butcher shops and meat for sale)

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Buddhism, explicitly prohibited the killing of cattle and horses.6 We should not assume,

of course, that early bans of this kind automatically transformed the habits and behavior

of the entire human population, but in the millennium that followed these initial decrees it

is clear that an aversion to the killing of domestic animals and, in particular, cattle,

became commonplace throughout the Japanese islands.7 This was something that the

Jesuits and other Europeans who reached Japan in the 16th century routinely noted.

Commenting on Japanese food, for example, João Rodrigues observed, “They eat only

wild game at banquets and their ordinary meals, for they regard a man who slaughters an

animal reared in his house as cruel and unclean.”8 Elsewhere in his writings Rodrigues

noted that as a result of Portuguese influence, some Japanese in the late 16th century,

including members of the nobility, had begun to experiment with European-style meat

eating: “Thus,” he wrote, “the practice is no longer considered so loathsome and horrible

in the kingdom as it was formerly, when they would strike us in the face as an insult,

declaring that we ate cows and domestic animals, and even human flesh.”9 In spite of

Rodrigues’ claims about the growing acceptability of meat eating, moreover, it is surely

6 Kamo Giichi, Nihon Chikusanshi (Tokyo: Hōsei daigaku shuppankyoku, 1976), 128-‐61. Harada Nobuo, Rekishi no naka no kome to niku: Shokumotsu to Tennō, sabetsu (Tokyo: Heibonsha, 2005), 81-‐102. Pieter DeGanon, “The Animal Economy” (Ph.D. dissertation, Princeton, 2011), 6-‐11. 7 For a general discussion of the process by which this aversion spread in the medieval period see, Harada, Rekishi no naka, 103-‐192. In English, see also De Ganon. 8 Michael Cooper, trans., João Rodrigues’s Account of Sixteenth Century Japan (London: The Hakluyt Society, 2001), 263. For other examples of Iberians commenting on the Japanese aversion to beef, see note 2 on p. 110. See also Akira Shimizu, “Meat-‐eating in the Kōjimachi District of Edo,” in Japanese foodways, past, and present, ed. Eric C. Rath and Stephanie Assmann (Urbana, Ill.: University of Illinois Press, 2010), 93-‐7. 9 Cooper, João Rodrigues’s Account, 110. De Ganon suggests that the idea of beef as a kind of “gateway drug” (my term) that might well lead to cannibalism was by no means uncommon. De Ganon, “Animal Economy”, 36-‐7.

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significant that in 1587, when Toyotomi Hideyoshi, the great warrior hegemon of the day,

issued the first official order to expel the Jesuits from Japan, one of the key justifications

he gave, alongside their involvement in the slave trade, was the practice of killing cows

(and horses).10 A clear sense of the way in which the slaughter of these animals, again

linked to the slave trade, came to form part of a general image of Christian wickedness

and depravity in this period is provided by the description of Portuguese ships in a

contemporary account of Hideyoshi’s military campaigns called the Kyūshū Godōzaki:

“[They] bought up hundreds of Japanese for their Black Ships, men and women both, and,

having put iron chains on their arms and legs threw them below the decks and subjected

them to tortures worse than hell. They bought up cattle and horses too and, after flaying

them alive, the priests and their followers used their hands to eat [the flesh]. Among

parent and child, and among siblings too, civility was abandoned, and it was as if this

world [of humans] were transformed into a Realm of Beasts (chikushōdō).”11

Under the early Tokugawa shoguns, of course, Hideyoshi’s initial efforts to curtail the

influence of Christianity grew into a fully-fledged campaign to eradicate it entirely—and

starting in 1613, the Tokugawa also followed the example set earlier by Hideyoshi and

began to issue their own bans on the slaughter of cattle.12 As Tsukamoto Manabu has

shown, the first century of the Tokugawa peace gave rise to various important shifts in

the general nature of human-animal interactions and, of course, Tokugawa efforts to

10 Maki Hidemasa, Jinshin baibai (Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 1971), 63. Charles Boxer, The Christian Century in Japan (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1951), 146-‐7. De Ganon, “Animal Economy”, 49. 11 Cited in Maki, Jinshin baibai, 61-‐2. Cf. George Elison, Deus Destroyed: The Image of Christianity in Early Modern Japan (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1973), 125. 12 Kamo, Nihon chikusanshi, 190.

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implement and enforce laws to protect animals were to reach a new height during the

reign of Tsunayoshi (r. 1680-1709)—the so-called “Dog Shogun” (inu kubō). As this

nickname indicates, Tsunayoshi’s “Laws of Compassion” are most closely associated

with the protection of dogs, but as Tsukamoto points out, the laws he enacted regarding

the abandonment of sick cattle and horses were, in fact, both stricter and further

reaching.13 Whereas many of the measures implemented under Tsunayoshi for the

protection of animals were repealed after his death in 1709, moreover, restrictions on the

killing of cattle seem if anything to have intensified in the early 18th century. In the late

1710s, for example, we find official records from Kyoto listing the killing of cows

alongside patricide as a particularly heinous crime, punishable with crucifixion, and in

the 1730s decrees were posted around the country on the “tall signs” (kōsatsu) that the

warrior state used to disseminate its most basic laws, again condemning the killing of

cows.14

As Japanese food historians have shown, it would be a mistake to imagine that the

inhabitants of the archipelago consumed no meat at all during the Edo period.15 In

general, the consumption of four-legged animals (as opposed to birds and fish) was

widely viewed as a potential source of defilement, but as Akira Shimizu notes, an even

more fundamental distinction seems to have been maintained between “draft animals

13 Tsukamoto Manabu, Shōrui o meguru seiji: Genroku no fōkuroa (Tokyo: Heibonsha, 1993), 238. On changes in human-‐animal relations in this period see also, Harada, Rekishi no naka, 288-‐9. 14 Yokota Fuyuhiko, “Senshi sareta shokunin shūdan,” in Nihon no shakai shi 6: Shakai-‐teki sho sho shūdan, ed. Asao Naohiro et. al. (Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 1988), 312-‐14. 15 In addition to the works by Kamo, Harada, Shimizu and De Ganon cited above, see also, Hans Martin Krämer, “’Not Befitting Our Divine Country’: Eating Meat in Japanese Discourses of the Self and Other from the Seventeenth Century to the Present,” Food and Foodways 16:1 (2008), 33-‐62.

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useful to agriculture and game animals inimical to it”.16 In his account of the

development of the so-called “beast market” (kemono dana) in Edo’s Kōjimachi district,

Shimizu notes that by the late 18th century it was possible to purchase and eat the flesh of

all manner of wild animal in the shogun’s capital—not only boar and deer, but also

“foxes, wolves, bears, raccoons, otters, weasels, cats, wild dogs and various kinds of

fowl.”17 These were prepared at specialty restaurants in the area around the main beast

shop, which became late Edo period tourist attractions as a result of their willingness to

serve up a growing variety of meat dishes for the ostensible purpose of “medicinal eating”

(kusuri gui). Even in this exotic corner of Edo’s increasingly diverse culinary world,

however, Shimizu finds no evidence to suggest that either beef or horse meat was ever

served.18 This, of course, does not mean that the general taboo on the eating of beef was

always upheld. Kamo Giichi has scoured Edo period sources for references to beef and

notes that some pharmacopoeias, usually based on Chinese sources, recognized the

consumption of beef as having health benefits, particularly for those weakened by

sickness. He has also found concrete examples of beef being prepared as food, the most

striking of which is provided by the Daimyō lords of Hikone domain (in Ōmi Province),

who, from the late 18th century, are known to have presented dried beef, beef marinated

in miso, and other such products, to the shogun and other high-ranking warrior lords for

16 Shimizu, “Meat-‐eating”, p. 92. 17 Shimizu, “Meat-‐eating”, p. 100. 18 Shimizu, “Meat-‐eating”, p. 104. Worth noting that the Kōjimachi restaurants were also a focus of considerable comment and anxiety among authors in the period, suggesting that the consumption of wild animals was not without its own baggage.

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the purpose of medicinal eating in the winter months.19 In the end, however, as Kamo

acknowledges, examples such as this only help to underline the fact that until the end of

the Edo period the consumption of beef remained a marginal practice—and the slaughter

of cattle for any purpose, rare.

All of this began to change rapidly after the Meiji Restoration. As we know from such

famous literary sources as Kanagaki Robun’s Aguranabe (“Sitting cross-legged around

the beef pot”), published in Edo/Tokyo in 1871, the consumption of meat generally, and

beef in particular, was to become one of the great cultural symbols of the new era of

“Civilization and Enlightenment”: “Samurai, farmer, artisan or trader, oldster, youngster,

boy or girl; clever or stupid, poor or elite, you won’t get civilized if you don’t eat meat!”

was how Robun wittily parodied the new attitude.20 This dramatic shift was also given

official sanction towards the end of 1871 (M4.12) when the old bans on the consumption

of meat within the palace of the newly “restored” Meiji Emperor were lifted, so that he

would be able to begin eating French cuisine, centered in particular on beef and mutton.21

There is, of course, much that could be said about how and why the old restrictions on

eating meat were dropped so quickly after the collapse of Japan’s old regime.22 To my

mind, however, the two most important factors were, first, the general reaction against all

things Buddhist that had built up over the latter part of the Tokugawa period and, second,

the influx of Western ideas about the fundamental importance of meat for building the

19 Kamo, Nihon Chikusanshi, 198, 200-‐201. On p. 199 Kamo also makes reference to the slaughter of cattle and production of a kind beef jerky in Innami-‐gun in Harima from as early as the Genroku period. 20 As translated in John Meertz, Novel Japan: Spaces of Nationhood in Early Meiji Narrative, 1870-‐88 (Ann Arbor: Center for Japanese Studies, University of Michigan, 2003), 1. 21 Harada, Rekishi no naka no kome to niku, 22. 22 For one excellent discussion, see De Ganon, “The Animal Economy”, 133-‐158.

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Image 3 An illustration from Kanagaki Robun’s Aguranabe (1871)

physical strength of human bodies. To some extent, these ideas meshed with the

Chinese medicinal discourse about the health benefits of meat that had already been

circulating in the Tokugawa period. But, as Pieter De Ganon has shown in his recent

Ph.D. dissertation, in the wake of the Opium Wars and Perry’s gunboat diplomacy, an

acute concern with Japan’s military vulnerabilities helped drive the search for Western

secrets that could help build the country’s strength, and meat eating was quickly

identified as key to the breeding of bigger, stronger soldiers.23

23 De Ganon, “The Animal Economy”, 133-‐158.

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As striking as the Japanese state’s embrace of meat in the early Meiji period may have

been, however, it would again be a mistake to assume that decrees from on high

immediately led the population as a whole to start consuming large amounts of beef. In

fact, we know that there was considerable resistance to the idea, most dramatically in the

form of an 1872 attack on the Imperial Palace by members of a religious group (Ontake-

kō) outraged by the permissive attitude to meat eating taken by the new regime, but more

fundamentally at the level of every day habits and customs.24 The rapid expansion of a

modern conscript army undoubtedly helped to facilitate and speed the pace of change, but

even so it was not until the early 20th century that beef began being incorporated into the

Japanese diet in a significant way. Given this, it is hardly surprising that in his discussion

of the production of beef in Kobe in 1868, the British Consul specifically noted in his

report that the cattle were being killed for “foreign consumption.” This statement too

requires some explication, however. After all, in 1868 the total population of Westerners

in Kobe was no more than 150 people.25 Even allowing for the possibility of

extraordinarily high levels of carnivorous gluttony, it is hard to imagine that such a small

group could have been responsible for the consumption of the meat of 20,000 cattle in a

single year (= 133 cows per person!), or anything remotely like it! Of course, we need

not put too much faith in specific numbers. The British Consul’s estimates were almost

24 On the Ontakekō’s attack, see Harada, Rekishi no naka no kome to niku, 23-‐4; Yasumaru Yoshio and Miyachi Masato, eds., Shūkyō to kokka (Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 1988), 168-‐77. In English, see also Richard Jaffe, Neither Monk nor Layman: Clerical Marriage in Modern Japanese Buddhism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), 114. 25 Kevin Murphy, The American Merchant Experience in Nineteenth Century Japan (London: Routledge, 2002), 35. See also, Hyōgo-‐ken shi Shiryō-‐hen Bakumatsu ishin 2 (Kobe: Hyōgo-‐ken, 1980), 515-‐518, which lists the total foreign population in 1870 as 166.

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certainly inflated. But still, as we have seen, there was a clear understanding at the time

that significant numbers of cattle were being slaughtered in Kobe for meat, and given that

even Yokohama, the largest of the Japanese “treaty ports” had a foreign population

(combined Chinese and Western) of only 1200 people in this period, we are left with the

question of who could possibly have been eating it all?26 The answer is that it was almost

certainly the crews of Western ships, which were, of course, calling at Japanese ports

with growing frequency in this period. Even in the 18th century, Keith Thomas informs

us that British sailors were allowed an official ration of over 200 pounds of beef a year

(in addition to another 100 pounds of pork), and there seems no reason to think that

numbers such as these would have decreased significantly in the 19th century.27 It is also

worth noting that in the advertisements they began running in the local English

newspapers, the new foreign butcher shops and groceries established in Kobe in this

period routinely listed “supply meat” and “preserved meat” alongside a variety of other

provisions that were clearly intended for sale to ships [See, for example, IMAGE 2

above]. In short, then, there seems little doubt that the “birth” of Kobe beef was a direct

result of the rapid expansion of Western shipping, and its particular food culture, into the

farthest reaches of the so-called Far East.

Yet, if this provides us with an answer to the question of demand, a far more interesting

issue is surely that of supply. Given that there was nothing close to a “beef industry” in

Tokugawa Japan, where did the meat come from? How was the old taboo against the

killing of cattle addressed? And why was it, that of all the Japanese treaty ports “opened”

26 Murphy, American Merchant Experience, 35. 27 Keith Thomas, Man and the Natural World: Changing Attitudes in England, 1500-‐1800 (London: Penguin Books, 1991), Kindle edn, loc.442.

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to Western trade in this period, Kobe, in particular, came so quickly to be associated with

the availability of high quality beef? Why was it, in other words, that the world did not

end up with, say, Niigata or Yokohama beef?

In order to provide answers to these questions, we need to understand more about the

place of cattle in Tokugawa society. Like food history, animal history has experienced

something of a boom in the English-language literature on Japan in recent years, but in

spite of this general trend, surprisingly little attention has been paid to the domestic

species which were of greatest importance and value to rural communities.28 Fortunately,

the rich tradition of Japanese scholarship in the field of agrarian history can help us fill

this hole.

28 The growth of interest in the history of animals in Japan was clearly signaled by the publication of Gregory M. Pflugfelder and Brett L. Walker, eds., JAPANimals: History and Culture in Japan’s Animal Life (Ann Arbor, MI: Center for Japanese Studies, The Univerity of Michigan, 2005). The volume contains the only essay on the history of horses I am aware of in English: Alexander Bay, “The Swift Horses of Nukanobu: Bridging the Frontiers of Medeival Japan.” As far as I am aware, there has been nothing published on bovines. One possible reason for this gap is the view expressed in the Introduction to the JAPANimals volume, by Richard Bulliet, a specialist on the Middle East and Islam, that “the domestication of nonhuman animals… played far less conspicuous a historical and cultural role [in Japan] than in the West and other parts of the world.” As a comparative statement, there may be some truth to this view, but as we shall see below cattle were, in fact, very important in important regions of pre-‐modern Japan. De Ganon has an insightful discussion of the origins of the false notion that draft animals were unimportant in Tokugawa Japan in his, “The Animal Economy”, 91-‐94. Other representative works in the field of Japanese animal history are: Brett L. Walker, The Lost Wolves of Japan (Seattle: The University of Washington Press, 2008), Aaron Skabelund, Empire of Dogs: Canines, Japan, and the Making of the Modern Imperial World (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2011), and Ian J. Miller, The Nature of the Beasts: Empire and Exhibition at the Tokyo Imperial Zoo (Brekeley, CA: University of California Press, 2013). Among the notable works to appear in recent years on the history of animals in other parts of the world, my colleague, Alan Mikhail’s The Animal in Ottoman Egypt (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), is an especially exciting addition!

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As Sumi Tōyō first suggested in 1954, one helpful starting point for thinking broadly

about the place of bovines in the culture of the archipelago during the Tokugawa period

is an entry in Terashima Ryōan’s popular 18th century encyclopedia, the Wakan sansai

zue [An Illustrated Guide to Things Japanese and Chinese], which makes the following

observation about the geographical distribution of draft animals: “Generally speaking, in

the Kantō [the North Eastern regions] there are many horses and few cattle, while in the

Kansai [the South Western area, around Kyoto], there are many cattle and few horses”

(Taitei Kanto ni wa uma ōku, ushi sukunashi, Kansai ni wa ushi ōku, uma sukunashi).29

This may seem a little vague and imprecise. In 1872, however, as part of its drive to

build a “rich country and strong army”, Japan’s new Meiji government began compiling

detailed statistics on various aspects of agriculture, including the number of cattle and

horses in each of the country’s ancient provinces (kuni), and as Sakai Hajime has noted,

these statistics provide strong evidence that the general picture painted in the Wakan

sansai zue was correct.30 Using GIS techniques to graphically represent the information

from the 1872 statistics, Map 1 shows the number of cattle per square kilometer in each

of the country’s eighty-six provinces (the raw data is also attached as Appendix 1).31

29 Sumi Tōyō, “Senshū no ushi kuji”, Kinseishi kenkyu 1:1 (September, 1954), 9. 30 Sakai Hajime, “Kinsei Kinai nōgyō to ushi ryūtsū: Komagatani ichi o chūshin ni 1”, Shirin 44:2 (March 1961), 2-‐6. 31 The compilation of the maps presented here was only possible with the very generous guidance of my colleague, Fabian Drixler, the History Department’s resident GIS guru. Drixler’s brilliant new book, Mabiki: Infanticide and Population Growth in Eastern Japan (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013), has also been very helpful for thinking about the importance of regional cultures in the Tokugawa period.

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Map 1 Head of cattle per square kilometer in 1872

Horses

Cattle

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From this it should be clear that the area to the Southwest of Lake Biwa, in the center of

the main island of Honshū, formed a “Cattle Zone”, quite distinct from the Northeastern

“Horse Zone.”32 While this in itself is a striking finding, the early Meiji statistics also

point to some fascinating regional differences within the “Cattle Zone.” There seems, for

example, to have been a great deal of variation in bovine sex ratios among different

provinces, including some provinces in close proximity to each other: More than 90%

(8080 out of a total of 8773) of the cattle in the province of Settsu in 1872 were cows,

while in Yamato, just a little to the East, cows accounted for only 34% (1454 out of a

total of 4248) of the total number (see Map 2).33 This clearly suggests that there must

have been market and distribution networks in place that made it possible for local

preferences for one sex or the other to be accommodated. Further evidence of this is also

provided by the statistics showing how many new calves were born in each of the

provinces. As Map 3 shows, the number of calves (3839) born in Tajima was especially

high, with neighboring provinces along the Japan Sea coast, especially Inaba (1634),

Hōki (1867), Izumo (2943), and Iwami (1426), also showing significant numbers. In stark

contrast to this, in the five Kinai provinces surrounding Kyōto, the 1872 statistics suggest

that there were almost no new calves born (a total of just 4 calves are recorded for all five

provinces—one in Kawachi and three in Settsu!). What this indicates is that within the

32 Sakai uses the terms “Cattle Block” (ushi burokku) and “Horse Block” (uma burokku ), but zone seems more natural in English. Using statistics from later in the Meiji period (the late 1880s), Nakanishi Ryōtarō has recently suggested that it would be more accurate to describe the country in this period as divided into three zones: A horse zone in the Northeast, a cattle zone in the western part of Honshū, and a horse and cattle zone centered on Kyushu, the Southernmost of the main islands of the archipelago. See his, “Meiji zenki ni okeru kōgyū kōba no bunpu to gyūbakō fukyū no chiikisei ni tsuite,” Rekishi chiri gaku 169 (June 1994), 2-‐22. 33 Sakai suggests that this was a product of the belief that steers were needed to farm in areas such as Yamato which had heavier soils (i.e. with more clay).

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Map 2 Cows as a percentage of all cattle in 1872

(Settsu Province had over 90% cows, while neighboring Yamato had only 34%)

Settsu

Yamato

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Map 3

Birth of calves per square kilometer in 1872 (by province) (Between them the five Kinai provinces recorded only 4 new calves for the year)

Tajima

Kinai (No calves!)

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“Cattle Zone” there were distinct “producer” and “consumer” areas for cattle. With

regard to the question of Kobe beef, moreover, the importance of Tajima (now a part of

Hyōgo prefecture) as a producer area for cattle in 1872 is especially worth noting because

one of the basic requirements for certifying meat in Japan today as true “Kōbe beef” is

that the slaughtered animal must have been a registered Tajima bovine (Tajima gyū).

The general understanding that the provinces of the Chūgoku region supplied cattle to the

Kinai is one that is also borne out in the impressive body of scholarship produced in the

early post-war period by local historians such as Ishida Hiroshi, who was among the first

to examine the processes by which local cattle, known as “nobori ushi” (lit. “cattle bound

for the capital”= Kyoto), were moved to the Kinai.34 More recently work by Yagi

Shigeru on the situation within the Kinai provinces, and particularly the changing role of

the Tennōji cattle market (ushi ichi) in Ōsaka, has done a great deal to deepen our

understanding of the circulation of cattle in Southwestern Honshū.35

Yagi’s research suggests that even before the founding of the Tokugawa Bakufu in 1603

the Chūgoku region was already supplying farmers in the Kinai with significant numbers

of cattle. In the late 16th century, officials in Osaka, working under the authority of

34 Ishida’s articles on this topic include, “Seto naikai chiiki ni okeru chikugyū no rekishi chiri-‐teki kōsatsu,” Seto naikai kenkyū 3 (1952); “Okayama-‐han ni okeru gyūba ichi narabi ni gyūba ni kansuru kōsatsu,” Seto naikai kenkyū 13/14 (1961); “Meiji igo no ‘nobori ushi’ no ryūtsū kōzō—Ōnobori, ainobori o chūshin to shite,” Okayama Daigaku kyōiku gakubu kenkyū shūroku 11 (1961); and “Meiji jūnen-‐dai gyūba ichiba to gyūba ryūtsū,” in Nōrinsho chikusan-‐kyoku (ed.), Chikusan hattatsu-‐shi beppen (1967). See also, Naitō Masanaka, “Chūgoku sanmyaku no wagyū, Nihon sangyō shi taikei—Chūgoku shikoku-‐hen (Tokyo: Chihōshi kenkyūkyōgikai), 1960.; tanabe Kenichirō, “Kinsei Chūgoku ushi chitai ni okeru ushi kosaku ni tsuite,” Jinbun chiri 7:1 (1955). 35 Yagi Shigeru, “Tennōji ushi tonya to Sek-‐ka-‐sen-‐ban no ushi ryūtsū—Tennōji ushiichi Ishibashi-‐ke monjo o chūshin ni,” Buraku mondai kenkyū 147 (May 1999), 38-‐71.

22

military hegemon, Toyotomi Hideyoshi, sought to facilitate the regulation of the trade in

these animals by requiring all buying and selling to take place at the Tennōji cattle

market, which was placed under the control of a cattle-trader (ushi tonya) named

Magoemon (thereafter a hereditary title). Needless to say, it cannot have been easy for

Magoemon to enforce his right to oversee the entire Kinai cattle trade and prevent herders

and farmers from bypassing the central market. In the first half of the 17th century,

however, Yagi notes that one of the things he did to bolster his authority was to establish

two checkpoints for cattle (ushi aratamesho) on the Southwestern edge of Settsu

province—one at the village of Maitani in Kawabe county and the other in Yatabe county,

at the village of Kōbe.36 Although I am yet to find clear documentary evidence, a quick

examination of the topography of the area (map 4) leaves very little doubt as to why these

two particular villages were chosen: Located at either end of the Rokkō mountain range,

they were obvious choke points on the two routes along which cattle being brought to the

Kinai from the Southwest of Honshū, must have traveled. Even in the 17th century, in

other words, the small fishing village of Kōbe had been identified as one of two possible

gateways through which cattle entering the Kinai had to pass.

In the end, Yagi notes that Tennōji’s role as an actual marketplace for cattle did not

survive the first century of Tokugawa rule.37 In part this was because of the rise of other

regional market centers, such as Komagatani in Kawachi province, which is the main

focus of Sakai Hajime’s work. At the same time, however, by the mid-18th century Yagi

36 Yagi, “Tennōji ushi tonya”, 45. Yagi, it should be noted, only mentions the two checkpoints in passing and, because he is focused on the agrarian economy of the Tokugawa period, does not make a connection to Kōbe’s subsequent association with beef. 37 Yagi, “Tennōji ushi tonya”, 45.

23

Map 4 The locations of Kobe and Maitani villages marked with red stars

also shows that Tennōji had again become important, this time because of efforts by

Magoemon’s office to bring Kinai cattle traders under a single organizational umbrella,

and require them to register and pay fees each time they bought or sold an animal. The

Tennōji cattle “market”, in other words, gradually evolved into something akin to a

centralized licensing system for cattle traders, which was justified in terms of the need to

ensure that local farmers, who depended upon access to healthy beasts of burden, were

protected from unscrupulous traders and shady deals that might endanger their ability to

grow food and, perhaps more fundamentally, tax rice.38

Scholars agree that during the late Tokugawa period most farming households in the

Kinai had at least some access to cattle, which were important not only for pulling

38 Yagi, “Tennōji ushi tonya”, 47-‐50.

Tennōji

Komagatani

24

ploughs and transporting heavy loads, but also as a source of highly valued manure.39

Wealthier households generally owned one or more head of cattle in their own right,

while poorer farmers banded together to form collective ownership groups, called ushi

gumi, which involved shared access to a single animal among two to five households.40

One other distinctive characteristic of cattle ownership in the Kinai was that farmers

rarely kept possession of the same animal for a long period of time. Instead, following a

practice not entirely unlike that of contemporary American consumers who opt to lease

their cars, it was common for farmers in the Kinai to arrange with local cow traders to

replace old animals with newer ones on a regular basis. In the case of a village in Settsu

called Yono, for example, Yagi notes that in the late 18th century farmers generally traded

in their old cattle for new ones every two and a half to four years, and in some cases as

often as every six months.41

At the level of human experience, we are able to get some sense of how this system

worked from the point of view of the cattle traders (ushi bakurō) thanks to an

extraordinary oral history that was recorded in 1941 by the pioneering Japanese

ethnographer, Miyamoto Tsuneichi (1907-81).42 On the outskirts of a village in the

mountains of Kōchi Prefecture, on the island of Shikoku, Miyamoto met a blind man in

his eighties who was living in a makeshift shelter under a bridge. He recounted his life

39 In addition to Yagi, see also Asao Naohiro, Kinsei hōken shakai no kiso kōzō (Tokyo: Ochanomizu shobō, 1967) and Oka Mitsuo, Nihon nōgyō shi (Tokyo: Merva shobō, 1988). 40 Yagi, “Tennōji ushi tonya”, 41. On the ushi gumi, see also Watanabe Tadashi, “Kinsei kinai nōson no ‘ushi gumi’ ni tsuite,” Ōsaka no rekishi 28 (1989). 41 Yagi, “Tennōji ushi tonya,” 41. 42 On Miyomoto and his Japanese colleagues see, Alan Christy, A Discipline on Foot: Inventing Japanese Native Ethnography, 1910-‐1945 (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2012).

25

and explained that as an orphaned child of fifteen (presumably in the 70s or 80s) he had

been sent off by his uncle to work with a local cattle trader. He provided the following

description of what this entailed:

Following the boss’ orders, my work was to drive cows to the auction grounds, and to take cows that were to be traded to the homes of farmers. I drove cows every day, all over the place. It was a different cow every day. I’d bring that cow here and that cow there. The boss was a smooth talker who told nothing but lies. He’d say, “This is a good cow,” and leave a bad cow with a farmer, and then take the good cow the farmer had and lead it off elsewhere. He’d take a calf to a village back in the mountains and move the big cow that was there to a place a bit farther down the mountain. And move the cow that was there down a bit farther still. In that way, he’d move the bigger, better cows farther and father downhill…. When [the bosses] found a good cow, they’d fasten their eyes upon it and work hard to get a farmer to raise it, and then they’d sell it for a good price to one of the big cow traders.43

Two things to note about this passage are, first, the clear sense that cattle were

continually being moved from place to place, and farmer to farmer, and, second, the

strong association between the raising of cattle and mountainous areas. In Honshū, too,

we know that cattle tended to be raised in the mountains and then slowly moved by cattle

herders to markets on lower ground. The old man went on to describe societal attitudes

towards the cattle traders as follows:

Cow traders wear clothes and we have balls and at a glance we look like other men, but society doesn’t see us as equals. Because we make a profit by fooling people, the expression for telling a lie is “cow trader’s mouth” [bakurō guchi]. Society didn’t trust us and we were looked down upon. But even so,

43 Miyamoto Tsuneichi, The Forgotten Japanese: Encounters with Rural Life and Folklore, trans. Jeffrey S. Irish (Berkeley, CA: Stone Bridge Press, 2010),113. For the original Japanese, see Miyamoto, Wasurerareta Nihonjin, (Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 1984), 137.

26

people were deceived by the cow traders into exchanging their cows.44

To once again make the connection to contemporary car culture, then, it would perhaps

not be so far off the mark to suggest that Japan’s cow traders in the 19th century were

viewed in much the same manner as the stereotypical used car salesmen of late 20th

century America. But if the cow traders were generally viewed as untrustworthy, as the

old man suggested, then why did farmers continue to use them? Why, in other words, did

farmers prefer to trade cows away on a regular basis, instead of just raising them over a

long period?

This is a question that requires more careful study, but the most likely answer is surely

that the practice of regularly exchanging cattle with a local cow trader provided farmers

with a way of protecting themselves against the risk that a particular animal might

succumb to illness, infirmity or death. We know that in at least some cases cow traders

did, in fact, provide formal contracts for the farmers with whom they did business,

guaranteeing that they would immediately replace any cow that fell sick, or was not to the

liking of the farmer for any reason.45 Needless to say, for any farmer who relies upon

animal labor, a sick or dying beast of burden is a serious problem, but in the case of

Tokugawa Japan the potential risk for a farmer of being caught in such a position was

almost certainly exacerbated by the fact that the carcass of a dead cow could not be used

or sold to help compensate for the loss. This was because Tokugawa law and custom

required that dead animals of all kinds, and especially large animals, were to be handed

44 Miyamoto, Forgotten Japanese, 114; Miyamoto, Wasrerareta Nihonjin, 139 45 See, for example, the contract concluded between the cattle trader, Kuroemon, and the farmer Ichibei, of Onohara village in Settsu, in Bunsei 11 (1828) contract as cited in full, in Yagi, “Tennōji ushi tonya”, 41.

27

over to local outcastes for clean up and disposal without any form of compensation being

paid to the owner.46

Like the “sacred cow”, “untouchability” is not something we typically associate with

Japan, but the broad similarities between the kawata or, as they were officially known at

the time, eta (lit. “much polluted”), communities of the Tokugawa period and some kinds

of dalit communities in South Asia are fairly well established.47 In passing (for this is not

a topic I am able to address properly in this paper) it is also worth noting that what we

might call the geography of untouchability in Tokugawa Japan appears to map closely

onto that of the cow, with a very heavy concentration of outcaste communities in the

Western part of the main island of Honshū, as well as Kyūshū and Shikoku: The cattle

zone, in other words, was also the outcaste zone.

As the unusually rich body of scholarship that has emerged on the subject in recent

decades in Japan has made abundantly clear, outcaste communities in the Tokugawa

period were complex social worlds of their own. In most cases, the task of retrieving

animal carcasses, for example, was not shared by a village community as a whole, but

rather by specific individuals or groups within the community who controlled collection

rights for a geographically defined “catchment area” (dannaba; kusaba; shokuba), which

would typically encompass the lands of multiple commoner villages. Within a single

46 On the development, and eventual abolition of this practice in the Meiji period, see Fujimoto Seijirō, “Kinsei ‘Hei-‐gyūba shori sei’ no tenkai to kaitai,” Nihonshi kenkyū 181 (1977). On the abolition of the practice, see also, Gotō Masatō, “Meiji shonen ni okeru kusaba torisabaki ken no haishi ni tsuite,” Hō to kagaku 3 (1975). 47 Among the most important recent comparative work is that of Kotani Hiroyuki. See, for example, his article, "Mibunsei ni okeru hisen gainen to kegare ishiki: Indo to Nihon no hikaku o tōshite", in Rekishigaku kenkyūkai, ed., Kokkazō, shakai-zō no henbō: Gendai rekishigaku no seika to kadai (Aoki shoten, 2003), 147-160. See also my article, “Kaasuto seido to mibun seido,” for an appraisal of some recent Japanese work in light of the contributions of Nicholas Dirks and others on the history of caste in South Asia.

28

outcaste community there could be a number of these groups, and it is clear that there

were sometimes intense rivalries among them.48 There were also outcaste cattle herders

(kawata bakurō), and although there was considerable variation within the Kinai, they

generally seem to have specialized in buying up aged and ailing cattle.49 If we were to

imagine the lifecycle of a typical cow in the Kinai in the late Tokugawa period, then, we

might picture it starting life in the mountainous areas of Tajima or one of the other

provinces of the Chūgoku region, being brought to the Kinai for sale at a market, then

moved around every couple of years by non-outcaste cattle traders and, finally, as it grew

old and infirm, being sold off to an outcaste cow trader. It is clear that some outcaste

cow traders developed a reputation for their ability to identify and care for sick cattle, and

in some cases, no doubt, they were able to re-sell an animal that had been restored to

health.50 More often, though, they must simply have found themselves waiting for their

animals to die.51

This, of course, begs the question of why the outcaste cattle herders were interested in

buying old, sick animals in the first place? (And, indeed, of why there was competition

within outcaste communities for the right to collect carcasses?) The answer, of course,

was leather. In a society dominated by an hereditary military caste, leather had always

48 The village of Furonodani, which I am currently studying, provides clear examples of this. In Furonodani, the “catchment areas” followed the boundaries of the the long defunct “shōen” estates of Japan’s medieval era, suggesting that the task of collecting carcasses was one that had been the responsibility of Furonodani residents from well before the founding of the Tokugawa regime. 49 Yagi, “Tennōji ushi tonya”, 67. 50 On the association between outcaste cattle herders and the identification and care of sick animals, see Yagi, “Tennōji ushi tonya”, 68. 51 It is surely no coincidence that some of strictest prohibitions on the killing of cattle in the 18th century were aimed specifically at members of outcaste communities. See Yokota, “Senshi sareta shokunin shūdan,”

29

been an important commodity, but particularly in the latter part of the period, when the

practice of wearing leather sandals became widespread among the general population,

demand for leather products soared. And, because kawata outcastes had the special

“privilege” of handling the “unclean” bodies of dead cows they were able to dominate

this increasingly lucrative business. This, of course, did not mean that all outcaste

communities were able to benefit equally from the leather trade. Standing at the apex of

the late Tokugawa period leather economy was a small group of outcaste merchants from

the community of Watanabe, on the southern edge of the city of Osaka.52 As is well

known, Osaka was the great commercial hub of the archipelago during the Tokugawa

period, with the great baronial domains from the Western part of the country all

maintaining warehouse complexes there, so that tax rice and other commodities could be

traded on the markets. The Watanabe merchants were able to use their proximity and

other connections to the city to build relationships with the domains, which in turn

allowed them to corner the market on hides from all over the archipelagic “cattle zone”.

According to Tsukada Takashi, whose work has done so much to illuminate the history of

outcaste communities in the Tokugawa period, by the 1830s and 40s, the Watanabe

merchants were responsible for buying up between seventy and one hundred thousand

cow hides a year, from all over Kyushu, as well as the Chugoku and Kinai regions. From

the late 18th century, moreover, they had also established a relationship with the domain

of Tsushima, an island half way between the Kyushu and the Korean peninsula, which

allowed them to import between ten and twenty-five thousand additional cow hides a

52 For an overview of Tsukada Takashi’s important work on this subject, see his Rekishi no naka no Ōsaka: Toshi ni ikita hitotachi (Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 2002), 165-‐176.

30

year from the Chosun dynasty—an especially remarkable accomplishment in an era in

which Japan is often said to have been “closed” to relations with the outside world.53

Of all the Watanabe merchants in this period, the most powerful and important was a man

named Taikoya Matabei, or Mataemon, whose fabulous wealth had, by the late

Tokugawa problem come to be seen as emblematic of the break down of the old systems

of hierarchy and social order. In the early decades of the 19th century, one well-known

samurai critic complained, “The pariahs of Kyoto and Osaka have become ever more

overweening, and the man known by the name of Taikoya Matabei of the pariah village

of Watanabe in Osaka is worth an estimated 700,000 ryō. His storehouse overflows with

treasures from Japan and China, and his extravagance is second to none…[In this age] the

good tends to wane while the bad waxes. Everywhere, pariahs and their like are in

ascendance.”54

53 Tsukada, Rekishi no naka no Ōsaka, 174-‐5. The idea that Tokugawa Japan was a “closed country” has, of course, been widely challenged in recent scholarship, but there is still no doubt that trading relations with the outside world were closely monitored and controlled. For a nuanced view, see Robert Hellyer, Defining Engagements: Japan and Global Contexts, 1640-‐1868 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University East Asia Center, 2010). 54 Mark Teeuwen and Kate Wildman Nakai, eds., Lust, Commerce, and Corruption: An Account of What I have Seen and Heard (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014), 368-‐9. The decription given on p. 369 of the outcaste village of Norata in Hikone domain, mentioned above as the place where special beef products were prepared for presentaiton to the Shogun and other lords, is also striking: “There they purchase for a pittance aging cattle and horses, which people bring them from far and wide; they feed them poison, and having killed them, skin them... Cattle and horses are of benefit to the people who sustain the state [i.e. farmers], and it is immoral to dispose of them when they grow old on the grounds that they are now valueless.... Norata used to be unique, but now similar places have sprung up elsewhere too.”

31

As this quotation clearly suggests, of course, the accumulation of wealth was hardly

enough to bring an end to the segregation and discrimination from which members of

outcaste communities suffered throughout the Tokugawa period. In the 1860s, however,

as the pressure for social reforms of all kind mounted, outcaste leaders around the

country began to imagine new possibilities for themselves and their communities. In this

regard, it should perhaps come as no surprise to discover that in 1868 the embryonic

news service run by the Fujioka-ya bookstore in Edo reported that Taikoya Mataemon

[=Matabei] had the previous year lodged a formal request with the Tokugawa authorities

in Osaka asking that they no longer use the old, derogatory status appellation, eta, to

address the residents of Watanabe.55 It is the grounds given for this request, however,

that are especially striking—because they bring us back (finally) to the question of meat

eating: Mataemon’s request began by claiming that the origins of the discrimination

suffered by members of his community dated back to ancient times when their ancestors

had gone to serve the Empress Jingū in her (mythical) campaigns against the three

Korean kingdoms of Silla, Paekche and Koguryo, and picked up the foreign custom of

eating the flesh of beasts. They continued with this practice after returning from the

campaign, Mataemon continued, but because Japan was the “realm of the gods, and a

pure, unpolluted land” (shinkoku seijō no chi), it was decided that those who ate meat

would not be allowed to serve at the Court. A distinction was drawn between pure and

polluted people, and from that time on they had been ordered to perform all manner of

unclean duties. As a result of this, they had eventually fallen into their current

lamentable state of being cut off from regular interactions with other human beings.

55 The text of the petition is reproduced in Hirota Masaki, ed., Sabetsu no shosō (Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 1990), 71-‐72.

32

Even so, Matemon continued, when the Westerners had first showed up a decade or so

earlier to demand trade and diplomatic relations, and the Imperial Court responded to

them by ordering their expulsion, the outcastes of Watanabe had been ready to stand in

the front lines and throw down their lives in order to repay their debts to the country (ittō

shiryoku o tsukushi aihataraki, on-kokuon o mukuiri tatematsuri taku). Yet, in the end,

the Tokugawa authorities had decided to accept the Western demands for friendly

relations. This, Mataemon noted, was in spite of the fact that it was now the Westerners

who defiled the sacred country with their practice of eating the flesh of animals (migi

gaikokujin no gi wa ittai ni jūniku o oshi sōrō yori, onkoku o kegashi tatematsuri sōrō). It

is truly lamentable, he continued, that these foreigners were not required to stand outside

the four ranks of humanity (i.e. the samurai, farmers, merchants and artisans who

constituted the respectable population), while the outcastes alone were. Under these

circumstances, he asked, surely the authorities, in their boundless benevolence, might be

willing to stop referring to the residents of Watanabe as eta—filthy, polluted pariahs?

As things turned out, Mataemon’s hope that the dreaded term, eta, be abandoned by the

state, was, in fact, granted not long after the collapse of the Tokugawa regime. In 1871,

the same year that the Meiji Emperor began eating meat, the new government not only

announced that the old outcaste status appellations were to be abolished, it also formally

decreed that from now on all former outcastes were to be treated in the same manner as

commoners, with regard to both their legal status and occupations.56 At a superficial

level, of course, this formal act of “emancipation” (as it would come to be remembered),

56 For the text of the edict, see Uesugi Satoshi and Harada Tomohiko, eds., Kindai Burakushi shiryō shūsei 1 (Tokyo: Sanichi shobō, 1984), 50.

33

like the end of the taboos on meat eating, might be viewed as evidence of the ways in

which Japan’s “opening” to the West began the process of sweeping away “traditional”

superstitions and prejudices—what the Meiji Emperor’s Charter Oath famously termed

“evil practices of the past.” Yet, the inadequacy of such an understanding quickly

becomes apparent when we shift our attention back to what was really new about Meiji

Japan’s “bovine revolution”: the killing—specifically, the killing of an unprecedented

number of strong, healthy animals. My point here is not just to raise questions about the

ethics of taking animal life on a mass scale—although these are, surely, important

questions, with serious implications for how we think about the meaning of progress and

“civilization”—but also to consider the impact on human social relations of the new

institutional space of the slaughterhouse, and the kinds of work associated with it.

We know that the first slaughterhouse in Kobe was opened in 1868, by an English

merchant named E. C. Kirby, who is also said to have been the first person to begin

sending cattle from Kobe to Yokohama for slaughter there (see also Image 2, above).57

Kirby initially rented a building that had previously been used as a sake warehouse for

the purpose, but tellingly enough, he was soon forced to close down his operations as a

result of complaints from nearby residents. Soon afterwards, he joined a group of foreign

merchant in establishing a new slaughterhouse at the mouth of the Ikuta river. It was also

here, near the new cemetery for foreigners, that the first Kobe cattle yards operated.

57 Kōbe shishi Honhen kakusetsu, 512; Minami Shōji, “Meiji-‐ki ni okeru Kōbe Shinkawa chiku no tochiku-‐gyō”, in Ryōke Minoru, ed., Nihon Kindaika to Buraku Mondai (Tokyo: Akashi shoten, 1996), 256; Ikai Takaaki, “Kindai tochiku-‐gyō no tenkai to hisabetsu buraku”, Buraku mondai kenkyū 160 (June 2002), 103. Kirby also features prominently in the Hiogo and Osaka Herald in this period.

34

Given the newness of the practice of killing healthy cattle for meat, we might perhaps be

forgiven for thinking that the Japanese would have been content to leave this unpleasant

task to the Westerners. In fact, however, by 1871 a local Japanese company had been

established on land adjacent to the Western slaughterhouse to compete with the foreign

butchers. The company was the product of an alliance of various different groups from

the surrounding area, but the group responsible for the actual work of slaughtering cattle

was known as the Ujino-gumi, or Ujino group.58 This is notable, because the village of

Ujino had been home to one of the two main pariah communities in the area since early

in the Tokugawa period. Village population records from 1871 offer further evidence

that members of this community were already involved in the beef industry by this

point—with three households (out of 270) listing their primary occupations as “beef

seller” (gyūniku-uri) and several others noting that household members were in service

with foreign butchers.59 Some accounts suggest that it was none other than Itō

Hirobumi—the man who would later come to be remembered as the father of the modern

Japanese constitution—who, while serving as governor of Hyogo in the early Meiji years,

first arranged for the Ujino community to assist the foreign merchants with the task of

58 Minami, “Meiji-‐ki ni okeru Kōbe Shinkawa chiku”, 257. 59 The overall Ujinomura population register is divided into four separate volumes. The first of these (“Ubusugami Ikuta jinja Sesshū Yatabe-‐gun Ujinomura koseki”) covers the population of the main village itself. The second volume covers a new “offshoot village” (shutsugō) called Hama-‐Ujino, and the third, titled “Sesshū Yatabe-‐gun Ujinomura chōjiri eta koseki,” covers Furonodani. The fourth volume provides a summary of the information contained in the other volumes. The date of compilation is given as the 8th month of Meiji 4 (1871). I am grateful to Professor Okumura Hiroshi and the librarians at Kobe University for allowing me access to this sensitive material. See also, Mae Keiichi, “Settsu Furonodani kawata mura no rekishi,” Buraku mondai ronkyū (Hyōgo buraku mondai kenkyū sho) 6 (1981), and Watanabe Keitarō, “Bakumatsu ishin-‐ki ni okeru hōkenteki nōson no henyō—Sesshū Yatabe-‐gun Hanakuma-‐mura no nōson kōsei o chūshin ni shite”, Shakai keizaishigaku 38:6 (1973).

35

slaughtering cattle.60 Whether or not this is true, it is clear that in the decades that

followed, Japanese butchers made steady inroads into the beef business, until finally in

1889 the last of the Western-operated slaughterhouses was taken over by a Japanese

company.61 The connection between former outcaste, or Buraku, communities and

butchery remained strong throughout this period. Ikai Takaaki notes that of six

slaughterhouses operating in Hyōgo Prefecture in 1879 five were located in known

outcaste communities. By 1887 the number of slaughterhouses in the Prefecture had

increased to a total of 27. Some six of these were not in Buraku communities and Ikai

reminds uses this to remind us that butchery was not exclusively associated with former

outcastes. Yet, he also notes that by 1921, with just one possible exception, all of the 17

slaughterhouses still operating in the Prefecture were in Buraku communities.62

Of course, we might ask whether there is necessarily anything wrong with this? After all,

if beef had become a valuable commodity, perhaps Buraku butchers were able to make

themselves wealthy in the Meiji era, much as the outcaste merchants of Watanabe had

done through their monopoly on the trade in leather in the Tokugawa period?

Certainly, it is possible that some individual Buraku entrepreneurs did well for

themselves as a result of their involvement with the meat industry. Overall, however,

there seems little question that the majority of people from Buraku communities who

went to work in the slaughterhouses did so because they had few other options. And, of

course, once significant numbers of “former outcastes” began working in the

slaughterhouses, the association with a new kind of work that was not only seen as dirty,

60 Murata Seiji, Kōbe kaikō sanjūnen shi (Kōbe: Kaiko sanjūnen kinenkai, 1896), I: 290-‐1. 61 Ikai, “Kindai tochiku-‐gyō no tenkai”, 103. 62 Ikai, “Kindai tochiku-‐gyō no tenkai”, 110.

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but also cruel, quickly served to bolster older prejudices about their general lack of

humanity. In this regard, the easing of Tokugawa period notions about the need to

protect cattle seems, in fact, to have contributed to the reinscription and intensification of

older patterns of discrimination against the supposedly “liberated” outcastes. The “sacred

cow” disappeared, but the figure of the untouchable remained.

In this regard, it is instructive to consider one final image, from Utagawa Sadahide’s,

Yokohama kaikō kenmonshi, from the early 1860s, which depicts two American butchers

at work.63 In contrast to the relatively dignified looking man shown in the “pole axe”

image introduced at the beginning of this paper, the men here have blood on their hands

and arms and look thoroughly disreputable. The caption explains, “Even among the

Americans, those in the cattle business (ushiya) whose role it is to butcher [the animals],

live on the extreme outskirts of town (goku hempi no tokoro ni jū su).” The implication,

in other words, is that, for all their love of meat, the Americans too had “eta” to do the

work of slaughtering cattle. And it followed from this that the Japanese practice of

maintaining distance from the former outcastes was entirely in keeping with the practices

of contemporary Western “civilization.”64

63 See, Utagawa (=Hashimoto) Sadahide, Yokohama kaikō kenmonshi (1862). The image and text are also discussed in Julia Meech-‐Pekarik, The World of the Meiji Print: Impressions of a New Civilization (New York: Weatherhill, 1986), 50-‐51. 64 There was, of course, real truth to this understanding. It is clear that butchers in the West were often subject to discrimination because of their profession. (See, for example, Thomas, Man and the Natural World (Kindle Locations 6363-6391) for evidence of this). But the fact that members of outcaste communities in Japan had been designated as a legally distinct status group for centuries prior to the birth of a modern “beef industry” in Japan also meant that the problem of discrimination there had a preexisting dynamic of its own. It was not just about particular kinds of work, but about particular, closed, communities of people. Needless to say, this is a topic that needs to demands more thorough and careful examination.

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Image 4 American butchers as depicted in Hashimoto Sadahide’s Yokohama Kaikō Kenmonshi

(1862)

If all of this seems somewhat abstract and detached from social reality, a more concrete

sense of how the cycle of poverty, dirty work and intensified discrimination played out in

the era of “Civilization and Enlightenment” can be garnered from a brief consideration of

the example of Kobe’s infamous Shinkawa district. Shinkawa, literally means “New

River”, and the district was originally formed in the early 1880s as a result of dredging

and excavation associated with an effort to re-engineer the flow of the old Ikuta River.

This was, in other words, an area of newly re-claimed land, with no connection to

Tokugawa period outcastes. In the mid-1880s, however, a decision was made to move a

number of Kobe’s slaughterhouses to this new location and in the years that followed

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“former outcastes” from communities all over the Kansai region began to move to the

area in search of work.65 Living conditions were never good, and problems were

exacerbated by the influx of non-Buraku laborers to flophouses that were established in

an adjacent area.66 While the abattoirs remained open there was at least steady work to be

had, but in 1909 new public hygiene laws led to their relocation—and by the beginning of

the 1920s Shinkawa was described by Japanese reformers and Western visitors alike as

one of the worst slums “in the world”: “What little we saw of it today was terrible,” wrote

one American visitor in 1920. “The street was being used as a public closet and sewer

without regard to passersby…. The houses are filthy-looking places, very small and

swarming with children. Dirt and squalor and poverty abound.”67

By way of conclusion, then, there seems little question that one critical reason why the

centuries old taboo on the killing of cattle in Japan could be so quickly overcome in the

early Meiji period was that the work of slaughtering was taken over by a group of people

who were already associated with the handling of dead animals, and held separate from

the mainstream population. If this helped smooth the gradual transition to something

much closer to a Western culinary regime in Japan, it also served to further entrench the

65 Minami, “Meiji-‐ki ni okeru Kōbe Shinkawa chiku”, 259. 66 On the division of Shinkawa into outcaste and non-‐outcaste areas, see Minami, “Meiji-‐ki ni okeru Kōbe Shinkawa chiku”, 280-‐2. For an overview in English, see also Noah Y. McCormack, Japan’s Outcaste Abolition: The Struggle for National Inclusion and the Making of the Modern State (London: Routledge, 2013), 76-‐7. 67 On the impact of the new law (1906) and closing of the Fukiai slaughterhouse in 1909, see Minami, “Meiji-‐ki ni okeru Kōbe Shinkawa chiku”, 286. The quotation here is from Wilson P. Minton, A Tour of Japan in 1920: An American Missionary’s Diary with 129 Photographs (Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland & Co., 1992), 250. Minton visited Shinkawa because by this time it had become well known as the base for the Japanese Christian social reformer, Kagawa Toyohiko, whose work is to be the focus of a new dissertation project by Bo Tao of the Yale History department.

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discrimination and social isolation of modern Buraku communities, whose members had,

in theory, been given the same status as ordinary commoners in 1871. In this regard, it is

surely no coincidence that Kobe, whose importance for the history of beef in Japan we

have explored above, would also continue to be associated with particularly intense forms

of discrimination against Buraku communities throughout the modern era.68 Nor was the

relationship between Buraku communities and meat production a short lived one: Well

into the 1980s, the meat industry was still “largely controlled” by the descendants of

Tokugawa period outcastes.69

The next time you see “Kobe beef” on an American menu, then, I hope you will reflect a

little on the complex and, in many ways, unhappy intertwining of animal and human

histories that helped give birth to the world’s fanciest steaks and burgers. I do not want to

conclude on an entirely negative note, however. In order to contextualize the Japanese

case within a broader history of meat in the modern world, it is, I think, useful to compare

the birth of Kobe beef in the nineteenth century with accounts of the rise of the modern

meat industry in the United States offered by scholars such as William Cronon. In his

landmark study, Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West, Cronon famously

describes how the growth of the meat industry in the decades after the Civil War in the

United States was also associated with a radical remaking of the ecology and landscape

of vast swathes of the American continent, as the native bison herds were wiped out, and

68 On Kobe’s reputation for discrimination see, Ambō Norio, Minato Kōbe—Korera, Pesuto, Suramu: Shakaiteki sabetsu keiseishi no kenkyū (Kyōto: Gakugei shuppansha, 1989). 69 John W. Longworth, Beef in Japan (St. Lucia, QLD: University of Queensland Press, 1983), 71.

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barbed wire, ranches and feedlots proliferated.70 In Japan, on the other hand, the modern

beef industry was built upon pre-existing networks and practices for raising and moving

cattle and, indeed, even today the production of high end “Wagyū” beef (including Kobe

beef) is clearly still shaped by these older structures, with small, family farms playing the

central role. Since World War II, it is true that the growth of the dairy industry has led to

a dramatic increase in the number of cows in areas of Eastern Japan, which had

previously formed part of the “horse zone”, but there is no doubt that the environmental

impact of the “traditional” Japanese beef industry has been far smaller than that in the

“New World.”71 While Westerners routinely comment on the high prices charged for

small portions of Kobe beef today (that is, indeed, part of the mystique!), it is

increasingly clear that the planet as a whole would be much better off if beef everywhere

were raised in the same way, and cost as much.

70 William Cronon, Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1991), 207-‐259. 71 For an overview of the development of the dairy and beef industries in Japan up until the 1980s, see Longworth, Beef in Japan. He notes, for example, on p. 112 that between 1945 and 1981 the number of dairy cows in Japan increased from under one hundred thousand, to more than a million. In 1980, almost 40% of Japan’s dairy cows were in Hokkaidō, with another 30% in the Kantō and Tohoku regions of Eastern Japan.

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