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was to become the crucial strategy employed by the state with the aim of
reconstituting the Japanese people into modern subject-citizens united
under the leadership of the emperor. 27 Beef was to play an important role
in this project.
The West, the Emperor and the
Meat-Eating Taboo
In January 1872 it was publicly announced that Emperor Meiji partook of
beef and mutton on a regular basis, breaking a centuries-old official ban
on meat eating. 28 This announcement placed the emperor at the centre of
the newly emerging meat-eating fashion.
The issue of meat eating is one of the most contentious aspects in
Japanese food history. The standard explanation declares that the Japanese
stopped eating meat in the seventh century because of a religious taboo that
sprang from the Buddhist precept against the taking of life. The consumption
of animal flesh remained very low and limited to game (especially venison
and wild boar) until the Meiji period, when it was encouraged by the new
government in order to bolster the physique of the Japanese population. 29
In essence, this account is by no means incorrect. Nevertheless, it needs
to be nuanced at least in three respects: the motivation behind the introduction
of the official ban was only loosely connected to Buddhism; the taboo
did not become widespread before the sixteenth century; and the consumption
of game remained common, though sporadic, until the Meiji period.
The first decree prohibiting meat eating in Japan was issued in ad 675.
Its main provision was to ban certain types of hunting and fishing traps that
were designed to catch indiscriminately, and to prohibit the eating of beef,
horse, dog, monkey and chicken from late spring until early autumn. Based
on the extensive study by another scholar of Japanese dietary history,
Harada Nobuo, the leading Japanese food historian, Ishige Naomichi,
explains that the decree ‘was prompted by the spread of what had once been
a purely ritual practice of eating cattle and horse meat into the sphere of
private enjoyment among the peasantry; and which was motivated by fear
of a decline in the already sparse number of animals’. 30 It needs to be
clarified that pigs were introduced from China in the seventeenth century,
and before the twentieth century the custom of raising them for food did not
spread beyond the south-western island of Kyushu. 31
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