Itadakimasu … いただきます

“Being vegan is the one of the most profound, far reaching, easiest and enjoyable ‘itadakimasu’ in the world.

There is no better way to offer your thanks and gratitude towards any living being … by not killing it and eating it.”

Meals in Japan traditionally begin with the hands in prayer position and the phrase itadakimasu or いただきます (pron. eat-tah-dah-key-mas). It translates roughly as, “I humbly receive” and it used in the same way as ‘grace’ used to be said in Christian homes.

One interesting difference is, whereas the Christians give thanks to their god for granting humans domination over the earth, and the right to eat animals, the Japanese Buddhist practise is to give thanks to the food itself for giving up its life. Thanks not just to the souls of animals but to the fruit and vegetables, and all those involved in cultivating or preparing the food.

Despite the Buddha Shakyamuni’s teaching that eating meat is the same as taking life, the ritual is said to originate in the idea that living organisms gave their life to human beings as “Dāna”, or charity. This may have made sense in the mainly plant-based society of post-industrial Japan, where the Buddhists sought to establish themselves and evangelize their religion, but it hardly applies to the Post-WWII Americanized state whose diet, and lifestyle, have been changed beyond recognition, and sustainability, by their “Christian” conquerors.

The practise is said to arise from Jōdo Shinshū or Pure Land Buddhism. A school of Japanese Buddhism which was targeted, mainly, at the lower social classes in Japan. Individuals who could neither devote the time, nor had the education or lifestyle privileges, to follow other more dedicated and esoteric forms of Buddhism. Buddhisms which teaches that animals don’t want to suffer and that they share the same essential nature as humans. Without wishing to cause anyone offense, it was a ‘Buddhism Lite®’ modified to suit the time and place.

What practical difference does Itadakimasu make to the slaughtered animals? I have no idea. None, I guess.

I have even less of an idea what effect Itadakimasu has on the polluted environment. One that suffers greatly from the effects of the meat industries and the vast resources of non-renewable energy which are used to oil and drive them.

There is a part of me that rejects ‘itadakimasu’, in the same way as I reject ‘Sunday School Christianity’. It feels like little more than childish social indoctrination. Do a few words undo a life of suffering for a battery chicken or crate animal? Do they repair the damage done to the ecosphere? No. Of course they do not.

What started off as a effort to make individuals reflect sincerely, in order that they evolve spiritually, has become a meaningless and empty gesture of social and institutional conformism. It hides the face of a vast and abusive, capitalist army engaged in an unmatched holocaust of other species … a holocaust based merely on the seeking of profits from the second richest economy in the world. A bloody conquest which reaches from the Arctic to the Antarctic, across the beef and pork belies of the Americas and Australia and, increasingly at their own dietary peril, back into China.

It is worth remembering that America’s first military conquest of Japan in the 1870s, and its opening up to the influences of the West, was entirely for the benefit of the USA’s whaling industry. By comparison, whilst the Americans took the oil from the whales and threw their corpse overboard as forgotten waste, in Japan there is a touching story of how one village erected a shrine to two whales who beached themselves during a winter famine when it was clear that many, if not all, in the village would die. The whole of the whales were used to save the community from starvation and, more than 100 years later, their souls are still venerated.

Fortunately and unfortunately, the fact is we all have evolved since the 12th Century. Our knowledge of science and the environment, law, ethics and morality, is vastly superior to those villagers who were merely fighting for survival. We all now enjoy unimaginable lifestyle privileges. Our “itadakimasu” should match them.

Being vegan is not natural. It is not traditional. It is not even “Japanese”. But, surely, it is the most humble ‘thank you’ humanity can offer to the entire ecosphere which supports us is?

Being vegan, or at least primarily vegan, means not to destroy the ecosphere merely for the sake of killing and eating other living beings which we really do not need to. This is especially true of those of us who live in the vastly unnatural and untraditional concrete chaos of modern Japanese cities.