According to the World Research Institute, the annual consumption of meat in Japan has risen from 17.8 kilos per person to 43.9 kilos over the last 40 year. More than double but still, thankfully, only a third of America’s consumption rate. By comparison, Indians, from a country with a similar population density to Japan, eat only around 3 kilos of meat per year.
The habit of eating meat really only came to Japan in the 19th Century and mainly under the influence of the Dutch. Prior to that, due to religious influences, meat had been a diet mainly fit for outcasts. Society ate a mainly vegetarian diet which many remote communities followed until the mid-20th Century.
During the Meiji Period, meat became a symbol of the Elite who strove to modernize … and militarize … Japan. They looked down upon the traditional Japanese diet as “uncivilised”. Meat, under their rule, became part of a new health regime but one not rapidly or easy adapted to; as the development of many sauces and strong flavorings to mask its taste provides evidence.
However, even to this day, one of the many remarkable things about Japan, is when you ride or drive around the countryside you hardly ever seen animal farming. The fields and fields of grazing animals, common in the West, are missing. Most of the meat is imported.
Japan is the largest beef and pork importers of any nation It is also a leading poultry importer.
Japanese companies import around 2,500,000 tons of dead pigs every year from America alone. 40% of the meat Japanese eat is pork and Japan, one single nation, consumes 38% of the world total imports of the meat.
Japanese companies also import around 720,000,000,000 tons of dead cows per year. It is prime target for the USA meat marketing industry, one of whose tools the We Care! website and campaign. An industry desperate to recapture its market lost during recent BSE health scares.
Japanese companies slaughter around 1,260,000 cows each year for meat. Around 40% of its domestic demand. Recent years have also seen an increase in dairy cow slaughter of up to 4% due to a drop in milk demand. Yes, that is “slaughter for milk”, a vegetarian food. Japan consumes 8,300,000 tons of cow milk, up from 4.8 million tons in 1970 … and throws away as much as 900 tons of surpluses in Hokkaido alone.
In face of a declining market, Milk is forced, by the government, into children at schools. A food almost unknown before the opening up to the West.
It is hard not to be struck by the difference impregnated into our minds at an early age of the illusion of animal farming (above left), versus the reality (center and above right). Naive images of bucolic utopias still used as propaganda for children, even in Japan.
But cultural roots may run much deeper in both our genes and psyche, and one is left wondering which diet will “win” in the long run. The long-term, mainly meatless diet of the past or the recently imported Western style diet?
Looking at the discussions of diet in Japanese history, and how it was used by the thinkers of the day, it is impossible to view food as removed from other social and political movements, and conflicts, within the nation.
In the early 19th Century, eating meat was seen as inferior against a rice based diet culturally binding Japan to China. During the Meiji Period, meat symbolised for some the civilised and scientific West. China was looked down upon, and the traditional diet Japan shared with it was seen as inferior. Changes in diet were part of a breaking away from China as Japan’s ‘significant other’.
Today, the tide is changing again. Meat is becoming seen as un-ecological and dumb. Barbarian. Part of a Western fast food culture at odds with “Slow Life’. The traditional Edo Diet is calling again in the form of macrobiotics, LOHAS and the tiny vegan and vegetarian movement.
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