After the dainty, health-giving, vegetarian cuisine of Koya-san, I had a yearning for some meat, lots of it, preferably rich, red, bloody beef. If the stories are to be believed, the Japanese accord their cattle a greater reverence than the Hindus do theirs—at least up until the point of slaughter. They are pampered to a degree that Paris Hilton’s Chihuahua might find excessive, enjoying beers and massage, sake rubs, and relaxing piped music. This, we are told, is why their beef—which we in the West know, variously, as Kobe or Wagyu beef—is so extraordinarily tender, its flesh patterned with river deltas of creamy white fat, and, of course, why it is so costly and desired. But, unicorns aside, there can be few more heavily mythologized beasts than the Japanese cow.
Cows have also played an improbable but important role in defining the Japanese’s self-image as devout, self-controlled, and abstemious vegetarians. It is said that when Buddhism came to these shores, around A.D. 730, the consumption of meat was outlawed. Not another shred of beef passed Japanese lips until, one morning in 1872, the emperor woke up and decided he fancied a little beef for his dinner and made a public pronouncement to that effect, and the Japanese became meat-eaters overnight. Even then, the historical blame for the Japanese’s loss of carnivorous innocence is typically placed at the feet of the mercantile barbarians from the West. As Shizuo Tsuji writes in A Simple Art: “The first cows slaughtered in Japan were for the tables of Western residents.”
Unusually, Tsuji is quite wrong. Let’s get this straight: the Japanese have always eaten meat. The A.D. 730 decree, which is generally held to be the vegetarian watershed, was in reality as much a pragmatic solution to the problem of overconsumption of animals that were needed for farmwork; it was intended to stop everyone from eating the cows and horses that pulled the plows.
As I have mentioned before, being partial to wild boar, the Japanese promptly renamed them “mountain whale” to circumvent the no-meat edict. Samurai in particular remained especially keen carnivores. As noted historian Naomichi Ishige writes in The History and Culture of Japanese Food: “The main purpose of the ban was to prohibit the eating of beef and horse meat and protect the livestock population as well as to prevent drought, insect damage, and famine. Moreover, it was limited to the spring and summer months which constitute the paddy farming season.”
The truth is, the Japanese kept on eating meat using the same excuse that my grandmother employed for her nightly whiskey: that it was for “medicinal purposes.” They realized the health values of meat and cloaked their love of game with the term yakuro, or “medicinal hunting.”
Increasing contact with Westerners in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries also alerted the Japanese to the fact that they were physically smaller, a situation they attributed to the Western traders’ meat-eating habit. Around this time, according to historian Katarzyna Cwiertka, so-called beast restaurants, serving horse, wild boar, and venison, became popular.
By the second half of the nineteenth century, as the trading ports of Nagasaki, Hakodate, Yokohama, and Kobe opened up to the West, eating meat became yet more popular—even the emperor was at it, and it is true that the floodgates opened with his 1872 announcement (followed by a public meal of beef on January 24, 1873) that meat was permitted. Within five years, Tokyo was consuming twenty-five cows a day, and within ten years, hundreds of restaurants serving meat sprang up across the country.
Beef consumption increased dramatically in the postwar period for much the same reason as in the latter part of the nineteenth century: the Japanese saw that their American conquerors were bigger and stronger and attributed this to their meat intake. In 1955, the Japanese ate an average of six to seven pounds of meat per year per capita. Today, according to some estimates, they eat over sixty pounds.
Those open ports were also the starting points of a more general craze for Western food and dining practices, such as the use of tables and chairs. Improbable as it may sound, initially at least, the Japanese adopted British cuisine as their favorite foreign food, because it was simpler and cheaper to produce than French cuisine—hence the otherwise perplexing rise of Worcestershire sauce and curry rice, both still popular in Japan today. The Japanese had seen how the British suppressed India, and they didn’t want it happening to them. The solution? Get with the meat program!
And this is where the misnomer “Kobe beef” stems from. Of all the nineteenth-century international trading ports, Kobe was the most cosmopolitan. These days there are still said to be over a hundred different nationalities living in the city, and visiting seamen always knew they could rely on finding a good steak on arrival. Much later, Kobe was the birthplace of one of the most popular ways of eating beef in Japan, which helped cement its position as a recognizable global brand. The dish was teppanyaki—in which cubes of beef are briefly seared on a hot plate—invented in the 1950s by an okonomiyaki chef who wanted to offer American diners a dish they might recognize.
But not all Japanese beef is Kobe beef; in fact, since most countries had until recently banned beef exports from Japan after the BSE (“mad cow disease”) crisis of 2001, anything purporting to be Kobe beef that you might have encountered in, say, one of those outlandish burgers with foie gras and truffles in New York or London has probably come from the American Midwest, Australia, or China. Even in Japan, Kobe accounts for only a small percentage of beef production. It is, after all, a city crammed onto a small stretch of land between the mountains and the sea. There ain’t much room for grazing.
A better name might be Wagyu beef, but that too is a little broad (it means simply “Japanese beef”). The main cattle-raising districts of Japan are Maesawa, Yonezawa, Yamagata, Kobe, and Matsusaka (not to be confused with matsutake, the posh mushrooms). Over 80 percent of cattle raised in these areas today is black-haired, short-horn Tajima-gyu cows, or “Japanese Blacks,” many of which start their life on the southern islands of Okinawa before coming to mainland Japan to be reared. The consensus among the chefs and foodies I had spoken to so far was that, of these, the best beef comes from those raised in Matsusaka, between the Kumozu River in the north and the Miya River to the south. The beef from here is said to be more tender, tasty, and beautiful than any other.
We’d seen this extraordinary meat, like inverse raspberry ripple ice cream, with the branches of fat—called sashi—lacing extravagantly through the red flesh, on sale in supermarkets everywhere, but our first chance to taste it came in Kyoto, in a shabu-shabu restaurant in the city’s famous Ponto-cho nightlife district.
Shabu-shabu is half dinner, half performance art in which bacon-thin escalopes of beef are wafted in a small charcoal-heated samovar—a hoko nabe—full of a very light, simmering konbu dashi. Shizuo Tsuji says that the name shabu-shabu comes from the supposed sound this wafting of the beef makes in the water, but it is not a traditional Japanese dish at all; it arrived in Japan only in the early twentieth century and is generally considered Mongolian in origin. The meat is wafted for mere seconds and then dipped either in ponzu or a sesame-based sauce, or sometimes raw egg.
After the precious meat had been eaten—with great enthusiasm from Asger and Emil; these kind of theatrical cooking techniques might well have been invented for small boys—mushrooms, onions, cabbage, and tofu went into the pot. As with the chanko nabe experience in Tokyo, just as we thought we’d conquered the whole lot, the waiter brought us noodles to add to the broth, which had by now become lightly flavored by the ingredients.
We tried another way of eating Japanese beef, sukiyaki, the next day. Sukiyaki uses slightly thicker escalopes of beef fried in beef tallow on a hot skillet, then dipped in a sugary soy-mirin sauce. (Japanese Food Schism No. 286: in the east, they cook the meat in the sauce; in the west, they use it as a dip.) It was a little too sugary for my taste, although the children devoured it like wolves: but then again, it is no great leap from sugary beef to a Big Mac, is it?
On both occasions the beef itself was a vivid pinky red and webbed with veins of fat to the extent that it was a split decision as to whether we were eating fatty meat or meaty fat. Its texture was akin to the tenderest milk-fed veal, as unctuous as Brylcreem, and it lingered on the tongue for just a few moments before melting away like butter in a hot pan. Alone it had a creamy, indefinably savory flavor, like uncommonly tasty fat.
I wanted to get to the bottom—the rump, if you like—of this extraordinary meat. How could they breed beef that was so rich and fatty without the cows keeling over from heart attacks? Could all the rumors concerning the beer, the music, and the sake rubs be true?
The rumors are to be found in the most reliable of sources: Japanese food writer Kimiko Barber says, for instance: “The beef is marbled because the cattle are massaged with beer to distribute the fat throughout the meat.” I had seen this claim made for Japanese cattle-rearing in newspapers and books countless times. But could massage actually move fat around in this way? And did beer really add to the fattiness of the meat, as others claimed? Could there be farmers on earth who played music to their animals?
If all the rumors were true, I had a very clear vision of what I wanted to achieve with my research. Since I’d started reading about Japanese beef, I had formed a childish ambition. I hadn’t mentioned it to anyone, not even Lissen, for fear that she would dismiss this entire Japan project as the self-indulgent folly of a crazed and immature man.
I wanted to give a massage to a cow.
It was partly the absurdity of it that appealed, but also, I’ll admit, the cheap kudos of participating in the production of one of the world’s greatest gourmet products. I became fixated on capturing the money shot of me standing next to a cow, giving it a meaningful rub. And if Matsusaka was where the best beef was raised, this was where my cow groping would have to take place.
Matsusaka is a historic castle town in central Mie Prefecture, about three hours by local train southeast of Osaka. Figuring that out had been the easy part. The rest—finding people from the cattle industry in Matsusaka who were willing to talk to me—was less straightforward.
Initial confusion on the part of the various local authorities I contacted—“Sorry, we don’t export”—was soon replaced by mistrustful suspicion, then stalling, with endless e-mails bounced back and forth. Could you send copies of articles you have written about beef before? Tell us again, what was your interest in Japanese beef? What did you say your name was? And so on, round and round in an endless, polite holding pattern. And I hadn’t even dared mention the real reason I wanted to visit a Matsusaka cattle farm.
Eventually, through sheer persistence, some dates and meetings were set up at the renowned Wadakin ranch, but I was not allowed to bring anyone apart from a translator. I set off from Osaka station for Matsusaka with my new friend Sasha, the ponytailed Serbian (who spoke Japanese) from my cooking demonstration in Kyoto.
The three-hour train ride gave us a chance to get to know each other. Sasha’s dream, he told me, was to return to Serbia to open an authentic Japanese restaurant. “It will be over many floors of the same building,” he told me. “The ground floor will be common people’s food like ramen and curry rice, then the higher you get, the more refined the food will be until, right at the top, you will have kaiseki.”
When you arrive by train in Matsusaka, the nature of the town’s main industry is immediately obvious. Advertising billboards promote beef restaurants, butchers’ shops, and ranches wherever you look. As we arrived at the Wadakin ranch—which looked more like a well-manicured country club than a place for raising cattle—I had my strategy all planned out. I would listen attentively as the farmers explained their methods, taking assiduous notes and asking serious questions in order to appear a proper cow enthusiast for as long as was necessary. At no point would I be so crass as to ask outright whether or not they massaged the cows or, heaven forbid, if I might give one “a bit of a rub.” I would bide my time until I judged the moment was right, then I would ask, casually, if I might, you know, perhaps just take a quick peek at some actual cows, for “research purposes.” Then, lingering by the stalls, I hoped to catch a glimpse of their secret husbandry techniques, to try to see any massage-and-beer action going down, and perhaps even to get Sasha to distract the farmers while I nipped under the fence and, under the pretense of just, you know, patting a cow, give it a surreptitious knead. At least then I could honestly say that I had massaged a cow.
What was the worst that could happen if they caught me? Sure, I would have to leave in ignominy, but if I got to rub a cow it would be worth it.
Imagine my surprise, then, upon arriving at the farm to find a field with four horned, black-haired Tajima-gyu cows with rings through their noses loitering in it, and two cow hands standing by with giant gallon-size bottles of shochu, a crate of beer, and two woven straw rubbing mats.
I was barely out of the car and shaking hands with my hosts before one of them was showing me how to spray a mouthful of the shochu over the flank of the cow before rubbing it into his hide with a bundle of woven straw, and then egging me on to try it for myself.
I heaved the huge shochu bottle up to my lips and took a mouthful of the burning liquor. I summoned all my lung power, puckered, and pointed at the side of the cow, and let rip with a messy, dribbling spurt, much of which ended up down my shirtfront. The Wadakin ranch hands looked on with broad grins. I half expected a hidden TV crew to emerge, perhaps from the back end of the cow, but the handler urged me on with the straw, showing me how to rub vertically to ensure the shochu permeated the animal’s coarse black hair. He then offered me a large brown bottle of beer. The cow, seeing this, started swinging its head around excitedly. I plunged the bottle into its mouth, although in the gnashing of teeth and flailing of cow lips, much of its contents spilled to the floor as the animal desperately tried to suck the bottle dry.
The farm hands looked on approvingly, and I felt a chapter of my life had drawn to a close. I had done it. I had massaged a cow. I felt empty, shallow, and not a little foolish, but somewhere there was also a perverse sense of achievement.
Not having had much practice at spitting at cows, I had managed to swallow a good portion of the spirit, so the interview with Kinbe Matsuda, the founder of Wadakin and one of the most respected cattle breeders in Japan, was not as coherent as I would have wished. Here is what I could decipher from my notes.
The cows are raised to the age of ten months in Hyogo Prefecture, another of the main cattle-breeding areas of Japan, before being brought to the Wadakin ranch. They are bred only for meat, never to produce milk, and not for breeding, and are slaughtered, virgins, at three years and ten months. By this stage a diet of mostly rice stems, with some corn, soybeans, and grain, will have brought them to a weight of thirteen to fifteen hundred pounds. After slaughter, three-and-half ounces of their meat will sell for ¥4,800 ($40) in Wadakin’s restaurant, the only outlet for its beef in the world.
“Why the beer?” I asked.
“If one of them isn’t eating as much as they should, it helps give them an appetite,” Matsuda, who is the fourth generation of his family to run the farm, told me. “We don’t do it every day.” And why shochu? “Because it is cheap and high in alcohol, which is good against insects.” And did they really play the cows music?
“No, that’s ridiculous.”
On the subject of exactly why Wadakin massages their cows, Matsuda-san was a little vaguer. “We massage to stop the fat building up,” he said, or at least that’s how Sasha translated it. “The fat is very important for the flavor,” he added. “It is very healthy. Not much cholesterol, like olive oil.”
We got to taste some Wadakin beef at the farm’s lavish five-story restaurant and hotel complex back in central Matsusaka. The restaurant’s specialty is sukiyaki, but I wanted to try Wadakin beef in its purest state, as sashimi. It was served with just a dipping sauce of ginger and soy, and was sweet and creamy and lacking in that metallic, bloody flavor that rare beef has back home. It was also actually a little tougher than the other Japanese beef I had eaten, which was no bad thing.
So, all in all, a triumphant day. But on the train home something was still nagging me: I didn’t really feel I had the definitive answers I had been looking for. So, a couple of days later, following more delicately negotiated phone calls, I headed back to Matsusaka, this time alone.
I was met by the manager of the local beef research center. We drove in his none-too-fragrant Honda to a group of cowsheds, which were home to a couple hundred Herefords and black Tajimas.
Along the way I bombarded him with questions. Why was Japanese beef so expensive? And why was it so tender? What did they feed the cows? Was it true about the massage and the beer? Was Wadakin for real, or is that just something they lay on for tourists?
“Raising cows here is a very labor-intensive process,” he explained. “It takes so long. We don’t slaughter them until forty-six months, and they don’t produce milk during that time. Look.” He pointed to a concave indentation in the back of one of the cows we encountered as we arrived at the sheds. “That’s how we judge when to slaughter—when that indent reaches about the size of an egg, they are ready.”
Wadakin was for real, he continued. The beer does stimulate appetite, but he didn’t really agree with its use. The real secret to Japanese beef, he told me, is the breed and the feed, that and the fact that most of their herd are females, which are tender more than the males. “The black Japanese cows are the only ones that you can get this marbling with. We feed them only grass to start with.” He gestured to a couple of big-eyed black cows munching lazily in their stalls. “Then they get rice straw, which is one of the most important factors in creating the marbling. After ten months we only feed them rice straw with a little green straw or grass because this helps to create the fat cells. Green grass stops the production of fat cells because it is rich in Vitamin A. They still need a little Vitamin A, though; otherwise, their legs get swollen and they go blind, so they get some green stuff.” He claimed that the Japanese prefer these kinds of ultra-tender meats because their “jaw muscles are not so strong because we are used to eating a traditional diet of rice.”
He led one cow out of its stable and offered me a metal-toothed brush. “You can have a go if you want.” Being by now an old hand at Japanese cow husbandry techniques, I began giving the animal a vigorous brushing.
And the massage? How did that affect the marbling? “It doesn’t have any direct effect on the fat, but the cows like it; it keeps them relaxed, which might mean they eat more. But we usually only do it before they are slaughtered, to calm them.”
I stopped brushing. So that was the secret. Massaging was essentially a relaxation regime—happy cows make for good meat.