Thursday, January 14, 2010
kobe beef
Kobe beef comes from wagyu cattle. For hundreds of thousands of years, people living in Japan lived soley off of rice, vegtables, and seafood. However in 1868 the ban was lifted. Buddhists were the ones who mainly wanted the ban to stay in place for religious reasons. For the next 100 years, people hardly ate beef. Some people believe that KObe beef was around in feudal Japan, and that emporers would secretly eat it. The switch to eating meet was made because they wanted to fatten up to become on par with the western imperialists, part of the westernization that took place during the Meiji Restoration. Recently Macdo as it is called in Japan, or McDonalds has become very popular. Most enjoy beef cooked in a traditional way and thinly sliced, eaten of course with chopsticks.
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Can you cite your source regarding the comment about the switch to eating meat being due to the fact that people wanted to fatten up?
ReplyDeleteAlso, I was curious about how McDonalds could be so successful in Japan if so many religious people did not eat beef, and I ended up finding some interesting statistics on religion in Japan. According to the CIA World Factbook 84% to 96% are both Shinto and Buddhist. It would seem that many people do not follow their religion strongly enough to boycott beef nowadays, which leads me to believe that Japan may not be an extremely religious country anymore in that respect.
That's a good point about their religion Cy. In the clip we watched from The Last Samurai in class, we saw how Japan was westernizing, with bigger, more dense cities, electric lines, and guns. However, they were still able to maintain a certain amount of their traditions and religion at this point. Many people still wore traditional clothes and bowing was taken very seriously when dealing with the emperor.
ReplyDeleteNow, as you pointed out, they are kind of disregarding their old traditions. A change like this usually occurs in modernizing societies because newer views, newer ways to do things, and more advanced technology weed out traditional ways.
The westernization of Japan made them adapt to different ways that sometimes went against their religion, as Cy and Dylan said. They were trying to construct a based upon the West, which gave them freedom to change to the way the world worked.
ReplyDeleteCy, we did talk about the eating of beef in order to fatten up this week in class. The government also told people to drink milk in order to have stronger bones so that the Japanese people could grow taller. All of this was for the purpose of having a stronger army so that Japan could defend itself. In addition, this blog post lead me to google Japan's beef consumption in the present day, and I found out some interesting facts. I looked at the height trends of Japan and then compared them to the heights of the rest of the word but the US especially. I discovered that the average height of the Japanese people is actually now very similar and on par with Americans, showing that the diet change has definitely worked over time, as well as that it must be true that religion is not as extreme in Japan anymore.
ReplyDeletehttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_height#Process_of_growth