Pigs and Battleships: The Birth of Corporate Specialty Foods and Promotion of Pork for the “Rich Country, Strong Army”

Pigs and Battleships: The Birth of Corporate Specialty Foods and Promotion of Pork for the "Rich Country, Strong Army"

Akira Shimizu - 2012-2013 Postdoctoral Associate, Council on East Asian Studies at Yale University and Lecturer, Department of East Asian Studies, Yale University

Wednesday, November 14, 2012 - 12:00pm to 1:30pm
Room 207, Sterling Memorial Library See map
120 High Street
New Haven, CT 6511

In early-modern Japan, physical contact with the corpses of four-legged animals was considered a cause of defilement, and the handling of dead animals was conducted by the hereditary outcast group. This assumption seems to have constructed a dietary map in which Japanese began the practice of meat eating in the wake of the modern period in the middle of the nineteenth century. However, meat eating itself was widely practiced under the pretext of “medicinal eating” (kusurigui). For example, in a block of the Kôjimachi neighborhood of Edo (modern-day Tokyo), people could walk into the “beast restaurant” (momonjiya) and eat the stewed meat of wild boar called the “mountain whale” (yamakujira). Or, Hikone Domain in modern-day Shiga Prefecture produced miso-marinated beef and periodically presented it to the Shogun. Against this historical background, this presentation aims to examine the “end” of early-modern dietary practice by focusing on the man named Kakuta Tôru and his promotion of pork. At the threshold of the Meiji political reforms, he established the Cooperative Relief Society (Kyôkyû sha) and attempted to advocate the consumption of the pork produced by his society. In doing this he claimed that his society’s specialty pork would serve as a crucial food to nourish Japanese and deal with the encroachment of the Western powers.

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Japan