When Was It Acceptable to Eat Meat in Japan?

The cookbook Ryōri monogatari, published in 1643, contained a section on beasts. Deer, wild boar, and rabbit appeared among its ingredients. Elsewhere, the book distinguished a stock made with dried bonito from a separate preparation for vegetarian cooking.^[1][2]

The combination makes a poor beginning for the familiar story that Japan stopped eating meat in the seventh century and resumed when the country encountered the modern West. It also complicates the opposite claim that restrictions were never serious because people sometimes ate animals anyway. A cook could need instructions for both sorts of meal precisely because the distinction mattered.

The history concerns changing permissions rather than a single national switch. An imperial prohibition named particular animals. A religious rationale could authorize hunting while taking the consequences of killing seriously. Later, meat could be described as medicine, a pleasure, or evidence of a modern way of life.

Across those settings, the question was rarely just whether an animal's flesh could be eaten. Who was eating it, what sort of animal was it, and what made this particular meal defensible?

The decree conventionally dated to 675 is preserved in the Nihon shoki, the court chronicle completed in 720. In W. G. Aston's translation, Emperor Tenmu prohibited eating cattle, horses, dogs, monkeys, and chickens. The passage then expressly excluded other kinds of meat from this prohibition.^[3]

That last provision changes the story. Deer and wild boar were not on the list. The text cannot support a universal ban on animal flesh, much less certify twelve centuries during which everyone obeyed one. It records a particular distinction made by the court.

The surrounding rules are equally instructive. The decree restricted certain hunting devices and specified a seasonal prohibition on blocking waterways with fish traps. Regulation reached the means of obtaining animals as well as the act of eating them. The seasonal fish-trap clause should not simply be transferred to the separate list of prohibited meats.

Even within the chronicle's account of that month, food appears in another form. An earlier entry describes a large feast of vegetable fare for priests and nuns.^[3] Such a meal had an identified religious company. It was not presented as an inventory of everything eaten throughout the emperor's realm.

These two records put useful limits around each other. A vegetarian feast shows that abstention could be organized as an activity. The selective prohibition shows that the court did not treat every animal in the same way. Neither requires us to imagine a society divided neatly into sincere vegetarians and people secretly breaking a universal rule.

Animals also had uses that continued while people debated their consumption. Horses and cattle supplied labor, transport, and military resources. In their review of archaeological and documentary research, Mark Hudson and Irene M. Muñoz Fernández stress that extensive animal use should not be confused with an economy organized primarily to produce meat.^[4]

Keeping a cow alive could therefore be important for reasons different from refusing to kill any living being. That observation does not explain every species on Tenmu's list, or prove the emperor's private intention. It identifies a practical relationship that an explanation based only on compassion would leave out.

The ancient evidence establishes several boundaries at once: particular creatures, particular methods of capture, and particular occasions for abstention. Later people inherited religious and practical concerns about animals, but they did not receive a complete, unchanging menu with instructions valid for every household.

Medieval religious life did not dissolve the problem of killing. It supplied ways to argue about it.

Within the cult of Suwa, in central Honshu, hunting was accompanied by a rationale concerned with the fate of the hunted animal. As Barbara R. Ambros explains in her historical discussion of meat-eating, the formula known as the Suwa no mon promised animals a better rebirth through the consumption of their flesh. Nourishing human bodies could be represented as a route toward salvation, addressing the hunter's karmic burden.^[5]

The promised rebirth belonged to religious belief. For the historian, the important feature is how the justification worked: an animal had died, and the hunter incurred consequences that the formula claimed to address. Permission retained an obligation toward the creature killed.

The distinction is important for understanding permission. A prohibition can be qualified without the value behind it disappearing. A hunter authorized to kill under specified religious terms is differently situated from someone who believes there is nothing to explain. The same physical act can carry a different meaning because the obligations attached to it have changed.

Nor was every medieval meal organized around a hunter's problem. The late-Muromachi culinary text Ōkusadono yori sōden no kikigaki, preserved in later compilations, includes a preparation of swan using a liquid made from bonito. The National Diet Library reproduces the passage in its history of stock.^[2] A bird and a fish could belong to the same carefully described dish.

That recipe opens a second field of expertise. The question for its cook was how to prepare the ingredients appropriately. The question in the Suwa rationale was how taking life could be reconciled with salvation. They were not rival explanations of a single dinner, and there is no reason to assign the recipe to a Suwa ritual. Their coexistence reveals different demands that food could encounter.

The medieval comparison thus makes “Buddhist Japan” an insufficient dietary description. Religious concerns about killing were influential, but their application involved particular institutions, participants, and arguments. Meanwhile, culinary traditions preserved knowledge of preparing animal foods. To understand acceptance, we need to identify which responsibility a person was trying to satisfy.

By the seventeenth century, Ryōri monogatari brought several kinds of culinary knowledge together in print. The author and publisher remain unidentified. Its categories included fish, birds, and beasts rather than a single undifferentiated collection of animal protein. The beasts section extended beyond deer and boar to animals such as bear, otter, and dog.^[1]

These categories are significant without turning the book into a national dietary survey. They show that named preparations could be preserved and communicated. They do not establish how often every ingredient was purchased or how readily every reader would serve it.

The distinction between its stocks is a more intimate kind of evidence. One preparation used bonito. The vegetarian alternative used plant materials, including dried gourd and kelp.^[2] Respecting abstention required a different preparation before the finished dish reached the table.

A meal could consequently cross a boundary without displaying a recognizable piece of meat. Removing a bird or a slice of venison would not make a fish-based broth suitable for a meal that excluded animal ingredients. The cook needed to know what had entered the liquid, not only what a guest could see floating in it.

Preserving both recipes gave the cook an adaptable repertoire. The handbook could teach someone to prepare animal foods and to maintain a genuine alternative, with a separate stock available when the meal required it.

This also prevents a common modern shortcut: assuming that avoiding mammalian meat necessarily meant observing a vegetarian diet. Fish and birds could occupy different positions from cattle and horses in everyday preferences. In a meal requiring abstention, however, a fish ingredient could be exactly what needed to be replaced.

The important boundary therefore ran through preparation as well as between species. Someone had to choose the stock, assemble the ingredients, and keep the purpose of the meal in mind. Religious or ritual requirements became edible through these decisions. They could not be fulfilled by a declaration at the dining table after the broth had already been made.

The cookbook's beast chapter and vegetarian stock belong in the same history for this reason. They document capacities that could coexist. Knowing how to prepare one sort of food did not remove the need—or the ability—to refrain from it on another occasion.

The later Tokugawa city offers a different setting: meat sold to customers who were neither attending a monastic feast nor necessarily joining a hunt.

In Edo hanjōki, published in 1832, Terakado Seiken described shops selling the meat of wild animals under the name yamakujira, or mountain whale. His account belongs to a satirical portrait of the city. It nevertheless presents meat-eating as something with recognizable premises, customers, and public language, rather than an activity that could only be imagined behind a locked door.^[6]

The language of kusurigui, eating for medicinal purposes, supplied another explanation. Meat could be consumed as something expected to restore or sustain the body. The claim concerned the purpose of the meal. It did not require the diner to argue that every ordinary objection to meat had become irrelevant.

A medicinal justification creates room for an exception. Something avoided in routine consumption may be defended when a person's condition is thought to require it. That logic can be sincere, convenient, or both. The surviving label alone cannot reveal how ill a customer was or how strongly that customer believed in a remedy.

Nor does a euphemism necessarily prove that the trade was invisible. Krämer's discussion of late-Tokugawa descriptions shows animal foods being sold and consumed in urban settings. The name mountain whale gave the activity a recognizable idiom; it did not turn a deer into a sea creature.^[6]

This evidence changes the meaning of apparent inconsistency. A society can attach discomfort to an activity while also creating recognized occasions and businesses around it. People need not agree that meat is an ordinary, unproblematic dinner before some of them become repeat customers.

Yet it would be a mistake to extend urban examples across every region or household. Availability, expense, local practice, and willingness to eat were different conditions. A printed description of a flourishing trade can establish a cultural presence without measuring its share of the population's meals.

Archaeology supplies another check on exclusively textual histories. Hudson and Muñoz Fernández review animal remains from several early modern settings, including pigs or boar at the Satsuma residence in Edo and other urban sites. The evidence complicates a picture of complete avoidance, while leaving the overall contribution of meat to diets difficult to calculate.^[4]

Taken together, these sources describe a world in which meat could be available, recognizable, and qualified. By the nineteenth century, the question was already more complicated than whether anyone would eat it. It included what someone should say about doing so.

In 1870, Fukuzawa Yukichi's Nikushoku no setsu, or “On Eating Meat,” pressed the argument in a new direction. Instead of asking for an exception to ordinary practice, it challenged the grounds on which ordinary practice condemned meat.^[7]

Why, it asked, should killing a large cow provoke an objection from someone prepared to eat a whale? Why should the suffering of a land animal be decisive when opening a live eel was familiar? These comparisons drew on foods readers might already recognize. The argument tried to make a distinction they accepted seem inconsistent.

Fukuzawa also addressed smell and disgust. Unfamiliar animal foods could be rejected for an odor while familiar preserved foods with powerful smells remained desirable. He located part of the difference in habit: what the senses had learned to accept. In his presentation, reluctance became something that could be reconsidered rather than an inherited verdict that ended discussion.

The essay went much further than these comparisons. It made sweeping claims about meat, milk, bodily strength, and national well-being. Those claims are evidence of the case being made in 1870, not medical advice. Their historical force lay in changing the obligation assigned to the eater. Avoiding an animal food could now be represented by an advocate as neglecting health, rather than protecting purity or compassion.

The document's commercial setting is essential. It was issued by the Gyūba Company in Tsukiji. Its argument led into descriptions of milk products, including cheese and butter, and practical suggestions for their use. The Edo-Tokyo Museum's catalogue independently identifies the company as the issuer of this 1870 pamphlet.^[8]

Readers were not being offered only an abstract philosophy of diet. There were goods to obtain and new habits to learn. Instructions for mixing milk with tea or coffee, and for using butter with other foods, addressed the distance between approving an argument and knowing what to do at the next meal.^[7]

The argument also joined products that moral categories might separate. Drinking milk did not require slaughtering the cow. Nevertheless, milk and beef entered the same campaign against aversion, associated with a broader proposal for raising and using animals. The cow could become desirable through more than one product.

The date matters. This appeal appeared before the widely remembered public association of the Meiji emperor with meat-eating in 1872.^[6] Advocacy and commercial provision were already under way. An account in which one imperial meal suddenly introduced an unknown food misses the prior work of comparison, explanation, selling, and preparation.

Fukuzawa's pamphlet does not tell us that its readers were persuaded. It gives us something more precise: an attempt to relocate the burden of explanation. Now the person refusing meat, not only the person eating it, was being asked to justify the choice.

Changes in justification did not require every cooking technique to change with them.

The food historian Noma Mariko follows this problem through gyūnabe, beef cooked in a pot, and its relationship with earlier medicinal meat-eating. Her study argues that the popular beef meal carried forward recognizable arrangements of cooking and eating while acquiring a different public meaning. A preparation could be familiar even when its new place in arguments about civilization was not.^[9]

That is an important alternative to equating meat adoption with the imitation of an entire Western dinner. A new ingredient might enter an existing meal form. People could encounter it through utensils, accompaniments, and ways of gathering that did not all need to be learned from abroad.

Noma also distinguishes this beef-pot world from Western-style cuisine and from inexpensive stewed meat sold in the streets. Her sources assign those forms different reputations. Enthusiasm for one did not guarantee acceptance of the others.^[9]

The difference exposes what a simple rise in meat consumption would conceal. A food could gain prestige without every way of producing, selling, or eating it acquiring the same standing. Acceptance could create a new boundary inside meat-eating instead of dissolving all boundaries around it.

The literature of the period makes the arguments audible, but not statistically representative. Kanagaki Robun's Aguranabe, first published in 1871, placed talk of civilization around the beef pot. Krämer discusses its fashionable meat-eating rhetoric as part of the changing discourse.^[6] Its diners are literary constructions; their confident pronouncements cannot be counted as respondents in a survey.

What such writing can establish is that a meal had become a setting in which people could perform a claim about themselves. Eating beef could be made to say something beyond satisfying hunger. The performance also offered material for comedy. A reader could recognize the claim without necessarily admiring the person making it.

This is why a familiar cooking method and a changed social meaning must be kept together. Explaining gyūnabe only through foreign influence misses what made the dish approachable. Explaining it only as uninterrupted tradition misses why people began to talk about eating it differently. The historical change lay partly in the relationship between the food and the case made for serving it.

A government decision in 1872 provides a final, sharply defined comparison with the decree of 675. The new proclamation allowed Buddhist clergy to eat meat, marry, and grow their hair. The National Archives preserves it under the title “Permission for Clergy to Eat Meat, Marry, and Grow Their Hair”; its wording is also recorded in the Shiga prefectural archive.^[10]

The named people matter as much as the named activities. This was a change concerning clergy. It cannot stand in for a first-ever permission for every inhabitant of Japan to consume every animal. The cookbook, the Edo meat shops, and the 1870 pamphlet already rule out that reading.

Nor did the proclamation instruct every cleric to order a meat dish. Government permission and a religious judgment were different things. A rule could remove a state restriction while leaving a community to consider vows, institutional expectations, and what conduct it recognized as appropriate. A meal permitted by government might still require explanation to someone else.

This makes 1872 more interesting than the supposed end of an ancient national fast. The government's relationship with a religious way of life was changing. At the same time, writers, businesses, and diners were making other changes through persuasion, supply, and practice. These developments could interact without being identical or proceeding at the same speed.

Even the object of regulation had changed between the two decrees. The 675 passage drew a boundary around listed animals; the 1872 proclamation altered the permitted conduct of a defined group of people. Reading them as the opening and closing dates of one universal ban would erase what each actually regulated.

The result was not one moment when Japan gave a single answer. Acceptance could broaden for a food while distinctions persisted between eaters, preparations, and occasions. An official text, a recipe, and a shopfront each changed what was possible in a different way.

For a cook, the distinction still had to become a decision. The presence of venison in a handbook did not choose the meal's purpose. A government permission did not select the stock. An argument for beef did not make every person willing or able to eat it. The diner and those preparing the food encountered the larger changes through particular ingredients and arrangements.

When was meat acceptable in Japan? When the animal and the circumstances fitted a recognized permission—or when people succeeded in changing what counted as a sufficient reason. There were periods of stronger prohibition and periods of expanding consumption, but no enduring border with all meat on one side and all Japanese people on the other.

The history becomes clearer when we stop asking for the date at which the nation began eating and ask how a particular meal became something its participants could serve, receive, and defend.