From Colonial Hoof to Metropolitan Table: The Imperial Biopolitics of Beef Provisioning in Colonial Korea

ABSTRACT

Compared to research conducted into the development of transoceanic meatways between Europe, the Americas, and Australasia during the long nineteenth century, relatively little is known about how meatways internationalized in East Asia. This article fills this gap in the literature by investigating how Japan exploited the bovine resources of colonial Korea. As a “hoof-to-table history,” it explains how bureaucrats, agricultural scientists, veterinarians, and merchants constructed imperial technoscientific regimes that made it possible not only to improve and sanitize Korean bovine bodies into meat suitable for Japanese palates but also to transport them not dead but alive. It also shows how failures at breeding based on Western strains and models led to a policy reversal that upheld the “purity” of Korean cattle. Threatened by the possibility that Korean beef could be superior to Japanese beef, the article argues how imperial meatways functioned in suppressing the “Koreanness” of cattle to making beef softer and more “sophisticated” than the tougher textures Koreans were portrayed as liking.

KEYWORDS:

• Cattle
• beef
• meat
• Japan
• Colonial korea

Acknowledgements

Two previous versions of this article were presented at the Imperial Foodways Conference, University of California, Santa Barbara, and the Livestock as Global and Imperial Commodities Workshop, Free University of Berlin. I would like to thank the organizers and participants, especially Bertie Mandelblatt and Samuël Coghe, for their incisive criticisms. I would also like to thank the two anonymous referees, as well as Miranda Brown, for their constructive feedback. The research on which this article is based was funded by a JSPS Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research, grant number 18K01041.

Disclosure statements

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author

Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1. Mintz, “Food, Culture and Energy.”

2. Ibid., 22.

3. Friedberg, Fresh: A Perishable History, 49–85; Perren, Taste, Trade and Technology; Smil, Should We Eat Meat? 77–80; and Specht, Red Meat Republic; Woods, The Herds Shot Round.

4. Woods, The Herds Shot Round, 163.

5. Ibid., 164.

6. Ibid., 166.

7. Perren, Taste, Trade and Technology, 33.

8. For a recent exception, see DuBois, “Many Roads from Pasture.”

9. This article builds on works that have sought to extend Michel Foucault’s concept of biopolitics and biopower to include the ways in which animals are subjected to various regimes of governance, broadly defined: Chrulew and Wadiwel, Foucault and Animals; Neo and Emel, Geographies of Meat, 7–8, 41–6; Porter, “Bird Flu Biopower;” and Shukin, Animal Capital, 1–28.

10. Imu, Inshoku Chōsen, chapter 2; Lim, “Korean Cattle;” Mitsuda, “Imperial Bovine Bodies;” Nakazato “Chōsengyū;” and Noma, “Nichiro Sensō;” Specht, Red Meat.

11. For a comparative analysis of the meat trade with other countries, including Australia and Qingdao, see Mitsuda, “Biopolitics.”

12. Cwiertka, Modern Japanese Cuisine, 31–3; Ishige, History of Japanese Food, 148–9; Harada, Kome to Niku; and Okada, Meiji Yōshoku, 41–7.

13. Miyazaki, Nikushoku, 37.

14. Nōrinshō, Chikusan, 6.

15. Matsukawa, “Ushi,” 78; and Nōrinshō, Chikusan, 285.

16. Nōrinshō, Chikusan, 286.

17. Ibid., 287.

18. Makino, “Washu hingyū,” 38–42.

19. Nōrinshō, Chikusan, 266.

20. Ibid., 404.

21. Honda, “Bokuchiku fushin,” 14.

22. Hanley, “Urban Sanitation;” and Tajima, “The Marketing of Human Waste.”

23. Honda, “Bokuchiku fushin,” 15.

24. Honda, “Ushi no hanashi,” 13–16.

25. Ibid., 13–4.

26. Honda, “Chōsen nōgyō,” 8.

27. Nakazato, “Chōsengyū,” 147–8.

28. Ibid., 131.

29. Honda, “Kankoku no chikusan (228),” 1.

30. Honda, “Kankoku no bokuchiku,” 32.

31. Honda, “Kankoku no chikusan (228),” 8.

32. Honda, “Kankoku no chikusan (227),” 3.

33. Honda, “Kankoku no bokuchiku,” 31.

34. Hizuka, Chōsen, 9.

35. Ibid.

36. Ibid., 11.

37. Ibid., 9.

38. Yamawaki, Kachiku densenbyō. Meiji hen, 80.

39. Ibid., 78–9.

40. Honda, “Kankoku no bokuchiku,” 33.

41. Tokishige, Kankoku gyūeki, 36.

42. Ibid., 53.

43. Yamawaki, Kachiku densenbyō. Meiji hen, 164.

44. Ibid.

45. McVety, The Rinderpest Campaigns, 31.

46. Kakizaki, “Glycerinated Rinderpest Vaccine.”

47. Chōsen Nōkai, Chōsen nōgyō, 164.

48. Ibid.

49. Chōsen Sōtokufu, “Chōsen no jūeki,” 165.

50. Nagura, “Kachiku densenbyō,” 49.

51. In, “Nihon no gyūeki bōeki,” 130.

52. Nagura, “Kachiku densenbyō yobō,” 50.

53. Nakazato, “Chōsengyū,” 147–8.

54. Yuchi, “Naze Gyūniku,” 311.

55. Yamawaki, Kachiku densenbyō. Hōki no hensen (2), 52.

56. Woods, The Herds Shot Round, 3.

57. Ibid.

58. Chōsen Nōkai, Chōsen Nōgyō, 169.

59. Ibid.

60. Ibid.

61. Honda, “Chōsengyū,” 7–12.

62. Ibid., 9.

63. Ibid., 11.

64. Ibid.

65. Ibid.

66. Schmalzer, “Breeding a Better China,” 1.

67. Chōsen Nōkai, Chōsen nōgyō, 169.

68. Ibid., 170.

69. Ibid., 170, 250.

70. Ibid., 251.

71. Lim, Inshoku no chōsen, 59.

72. Nakazato, “Chōsengyū,” 151.

73. Cited in “Chōsengyū ni tsuite,” 21.

74. Ibid., 70–1.

75. Mitsuda, “Biopolitics.”

76. In an important recent article, Thomas DuBois has taken issue with this widespread assumption that the Chinese did not consume much meat by showing, based on a critical evaluation of three data sets, that “Chinese people in the first half of the twentieth century consumed a small but not insignificant amount of animal protein.” Dubois, “Counting,” 4.

77. Hizuka, Chōsen, 14.

78. Suzuki, “Chōsen,” 53.

79. Furuumi, “Daitōa senka,” 56.

80. Kan, Kankoku shokuseikatsushi, 403–4.

81. Majima, “Chōsengyū,” 21.

82. Okita, Rimen, 77.

83. Yokohori, “Naichi,” 443.

84. Nōseika Chikusan Gakari, “Chikugyū,” 12–13.

85. Woods, The Herds Shot Round, 178.

86. Ibid., 170.

87. Doi, Shokuminchi chōsen, 82.

88. Wilcox, Cattle in the Backlands, 204–22.

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Tatsuya Mitsuda

Tatsuya Mitsuda is Associate Professor at Keio University, Tokyo/Yokohama, Japan. He was educated at Keio, Bonn, and Cambridge, where he received a PhD in History. His research interests span the intertwined social and cultural histories of food and animals, with particular reference to the German and Japanese experience in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.