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

Globalizing Meatways

In his short overview of the globalization of foodways, the eminent anthropologist Sidney Mintz posited there were three overlapping stages during which parts of the world gained access to a wider variety of new and cheap foods.¹ In the first stage, European voyagers took potatoes, maize, tomatoes, peanuts, cassava, fruits, vegetables, and beans from the Americas and introduced them to the rest of the world through the Columbian Exchange. European commercial operators were equally important actors in this period, as the Dutch and English East India Companies challenged East Asian monopolies by establishing international trade networks for spices, tea, coffee, and cacao that linked China, Vietnam, Arabia, and Japan to Europe. During the second stage, which began in the first decades of the sixteenth century, European colonial empires established plantations of cash crops, such as sugar, tea, and coffee, across the tropical Americas, marking “the first global division of labor and the first basic provisioning of the white world by labor that was nearly all nonwhite.”² During the third stage, which Mintz traced back to the last quarter of the nineteenth century, colonial settler regimes contributed to the further globalization of foodways as sites of production shifted from the tropics and subtropics to temperate former European colonies. Countries such as Argentina, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, Chile, and the United States emerged as major producers and exporters of food commodities. Meat was part of this third stage

In recent years, a substantial amount of research has built up to show how former colonies such as Argentina, Australia, New Zealand, and the United States emerged as major meat exporters to European countries, thus sowing the seeds of current environmental problems caused by the mass production of meat.³ Great Britain played a pivotal role in the emergence of these transoceanic meatways. Not only did it become the main market for foreign meat – imports jumped from just 3–5 percent in the 1860s to 41 percent in 1875 - but Britain also exported expertise, capital, and animal bodies across the world as it shaped, standardized, and dominated a global trade that became the foundation upon which today’s global meat complex was built.⁴ In her recent book, environmental historian Rebecca Woods demonstrated how domestic pressures on the production of beef – precipitated by industrial and urban competition for land – reached “a tipping point” in the 1860s that led to a global search for “Britain’s extended pasturelands.”⁵ Convincing a nation that prided itself on the superiority of British beef to accept imports, however, proved difficult. She pointed out that “the strength of the connection between breed, quality, and the discerning British palate” posed a major challenge.⁶ To solve this problem, purebred British bulls such as Herefords were sent out to improve New World breeds, which resulted in weakening British resistance toward foreign beef, including refrigerated products. As Richard Perren has written, “prime pedigree breeds were so good” that, after the 1890s, “they contained animals able to produce chilled beef of a quality good enough” to satisfy refined British tastes.⁷

In contrast to the Euro-American focus of the current historiography, relatively little is known about how the meat trade internationalized in East Asia, even though a major proportion of the global meat trade today is conducted in the region.⁸ Nor do we fully understand the process by which Japan, which was the first country to embrace beef eating as a symbol of modernity in the region, came to pursue an imperial “biopolitics” in which political and technological controls over the life and death of cattle became crucial in the provisioning of beef.⁹ Looking to Britain as the model, the Meiji government (1868–1912) first purchased British pedigree bulls, such as the Shorthorn and Devon, and then later imported European breeds such as the Simmental, in efforts to increase the size and number of indigenous stock so as to produce enough milk and beef that would modernize the largely plant-based Japanese diet. Unlike the British experience, Japanese recourse to overseas provisioning stemmed less from the pressures of urbanization or industrialization. The fundamental lack of available land (around 70 percent of the country today is mountainous) on which cattle and feed could be cultivated, combined with the failure to persuade farmers to take on Western breeds, were larger push factors that led Japan to look abroad for its supplementary source of animal traction, beef, and hide. From the end of the nineteenth century, Japan thus took tentative steps to join the transoceanic meat trade; it reached out initially to Australia and later expanded to China and Korea to bring down beef prices. Imperial conquests were crucial in fomenting demand and creating opportunities for exploiting the bovine resources the Asian mainland appeared to offer in abundance. In this way, beef joined a growing group of colonial foods, such as sugar, tea, rice, fruit, and soybeans – which were increasingly produced in Taiwan, Korea, and Manchuria – that could be brought over tariff free to metropolitan markets.

Focusing on colonial Korea, which became the main supplier of cattle and beef to the metropole, this article builds on previous scholarship by presenting, as Joshua Specht has recently done for the United States, a “hoof-to-table history” of the construction of imperial meatways.¹⁰ Such an approach draws on a wide variety of political, economic, scientific, as well as cultural factors in explaining why, despite the availability of refrigeration as a technology used for the import of Qingdao beef, Korean-Japanese meatways were primarily based on the transport of live and not dead cattle.¹¹ Due to the heavy involvement of Japanese bureaucrats, agricultural scientists, veterinarians, and merchants in the construction of imperial technoscientific regimes that sought to improve and sanitize Korean bovine bodies, it became possible to reduce the sanitary and economic risks of transporting cattle alive. Yet, in contrast to Britain, where the superiority of its own breeds dictated the acceptance of beef imports, the article shows how the acceptance of colonial beef was complicated by the praise the same actors heaped on Korean cattle. Failure to transplant Western breeds in the colony quickly led to a protectionist policy in which stakeholders upheld and promoted the purity of Korean bovine bodies. In doing so, however, Japanese feelings of superiority were challenged, resulting in attempts to defend both metropolitan rearing techniques and metropolitan palates. This study finds that importing young Korean cattle as livestock and finishing them under Japanese supervision enabled the maintenance of meatways in which Korean and Japanese tastes for beef could be differentiated.

Domestic Breeding Failures, Wars, and the Limits of Metropolitan Supply

When Japan started to modernize in the 1860s, beef became the symbol of its attempts to transform the population’s traditionally plant-based diet. Championed by the state and intellectuals, beef was elevated to a fashionable, if expensive, item of food that civilized Americans and Europeans were thought to consume in abundance. Standard histories of this foodstuff have shown how a Buddhist country that had previously shunned beef eating as a defiling act came to acquire a taste for beef, pointing to how newly invented dishes such as beef pot (gyūnabe) helped popularize a taste for beef from the 1870s.¹² The consumption of gyūnabe took off, especially in urban conurbations such as Tokyo and Osaka in part because cooks made beef more palatable by preparing it with miso or soy sauce. In places like the Iroha beef pot restaurant, which once boasted a chain of 22 outlets in Tokyo alone, people from all walks of life, including children, ate beef.¹³

Consumer-centered portrayals of beef’s ascent have tended to pay little attention to the difficulties of production. Breeding and rearing cattle for food was challenging in a country where bovines were mostly draft animals. Concerted efforts at reengineering indigenous bovine bodies with the aim of producing sufficient supplies of beef and milk fit for a modern nation were launched in the late 1860s. Spearheaded by the likes of Ōkubo Toshimichi (1830–1878), who headed the powerful Ministry of Home Affairs, the Meiji government pursued a biopolitics based on a “Western model of propagation” (ōbeiteki bokuchiku no chokuyakuteki ishoku) in which pedigree Western bulls were crossed with indigenous cows.¹⁴ During this initial drive for improvement, hopes were attached to the import of British Shorthorns and Devons, which comprised the bulk of cattle purchases made in the 1860s and 1870s.¹⁵ These breeds were selected because they were quick to mature, easily fattened, boasted sturdy frames, and could serve multiple purposes of providing labor and food. To encourage foreign cattle crossbreeding, government-owned forests were either sold or rented out to former samurai; experimental farms were established in places like Mineoka (1868), Naitō Shinjuku (1872), and Shimofusa (1875); regulations were issued to make it easier to loan Western bulls; and subsidies were provided to private breeding companies to create a market for foreign cattle.¹⁶

Stockowners appeared to have fiercely resented the biopolitical interventions of the state. Government policy was mostly oblivious to the modest agricultural conditions in which cattle were set to work, and resistance emerged to enlarging the size of bovine bodies at all costs. Success was measured in quantitative terms, with the amount of meat or milk cattle could produce serving as the chief metric. According to a technocrat in Hiroshima, in 1882, Western breeds were five times more valuable than Japanese cattle, as the latter could only yield half the amount of beef produced by their Western counterparts.¹⁷ Much attention thus concentrated on closing this gap through repeated and aggressive crossbreeding with Western breeds, thereby turning indigenous cows into reproductive vessels for the creation of mixed breeds in which Shorthorn and Devon blood would hold progressive sway. The fact that Western breeds were difficult to handle and easily succumbed to diseases such as tuberculosis – to which indigenous cattle appeared immune – were also grounds for frustration among farmers.¹⁸ The failure to make bovine bodies serve national as opposed to local interests resulted in disappointing increases in the national bovine stock. In 1877, the number of cattle in Japan amounted to 1,076,000 head; five years later, it had increased to just 1,160,000.¹⁹ As this article will show, this figure remained largely constant until colonial cattle began to be imported.

Starting from the early twentieth century, the government tried to learn from the past and made efforts to import Western bulls such as the Ayrshire, Simmental, and the Brown Swiss – all of which were observed to be better suited to the environment in which Japanese agriculture typically operated. The Brown Swiss also had the added advantage of being resistant to tuberculosis. Following the second wave of imports, the situation somewhat improved, with the size of mixed breeds sufficiently increasing and producing more meat. In 1895, the average amount of beef that could be won from one head of cattle had been 135.7 kilograms; this amount increased to 142.4 kilograms in 1903 and then increased further to 154.4 kilograms in 1911.²⁰ Yet demand continued to outstrip supply: beef prices rose continuously beyond inflation in the early twentieth century, with the Russo-Japanese War (1904–1905) and the First World War (1914–1918) contributing to price hikes in particular as military demand for canned beef to feed to soldiers resulted in a major depletion of domestic bovine stock.

Honda Kōsuke, Agricultural Science, and the Turn to Korea

Predating these wars, agricultural scientists – who had been involved in the biopolitics of improving bovine bodies – had become increasingly pessimistic about the country’s ability to meet demand. One of the leading figures who expressed this bleak view was Honda Kōsuke (1864–1930). Born in 1864 in Kagoshima, Honda graduated from Komaba Agricultural College in 1886 and studied, like so many other scientists of his generation, in Germany between 1892 and 1895. He returned to take up a professorship at his alma mater, which had been incorporated into Tokyo Imperial University, where he was tasked with teaching livestock breeding until he was called to direct colonial livestock policy in Korea in 1906. His time in Europe strengthened his impression of the undeveloped state of animal husbandry in his home country, which most clearly manifested itself in the subordinate position cattle assumed in the Japanese agricultural economy. Unlike in Western countries, where cattle were an indispensable source of fertilizer – embodied in the proverb “no cattle, no manure, no manure, no crops”—Japanese cattle were peripheral to the cultivation of foodstuffs.²¹ Not least because night soil had functioned as the main source of Japanese fertilizer historically, the role of cattle was circumscribed.²²

Honda attributed Japan’s small number of cattle to a combination of environmental and social factors. Mountains and a lack of flat terrain restricted the amount of arable land available for grazing, while the seas and rivers inhibited the use of bovines for freight and transport.²³ As for the protein needs of the population, this was met mainly by fish, the consumption of which further diminished incentives to breed and rear food animals. Due to the dominant role played by rice cultivation, farmers also thought little about practicing crop rotation that might otherwise allow for the cultivation of animal feed. Compared to Europe, Honda thought that the balance between cattle and horses was all wrong.²⁴ In advanced Western economies, the ratio stood at a healthy three to four head of cattle for one head of horse. By contrast, there were 1.5 million horses and just 1.2 million cattle in Japan, most of which were concentrated in the west of the country. This was not an East Asian anomaly, either, he added. China and Korea had struck the “correct” balance between the two domesticated animals, with the number of cattle outstripping that of horses. “It is only in Japan,” he quipped, “that there are more horses than cattle.”²⁵

Comparisons with China and Korea reveal Honda’s increased interest in other East Asian countries, which were looked at as potential locations for overseas ranches that could solve Japan’s domestic bovine supply problems. On the eve of the Russo-Japanese War, the agricultural scientist made his first trip to Korea, together with his colleague Yoshikawa Suketeru (1868–1945), to conduct a survey assessing the bovine resources of a country that was increasingly coming under Japanese military and economic rule.²⁶ This was not the first time that the Japanese had set foot on the Korean peninsula in search of quality bovine stock. Historical geographer Nakazato Tsuguo has shown that the cattle trade with Korea dated back to the 1880s and 1890s.²⁷ Much of this private trade involved transporting Korean cattle on small boats to southern port towns, such as Nagasaki and Shimonoseki, from where Korean cattle – which had gained a reputation as strong, docile, and cheap – would be delivered to farmers in the south and west of the country. By the end of the nineteenth century, around 5,000 head of Korean cattle were being imported annually and employed on farms in Kyūshū, Chūgoku, and Shikoku.²⁸

For Honda, the extant cattle trade with Korea had one problem, however: it was restricted to purchasing stock from Gyeongsang Province (located in the southeast of the country) that, while superior to Japanese breeds, could not compare to north Korean cattle.²⁹ This was why, upon entering via the port of Pusan in the south, Honda headed immediately to the north, surveying the state of cattle breeding and rearing there. He also made visits to Wŏnsan and Sŏngjin – both of which were ports from where the Russians were already exporting some 30,000 head of north Korean cattle to Vladivostok – presumably to ascertain the feasibility of using the same ports for bringing north Korean cattle to Japan.³⁰

Honda’s firsthand appraisal of Korean cattle brimmed with optimism. First, he pointed to the amount of land that was available for the breeding and rearing of cattle, with plenty of land for more cattle to meet future Japanese demand. When compared with Japan’s stilted livestock economy, which had a disproportionate number of horses, Korea’s ratio was correct because horses made up just one-tenth of the bovine stock. Honda also drew attention to the central role cattle played in the economy. They were indispensable sources of traction, bone, and fertilizer, and they were bred and reared across the country.³¹ He also pointed to the custom of beef eating among the nobility that helped encourage the breeding and rearing of cattle for food. A combination of surplus land and a lack of manpower conspired to make the country dependent on bovine power. Each peasant household, he observed, kept at least one head of cattle; on average, it was more like two or three, and more wealthy households boasted between 30 and 40.³² Compared to Chinese and Japanese types, Korean cattle were, he concluded, “vastly superior.”³³

Many of Honda’s observations were widely shared among agricultural scientists and acquired elevated meaning following the Russo-Japanese War. In response to the need to supply the military with beef rations, a disproportionate number of domestic cattle had to be slaughtered. As Table 1 shows, the number of cattle slaughtered surpassed 200,000 head in 1903 and jumped to record nearly 300,000 in 1904 before dropping to around 150,000 in the few years following the end of hostilities. More significantly, efforts to replenish bovine stock ravaged by war proved only marginally successful. The numbers of domestic cattle eventually recovered to prewar levels, but they were far from satisfactory for a country with imperial ambitions to construct a “wealthy country and strong army.”³⁴ Policymakers expressed specific concerns about the security risks of continuing to rely on domestic sources of supply in the event of future hostilities.³⁵ Korean cattle figured in these discussions as a panacea.

Table 1. The Japanese bovine economy before and after the Russo-Japanese War.

Year	Total number	Number of births	Numbers slaughtered	Number of deaths
1903	1,286,116	155,789	221,386	16,349
1904	1,200,135	147,049	287,694	15,867
1905	1,167,610	145,259	202,766	14,098
1906	1,190,373	151,400	158,484	11,490
1907	1,237,161	174,785	155,710	12,590

Source: Hizuka, Chōsen no sangyū, 12–13.

In making the decision to exploit Korean bovine resources, references were made to the British model of outsourcing the beef supply to colonies like Australia. Hizuka Shota, a veterinarian working in the Department of Agriculture and Commerce for the governor-general of Korea, referred to discussions in which policymakers proposed Japan follow the British example by maintaining pedigree bulls in the metropole while the colonies could be left to provide the actual supply of beef.³⁶ In adopting this British model, policymakers envisaged a situation in which Korea would serve as the “producer” while Japan would act as the “consumer.” Gloomy economic projections for the domestic livestock sector also helped push forward the discussions. Given Japan’s increased urbanization, rising cost of living, continued cultivation of fields and mountains, the protection of forests, the encouragement of horse breeding and the like, the costs of breeding and rearing cattle were set to rise further.³⁷ It was thus time to turn to Korea.

Infectious Diseases, Interventions into Colonial Bovine Bodies, and the Sanitization of the North

One major concern that vexed policymakers and scientists alike was the threat infectious animal diseases posed to a stable trade. In 1892, for example, the Japanese consulate at Wŏnsan reported on an outbreak of rinderpest in Hamgyŏng Province which spread like wildfire to Gyeonggi Province in central Korea.³⁸ Crossing the Sea of Japan, the epizootic disease made its way to Yamaguchi, Okayama, Nagasaki, Fukuoka, and Oita. Except for 1900, cases of rinderpest broke out every year between 1892 and 1910, claiming the lives of a total of 30,758 cattle while policies to stamp out the disease cost the state 1,416,927 yen.³⁹ By the time state-sponsored mass imports of Korean cattle were being entertained, however, the trepidation that had characterized veterinary policy subsided, with Honda himself expressing optimism that fighting rinderpest was “relatively easy.”⁴⁰ Part of the reason for this shift owed to the realization that the benefits Japan could derive from developing Korea into a major livestock economy outweighed the risks of losses to cattle that epizootics could cause. Despite the sanitary risks posed by imports of north Korean cattle, Honda remained bullish.

Growing confidence also characterized the opinions of other veterinary experts, such as Tokishige Hatsukuma (1859–1913), Honda’s colleague in the Department of Agriculture at Tokyo Imperial University. Sent by the Ministry of Agriculture and Commerce to report on the state of rinderpest in Korea, Tokishige returned with a sympathetic report, published in 1907, that shifted the responsibility for bovine disease incursions from Korea to “Manchuria and other places in China.”⁴¹ He observed that the chief difference between Japan and Korea simply lay in the misfortunes of geography: Korea was far more exposed to the threat of rinderpest simply because it shared a border with China and Russia, where the disease was endemic. Tokishige thus suggested that the fight against epizootics should be moved from Japan to Korea, recommending the Korean government establish more stringent biopolitical controls and invite foreign veterinarians to train veterinary officers. More specifically, he proposed placing a chief veterinary officer in the central government, appointing one veterinary officer in each province, and sending 12 veterinary officers to police the border with China and Russia. A key weapon to be deployed in the fight against disease were sera, the research and production of which Tokishige felt needed to be carried out in Korea. Remarking that building such a facility would serve the mutual interests of both countries, he called for the use of public funds to pay for the labor, buildings, and land required – proposals that resulted in the setting up of the Rinderpest Serum Manufacturing Facility (Gyūeki Kessei Seizōjo) at Pusan a few years later in 1911.⁴²

Tokishige advocated for the potential for sera as inoculants because he was himself involved in this area of research. An investigation into developing a serum for inoculating cattle against rinderpest had begun in 1896 at the Center for Infectious Animal Diseases (Jyūeki Chōsa Jo).⁴³ Extracting bile from infected cattle, veterinarians such as Tokishige and Kakizaki Chiharu (1870–1950) successfully applied this inoculation technique on 64 cattle in 1904 during an outbreak that had affected the Tokyo region. As a result of inoculation, they claimed that up to 60 percent of cattle had been saved. Two years later, the serum entered common use, and the Center was tasked with its distribution – not only in Japan but also overseas in territories where Japan had significant imperial interests. In 1907, the Center was producing approximately 200 liters of sera a year.⁴⁴ When most of the Center’s functions were moved to the Rinderpest Serum Manufacturing Facility in Pusan, the frontlines of the battle against livestock disease moved with it to the Asian mainland. Prominent serum developers such as Kakizaki also made the move, attracted as they were by the prospect of collecting a wider variety of cheap specimens in a country that was more exposed to epizootic outbreaks. As the facility’s chief scientist, Kakizaki developed the world’s first rinderpest vaccine, inactivating a mixture of blood that came from immune cattle and spleen.⁴⁵ Experimenting on colonial cattle, he revealed that bovine bodies injected twice with the vaccine acquired sufficient levels of immunity.⁴⁶

In combination with prophylactics, the colonial authorities expanded biopolitical controls in Korea to sanitize indigenous cattle. From as early as 1907, following an outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease in Taegu, the Korean government stepped in to inoculate cattle in the surrounding area. By 1910, around 5,000 head of cattle had been jabbed with a serum to protect against the disease.⁴⁷ In the same year, the governor-general’s engineering department experimented with rinderpest sera and opened workshops in Puryong, northern Korea, which were designed to impart the techniques of inoculation to the locals.⁴⁸ In 1912, a broader offensive was launched that aimed to prevent rinderpest incursions from China, making use of the sea that were being manufactured in Pusan. Under the supervision of nine veterinary officers who were sent to the borderlands to police the situation, sera were carried in refrigerated trucks to 13 different locations, ready to inoculate stock as soon as outbreaks were detected. Between 1912 and 1915, more than 40,000 head of cattle were injected with the colonial serum.⁴⁹

Such aggressive veterinary interventions were expanded in the 1920s with the rollout of Kakizaki’s rinderpest vaccine, which was first tested on cattle in Kankyō-nan and Kankyō-hoku prefectures, as well as in Kando (Chinese: Jiandao), an area contested with China along the north bank of the Tumen River.⁵⁰ Proven effective in preventing deaths during the rinderpest epizootic that ravaged the area between 1923 and 1924, vaccine campaigns were ramped up from 1926, with around 50,000 head of cattle receiving injections each year. What was particularly striking about this act of biopolitical imperialism at the edge of empire, as In Tetsuyū noted, were its attempts to extend controls to spaces across the border.⁵¹ Exploiting the fact that infectious diseases disrespected political boundaries, the colonizers organized screening sessions for the Chinese inhabitants with the aim of propagating the modern approach of Japanese veterinary measures. Chinese veterinary policy under the auspices of the Qing not only lacked the financial backing that the governor-general commanded – inoculating cattle was little more than a pipe dream – it had nothing more to offer than order the slaughter of sick animals or halt their movement. With the tacit consent of their owners, the Japanese proceeded to inoculate Chinese bovine bodies that were deemed a threat because they were used to transport goods across the border with Korea.⁵²

These biopolitical interventions into colonial bovine bodies were an important prerequisite to provisioning politics. Prior to the sanitization of the north, animal quarantine had been set up in Pusan where a facility boasting a size of 33,000 m² and sheds able to accommodate 300 head of cattle had been built. One reason why the facility was so large was that livestock had to be kept in quarantine for nine days before being shipped to Japan. Following a journey that would take two days, animals would then be offloaded at ports such as Shimonoseki, where the imports would be subject to a further nine days of quarantine before being released.⁵³ One major problem with this “double quarantine” was the maintenance cost of having to keep livestock detained. Immediately after annexation, Yuchi Hikotsugu, a high-ranking bureaucrat in the Ministry of Agriculture and Commerce, criticized the amount of paperwork needed to attest to the health of cattle, arguing that it was responsible for keeping beef prices high.⁵⁴ Echoing Honda’s verdict, he praised Korean cattle for their large and powerful bodies as well as their sturdy legs and urged action on combatting rinderpest so as to lift the protective health measures in place.

It was undoubtedly on the back of the success of the inoculation campaigns in the north that the governor-general moved to relax animal quarantine measures in 1913, resulting in a decree that prescribed quarantine should only have to be carried out in Pusan. At the same time, the governor-general also aimed to open up the bovine resources of the north through the export of cattle via the ports of Gensan (Wonsan) and Joshin (Songjin) to Tsuruga, where animal inspection facilities had been newly established. Reflecting ingrained fears of epizootics, the initial regulations specified that imports should be limited to cattle destined for Japanese stomachs and ordered they be slaughtered in Tsuruga on arrival. Yet this clause was quickly rewritten, following intense pressure, to make it possible for north Korean cattle to be kept alive so that they could also be employed on farms before they were fattened up for the meat markets – a reflection of Japanese confidence in the colonial veterinary measures that had been implemented.⁵⁵

The Colonial Biopolitics of Reproduction, the Abandonment of the British Model, and the Shift to Protecting the Purity of Korean Cattle

In parallel with the development of veterinary controls that stretched north, the Korean governor-general implemented policies designed to elevate the state of cattle breeding in the country as a whole. In keeping with the British model, the colonizers set out to improve both the quantity and the quality of supposedly inferior colonial cattle by importing pedigree Western breeds and crossing them with indigenous stock. As Rebecca Woods has shown, “British breeds of livestock had conquered the world” by the end of the nineteenth century.⁵⁶ Looking to replicate the kind of “agropastoral expansion of the British Empire” that had made it possible to feed the industrial metropole, Japan dreamed of doing the same by turning Korea into a massive ranch.⁵⁷ It was with this intention in mind that Honda moved to Korea in 1906 and became head of the Agricultural Experimental Station, from where he directed colonial livestock policy until his departure in 1919. As part of this objective, Western breeds, such as the Simmental and the Ayrshire, were brought over from Japan and made available by the governor-general for crossbreeding purposes through the Central Agricultural Society (Kankoku Chuō Nōkai).⁵⁸ Mixed breeds that emerged from mating Western bulls with Korean cattle, it was hoped, would yield bovine bodies able to produce greater amounts of meat and milk. However, in 1911, the crossbreeding programs were abandoned, and the biopolitics of reproduction shifted to inbreeding, with an emphasis on north Korean cattle as the pedigree bull of choice. The nominal reason given was that the programs “did not fit the cultural level of Korean peasants.”⁵⁹

Concerned with improving south Korean cattle, north Korean bulls were sent to Gyeongsang Province in the south so that southern bovine bodies could be enlarged for shipment to the metropole. It is unclear from the sources why this policy reversal took place. One possible explanation is that the cost of feeding Western bulls was financially burdensome, especially when compared with indigenous cattle that could be maintained on low-quality feed. Impatience surrounding meeting the metropole’s bovine needs – as it was perennially starved of cattle – must have also played a role. Skepticism about the governor-general’s intentions also meant farmers were wary that the state would take away their bovine possessions after crossbreeding efforts were over, or that they might be charged a large bill afterward.⁶⁰ To maintain steady supplies to the metropole, it made sense to keep stockowners onside.

The speed with which the colonial breeding policy was reversed could also be attributed to the negative experiences Honda had accumulated back home. Invoking past breeding failures, Honda explained that attempts to cross Western breeds with Japanese ones to create mixed strains had not gone well.⁶¹ By the time he had moved to Korea, metropolitan bovine biopolitics had shifted away from a reliance on Western bulls to employing the best Japanese breeds to improve herds. Korean cattle, which Honda labeled “provincial” (chihō) breeds, were seen to be particularly sensitive to the human and natural environment. “Influenced both by the natural habitat of the area and its people,” he pointed out, Korean cattle had derived its state of perfection through a long history of adaptation to local peculiarities.⁶² Such traditions should not, he argued, be easily abandoned. Coupled with these environmental obstacles, Honda also reflected on the problematic practice of “crowded grazing” (gunshūhōboku), which involved uprooting and transplanting large numbers of cattle from one area to the next in the hope of achieving economies of scale.⁶³ Applying this New World practice resulted in “completely killing” the value of Korean cattle as draft animals because it eliminated the docile and obedient characteristics that had made Korean cattle attractive in the first place.⁶⁴ Revising the original plan to transform Korea into a ranching colony, Honda argued that increases in the number of cattle should be continued along labor-intensive lines of encouraging as many individual Korean households as possible to breed and rear a small number of cattle.⁶⁵ He suggested that in upholding the close and intimate relationship that existed between cattle and farmer, the compliant and acquiescent nature of Korean bovine bodies could remain undisturbed. In short, the implementation of modern livestock practices was to stop and be replaced by a biopolitics that preserved the purity of Korean cattle and the traditional husbandry practices that had contributed to its development. Such a turnaround is even more astonishing given the universalist tendencies of modern, Western science to view “local knowledge and practices” as unimportant.⁶⁶

Once the decision had been made to maintain Korean bovine purity, the governor-general was quick to set up infrastructure and regulations to enforce a revised biopolitics that was designed to protect colonial cattle from contamination with foreign breeds. As for imports, only dairy cattle were permitted to enter the country. In 1911, as a means to control places of reproduction, a central stud farm was set up at Honda’s Agricultural Experimental Station in Taikyu (Taegu), which was quickly followed a year later by the establishment of a network of provincial studs across the colony.⁶⁷ Under the rules of protection (hogo taneushi seido), bulls were selected based on set criteria that encompassed size, strength, health, and character. Private owners of stud bulls were provided financial support to make them comply with the rule that the bulls should only mate with cows from the same region. More stringent rules that included forbidding the slaughter of pregnant cows were also introduced, underlining the extent to which the governor-general was determined to increase the number of colonial bovine bodies.⁶⁸ In 1912, 262 bulls were designated for protection; one year later, the number had increased to 1,398 head.⁶⁹ Eventually, bulls earmarked for protection were extended nationwide, including stock kept in Heian-hoku, Heian-nan, and Kōkai prefectures in the north. Breeding societies also contributed to increasing the number of colonial cattle through the organization of lectures, workshops, and exhibitions that educated and instructed farmers about breeding techniques, hygiene practices, feed, and maintenance. Quantitatively, the new bovine politics was a success. In 1912, a total of 1,768 stud bulls covered 39,692 cows, and the figure jumped to a record 351,780 cows six years later.⁷⁰ As Table 2 illustrates, the number of stud bulls continued to rise in the 1910s and remained constant from the mid-1920s through the 1930s; the corresponding number of cows covered also continued to mount before reaching a plateau from the mid-1920s onward.

Table 2. Number of stud bulls, cows covered, bovine population, and exports to Japan in colonial Korea, 1912–1940.

Year	Stud bulls	Cows covered	Population	Exports to Japan
1912	1,768	39,692	1,040,720	3,938
1914	2,967	98,440	1,338,401	12,214
1916	5,528	219,734	1,353,108	15,770
1918	8,272	351,780	1,480,037	38,895
1920	8,049	347,750	1,489,797	55,326
1922	7,252	376,601	1,607,707	40,161
1924	9,817	474,962	1,605,072	61,225
1926	11,841	511,699	1,594,894	47,749
1928	12,116	521,900	1,569,722	59,032
1930	11,425	474,091	1,611,585	37,044
1932	12,264	525,976	1,664,435	56,896
1934	12,288	535,990	1,671,185	69,410
1936	12,686	544,810	1,702,979	62,798
1938	13,041	570,701	1,717,063	74,526
1940	12,832	572,218	1,740,390	80,049

Note: Compiled from: Nīno, “Shokuminchiki chōsen,” 38–9, 51–5.

What is striking about these figures, when set against the increases in the colonial bovine population, is that the total number of cattle in Korea between 1912 and 1926 rose just 1.5 times as opposed to the large increases observed among stud bulls (6.7) and covered cows (12.9) over the same period. Such a discrepancy was largely due to the numbers being shipped to the metropole. Prior to annexation, Russians had been the major traders in Korean cattle. Between 1908 and 1911, 61800 head of cattle were shipped from Korean ports to Vladivostok; but the Russo-Korean cattle trade almost evaporated after the outbreak of the Russian Revolution.⁷¹ Coupled with a spike in domestic demand following the outbreak of the First World War, the Japanese took over from the Russians as the main exporters and monopolized the trade thereafter. Between 1912 and 1926, the number of Korean cattle shipped to the metropole increased 12.1 times. During the 1930s, when increases to the colonial bovine population were meager, exports of live cattle constantly recorded more than 50,000 head each year.

Not surprisingly, the metropolitan bovine population began to bulge with an increasing number of Korean cattle as trade flourished. In his seminal study, Nakazato calculated that as much as 16 percent of the bovine population in Japan was made up of colonial cattle by 1919.⁷² Six years later, statistics compiled by the Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry showed that there was a total of 214,000 cattle of Korean extraction in Japan – representing around 15 percent of all cattle.⁷³ These cattle were most prevalent in Kagawa, Yamaguchi, Hyōgo, and Osaka, all of which were traditional cattle country. Yet significant numbers were also recorded in the east of the country, such as Saitama, Kanagawa, Tokyo, Chiba, and Ibaraki. No longer was the popularity of cattle limited to areas that had historically engaged in the cattle trade with Korea, it had also spread nationwide to include Okinawa, Niigata, and Hokkaido.

The Impact of Imperial Bovine Biopolitics and the Metropolitan Problem of the Right-Tasting Beef

The impact of imperial bovine biopolitics was in no way small. After adjusting the figures for accuracy, economic historian Chaisung Lim has demonstrated that increases in the number of Korean cattle first started to slow in the 1920s. In the late 1920s, she showed that the number being born began to dip and continued to decline thereafter. Toward the end of the 1930s, as military conflict exerted further pressures on the cattle trade and demand from Manchuria rose, the number of Korean cattle declined further. The effect of provisioning politics manifested in the decreased weight of colonial cattle from the late 1920s. In the view of Lim, the fault for this clearly lay in the haste with which colonial cattle were brought to the metropole.⁷⁴

One major challenge that the influx of colonial cattle posed for consumption was the resulting beef’s fit with metropolitan tastes. The fact that Korean bovine bodies were imported on the hoof – not on the hook – was no coincidence. Such an arrangement not only had to do with their historic popularity as draft animals, but it also reflected metropolitan anxieties about consuming beef that had been processed in distant lands. Past experiences of importing Australian and Chinese refrigerated beef had demonstrated the difficulties involved in convincing stakeholders and consumers alike of selling and buying beef over which they had limited control.⁷⁵ In the case of Qingdao beef, which was labeled as such in the metropole, trust in the technoscientific regimes that the Japanese had bequeathed from the Germans proved to be insufficient in allaying fears about Chinese beef’s sanitary and gustatory credentials. Importing Korean cattle alive, slaughtering them near places of consumption, and labeling them Japanese went some way to weakening such fears but did not exclude the possibility that Korean beef could be better than Japanese beef.

Compared with the discourse on Chinese beef, which was marked by an absence of reference to Chinese dining customs (because eating beef was a rarity there), the discourse on Korean beef was characterized from early on by its connection to the beef-eating habits of Koreans themselves.⁷⁶ In 1911, the veterinarian Hizuka Shōta wrote that the country had “ancient customs of eating meat” and that beef was a regular feature of everyday life.⁷⁷ Not least because of underdeveloped systems of transportation, he explained, eating fish was rare; in contrast, meat featured prominently at festivals and as gifts at wedding and funerals. Portrayals of Koreans as voracious beef eaters tended to be repeated and amplified over the years by those with a vested interest in promoting the trade in Korean cattle. In 1930, Suzuki Takemaro, a technician at the Rinderpest Serum Manufacturing Facility in Pusan, remarked that beef consumption levels in Korea were double those recorded in Japan, with the colony straddling the meat-eating culture of the West and the rice-eating culture of the East.⁷⁸ He also praised the governor-general for implementing protectionist policies that helped maintain the purity of Korean cattle. Pointing to the “world miracle” that had helped Korean cattle maintain their purity, Furuumi Bansaku, a representative of the Korean Cattle Distribution Company, also wrote that because beef eating in Korea stretched back into “the distant past,” the quality of its beef was unmatched.⁷⁹ Such representations of the Korean diet, it bears pointing out, were far from the truth: the vast majority of Koreans under Japanese rule went without not just beef but also meat in general, partly because so much of it was shipped to the metropole, especially after 1939.⁸⁰

Such colonial depictions, however, challenged the metropolitan mind-set about beef eating as a symbol of advanced civilization and dietary progress. Metropolitan meat discourse had been dominated by the notion that Western bodies derived their power from beef consumption. Suggesting the possibility that Koreans, because they seemed to consume more beef than the Japanese, could thus be more powerful and advanced disturbed the imperial psyche. One army physician ventured that the beef Koreans consumed was the principal reason why the Korean diet was more nutritious than the Japanese one.⁸¹ The journalist Okita Kinjō, who otherwise expressed unflattering views of Korea, was also explicit in this regard, claiming that it was “because Koreans eat more meat that they are superior to us.”⁸²

Drawing a line between cattle and beef was one way in which the metropole could push back. For Tokyo meat merchants, such as Nishikawa Kamon, the supposed superiority of Korean cattle did not necessarily translate into superior beef. Following a visit to Korea in 1911, Nishikawa praised Korean cattle and echoed widespread calls to import north Korean cattle. However, he alleged that because they were fed poor fodder and were worked too hard, the resulting beef tasted inferior to Kobe beef. Such a position implied, of course, that if Korean cattle could be imported alive and reared in congenial metropolitan surroundings, the resulting beef would match the best Japanese beef had to offer. Another way in which this challenge was met was through differentiating between tastes. Reflecting on the discussions that took place about the taste of Korean beef at the start of trade, Yokohori Zenshirō, a veterinary officer posted with the governor-general, explained that a clear line could be drawn between metropolitan and colonial preferences.⁸³ While the Japanese preferred to eat tender and fattier meat, Koreans were partial to harder meats that had to be chewed to release the juices inside. He went on to explain that such differences reflected levels of civilization: primitive peoples ate coarse meat while advanced societies consumed more refined meat.

No doubt this difference accounted for the uneven proportion of young cows – around 98 percent—that were shipped to the metropole and provided the kind of soft and tender meat the sophisticated Japanese consumer appeared to be after. Despite attempts to castrate Korean bulls, thus rendering the beef more tender, such a practice was not seriously entertained until the 1930s when, in response to an impasse in the imperial beef trade, attempts were made to expand the bovine pool from which colonial cattle could be sourced.⁸⁴ Even then, young cows continued to be preferred and to fetch higher prices. Despite the availability of refrigeration technology, the trade in colonial cattle continued to be a live one. Rendered safe for import after being inspected, Korean cattle could be utilized on Japanese farms, then fattened to suit the metropolitan palate, and finally transported to and slaughtered near places of consumption without any hint of their colonial origins.

Conclusions

Just as Japan was developing an interest in the international beef trade at the end of the nineteenth century, British Hereford bulls were quickly becoming the sites of choice when it came to “upgrading New World herds.”⁸⁵ Prior to their meteoric rise, the Shorthorns had been preferred but proved too delicate for the extensive ranching cultures in America, Australia, and Argentina, where cattle would need to survive bitter winters and feed themselves without receiving the attention they were usually bestowed in Britain. As Rebecca Woods has put it, “[t]he pinnacle of refinement in Great Britain, Shorthorns failed to thrive abroad, where the harsh conditions of extensive agro-pastoralism that characterized London’s ‘global wests’ made the ‘quality’ that distinguished them at home a disadvantage.”⁸⁶ Passing this test of resistance, Herefords proved their worth as hardy and self-sufficient breeds and helped, in turn, convert the primitive, feral, and mongrel breeds of the New World into refined and sophisticated types that would satisfy discerning British tastes. Eventually, as the dominance of the Hereford rose, the importance of climate and environment in the selection of breeds took a back seat.

Compared to this global story of beef cattle’s ascent and standardization, Japan’s imperial bovine biopolitics bore witness to a different trajectory. Although the motivation to supply the metropole with increased amounts of beef mirrored that of Britain, Japan’s failed experiments with European breeds – first in the metropole and then in colonial Korea – resulted in a radical policy shift. In colonial Korea, attempts to subject colonial cattle to crossbreeding with Simmentals, which involved extensive ranching that aimed to reach economies of scale, ended in failure owing to a combination of social and environmental reasons. Yet, whereas Herefords replaced Shorthorns in the British bovine empire, the governor-general of Korea did not choose to experiment with another European breed; policymakers such as Honda chose instead to increase the purity of Korean stock and to strengthen the traditional and localized labor-intensive practices of breeding and rearing among Korean farmers. The positive, even romantic, appraisal of Korean cattle that underpinned this abrupt turnaround was highly unusual: Japan generally viewed Korea as an agrarian backwater in need of the kind of agricultural modernization that Japan boasted it had learnt and applied from Europe.⁸⁷ Such a recourse to non-European breeds, it should be pointed out, was not unique to either Japan or colonial Korea: it mirrored the contemporaneous experiences of countries such as Brazil, which chose to import the Zebu breed from India in developing an export market for Brazilian beef in response to rising beef prices caused by the First World War.⁸⁸

Yet precisely because imports were of pure Korean breeds, reservations about the meat festered in Japan long after similar objections about the taste of chilled American beef had diminished in Britain. Skepticism about sanitation and distance could be overcome, first because Korea was close enough for the trade in livestock to be profitable, and second because colonial technoscientific regimes, which Japan had constructed in Korea, rendered Korean bovine bodies safe. In trying to uphold the metropolitan mind-set of Japanese superiority, differences relating to bovine rearing and taste were thus invoked that helped shape the disproportionate trade in live, young cattle, the meat of which was more tender and delicate and seen to be the result of metropolitan interventions rather than an indigenous Korean quality.

Following the end of the Second World War, the imperial meatways Japan had constructed were quickly dismantled. No longer reliant upon beef supplies from its colonies, the protein needs of the population were met in part by increasing the consumption of whale meat. Eventually, as machinery relieved cattle of agricultural work, and cheap feed was imported from the United States, it became possible for Japan to meet its own beef needs without looking abroad. Following intense public and international outcries in the 1970s that highlighted the high costs of Japanese beef, the country agreed to import foreign beef in 1988 for the first time in nearly five decades – however, this time, it chose to import not from East Asia (despite considering and deciding against Chinese imports) but from the United States and Australia.

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.

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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.

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Notes on contributors

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.

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.