Black Ships and the Lifting of the Meat Ban — The Table of Civilization and Enlightenment

By the time the style of one soup and three dishes had taken shape, and sushi, tempura, and soba filled the streets of Edo, the Japanese table had honed its own distinctive perfection while remaining almost entirely cut off from the outside world. Rice and fish, dashi and umami. That quiet harmony was the crystallization of an aesthetic nurtured over many hundreds of years. Yet in the middle of the nineteenth century, into that closed world, black ships came from beyond the Pacific. A fleet of four vessels, breathing steam and bristling with cannon. They were not merely envoys of diplomacy; they were also the beginning of a long transformation that would shake the Japanese table itself to its very foundations. Before long, a single taboo that had lasted more than a thousand years would be lifted, together with a steaming pot.

The Black Ships That Opened the Door of Food

In 1853, when the fleet led by Perry appeared off Uraga, it was not only the cannon and the steamships that astonished people. When the Americans came again the following year, the shogunate received them at Yokohama village, and what was served there was unmistakably Japanese banquet cuisine. The American side, in turn, is said to have entertained Japanese officials aboard ship with a Western-style meal. It was the moment when two different food cultures faced one another for the first time in an official setting.

When the Treaty of Amity and Commerce of 1858 brought trade fully into the open, foreign settlements were built in open ports such as Yokohama, Kobe, and Nagasaki. There the foreigners baked bread, sought beef and pork, and drank wine and beer. Smells the Japanese had never seen nor sniffed began to mingle in the air of the port towns. At first, many Japanese kept such food at a distance as something strange. Yet around the settlements, those who sold beef to foreigners, and cooks who imitated Western cuisine, gradually began to appear.

It is worth recalling here the fact that Japan had spent a long stretch of time as a ‘country that did not eat meat.’ The influence of Buddhism, the indispensability of oxen and horses to farming, and a sense that shrank from the taking of life all overlapped, so that openly eating four-legged beasts had long been frowned upon. Of course, there was ‘medicinal eating’ done under the name of a remedy, and in some regions the custom of eating boar or deer, so meat-eating had not entirely vanished. Even so, to set beef openly upon the table had long been absent from the public face of the culture. The black ships put the first crack in that thick wall.

The Day the Emperor Ate Beef

When the new age called Meiji began, the government set catching up with the West as a goal of the state. Institutions, the army, the calendar — one after another, all were reformed to fit Western patterns. Within that current of modernization, food too came to be spoken of as a measure of ‘the degree of civilization.’ Westerners were blessed with fine physiques because they ate meat — such a way of thinking is said to have spread among the intellectuals.

The symbolic event passed down from this time is the affair, said to have occurred in the fifth year of Meiji — that is, 1872 — in which Emperor Meiji is said to have partaken of beef. The flesh of beasts had long been avoided within the court, it is said, yet the news that the one who stood at its very pinnacle had himself eaten beef moved people’s consciousness greatly. It is an event often described as having abruptly thinned the resistance to meat-eating. That said, the details of this anecdote, and how directly it influenced the common people, are matters of differing accounts, and it has been pointed out that the records of the time must be read with care.

The Beef Pot That Raised the Steam of Civilization

As the mood surrounding meat-eating shifted, what spread rapidly through the city of Tokyo was the ‘beef pot’ (gyunabe). It was a hot-pot dish in which thinly sliced beef was simmered with miso or soy sauce as everyone gathered around. This was not Western cuisine itself, but a hybrid flavor in which a new ingredient, meat, was fitted into the familiar way of eating from a pot. An unfamiliar ingredient, once drawn into the world of dashi and soy sauce, would settle onto the Japanese palate. This idea was an important seed that would later lead to ‘yoshoku.’

What vividly conveys the vogue for the beef pot is ‘Aguranabe,’ which the comic writer Kanagaki Robun began publishing in the fourth year of Meiji. Through the conversations of customers gathered at a beef-pot shop, this work depicted the spirit of the age of civilization with a touch of laughter, and it vividly captures the mood that one would fall behind the times if one did not eat the meat pot. It conveys well that gathering around a beef pot carried a meaning beyond merely filling the belly — the pride of standing on the side of a new age. By some accounts, around the tenth year of Meiji the beef-pot shops of Tokyo are said to have numbered in the hundreds, and the steaming pot became a scene that symbolized civilization and enlightenment.

Yet alongside that fervor, the price of meat was not cheap for ordinary folk, and it is thought that those who could enjoy the beef pot daily were chiefly people of some means. New food spreads first from the cities, and from the layers within reach. For the change at the table to reach into every corner of society, still more time, and a different force, would be needed.

From Imitating to Reworking

The chain of events that began with the black ships brought the Japanese a new option: to ‘eat meat.’ Yet the greater change lay beyond. People did not merely accept Western food; they gradually reworked it to suit their own palates. The beef pot, which fashioned beef into a hot pot, was the first step of that.

The authentic Western cuisine served in the restaurants of the open ports was, at first, for a very limited few. The use of knife and fork, the richness of butter and sauce — for many Japanese these were unknown experiences. Yet the cooks observed those foreign flavors and drew them toward the ingredients at hand and the tastes of the Japanese. That it go with rice, that it be eaten with chopsticks, and that it come at a reachable price. When Western cuisine was reassembled into a form that met these conditions, a new genre, still without a name, was about to be born on the Japanese table.

This age, when a meat taboo more than a thousand years old was lifted and the steam of the beef pot covered the towns, was the moment when Japanese food flung its door wide to the outside. And the Western flavors that flowed in from beyond that door would soon, by Japanese hands, transform into dishes wholly their own.