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Japanese Beef I know what you are thinking. You know your cows. Japanese beef is highly prized, a special category of meat that is coveted and expensive and served only in the best and most fashionable restaurants around the world. You are imagining television chefs singing the praises of Kobe beef and proclaiming its superior qualities. And you are probably assuming, just as I did, that the Japanese might have been perfecting ‘the art of beef’ for centuries, perhaps even millennia. As it turns out, the history of beef in Japan is not longstanding; it is, without a doubt, a modern development.

By 4000 BC, cattle were fully domesticated and had become a reliable presence in human groups. They had also evolved into two main and distinct sub-categories, which formed the basis for the development of cow species around the world: these are known as the ‘humpless’ cattle (Bos taurus) – which developed originally in Africa and the Near East – and the ‘humped’ cattle (B. indicus), more indigenous to Indian regions. Velten asserts that, without a doubt, these two species played an ‘enormous role in shaping civilisation’, impacting not only on lifestyle – their culinary uses converting human existence from nomadic to sedentary – but also functioning as an important socio-economic expression of wealth.

The meat is cut into small pieces and cooked on griddles and gridirons over a low flame of wood charcoal. Recently, pork has also begun to make an appearance as an additional ingredient at yakiniku restaurants; in spite of this, however, beef remains the favourite meat of choice for this particular grilling method. At yakiniku restaurants, the meat is chosen by the patrons and is taken directly to their table still in its raw form. The diners themselves cook the pieces of beef and offal on a grill.