Cashier Xiao Qiu
The COVID-19 pandemic, which has not yet completely subsided, has had different degrees of impact on all walks of life in Japan. Among them, the foreign food industry is undoubtedly one of the most affected industries.
For example, since the real impact of the epidemic on Japan in March last year, major media outlets have launched special reports on the performance of the Oxboyaki chain "Mizoya" – Shikiya, Yoshinoya and Matsuya – almost every few months. From this, we can learn that although the profits of the three companies have shrunk due to the epidemic, compared with the Yoshinoya and Matsuya, which are in a bitter battle, the Food Family has not only stabilized its position, but even improved in some months. Naturally, multiple factors, including raw material selection, business strategies and publicity methods, have affected the performance of different enterprises under the epidemic. And one question that may be more meaningful is: Why is there such a deep concern for the Japanese public about cattle breeders?
In the previous article, I have analyzed that the two major "national cuisines" in Japan today – curry and ramen – actually originated abroad (India and China, respectively). Interestingly, we can find a similar phenomenon here in the cowboys, which are known as the "national fast food". For most of Japanese history, beef as a food was not accepted by the general public. It was only after the beginning of modernization that beef, as a representative of foreign cultures, gradually spread. Nowadays, in Japan, the price of beef bowlers has risen and fallen enough to affect the livelihood of ordinary people, and abroad, as a representative of Japanese cuisine, it has indirectly conveyed a Japanese way of life while generating income. If you look closely at the history of the development of beef cattle in Japan from the perspective of history, economy and culture, you can find more details of society hidden behind a bowl of beef rice.
Matsuya store
The birth of the cowboy – between native and Westernization
To trace the history of the birth of the cowman, we must first look back at the development of beef itself in the Japanese archipelago. Although different historians have inconsistent conclusions, one of the more common views is that cattle arrived in Japan from Eurasia around the 5th and 6th centuries. Since then, cattle, which have been mainly used for farming, have been protected by various regimes. The law of 718 even provided for a sentence of 1 to 3 years' imprisonment for cattle killers. In this context, although the consumption of beef is sporadic, it is not the mainstream of society at all.
The increasing number of European merchants, who began in the 16th century, had an impact on the situation. Their habit of eating beef entered Japan along with its goods and began to attract social attention. One of the most influential viewers was naturally "Tenjin" Toyotomi Hideyoshi. He is very interested in foreign cultures and likes the Western-style diet represented by eggs and beef. But Hideyoshi's love of Western food was ultimately only regarded as a pleasure for the privileged class, and once he realized that the Merchants' Christianity could have a negative effect on his rule, Hideyoshi soon restricted the free spread of a Western-style lifestyle, including religion. Thereafter, this dietary taboo, indirectly formed out of the rejection of foreign cultures, continued throughout the mid-Edo period. In 1687, the Edo shogun Tokugawa Tsunayoshi issued a "Mercy Order for Raw Species" aimed at prohibiting killing, which directly made the consumption of beef impossible. It wasn't until after his death that the situation improved. But as a food with a negative color, beef does not appear on the daily table of ordinary Japanese people.
When Japan was forced to open its locked doors at the end of the curtain, Westerners who had been granted the right of settlement at the country's major treaty ports began to enjoy beef in a just and bright way. Beef, which had been criticized for its close ties to Western culture, was in turn allowed and even rewarded. In meiji's early bestsellers, it was more blunt that "not eating beef equals not being civilized." According to a study by Japanese scholar Ryoichi Iino, a special beef shop appeared in Yokohama, the minato, in the 1860s. Since then, specialized cattle slaughterhouses have also become the infrastructure of large cities. In 1868, the capital, Tokyo, slaughtered an average of only one and a half cows a day; by 1909, that number had surged to 20,000.
After achieving the huge leap of beef from scratch, it is much easier to evolve from other ways of eating to the special form of beef. Iino believes that the cow pot that appeared in the late Edo period is an important origin of the later generation of cowboys. The so-called beef pot is actually a direct application of the previous cooking method for pork or chicken to beef. Among them, the "merging pot" with miso as the base and the "yakiniku" (later "Sukiyaki") with soy sauce and sugar as the base are the most popular. Over time, the people gradually combined the beef pots and rice that were eaten separately, thus forming the prototype of the cowboy.
Cover of Ryoichi Iino's book. In the book, he explores the origins of five of Japan's most common types of rice bowls, namely tempura, pork chops, cowboys, eels, and parent-child rice bowls.
Researchers from the Modern Food Culture Association have put forward a slightly different point of view. First of all, they pointed out that the main consumers of early cattle were mostly manual workers in the lower and middle classes of society, and beef-based beef pots exceeded their consumption power even if the meat part was worse. Therefore, compared with the beef pot, the popular "boiled rye" cuisine based on beef sewage at the same time (somewhat similar to the traditional brine boiling in Beijing) is the real origin of the beef bowl.
Further, the authors of the association also offer us a new perspective from the container used by the cattle. The word "丼" is pronounced in Chinese in jing and dan (both three sounds). However, as a very useful word, I believe that many people directly borrow its pronunciation "dong" (どん) in Japanese in their lives. However, the appearance of the Hirohime itself also had to wait until after the Meiji. Prior to this, the Japanese used containers about the size of today's tea bowls. On the one hand, this is because the daily energy source of people at that time was very different from today, and because in ancient Japan there was a taboo against eating only one bowl of rice - this behavior known as "one meal" is mostly related to funeral rites, so in daily life people rely on the method of eating more bowls in small bowls to avoid it. With the demand for efficiency in "civilized civilization" and more practical capitalism, this taboo is becoming less and less common, at least in cities. As a result, people also began to use larger "bowls" directly with various "toppings" to solve the lunch on weekdays.
Looking back at the history of cowboys, it can be found that although beef has always been bound to the Imagination of the West in Japan, this relationship has a very different value orientation before and after modernization. Having said that, it's hard to tell whether ordinary people are really absorbing the words about "civilization" and suddenly accelerating their beef consumption, or whether they finally have a legitimate excuse to justify their long-unrecognized appetite at this point. In any case, this Western-style ingredient and local living habits have undergone an evolution of synchronicity after the founding of Japan. In the end, the beef rice bowl that we are familiar with was born smoothly.
The development of cattle tuo - as a global industry
In fact, for the birth of the cowman, there is an equally important but not easily detectable factor: exophagmatization. Appearing in various studies of the history of cattle bowls has always been as a "specialty store" of the community, rather than revolving around a few specific founders as other food histories have done.
Hidden behind the cattle that was established in the form of foreign food is the industrialization of the Japanese economy itself. The Meiji Restoration's "breeding and prosperity" was indispensable to the labor force from all over Japan. Unlike the feudal rural families, where there were always female members preparing food for them, single workers who came to the cities had to resort to various shops for the masses to achieve their own "reproduction". At the same time, cattle is also a good business for shopkeepers. Unlike tempura or parent-child beggars, which develop at about the same time, the cooking process of cowboys is much simpler. Just a simple stall and a large pot, and then put all the ingredients together to stew can ensure a certain degree of "quality control". For retail entrepreneurs with little principal, there is no better product than a cowboy. This explains why the first to recover after the Great Kanto Earthquake of 1923 were the various cattle shops. In the short time after the earthquake, thousands of stores appeared in Tokyo alone. To some extent, the effect of the disaster on smoothing out the class gap has also accelerated the penetration of cattle to the higher levels of consumers.
An old photograph of the "No.1 Shop" that Yoshinoya opened at Tokyo's Tsukiji Market after the war. The store also moved to Toyosu in November 2018 with the market as a whole. Image credit: Yoshinoya, Japan.
Of course, for The Bullfighter to develop into a mature industry on a larger scale, it is indispensable to have huge capital and standardized operating procedures, and these conditions can undoubtedly only be achieved in a post-war peaceful environment. Perhaps the most well-known representative is the Yoshinoya. According to the company's official introduction, Yoshinoya was founded in 1899 at the fish market in Nihonbashi, Tokyo, and the small-achieving shop, like other similar shops, was reduced to ashes in World War II. But soon in 1947, Yoshinoya reopened. The company is really bigger is the second generation of Mizuho Matsuda. Matsuda achieved its goal of an annual revenue of 100 million yen in 1965 with a stable taste and operation. In 1977, Yoshinoya's stores throughout Japan expanded to 100.
Interestingly, the chaining of the Yoshinoya at this time was inspired by the fast food industry in the West, represented by McDonald's. Thus, we can find another manifestation of the motif of "beef and Westernization" in post-war Japan. What is more worth mentioning is that Japan, which has achieved economic recovery, also has the ability to "reverse export" to other countries, including the West. In 1975, Yoshinoya opened its first foreign branch in the United States. Today, the company has nearly a thousand overseas stores in many countries around the world, including China and the United States. In Japan, the Yoshinoya family, along with Matsuya, founded in 1968, and Eata, which started in 1982, became the "Mizoya" that accounted for more than 90% of the beef bowl market. The status of beef bowlers as "national fast food" has also been consolidated with the development of this foreign food industry.
However, it is worth noting that what supports the "national nature" of Japanese cattle players is actually the rapidly changing global meat industry. In addition to the special goods limited by the time limit, the beef beef provided by the above-mentioned "Imperial Three Houses" is all from North America or Australia. Unlike the two "national delicacies" mentioned at the beginning, curry or ramen, industrialized beef bowlers are fundamentally unable to "localize" all ingredients because of cost problems. In normal times, imported beef, which is much cheaper than the well-known "Wagyu beef", provides consumers with a reasonable choice. However, in the event of special circumstances, Japanese people are likely to not be able to eat their own "national fast food". In fact, this working-class nightmare has long since become a reality.
On December 24, 2003, cattle infected with spongiform encephalopathy, commonly known as "mad cow disease", were found in Washington State, USA. Two days later, the Japanese government immediately made a decision to completely ban U.S. beef imports. Considering that U.S. cattle accounted for nearly one-third of the Japanese beef market at that time, this news was a fatal blow to the cattle industry. In January 2004, Yoshinoya first announced that its cattle were stopped from being sold. The following month, the bottoming out of the inventory of Eater's House and Matsuya also made the same decision. In response to this situation, the three companies have taken different measures. In July and October of that year, respectively, Food House and Matsuya announced the use of safe Australian beef as an alternative, restarting the sale of beef bowlers. The Yoshino family, on the other hand, did not make the decision to replace the meat source on the grounds that they "did not want to destroy the Japanese tradition (guarded by American beef.") Since then, apart from a few brief small-scale returns, the Yoshinoya's cowboy has disappeared from the menu for about 4 years. It was not until March 2008 that all branches across the country fully resumed 24-hour uninterrupted supply. Probably because of Yoshinoya's slightly stiff response, in September of the same year, the number of stores in Japan was surpassed by competitors, and until now the company has not regained the throne.
Although mad cow disease is only a special event, this does not mean that the "naturalness" of being able to eat cowboys at any time can return safely after the storm has passed. In recent years, a growing number of Japanese critics have raised warnings about beef supply. Rising demand for beef in emerging countries has weakened Japan's bargaining power in global markets. This, coupled with the fact that beef production is increasingly "financialized" and its attendant sharp price fluctuations, casts a shadow of uncertainty over Japanese cattlemen who presuppose cheapness.
Nippon Yoshinoya 门 store
Body, class and gender – the cultural side of the cowboy
Any food labeled "national" needs to play a role in the more abstract level of the mass narrative, in addition to its own enormous consumption volume. However, the cheap and good cowboy does not always appear in a positive image as a cultural symbol. The word "Shiba-niu", which has been very popular in Japan in the past two years, may be the best example of this.
The story began in July 2018, when a netizen posted a post on a large forum. He claimed to have gone to the Labor Support Centre today, where the users of the service were young men with similar faces. The landlord also accompanied the post with an illustration. The picture itself is a slightly self-deprecating self-portrait published by another netizen a few years ago. But the poster added a new line to the bespectacled and expressionless man in the picture: "Please give me a very large portion of the tricolor cheese cowboy, and add a hot spring egg." The post immediately spread, with responders saying that people with this look were really around them, and they were basically.
The so-called "yin" comes from the Japanese word "陰キャラ", and the katakana part of the word is a short term for the English word chariter (i.e., personality). "Yin" does not neutrally refer to a person who is introverted or unsociable, but also carries more negative value judgments such as accusing these people of being unpopular (in the marriage market) because of autism. Netizens quickly extracted the keyword "cheese cowboy" from the post and let it ferment on a larger scale. Stalk-making activities such as "Zhiniu" portrait re-creation, "Measuring Your Zhiniu Index", and #Zhiniu Around Me are booming in cyberspace. In 2020, the term "Shiba Niu" also won the third place in a company's annual buzzword selection. An important opportunity to raise the social attention of this word was a gaffe in July of the same year, the creative director of the well-known game manufacturer "Sega" Nagoshi Minoru. During a live game broadcast, when asked by the host about his impression of the contestants, he replied with a smile: "It's all about eating 'Shiba Beef'." As soon as this statement came out, it immediately caused criticism from netizens, and a few days later the company had to come forward to delete the images of the part involved and publicly apologize. From this, we can also see that the personal attack color of "Zhiniu" has long gone beyond the general self-deprecating language.
Looking back, where did the aggressiveness of "Shiba Cow" come from? First of all, one of the constantly mentioned features of the male in the original portrait is that he has a "childlike face (in the negative sense)." This childishness undoubtedly violates society's ideal definition of the "masculinity" of adult men. Secondly, the unadorned hairstyle and sloppy outfit of the "Zhi Niu" plus his love of eating "Cow Beggar" itself also implies that he is in the lower social class (not to mention that the original landlord originally saw the "Zhi Niu Face" at the Labor Introduction). The class color of this consumption also implies "physicality" in this case: the middle class who knows body management/self-discipline naturally does not easily order extra large portions of cheese beef. Only the "yin" who does not need to socialize and does not have social interaction at all can unscrupulously eat shiba beef as a staple food. What's more, some disability rights groups pointed out that although the public uses the term "Zhiniu" with an understated joke. But the original post and reply actually contained a lot of remarks linking "Shiba Cow Face" with specific physical disabilities. As a result, the symbolic "cheese cowboy" brings together numerous discriminations about gender, body, and class.
Of course, the words about the cow boy are far from the only case of "Zhi Niu". Another gender-related issue is the feasibility of women going to cattle shops alone. In today's Japanese society, single female dine-in cows are most likely not to be looked at by others. But just a few random online votes can clearly identify how hesitant many women are when they enter the store by themselves. This phenomenon itself is related to the image of cowboys who are usually male office workers' efficient lunches, but if we continue to dig deeper, we can reasonably diverge into the stereotypes of Japanese society that women should be more in the family than in the public sphere. But on the contrary, an emerging trend is that in the face of the impact of the epidemic mentioned at the beginning, the stores of the Niubei chain are actively exploring the market of women with great potential.
All in all, whether as a commodity or a cultural symbol, the cowboy is inseparable from the daily life of the Japanese people. And how will the cattle industry respond to various new and old challenges in the face of globalization? This question is believed to have value for further observation on many levels.
bibliography:
Ryoichi Iino, Tendon Katsudon Beef Bowl Unagodon Oyakodon, Chikuma Shobo, 2019
Modern Food Culture Study Group, Prewar History of Beef Bowl, 2019
Editor-in-Charge: Fan Zhu
Proofreader: Zhang Liangliang