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“Not Befitting Our Divine Country”: Eating Meat in Japanese Discourses of Self and Other from the Seventeenth Century to the Present

In volume 3 of his bestselling series Sensōron (“On War”), published in 2003, the popular Japanese right-wing cartoonist Kobayashi Yoshinori devotes the first two pages of a chapter entitled “A World History of Invasions and Massacres” to ruminations about the difference between Japanese and Western attitudes towards animals. Kobayashi contrasts the Japanese tradition in place “since the time of the myths” of treating animals kindly, a tradition that rested on the assumption that “gods resided in humans as well as animals,” with attitudes in Europe, where “there has been the sentiment that humans and animals differ absolutely and thus cruelty towards animals other than humans has always existed universally.” The most obvious result of this difference, writes Kobayashi, is that, while “in Japan people could raise grains for immediate consumption, in Europe agriculture did not develop, so instead they raised animals by letting them eat the grass of the meadows, and ate them after killing them.” Accordingly, a “meat-eating culture” developed in Europe, while in Japan “eating meat only spread since the Meiji Period [1868–1912].”1 Kobayashi soon shifts his attention away from these considerations and towards giving examples of atrocities from the histories of other countries with the transparent aim of exculpating war crimes committed by Japan during World War II. It is significant, however, that he sets out by contrasting East and West through commenting on their food practices. Throughout history, food has been employed culturally to represent meaning, and it has also often been used for ideological purposes. In particular, food issues have loomed large in building a sense