I've read that until the Meiji Restoration when the Japanese sought to emulate certain elements of Western societies, no one in Japan ate beef or dairy. Can anyone confirm if this is true? The story I've heard is that the unofficial ban on beef and dairy was lifted by announcing that the emperor enjoyed eating beef and drinking milk, with the idea being that people would follow the emperor's lead.
If anyone could give me any more ideas/sources about the Japanese diet and the Meiji restoration, I would really appreciate it.
Beef-eating and dairy have long histories in Japan. Cattle were kept - and eaten and milked - by the 5th century AD, and butter was being made in the 7th century if not earlier.
The earliest ban on eating meat in Japan we know of is Emperor Tenmu's ban of 675, which prohibited the killing and eating of various animals (cattle, horses, dogs, chickens, monkeys) from April to September; it didn't prohibit wild meat other than monkeys, nor meat for the rest of the year. Similar bans were decreed by later emperors, and in later times, when power was held by shoguns and warlords, by them. For example, Hideyoshi banned beef-eating in 1587, to protect cattle for use as animal traction in agriculture. Cattle were not the only objects of such laws; the 5th Tokugawa shogun, Tsunayoshi, issued laws strongly protecting dogs.
Despite such bans, beef-eating continued. Beef was eaten less than the meat of other 4-legged animals - beef-eating suffered from the value of cattle for traction, as well as the wider protection of animals. Typically, where cattle are protected for use as working animals, they are often eaten only after they have reached the end of their working life - the beef that is most commonly eaten is very old and tough beef. Despite this, beef was eaten (even if not as much as other animals). There were social taboos against beef-eating (except for the eta, the outcaste underclass of Japan, who among other occupations, worked as butchers), and euphemisms were common. The consumption of beef (and other meats) was often - officially - for medical reasons.
The Meiji program to increase beef and dairy consumption aimed to remove, or at least reduce, such social taboos. The Meiji government also took other steps, such as no longer limiting butchering to the eta.
Some sources:
On eating meat: Hans Martin Krämer (2008) “Not Befitting Our Divine Country”: Eating Meat in Japanese Discourses of Self and Other from the Seventeenth Century to the Present, Food and Foodways, 16:1, 33-62, DOI: 10.1080/07409710701885135
More generally on Japanese cuisine and its evolution:
Rath, Eric. Food and Fantasy in Early Modern Japan, University of California Press, 2010
Katarzyna Joanna Cwiertka, Modern Japanese Cuisine: Food, Power and National Identity, Reaktion Books, 2006
Specifically meat, and convenient and online: https://www.kikkoman.co.jp/kiifc/foodculture/pdf_09/e_002_008.pdf