Newsletter

As I helped prepare food to hold the customary ancestral rite over the recent Chuseok holiday, a random, cheeky question crossed my mind. Would it be considered disrespectful to place dog meat on the table of food meant as an offering to my ancestors? After all, hadn't I placed jujube tea my father used to enjoy drinking instead liquor on the table as I held the annual memorial rite for him a month ago in August? Choosing to replace the usual liquor with tea was because my father never enjoyed drinking liquor and the one glass of soju he had from being overjoyed on my wedding day thirty years ago left him sick in bed for the rest of the day. My father was a man who refused to acknowledge a salad full of greens as food suitable for mankind. His love for dog meat was so great that he would always burst into laughter as he talked about how the Chinese character yeon (然) that stands for "thus" was made from a combination of individual characters that can be lined up to be read as "it is quite natural to eat dog meat grilled over a fire." Thanks to my meat-loving father, I get to hear the same story every few days from my mother, who was originally a vegetarian and is now suffering from Alzheimer's.

"You have no idea how challenging it was for me to cook right after I got married. I had to prepare the same dishes every single day. Chicken for breakfast, pork for lunch, and beef for dinner. Then pork for breakfast the following day, beef for lunch, and chicken for dinner. If there was no meat, I at least had to cook some fish. Tsk tsk... at first I truly believed your father was the son of a butcher."

The Japanese tend to be particularly fond of sea meat and consider the Korean culture of enjoying land meat as unique. And after trying land meat due to the Korean Wave or some other occasion, the taste of it seems to have been memorable enough to take Bulgogi, a beef recipe Koreans take pride in, and give it a different name called Yakiniku (焼肉) in Japanese. Whenever I visit the Korea Town in Shin-Okubo, Tokyo for a taste of some proper Bulgogi, I hear Japanese people voice condemning remarks like "Koreans eat dog meat. How disgusting!" as they chew Bulgogi or gnaw on roasted ribs. Those kinds of remarks are rather carefully made by the average Japanese who tend to be cautious, but the anti-Korean Japanese huff and puff, shouting that all dog-eating Chosenjin should go back to where they came from.

Most people in Japan believe their ancestors from the traditional era did not eat meat from being heavily influenced by Buddhism. But there are many records to prove their belief wrong. According to records about the year 675 in Nihon shoki (日本書記), the Japanese were banned from eating beef, horse, dog, monkey, and chicken for six months during the busy farming season between April and September, which indicates that they must have feasted on meat throughout the months when they were not banned. During the Nara period in the eighth century, the Japanese captured and ate squirrels and even seasoned deer intestines with vinegar to eat them raw. Anyone who visits Nara nearby Kyoto in Japan today will notice that deer is considered a sacred symbol of the Kasuga Shrine and ever since deer was designated as a natural monument in 1957, the city has undoubtedly become a land of deer.

Apart from deer, the Japanese also hunted and ate boars, boar skin, bears, rabbits, raccoons, and otters. According to records left by Luís Fróis, a Portuguese missionary who once met Toyotomi Hideyoshi, the Japanese also enjoyed eating wild dogs, monkeys, cats, and cranes. The Japanese book “Tales of Cookery” (Ryori monogatari) published in the seventeenth century introduces stews made of deer, raccoon, boar, rabbit, otter, bear, and dog.

In Japan, there are quite a few lyrics and stories featuring raccoons. This is how the lyrics go for a nineteenth century children’s song called Anta gata doko sa ((あんたがたどこさ), which essentially means “Where are You?” “There was a racoon, but a hunter came and shot it, ate it boiled or grilled, then covered the leftovers with leaves...“ And from the fact that people both young and old in Japan enjoy eating a noodle dish named after raccoons called ”tanuki udon,“ one can easily notice how fond the Japanese have been and still are of raccoons.

Meanwhile, records of the year 1361 in Kagenki (嘉元記) mention that rabbit meat was pickled with salt and fermented into a condiment sauce and that monks secretly ate rabbit meat. Interestingly enough, monks considered rabbit as a sort of bird, perhaps because they particularly feared eating the meat of a four-legged animals. This may be the reason why Koreans only use the term “mari” to count rabbits, birds, or any other animal, but the Japanese use the term “hane” (羽) to count rabbits or birds as opposed to the term “biki” (匹) used to count all other animals.

Not all Koreans eat dog meat, just like not all Japanese eat whale meat. I myself am not an advocate of dog meat. However, I do believe people should try not be disrespectful of a different country’s dietary culture by branding it as barbaric. People around the world, especially those in the West, despise the Japanese for being on the lookout for any chance to commercialize whale meat. In Japan, a group called kujira-gumi (鯨組) used to engage in large-scale whaling during the Edo period. By the Meiji period, the Japanese picked up Western whaling methods and traveled as far as the Antarctic Ocean to hunt as many whales as possible. Nowadays whaling is internationally heavily regulated due to concerns about overhunting, but the Japanese still hunt whales around the South Pole under the pretense of research. Such hunting activities are of course being funded by Japanese taxpayers. The fact that one can easily discover restaurants serving whale meat when traveling through the Japanese countryside seems to demonstrate that apart from whales hunted for research, much more are being hunted in secret to satisfy the demand.

The pride the Japanese take in eating raw food goes beyond our imagination. I remember the time I went out to dinner to a nearby restaurant with five or six Japanese colleagues after a seminar at Tenri University about ten years ago. What was served for dinner was not sushi or sashimi, but, lo and behold, raw chicken! I kept refusing to the eat the raw chicken, but Dr. R from the University of Tokyo continued to tease me and insisted that I try it. So, I told him I would if he promised to have dog meat with me on his next visit to Korea. He promised, so I reluctantly ended up taking a bite. I've met Dr. R often after that in Japan, but for some reason, I haven't had the chance to meet him in Korea yet.

That brings to mind another incident from seven years ago. Reverend Doi Ryuichi (1939-2016) had always considered me as his "Korean son" and when he heard that I'd come for a visit to Japan, he suggested that we meet in front of the National Diet Building. Telling me the meal he had at my place in Korea was unforgettable, he led me to a basement-floor restaurant along the alley behind the National Diet Building. He ordered me a dish of which only one serving was available and ordered something else for himself. After I finished the dish, he said "What you ate was whale meat. I can't have it because I'm a public figure."

Reverend Doi was born in Dongdaemun-gu, Seoul during the Japanese occupation of Korea. He said he could never forget the ball of rice a Korean readily offered him on the train he boarded with his father to return to his home country Japan once it lost the war. He told me the whale meat he treated me to was nothing compared to what that ball of rice tasted back then. Also having served as a lawmaker, Reverend Doi signed a joint statement in February 2011 demanding that Japan apologize to the Japanese military comfort women victims and cease its claims of sovereignty over the Korean island Dokdo. Although he suffered threats from far right-wing supporters after signing that statement, he never lost his humor. He would he say things got more convenient and quicker for him because the police would be waiting on the Shinkansen platform to immediately escort him back home. All of a sudden, I miss both fathers.