Reconstruction
On the seventeenth day of the fourth lunar month of 675, Emperor Tenmu’s government issued a regulation recorded decades later in the Nihon Shoki. It restrained fishermen and hunters from using pitfalls, spear traps, and certain fish traps. During the regulated season—beginning with the fourth month and ending on the thirteenth day of the ninth—it also prohibited eating the flesh of cattle, horses, dogs, monkeys, and domestic fowl. Offenders faced punishment. This is the earliest surviving Japanese state order commonly described as a meat-eating prohibition, but it was neither a permanent ban nor a command that everyone become vegetarian.
The decree itself does not reveal what people ate that day. Its list nevertheless shows that several domestic or human-associated animals were conceivable foods. Just as importantly, deer and wild boar—the game animals most frequently represented in discussions of premodern meat consumption—were not prohibited. Fish remained available even though particular fishing technologies were seasonally restricted. Broader historical and archaeological evidence indicates that grains, vegetables, gathered plants, fish, shellfish, and occasional game all contributed to diets, with large differences between court, farming, fishing, and mountain communities. Cattle and horses also had value as working and transport animals, making their protection economically defensible as well as morally meaningful.
Buddhist opposition to taking life probably influenced the order: Tenmu supported Buddhism, and compassion for sentient beings became an important element in later arguments against meat. Associations between blood, death, and ritual pollution also shaped court practice. Neither motive, however, is stated explicitly in the edict. Scholars have therefore proposed an additional political reading. The restricted months overlapped much of the rice-growing cycle, and regulating mobile hunters, fishers, traps, and animal foods may have helped a centralizing state keep labor and resources within taxable agriculture. The selective species list and continued availability of game caution against treating the measure as purely Buddhist doctrine.
Later rulers issued further restrictions, while court ritual increasingly treated contact with animal death as defiling. Yet meat never disappeared. Medieval records describe deer, boar, birds, and other animals being hunted and eaten, and early modern consumers obtained game as medicinal food, or kusurigui. The resulting history was a tension between official ideals and diverse practice, not an uninterrupted 1,200-year prohibition. That tension gave beef unusual symbolic power during the Meiji period. Gyūnabe was already becoming fashionable in the 1860s and early 1870s, and Emperor Meiji’s publicized consumption of meat in 1872 associated beef with health, Westernization, and national transformation. Modern Japanese meat dishes therefore represent change against a remembered dietary ideology, rather than the simple repeal of one continuously enforced ancient law.
Historical context
Tenmu ruled from the Asuka region only three years after winning the Jinshin succession war of 672. Japan’s court was adopting continental administrative, legal, religious, and writing practices while seeking tighter control over provincial labor and agricultural production. Wet-rice cultivation was established, but fishing, gathering, and hunting remained economically important. Buddhism had entered Japan through networks linking the archipelago with the Korean Peninsula and China, while Tang China provided influential models of government. The Nihon Shoki, which preserves the edict, was completed in 720, about forty-five years after the event.
Evidence
Written sources
StrongThe Nihon Shoki records a regulation under the year 675 that names the prohibited animals, restricted hunting and fishing equipment, seasonal dates, and punishment. The chronicle was compiled in 720, so it is near-contemporary state historiography rather than the original edict document.
Dating
StrongThe Nihon Shoki places the order on the seventeenth day of the fourth month in Tenmu's fourth regnal year, corresponding to 675 CE. Its calendrical dates are lunisolar and should not be equated directly with modern April-to-September dates.
Food identification
StrongThe text explicitly lists cattle, horses, dogs, monkeys, and domestic fowl. Translational variation such as kine versus cattle and barn-door fowl versus chickens does not materially change the identification.
Geographic attribution
ProbableThe order belongs to Tenmu's court in the Asuka region, where he maintained his palace. The supplied coordinates reasonably represent Asuka, although the surviving chronicle does not provide a modern coordinate for the act of proclamation.
Archaeological
ModerateArchaeology supports the presence and varied use of domestic and wild animals in ancient Japan, but no archaeological object is known to constitute the edict itself.
Zooarchaeological
ModerateFaunal research supports continued exploitation of wild animals and a comparatively limited dietary role for domestic livestock. The historic-period record remains uneven and cannot measure compliance with the 675 order precisely.
Historical interpretation
InterpretiveBuddhist non-killing principles, court concepts of pollution, protection of useful animals, agricultural labor control, and state centralization are scholarly explanations. None is explicitly declared as the edict's motive in the surviving text.
Visual reconstruction
LimitedNo contemporary image of the proclamation or an associated meal survives. Any scene showing Tenmu, prohibited meats, hunters, or a court audience would be a reconstruction.
Sources
- 1.William George Aston, translator (1896). Nihongi: Chronicles of Japan from the Earliest Times to A.D. 697, Volume II. Japan Society of London. library.si.edu/digital-library/book/nihongi2astoHistorical primary source
- 2.Mark Hudson and Irene M. Muñoz Fernández (2023). Henceforth fishermen and hunters are to be restrained: towards a political ecology of animal usage in premodern Japan. Asian Archaeology 7, 183–201. doi:https://doi.org/10.1007/s41826-023-00072-6Scientific literature
- 3.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:https://doi.org/10.1080/07409710701885135Modern synthesis
- 4.Hitomi Hongo (2017). Introduction of Domestic Animals to the Japanese Archipelago. The Oxford Handbook of Zooarchaeology. academic.oup.com/edited-volume/34661/chapter-absScientific literature
- 5.Mariko Noma (2006). The Process of Accepting Meat in Modern Japan: Stewed Meatstands, Gyunabe and Western Food. The Journal of Agricultural History 40, 77–88. doi:https://doi.org/10.18966/joah.40.0_77Modern synthesis
Limitations
- majorduration
The claim that the edict was reinforced continuously for more than 1,200 years is misleading. Later restrictions were intermittent, varied in scope, and did not prevent continuing consumption of game and other meats.
- moderatedescription
The surviving text gives lunisolar dates from the first day of the fourth month to the thirteenth day of the ninth month; calling these simply the fourth through ninth months of an 'agricultural year' loses calendrical precision.
- moderatereligious attribution
Buddhist compassion and ritual-purity concepts are plausible scholarly explanations, but the edict does not state its motive. Political control of hunting, fishing, labor, and agricultural resources is an important alternative or complementary interpretation.
- moderatepractical effect
There is insufficient evidence to conclude confidently that the order had only a modest effect because rural commoners rarely ate meat. Rural hunting and meat consumption probably continued, but their frequency and the decree's enforcement cannot be quantified.
- minorMeiji date
Beef dishes and gyūnabe were publicly fashionable by 1871, but Emperor Meiji's widely publicized consumption of meat occurred in 1872. These related developments should not be collapsed into a single 1871 event.
