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Abstract

Domestic animal usage remains a key problem in understanding Japan’s premodern economy. Assumptions that religious and other cultural proscriptions limited the use of domesticated animals, and the consumption of meat in particular, from Late Antiquity until Westernisation in the nineteenth century remain widespread. However, the zooarchaeological record from historic Japan is patchy and the scholarly literature often uncritically reproduces state-centred ideas about agriculture and the economy. In this essay we critically review the ways in which historical and zooarchaeological studies of animal usage in premodern Japan have been impacted by broader cultural discourses. We examine animal usage from the Bronze Age to the eve of modernisation, broadly 1000 BC to AD 1850, in terms of a tension or dialectic between promotion and restriction by the state and other authorities. While the utilisation of animals for warfare and official transport was more closely controlled, other uses reflected a complex and often international political ecology that requires further analysis by zooarchaeologists.