Wedged between the Rokko mountain range and Osaka Bay, Kobe is the sixth largest city in Japan with more than a million and a half people. Its namesake beef doesn’t come from the city itself but from the surrounding farmland of Hyogo Prefecture where Kobe is the capital and the key port.
As the story goes, it was an Englishman visiting the port of Kobe who first had the idea of eating beef from cows raised in Hyogo – or at least was the first person known to have acted on the notion.
He tucked in to his legendary meal back in 1868, when Japan only just had opened up trading with the West. At that time the Japanese diet did not include meat, and cows in Japan were used mostly as draught animals.
Since then, though, Kobe beef has been celebrated as what many believe to be the best in the world, and no local farmer would dare make the area’s prized Tajima cows put in a day of labour to earn their keep.
Read my complete article at City AM.
