Japanese Black
Japanese breed of cattle
The Japanese Black (Japanese: 黒毛和種, Kuroge Washu) is a Japanese breed of beef cattle. It is one of six native Japanese cattle breeds, and one of the four Japanese breeds known as wagyū, the others being the Japanese Brown, the Japanese Polled and the Japanese Shorthorn.
All wagyū cattle derive from cross-breeding in the early twentieth century of native Japanese cattle with imported stock, mostly from Europe. In the case of the Japanese Black, the foreign influence was from European breeds including Braunvieh, Shorthorn, Devon, Simmental, Ayrshire and Friesian.
History
Cattle were brought to Japan from China at the same time as the cultivation of rice, in about the second century AD, in the Yayoi period. Until about the time of the Meiji Restoration in 1868, they were used only as draught animals, in agriculture, forestry, mining and for transport, and as a source of fertiliser. Milk consumption was unknown, and – for cultural and religious reasons – meat was not eaten. Cattle were highly prized and valuable, too expensive for a poor farmer to buy.
Japan was effectively isolated from the rest of the world from 1635 until 1854; there was no possibility of intromission of foreign genes to the cattle population during this time. Between 1868, the year of the Meiji Restoration, and 1887, some 2600 foreign cattle were imported.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Japanese Black” is japanese breed of cattle. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Japanese, Black and breed, not as a finished interpretation.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Dec 21, 2025. The linked authority identifier is Q11678387. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1868, 1635, 1854 and 1887.
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This entry incorporates text from “Japanese Black” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.