In 1939, the typical Japanese person only ate 4 grams of meat per day. Today, the average person eats 130 grams, and their favourite meat is pork, not fish as one might expect. One of the reasons for this significant change was the rise of Western influence in Japan.
Japan was known as a vegetarian country in medieval times. The national religions, Buddhism and Shinto, are both in favor of plant-based eating, but the Japanese couldn't eat meat mainly because of a shortage of arable land. As a way of dealing with this problem, Japan’s rulers banned people from eating meat.
With the arrival of the Dutch in the eighteenth century, things changed. The Japanese came to associate the meat-loaded diets of the Europeans with societal success. And in 1872 Emperor Meiji ate meat in public for the first time, automatically lifting the meat-eating ban.
