Our friend Oyama-san had posted on my private feed about what it was like to live in wartime, meatless Japan. Without comment, I’d like to copypaste what he’d written. It is an education. - William
People who could get peasants and ducks ate them, then they had to hunt in the mountain area depending on where they lived. People who possessed horses or cows for doing agriculture could eat them if they tried to. But they should have been a treasure or the way to live on with. That must have been a rare case, I guess. Of course, people live near the sea could eat raw fish, but corned fish was available even in the mountain area. But we didn’t grow mammals just for eating. Growing mammals for food could come out of Japan after Edo era. In the countryside of Japan, even my parents house, had several chickens for their eggs, and sometimes such as neighbors party held once a year or two when I was only a child. It was about fifty years ago. Monks couldn’t eat mammals, I heard, so they pretended rabbits were a kind of birds and counted them like birds and made it a excuse to eat rabbits. Sometimes the Japanese are blamed for eating whales or horses, but I think nobody can blame others for their cultures on eating. Each has their own situations, he or she was or is trying to live his or her life with given situation.