East and Southeast Asian Foodways

Long before rice cultivation reached the Japanese archipelago, the Jomon culture, spanning roughly 14,000 to 300 BCE, sustained itself through hunting, fishing, and the gathering of nuts, shellfish, and wild plants, leaving behind enormous shell middens that attest to a diet rich in marine resources. Wet-rice paddy agriculture arrived from the Korean peninsula and mainland China by around 300 BCE, marking the transition to the Yayoi period and fundamentally reorganizing Japanese society around rice cultivation, which became both the primary staple and, in later centuries, a unit of taxation and currency. Fish remained central to the Japanese diet throughout this transition, preserved through early fermentation techniques such as narezushi, in which fish was packed in salted, fermented rice for extended preservation, a practice considered the distant ancestor of modern sushi. In 675 CE, Emperor Tenmu issued an edict, rooted in Buddhist principles that had spread from the Asian mainland, prohibiting the consumption of cattle, horses, dogs, monkeys, and domestic fowl, a ban that, while not always strictly observed, reinforced a long-standing cultural preference for fish and plant-based protein over land-animal meat that persisted in Japan for well over a millennium.