Before Japanese ate Wagyu Beef … | Yonezawa, Yamagata

hey everybody welcome to yonezawa in yamagata prefecture i've been here for now uh a couple of days now this is my second night and uh you can see i'm inside of a restaurant we have some japanese sake this is from yamagata i won't be able to try any of the sagi because i'm driving however i do have some not beer but this episode is all about something that's really unique i always wondered why japanese don't eat lamb or mutton it is a very unique meat i've eaten a lot of mutton when i was in india i ate some pork chops in the united states i guess lamb chops we call them the pork chops lamb chops but it was never really a meat that was so popular and since i came to japan 23 years ago i found that it's almost never on any of the menus even if you go to a place that's very famous for having a lot of meat you won't see slam on there on the prolific izakaya menus however in recent years lamb has been growing in popularity and we're in wagyu country this is uh yonezawa very famous brand of wagyu beef i i we we found a really interesting restaurant the owner of this restaurant is shinchan we're going to introduce you to him as well as the meat that we're going to be consuming tonight which is lamb this is this is lambton or lamb's tongue like there's various parts of it there's some lamb chops i believe that's that's uh mutton there and the difference between mutton and and lamb is i believe the age lamb meat would be if they're a year old or younger and i believe it becomes mutton after uh they're a little bit older so we will find out a little bit more about this you cannot eat that raw who wrote that winter mage no you don't eat we got we got it on a fire here you see this right here this is a a gas stove where what people mainly eat in japan is this has like a genghis khan they call it which is kind of a yakiniku style it's i guess it came from the mongolian helmets and they used to put a fire underneath there and heat the helmets and put slabs of of lamb meat around the helmet and they would cook that way so they almost look like a helmet which is interesting over the course of this live stream we're going to talk a little bit about the history and why japanese don't eat lamb which is weird one of the reasons i think might be the odor i know that when you cook it especially fresh lamb meat there is a different odor to it it's not the same as beef or chicken or pork that might be something that turns off some japanese because they're very acute to taste and smell more so than other nationalities that i've found in my experience but there's other reasons too but actually according to shinchan xinjiang this is shin-chan he's the owner yes yeah introduce your restaurant restaurant no no no no no no [Music] his grandfather why did he want to start this restaurant it came from his grandfather they had a ton of lamb back uh in his grandfather's day before world war ii yes [Music] sir [Music] right there they were used for the the fur but when after that they would they would utilize that meat too and they would eat it in japan back then before the world war ii that's how it started so in yonezawa before world war ii they had one million people one million lamb in this area which is probably more than the population after world war ii um that number went way down to about uh 10 000 which is one percent of what they used to have so you can see there just wasn't a demand for either the the lamb hair uh wool or the um was it lamb it was wool right we wouldn't there was no need for it and nowadays another reason why lamb isn't popular in japan is because the the uh it's very cheap from australia and new zealand from international country international places where we can import it much cheaper than it would be to race here in japan but [Laughter] all right never mind that but the the point is though that in general in japan people don't eat a lot of lamb meat however in recent years so sometimes they have local lamb but it's it's just rare because there's just not a lot of them they're not used for that anymore um because of the demand is down but the demand is growing and when the demand comes and so will the industry change as well this is going to be a lot of fun wxrt is the house where were you earlier huh we were looking for you um yeah you can't eat this raw you got to cook it well done no medium layer medium rare yes oh really okay [Music] this is ross which is uh like you'd see this in in um uh wagyu too but at a much much bigger size it's kind of you oh the center part there so that's just the center part of the lamb chop they've cut it into the big one but the chops here have a small part of it this is like i'm learning about this too because i haven't not eaten a lot of a lot of lamb or mutton before my life wow awesome hi let's eat let's eat so i've been in yama yamagata now for a few days i've had to get extensively tested before coming and we're here with a bunch of other people [Music] how you doing and today we're going to be eating that yesterday we ate wagyu [Laughter] no more wagyu we're going to just uh fill up with something else another reason i think another thing that's really good with eating um mutton lamb meat is that you know in japan because you're eating chicken poor fish actually that's quite a quite a nice variety uh it's nice to add some something unique in there every now and then we can't have zebra and and there was a restaurant in kenya that i ate um all these weird meats called carnivore after i'd done a safari it's twenty dollars all you can eat after you finish you lower the flag they just keep bringing weird meat zebra was on the menu zebra with a little mint jelly this they said ah hi whoa come together the snow kind of uh brings out the different kind of flavor the amami oh you can see the garlic on there whoa miso garlic miso very garlic yeah and then there's a yonezawa apple on there interesting [Music] i've eaten a lot of meat in the last 48 hours all right just just to put out before world war ii a lot of a lot more mutton was eaten in fact wagyu was not really eaten by japanese until after world war ii many decades after actually as more disposable income came about during the bubble era of the 1980s and maybe a little bit before that before world war ii wagyu was something that was very expensive and very prized and not something that was very you wouldn't see it a lot in fact wagyu didn't become a thing in japan until the meiji era when foreigners came to yokohama they tried this really interesting beep that they hadn't had in europe before they asked what it was and they just started bringing it from kobe by boat to yokohama and from places like umi and matsuzaka and all of that wagyu came in there and then the westerners that were living in japan back 150 years ago just loved that wagyu it started to proliferate from this from a demand from foreigners because beef was not eaten by japanese because of the buddhist culture in fact i don't think japanese didn't really eat a lot of of meat at all because of the buddhist culture back then so it was after world war ii that this very expensive meat called wagyu started to grow and grow and other brands of wagyu started to to increase around the country nowadays it's hard for you to travel around japan and not found find a wagyu brand now yonizawa where i am today is one of the strongest wagyu brands in japan and this is this is the premium wagyu from yamagata prefecture around here we would call yonezawa and i've been eating a lot of that so this is like a this is actually a vacation yeah it's really delicious okay this is a meat-eating town i would say in tohoku maybe yonezawa is one of the gourmet cities of tohoku maybe of japan yeah yeah because they've got all sorts of the chicken is the um pork is very famous here a lot of people don't know about it it's actually quite quite good and famous the wagyu is very famous the produce the vegetables uh is is famous the water here is so good from the tap the water from the tap is like drinking bottled water i don't know like so none of them mean a pit butter cow no music sweet or more oil i don't know why i asked why don't you why don't why do the people drink buy any bottled water here if you live you live in the countryside it doesn't make any sense to me [Music] so the sauce actually that miso garlic apple is inside of this magic water yeah the water looked a little thick whoa so i hope that information's uh kind of interesting to you i i'm fascinated about the history of wagyu and how beef came into japan because it wasn't a thing until actually quite recently in japan's history it is magic it smells magic he knew it i see nicholas is here first bike dedicated to the glass pet lamp for leo if canai says yes nicholas she's coming tomorrow on the shinkansen so i'll ask her it might have to be one of those stuffed ones though maybe if we swap the stuff one for a real one she won't notice on the table here is a zero percent alcohol beer a sapporo so we're gonna see how good that this this tastes yeah i think if you're gonna eat be eating um like a barbecue you're gonna want to have some beer the bubbles kind of break down the fats a little bit that's that's the excuse uh so the lamb chops come from a different different place but the ramtan wan oh okay boom so whenever i go to do they have restaurants that are dedicated to this called they're called genghis khan restaurants and i guess the history that i was told is it has a mound here it just looks like a helmet from the mongolian army maybe back then i guess you can on the handles could be where you put the chin strap i'm not really sure on that but oh wow look at that steaming meat i don't have words anymore this is rare i guess there's only one thing to do eat it yeah can ashtakara diet i start the diet from tomorrow seriously i've been eating too much this is red and we call it very hot angel means wow very hot very hot yeah oh it does it can't be that hot what the hell what is all right well then we're going to have to try this here okay oh it's very hot so a little bit you you have to step oh it's not that hard [Laughter] it's not that hot all right it's got a little bit of a kick right yes yes it has a wide range of look i found that if you don't have spice in your food you it's it's not as much fun i put spice on ice put hot peppers on pizza on sushi sushi no i'm joking i didn't eat like sushi no i don't put but i would if they had it everything steak you know it's just more fun when it's spicy getting a kick to it right i bet you half of you out there are the same way happy out there the same way all right before we get here let's do a little comp by everybody come bye cheers [Laughter] that's not beer that's it's it's sal poro but it's not beer it tastes um let me raise you up a little bit higher i know that a lot of you that are watching and probably if you're in the u.s you're probably asleep right now and what if you are awake what are you doing awake it's like two in the morning but a lot of you can't come to japan and uh i finished most of the shoot for this episode that i came here to make in yonezawa and this is the the last night that i'm here so it's kind of like a little bit of a celebratory thing but the the um the process the travel right now and be safe is really hard i have to take my temperature every day and report on that and i take antigen tests once or twice a day to make sure that i'm i'm not getting anybody sick and it's i've been doing that for quite a while now and i'll be happy when this is all finished and all of you can come back to japan and numbers look really bad in tokyo right now i'm not in tokyo so things are a little bit different but we're uh um when i'm out there uh among there i'm trying my best you know because i i understand the situation but for me i gotta get only in japan going again so we gotta we gotta keep shooting now yonezawa town of delicious wagyu eating mutton this is this is good all right it's time time to try the mutton here all right so the sauce is actually in in the mutton the sauce yeah so the the miso garlic apple is in here right that's so good that's really good in there it's got it's got different different consistency than beef and pork it's mutton i guess if you don't eat it a lot you can tell the difference right away it's certainly got a different consistency but we're going to see when the pork chops come out here and the and the and the tongue and see if i can compare it to other other meats here wow that spicy sauce is so good yeah mm-hmm it's homemade here in the shop i want that bottled i'll buy some of that we can sell that in the only japan merch store which is starting this this week i believe thank you for eating for us who can't travel to japan thank you arnold and bradania it's it's only been well yeah if you count hawaii aloha why is different hawaii [Music] [Laughter] place well ah you've been to america why do japanese love hawaii maybe the most equals america so when we go to tropical places we go to like florida or caribbean yeah california the west coast maybe hawaii or tijuana yeah mexico oh yeah maybe [Music] all right let's go let's go into the kitchen i hear meat frying eat eat his coffee sure sure all right let's go into the kitchen okay come on [Laughter] whoa i have not seen this in a long time [Music] i it's been three four years since i ate lamb chops all right i i got some more stories i was hitchhiking about by the way if you're if you wanted to buy the hitchhiking blu-ray that i i have i'm going to put it on sale on the merch store which will be starting this week i believe on friday i could probably launch the store at any time it's on shopify so it's being sent from the united states when i was hitchhiking in 2017 about four years ago five years ago now almost five years in a couple of months i stopped in a town in hokkaido called shibatsu it's on the way to wakanae which is a very north of japan there's a little handle that goes up there on the way there shibetsu was famous for its lamb in fact it was so famous they put it on the manhole covers so if you look down you would see the manhole covers had a lamb on it so when i stayed at the hotel there the uh a hotel owner uh said if i'd want to stay for dinner it was only like eight or nine eight dollars and i got this amazing plate of lamb chops and i i was just freaking out because i said this is not something i've had in japan in the 20 years that i've lived here this is just bizarre it was so good and it was so cheap because again it's not something that's in high demand but uh when when i heard about this restaurant i said well we gotta we gotta try to we gotta try this out here the only is our land of beef we're eating lamb it's like when i went to shiogame in miyagi prefecture let it has the most sushi shops in the entire country um than anywhere else in japan there's like one sushi shop yeah more more sushi shops than anywhere else in japan and and i ate curry rice when i went there but but it's because the the coast japanese coast guard is based there and they have their own special japanese coast guard curry so it was a thing it's a live stream you can check that out oh you won't you should check that out because you won't believe the food that we ate there that was totally different i never i've never tried this uh maki gosh i can't remember the name of it right now wogi's on my brain all right let's try the lamb chop this is a gourmet place look at this this is uh the mustard is also that's real mustard i thought it was caviar yeah nice unusual caviar this is a handmade mustard from here in the shop and then we have over here which is uh uh wow tataki is right now [Music] but chicago is the same way to cook as a tataki but you can use it with different animals interesting okay this is a very very good meal we got here going on to all right let's try let's let's try this lamb chop and then we can end the live stream that's my my meat eyes things get a little crazy i live in japan you always get a hot hot towel to clean your hands with push and on those hot summer days if you're over the age of 50 you can use that hot towel to wash your entire body but you have to be over the age of 50 for it to be socially acceptable i've never seen anybody under that age do that okay [Music] all right this is what it looks like before i consume it you always want to show wow so this was raw before now it's not see i told you they don't eat this raw that looks good that's my first bite right there with the mustard all right the moment of truth i'll be honest with you i'll be honest i did i guess [Music] [Laughter] okay uh a lot of people say they ask me what's your favorite wagyu for example they say oh you must love a5 because it's the best i said that's not true at all you're looking at it from the wrong way a5 is rare because it's hard to find that kind of marbling but it has a lot of fat in it and that that's not always what you're looking for just because it's rare and it's expensive doesn't make it the best right i like an a3 i like something with a with some akami angus beef which has no fat at all she'd like to try different kinds of meat this is so tender this is like there's a got such a very unique taste to it and when you eat it you can you can i know there's a consistency to it that's different it breaks into your mouth differently but it's so juicy and the sauces that they've they've fried this up in is so good yeah yeah i could be i could eat this more often but it's hard to find but it's hard to find it in japan or easy but when i go to my supermarket i just want to buy it i don't want to wait from delivery tokyo no there's nothing in our refrigerator really frosty's got when it comes to meat we consume it and it's gone we just get more at the supermarket we don't really stock it but this is so good often yeah oh wow oh wow so you can't buy it whoa i might i might end up leaving here with some of these here anja mo what the hell is this heart what it's called here because the hook is cold people eat a lot of spice which makes sense fire to show but in india we eat a lot of spice because it cools you down the fire makes you sweat and then you you feel cooler from the spice it's just a different way to look at it [Music] taiwanese some of the spiciest food i ever ate was in taiwan it's just fiery there too all right if you have any questions leave them in the comments below i'm really interested to hear your opinion what did you think of lam nico in japan again you're not gonna find it in a lot of places but when you do usually it's somebody who specializes in it i put a link in the description by the way this is shinchan's grandfather from before world war ii you can see the pictures do you have are you on it okay oh yeah uh the the pictures of his grandfather back in the day with uh lamb meat like we're talking you know before world war ii where people were eating the lamb a lot more nowadays um it's getting rare to find but more and more people are coming back to it they're coming back to the way that their grandfather's um what they used to eat which is interesting we come full circle good i hope leo is going to be eating pizza because that's what his father eats but he could go back to what his grandfather ate which might have been pork chops lamb chops i don't know some kind of chops seems to me like a 19 like 1950s type of food lamb chops and applesauce pork chops and applesauce oh here it is oh that's uh shinchan's grandfather and he's got some what's he got there is that uh yeah he's cutting uh some lamb and then it's memo and uh it's a fast fast this is a lamb uh but like a butcher shop for lamb meat oh he also sold wool lamb gay kitsuji so he sold wool and the meat nico he saw the meat with the with the fur that's awesome oh that's a nice car 1960. ah the olden days kind of an upgrade 1978 i'm four years old and now this is what it looks like here very cool and now it's been renewed i got a question though if you sell see this doesn't make sense to me i got a question here shinto i don't want to use a big voice because i might get retribution from this question okay so you take the the wool and then you would you would eat them yeah so some of i saw this movie babe with pigs and the the lambs are very old in the movie babe and you know they weren't just young ones they were kind of old ones but so ojicha hi yeah and lam is a younger one so there's a difference between mutton and lamb but this is interesting ah interesting i i don't eat a lot of it so i'm not sure smoked lamb's tongue so the lamb was smoking [Music] i think that's a joke so that i'm like sorry i'm a little slow but maybe not that's so the left this is smoked lamb's tongue and no the lamb did not smoke but this it was smoked after all right yeah it's kind of like it's like a pickled thing that you would eat uh that's been smoked it's very good in tohoku right you get it in akita and which is the neighboring prefecture we're just south of akita oh so this is gonna be really good so okay okay yeah so i learned that um i use this part of the chopsticks so you can turn your chopsticks around to the backside and sometimes it's more polite somebody do it i'm not sure if i do i put that on the side there yeah this is the age that we live in we should be careful right away but then you get you have to watch out for your chopstick on the other side here oh that's so good here's the the tongue certainly different consistency than with the beef tongue of course a little bit sweeter and here's the beef tongue right here yeah that's been grilled ram tongue this is uh from australia maybe australia australia be fully transparent it's from australia hello yeah it's international global yeah global what is this on the side this fujiyama this is uh wasabi right okay let's clean out the system here let's give it a try show you the table okay and water all right this is lam tong with just a little bit of wasabi here oh yeah it's so much softer and easier to chew than with the uh beef tongue look when i came to japan i was freaked out i didn't want to eat tongue i thought that was weird we don't eat tongue in america really like not in not when i was growing up so when i saw it i was like yeah but you start to eat it like wow it smells pretty good became famous after the um after world war ii again in sendai because they had a lot of parts from the animals coming in and and tongue was one of them so we all of the utahn almost all the guten in in japan comes from the imported from the united states even today so this sunday yutan is american american beef because wagyu tongue is not so as good as the american uh beef tongue interesting yeah interesting i talked to the to the yutan people they told me that american tongue is better i believe him too as an american uh i grew up eating beef tongue tacos really donny that's interesting tang sushi i have seen that before uh it's not too bad it's actually pretty good everything's pretty good uh i'm eating some chicken wings right now yeah angel you know what that's not even real relevant to this but i read it anyway it's just because i'm a nice guy having fun all right everybody i hope heart is also pretty good if seasoned it is in japan it's interesting we eat just about every part of it and i think that that culture came after like the multinight culture don't waste anything and also the culture of um we didn't have a lot of things in japan when i say we the the people after world war ii there really wasn't a lot of choices um a lot of food and and people made made with the best that they could get so you have things like motsunabe which had the inners or the organ meat in a stew and it sounds gross but it's really good and i think if you grew up eating it it has like this nostalgic feeling to it and there's places in shinjuku the um um it's in shinjuku it's called piss alley but which is like memory lane right of an alley that used to be called p alley but never mind that the point is motsunabe back if you look at the old pictures after world war ii of shinjuku you'll see there was just shacks they couldn't get a lot of meat so they got whatever they can get from from the united states which was brought in on on planes and that was what they made with the innards that they can get pretty cheaply and they found a recipe that worked really good so it's nice that these recipes are still available in japan you can eating that's kind of like eating the history uh these foods that came as a result of it that have entered in japan's uh culinary daily life i'm talking too much anyways thanks so much for watching everybody nicholas i'm gonna look look into getting that stuffed lamb and then replace the stuffed lamb one day with a real one that's the way to go i hope so and chan it's nice to see that you you're doing okay in the trunk i did leave you some ice cream back there this might be i don't think it's melted either because it's so cold see everybody hope you enjoyed it if you have any questions leave in the comments below for the next 10 seconds you can write in where you're watching from what part of the world as i said yeah you can write in where you're watching in the world while you get a static view of shinchan's restaurant right here i put a link in the description too so if you are in yonizawa please come come in and say hi shinshan is super friendly and he speaks shinjan yeah shinshan speaks fluent english and he's very what are you having about happy to talk to you in fluent english in fact if you can 45 countries on trip advisor 45 countries and he speaks cockney too so if you're from a rough town in the uk he can probably communicate with you i just made that up please do come and tell me what happens have a good day everybody wow morocco philippines indonesia california what are you doing still up finland australia new zealand india hawaii british columbia netherlands germany wales cape town texas wow a lot of places space wait all right see you guys

Channel: ONLY in JAPAN * GO

Views: 14,496

Keywords: Only in Japan, Japan, John Daub, Japanese, Tokyo, travel, meat, Wagyu, lamb, mutton, Lamb meat, restaurant, Yonezawa, Yamagata

Id: MgHJ7A_I08A

Length: 43min 10sec (2590 seconds)

Published: Tue Jan 18 2022