Consumption of Bear Parts in Upland Japan
This paper offers a brief report of the consumption of bear parts in upland Japan. Data are drawn from ethnographic fieldwork carried out in Hongu, an upland municipality in the interior of the southern part of the Kii Peninsula, western Japan, and from secondary sources documenting animal cure customs from other regions of Japan.
By JOHN KNIGHT
The Japanese black bear (tsukinowaguma, Selenarctos thibetanus japonicus) is a small black bear with a white crescent on its upper chest. Black bears have long been hunted in Japan. In the 1980s, on average just over two thousand black bears were being killed each year. But of the 2,027 killed in 1989, only a minority, 37.5 per cent, were killed as game animals, while 62.5 per cent were killed as pests (Hazumi 1994: 146).Its hunters say that one feature of the bear is that every part of it is used. Most parts of the bear are said to have medicinal value. The bear's brain, in charred form, is a cure for headaches or nausea during pregnancy. The heart and lungs are used for asthma, the paws for neuralgia and rheumatism, and bear meat is used for stomach disorders, for diarrhoea, and for people with a tendency to catch cold. Bear fat provides relief when applied to cuts, burns, rashes, chapped skin, and chilblains. Bear's blood too, dried and then re-mixed with water, was given to post-partum women or to anaemic people.
The most important curative part of the bear is the gall-bladder. In Japan the bear's gall- bladder (kuma no i) is the foremost example of a myoyaku 'miracle medicine' or a panacea which is said to be effective for intestinal, liver, and heart disorders, parasite and bacterial infections, providing relief for those suffering from burns, swellings, and fever, as well as being rich in colloids which can dissolve gallstones (Kaneko et al 1992: 41). There is even a popular belief in Japan that bear gall is a cure for cancer.
Many bears are killed as pests on account of the damage they cause to commercial timber plantations because of their bark stripping from trees and the damage they cause to farms through crop raiding (honey, rice, melons etc.). The bear parts yielded by culled bears have long served as informal compensation to local people for the bear damage they have had to endure. Some Japanese conservationists argue that the scale of bear culling in Japan stems from the commercial value of the bear parts, especially the gall-bladder, as much as from the economic loss because of bear damage.
With the present-day scarcity of bears, an alternative source of gall is the wild boar. Many families on the Kii Peninsula keep wild boar gall-bladders which, on account of the ubiquity of winter boar hunting, are easier to obtain than those of wild bears. Another source of supply are boar farms. One man who runs a wild boar farm on the southeast of the peninsula gives away between 50 to 60 gall-bladders each year to friends, relatives or acquaintances, above all where there is illness in the family or where there is an ailing elderly grandparent. He used to sell them, but now the price is so low that it is hardly worth his while.
The curative forest
The curative power of bear gall is said to vary greatly, affected by the forest diet of the bear. In Niigata, for example, bears which have lived in white oak (Quercus spp.) forest are believed to have harder and better quality gall-bladders than do those which have lived in beech forest (Suzuki 1982: 222). Similarly, the gall of bears from particular regions renowned for their natural forests and the herbal growth within them, is reputed to have special curative and tonic powers.
This idea of the environmental determination of the curative potency of wildlife parts is also evident in the case of other forest animals. In Japan snakes are recognized as being very beneficial to health. Snake extract serves as a powerful tonic and as a cure for a wide range of disorders (including a tendency to catch cold, rheumatism, and impotence).
In present-day Japan good snake extract is also becoming a scarce commodity because the forests which once nurtured potent snakes have been ruined in the course of post-war economic development, a process of decline which includes the replacement of the natural forest by extensive timber plantations. There are only a few remaining natural or primary forests, including the forest of Odaigahara on the Kii Peninsula, where the snakes, according to some local specialists, are the best in all Japan fed on concentrated cocktails of the most beneficial natural herbs (Ue 1993: 93-4).
An unequivocal expression of the idea that the consumption of the animal indirectly represents the consumption of its habitat is the preference for the body parts of wild animals rather than those of farmed animals. There are many substitutes for wild bear gall, including imported Chinese farmed gall and chemically synthesized gall. However, the gall of farmed bears (and even more so synthesized gall) is believed to be inferior to that of their wild counterpart. Hence there continues to be a sizeable demand for wild bear gall in Japan which is met partly by the domestic bear population and partly by illegal bear imports. The basis of this preference would appear to be the idea that wild animals can concentrate the beneficial powers of their natural environment within them.
Conclusion
Japanese forests have long supplied medicinal animal parts. While this used to be an important source of local income for hunters, the wildlife product market has long since been depressed because of competition from imports. In the 1990s there is still a local demand for Japanese wildlife products. In the larger market context, this Japanese supply would appear to be relatively minor. But this demand is locally justified in terms of a positive preference for local, rather than foreign, wildlife substances, and this is articulated in terms of the natural character of the local environment. Perhaps this also indicates why there has been a decline in domestic supply. The Japanese forests have undergone enormous changes, and much of the natural forest which supplied curative (plant and animal) substances in the past has been lost. As a result, there is a growing belief that truly curative forest is now located elsewhere, in other parts of Asia.
The apprehension generated about forest change through a perception of diminution in the curative quality of animal parts is of some interest. Clearly, the continued consumption of curative animal parts is not, in the long-term, quantitatively independent of environmental change. But in the comments on the changing qualities of the gall of bears (or of snake extract) referred to above, such consumption is not qualitatively independent of ecological change in the forest. In other words, even before the threshold of radical scarcity in supply in wildlife products is reached, curative consumption is affected.
The corollary of this is that it is not the preservation of the animal species per se (for example, through farming) which will guarantee the future of the curative consumption of wildlife parts, but rather the conservation of the forests in which potently curative wild animals live. *
References
Hazumi, Toshihiro
Status Of The Black Bear
International Conference of Bear Research and Management 9(1):
145-8, 1994
Kaneko, Hiromasa, Konishi
Masayasu, Sasaki Kiyomitsu and Chiba Tokuji
Nihonshi No Naka No Dobutsu Jiten (a Dictionary Of Animals In Japanese History) Tokyo: Todo Shuppan, 1992
Suzuki, Tozo
Nihon Zokushin Jiten (Dictionary of Popular Beliefs)
Tokyo: Kadokawa Shoten, 1982
Ue, Tetsuya
Hyappiki Mamushi Wa Sei Ga Tsuku Choju Ni Kiku (one Hundred Snakes For Long Life With Vitality)
Tokyo: Riyonsha, 1993
Dr John Knight was an IIAS research fellow from 1 September 1996 to 1 September 1999. He is now Lecturer in Social Anthropology at the Queen's University of Belfast. E-mail: J.Knight@qub.ac.uk.