Fantastic Insights found - AWA’s Japan Wagyu tour

There were some fantastic industry and cultural insights to be found for 37 Wagyu breeders and other industry stakeholders who took part in Australian Wagyu Association’s 2022 Japan Wagyu tour, which travelled the length and breadth of the country in October.

The 14-day tour involving stakeholders from Australia, the US and Brazil was the third undertaken by the AWA to coincide with Japan’s famed Zenkyo, an unforgettable Wagyu cattle, carcase and genetics industry event held in different parts of the country every five years.

Previous AWA tours visited the event in 2017 and 2012, providing a great opportunity to benchmark the Australian Wagyu industry’s progress. This year’s Zenkyo was held in a rural setting near the southern city of Kagoshima, provided the perfect culmination for the AWA Japan tour.

Described locally as the ‘Wagyu Cattle Olympics’, the colourful five-day event is the largest gathering of Wagyu stud cattle anywhere in the world. More than 400,000 people visited the previous Zenkyo held in 2017, and expectations this year were closer to 500,000, given the Japanese’ appetite for travel since COVID restrictions started to ease.

Some 440 head of cattle were involved in this year’s judging, representing 41 of Japan’s 47 prefectures – from the snowswept island of Hokkaido in the deep north to semi-tropical Oita in the far south. A separate meat judging competition involving 166 carcases was judged for marbling abundance and fineness, carcase yield and fat cover using the Meat Image Japan digital camera (see references below), as well as fatty acid composition. Big winners this year were the ‘heavyweight’ prefectures of Kagoshima, Miyazaki, and Hokkaido, which is hosting the next event in 2027. The winner of the Prime Minister’s prize for overall results was Miyazaki prefecture, while Kagoshima claimed the coveted breeding bull championship.

Sense of openness One message that clearly came across at the Zenkyo event and throughout the tour this year was that Japanese Wagyu industry stakeholders are now much less wary about the presence of Australian Wagyu industry members than they once were. Earlier Zenkyo visits in 2012 and 2017 were met with some reservation and even wariness by locals, but the tour group this year could not have been made more welcome.

Language barriers aside, there was good-natured banter between local and Australian Wagyu breeders, with common interests clearly attracting the two together. Many locals were clearly curious about why the AWA tour group was there (Japan had not yet re-opened to overseas tourism at the time), and Wagyu beef production in Australia.

Some other key take-home messages gathered by this year’s tour group:

While the best A5 Japanese Wagyu carcases continue to make the equivalent of A$18,000 at auction in Japan, rising cost of production, and the deteriorating value of the Japanese Yen continue to weigh heavily on Japanese Wagyu feeders and breeders. Currency movement and its impact was seen by some Wagyu lotfeeders as the biggest single problem currently faced by the local industry. Having started the year at Y115 to the US$, it slid to around Y148 during the AWA tour, before softening a little since then.

While the Australian Wagyu industry’s trend in both marbling performance and carcase size has continued to track sharply higher over the past five years since the last Zenkyo event, it was hard to find evidence of substantive progression in these traits in Japanese carcase performance over the same period. One Wagyu breeder/feeder the tour group visited felt that eventually, it was likely that Australian Wagyu might one day match the performance of the Japanese Fullblood industry.

It should come as no surprise that experiencing high-end Japanese Wagyu beef in all its glorious forms became one of the highlights of the AWA tour.

The travel group enjoyed a wide range of Wagyu cuts in myriad cooking styles, from teppanyaki hot plate dining to shabu shabu (thinly shaved and cooked quickly in hot broth), and various cuts grilled over hot coals. Some items unfamiliar in Australia, such as marinated, thinly sliced grilled Wagyu beef tongue, are highly prized in parts of Japan.

What became immediately apparent is the pride with which each prefecture takes in their Wagyu product, with certifications of authenticity proudly displayed on many restaurant walls.

Australian style steak cuts are not widely seen outside the Teppanyaki dining style, but each Wagyu muscle group is prepared and sliced differently, with great precision, to suit specific Japanese cuisine styles.

Thin slicing is a key component in many cooking styles. Whether a piece of chuck eye roll is sliced 2mm or 4mm thick makes an important difference, in the eyes of the Japanese food service and retail industry and their customers, in how it is used.

Several restaurants visited during the tour, especially in Sendai, Kobe and Tottori had reserved hand-picked carcases and primals to provide the best possible samples for the AWA tour group, all grading A5.

I n visits to high-end Tokyo department store meat halls, some extraordinary prices were seen for the best Wagyu beef on offer. One sample of Matsuzaka sirloin beef from Mie prefecture was retailing at the Mitsukoshi department store for 7000 Yen per 100g, or the equivalent of A$767/kg.

The most highly regarded Wagyu prefectures (many of which were prominent winners in this year’s Zenkyo events) commanded big price premiums over lesser-known prefectures in retail displays. Individual animal breeding, feeding, and processing history accompanied the high-end beef on display in department store show cabinets.

During a briefing in Tokyo at the start of the tour, MLA Japan personnel said there was evidence that some younger Japanese consumers were becoming less aligned with highly-marbled Wagyu beef, instead looking more frequently for a lighter, less fatty, less costly item that some perceived to be more ‘healthy.’ Having made that point, however, Wagyu beef is still central to many Japanese consumer’s domestic beef choices, MLA said.

The Japanese industry continues to show pride in the export of Japanese domestic Wagyu beef into key markets around the world, including the US, China, Europe and even Australia – albeit in very small quantities. Exports to Australia this year have totalled less than 100 tonnes, but the trade is seen as symbolically important, in accessing countries with some of the tightest trade access and animal health risk profile requirements in the world.