Pig colonizations and pig-human societies

It is difficult to say whether humans domesticated pigs or pigs domesticated humans. The two became socially entangled millennia ago. Wild pigs probably came to live in human settlements in multiple regions independently, including separate domestications in eastern and western Eurasia.Footnote ¹¹ Pigs are gregarious herd animals and will attach emotionally to humans. In contrast with ruminants, they are omnivorous, making them potential competitors with humans for a range of foods that ruminants will not eat. The pig’s rooting habit and its voracious omnivory place wild pigs among the worst nuisance animals for crop-growing farmers. Although pigs will consume human waste, people seeking to keep domestic pigs from consuming their crops as well are compelled to offer them additional food. Pigs obviously benefit from this arrangement. The process of domestication thus involved a mutual accommodation: in exchange for being fed, pigs became more manageable and offered themselves up as food.

Unlike many other domesticated mammals, people keep pigs around for only one purpose: to eat them. A pig won’t guard a house, pull a plough, or allow people to ride its back. Nor do we drink the pig’s milk. Viewed in utilitarian terms, pigs are pure meat animals.Footnote ¹² At the same time, they are forest foragers by nature and will quickly become feral if given the opportunity. All domestic breeds of pigs in the world belong to the same species, which is close enough to the wild boar that they will mate and produce fertile offspring. Pigs thus live with and around humans across a full spectrum of habits, from domesticated to wild, and of relationships, from intimate to antagonistic.

In the anthropological literature, pigs have figured prominently in a debate posing a semiological approach against an ecological one to explain why consumption of certain animals is taboo in some societies and not others. Mary Douglas argued that the Hebrew bible prohibited eating the flesh of pigs because they failed to fit into classifications devised to show order in God’s creation.Footnote ¹³ In contrast, Marvin Harris argued that the interdiction of pig flesh resulted from the fact that deforestation and the growing human population in the ancient Middle East made pig husbandry unsustainable.Footnote ¹⁴ Both these studies focused on ancient societies. Related studies have examined smaller societies in the present. Few, however, have sought to explain the dynamics of how an animal’s fit within a human community, as companion, labour source, or food, changed in a particular historical context. Yet major changes in both the ecological and cultural place of domestic animals have occurred in recent history, when we can identify human actors and political causes. Just as we know the names of the individual Hawaiian-Okinawans responsible for the pig gift of 1948, we can follow the transfer of pigs and of ideas about pigs around the Pacific with reference to particular people.

White shows that pigs in China and Europe evolved differently due to the differing social and historical conditions in which they were bred. Hemmed in by humans in denser settlements, Chinese pigs accommodated themselves to living principally on household refuse rather than foraging in the woods. As sedentary animals, they became ‘round, pale, short-legged, and pot-bellied.’ The label ‘house pig’ is clearly apposite for these animals. In contrast, European pigs continued to demand pannage (release into the forest to feed on acorns and nuts) and exhibited more of the characteristics of a forest animal. These habits came into conflict with human needs as human population growth reduced available forest land. The cross-breeding of Chinese house pigs and European forest pigs in eighteenth-century Europe produced what White refers to as ‘capitalist pigs,’ the pork-making ‘machines’ we know today, kept housed or penned and fed grain, in farms and factories with hundreds or thousands of animals.Footnote ¹⁵

Since the presence of pigs influenced humans too, instead of focusing only on the resulting pig types, we might instead think in terms of the different social configurations, or pig-human societies, that formed wherever pigs and humans cohabited: a paddy-farming, house-centred Chinese pig-human society versus a broadcast-farming and forest-dependent European pig-human society, for example. If we follow pigs from the Eurasian continent into the island Pacific, we find a third type of pig-human society. And if describing the Chinese and European cases as ‘pig-human societies’ feels slightly hyperbolic, it should not for the island Pacific, in many parts of which pigs once had a social and ritual centrality that is now hard to imagine.

People travelling in outrigger canoes from New Guinea and Southeast Asia began populating remote Oceania, including Polynesia, around 3,500 years ago. Although scholars differ on when they reached Hawaii, recent archaeological evidence suggests that it may not have been until as late as the thirteenth-century CE.Footnote ¹⁶ Their boats carried with them what Alfred Crosby called ‘portmanteau biota:’ an ensemble of co-travellers including pigs, dogs, and chickens, as well as rats. According to no less a maritime authority than Captain James Cook, pigs are prone to seasickness, so it cannot have been an easy trip.Footnote ¹⁷ But pigs soon established themselves together with humans in many Polynesian islands. When Europeans arrived in the eighteenth century, they found large pig populations.

European visitors to Polynesia in the eighteenth century observed that the pigs they encountered there differed from the pigs they had at home. Polynesian pigs were generally smaller, slimmer, and hairier, with long hind legs. All of this indicated that they remained closer genetically to their wild ancestors than the pigs then common in Western Europe, even though there were no wild pigs indigenous to Polynesia with which they could interbreed. In many places they roamed free.Footnote ¹⁸ Voyagers’ accounts and later ethnographies suggest varying degrees of domestication. In general, however, Polynesian pigs were in social terms what we might call village pigs.Footnote ¹⁹ Individuals were often fed, named, and claimed by particular households, but they spent most of their lives foraging around the settlement rather than penned. Where there were fences, gardens were fenced to keep pigs out, since it was assumed they would roam and forage. The laws of Huahine (part of French Polynesia) recorded by William Ellis in 1829 made clear the pig’s right to roam: ‘If a pig enters a garden and destroys the produce there, let no recompense be required, because of the badness of the fence he entered.’Footnote ²⁰

European ideas of human and animal slavery in Polynesia

Eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century European voyagers frequently mentioned pigs in their accounts because their ships were in constant search of animal flesh to eat and pigs were the largest land animals in the island Pacific. Europeans therefore showed a strong interest in the question of who owned the pigs in Polynesia. They also interpreted the management of pigs and traits of the animals themselves in terms of their own conceptions of civilization and savagery.

Georg Forster, who accompanied Cook on his second voyage, noted that the pigs in Tahiti appeared more wild than European pigs, writing that they ‘have not those pendulous ears, which according to the ingenious count de Buffon, are the characteristics of slavery in animals.’ He went on to observe that they were ‘cleanlier than our European hogs,’ and ‘part of the real riches of the Taheitians,’ yet appeared only to be eaten ‘on certain solemn occasions,’ when the chiefs consumed massive amounts of pork.Footnote ²¹ Buffon’s widely read Natural History, to which Forster alluded here, theorized that traits such as droopy ears were products of the domesticated animal’s ‘degeneration’ under human bondage. This also implied the complementary idea that creatures less influenced by captivity were inherently superior. Buffon was one of a number of eighteenth-century European writers who viewed animal domestication through the lens of slavery.Footnote ²² This mode of thinking rendered the Polynesian pigs into noble savages.

However, Polynesian pigs were not necessarily less domesticated than their distant relatives in China and Europe. After all, their ancestors had arrived by boat with humans, who continued to feed them and treated them as both community members and ritual animals of the highest importance. They simply lived in a different domestic relationship. Throughout the island Pacific, communities keeping pigs found ways to tie them to their caregivers emotionally without physically tying or enclosing them. Women often cared for piglets from infancy, grooming, hand-feeding, and sometimes suckling them.Footnote ²³ The animals ‘were the constant companions of their masters,’ observed Russian ship commander Urey Lisiansky, who visited Kealakekua Bay on Hawaii Island in 1804.Footnote ²⁴ The affective bonds between pigs and humans in village-pig societies could thus be extremely intimate (Marvin Harris has called it ‘pig love’ in the case of Melanesia), but mature pigs fed and mated at will. With mating uncontrolled, little selection occurred to produce a fatter or more meat-efficient pig.Footnote ²⁵

The Pacific island village pigs might also be called feudal pigs. This was anyway the perception of Europeans. And it seems true that in Tonga, in Hawaii, in Tahiti, and elsewhere, although individual households looked after pigs, the king or chief had a claim over them, as he did over all the land and the labour of his subjects. As Forster noted, pigs were not daily food for Polynesians. Like other agricultural products, the people tending them gave them as periodic tribute to their overlords. In other cases, the kings’ demands came irregularly. One local ruler told a missionary, however, that he had to distribute everything he got, ‘or else he would not be king.’Footnote ²⁶ Tribute pigs were sacrificed and consumed at festivals, a rare occasion when commoners were able to eat them. Together, in this way, commoners, rulers, and pigs constituted a society that was ‘feudal’ in the sense that those who worked the land gave a portion of the product, including pigs, to a local lord or the king, who distributed what he had exacted to his immediate entourage and to the farmers themselves in occasional ritual displays of largess.

A system like this developed its most evolved form in Hawaii during the three centuries prior to the arrival of European explorers and the beginning of trans-oceanic trade. The archaeological record indicates a marked increase in pig sacrifices sometime after 1500, unaccompanied by evidence of increased pork consumption in domestic sites. Michael J. Kolb reads this as the sign of a growing ‘chiefly hierarchy.’Footnote ²⁷ This process would ultimately lead to the consolidation of a multi-island state under Kamehameha at the end of the eighteenth century. In contrast with his predecessor Kaheliki, who treated each encounter with a foreign ship as a separate episode, seeking advantage through either trade or theft, Kamehameha used his control of island resources to negotiate acquisition of European arms and ultimately to gain assistance in constructing a navy. Pigs were a critical commodity in this exchange. In the words of one American captain, the Hawaiian king was ‘a magnanimous monarch, but a shrewd pork dealer.’Footnote ²⁸ Weaker subsequent members of his dynasty used their monopolies of pigs, native women, and eventually sandalwood, to acquire imported luxuries.

Judging from Marshall Sahlins’ analysis of sexuality and alliance-making in Hawaii at the time of Captain Cook, there seems to have been some congruence between the treatment of pigs and attitudes about human offspring. Hawaiian kinship was not based on patrilines. Most young people’s sexual behaviour was not controlled by their parents. However, sex was used to create or maintain alliances among households. Similarly, pigs were important to families not as their private property but as the means to maintain relationships with chiefs and relatives. In killing and giving or sharing a pig, a household affirmed bonds and obligations with other households. Human offspring tied households and extended kin groups by having sexual relationships, much as animals tied households by being killed, exchanged, and eaten.Footnote ²⁹

As whites came to acquire greater stake in Pacific island societies, the pig’s freedom from bondage before its final sacrifice to the chief or king came to be seen as the flip side of a condition of unfreedom for the Polynesian common man. Pigs served as props in a story that circulated among missionaries in the early nineteenth century. In this story, an island man acquires a pig and raises it for a year in secrecy to feed his own family, only to have it taken from him by the king’s procurer at the moment the family is to eat it. ‘Such is the civil condition of the mass of the nation,’ wrote the American missionary C.S. Stewart after recording this tale. ‘Their only birthright is slavery; and its highest immunities cannot secure them, a right of life, much less any inferior possession.’ Without the right to private property in livestock, in the missionaries’ view, the common people were slaves to their king.Footnote ³⁰

There is evidence in voyagers’ and missionaries’ accounts that in places where taxation was not regularized, chiefs did in fact exact tribute when they wished. Marshall Sahlins and Patrick Kirch, citing David Malo’s early nineteenth-century description of Hawaii, assert that Hawaiian kings had become selfish and acquisitive, although they suggest this may have begun after the introduction of European goods.Footnote ³¹ The concern here, however, is not whether in fact this royal pig expropriation occurred, but what its telling signifies. The story offered a parable for the protestant missionaries’ ideals of the autonomous individual, domesticity attached to the hearth and the family meal, and the ethic of labour to bring hard-earned bacon to the table. It also derived ultimately from eighteenth-century ideas about animals and slavery: Buffon had claimed that Native Americans demonstrated their lack of civilization by the fact that they had no command over animals.Footnote ³² According to the missionaries’ circular logic, the Polynesians gave up their property to their lords and were indolent as a consequence of having no property rights. Their inability to raise their own pigs and eat them in the privacy of their homes when they pleased signified their slavery. And therefore, implicitly, to be free was to be able to hold sovereign dominion over a domestic animal.

The solution to this condition of slavery in Hawaii was the privatization enacted in the Constitution of 1840 and the Great Māhele (1848–52), in which the land formerly held, together with its agricultural products and animals, in a complex system of usufruct and tribute within the hierarchy of king, chiefs, subordinates, and commoners, was divided between king and subjects, registered to individual owners, and commodified. Within a few years, the great majority of Hawaiian land passed into the hands of white settlers and the mass of commoners found themselves indebted tenants.Footnote ³³ Thereafter, commoners could kill and eat pigs when they chose, if they could find the money to acquire and keep them.

In addition to land titling, the Māhele meant enclosures. White settlers brought cattle and quickly moved in to claim common agricultural land (kula) for pasture. Indigenous commoners found their animals shot at for trespassing on foreigners’ property. Although range cattle had first destroyed the native commons, Hawaiian courts upheld the sovereign property rights of the shooters against the keepers of the errant animals.Footnote ³⁴ It is easy to imagine that in the years after this, many native Hawaiians, now compelled to pen and feed their pigs if they wanted to keep them, simply gave up on the previous semi-domestic arrangement.Footnote ³⁵ Open land went first to pasture for cattle and subsequently to sugar cane and pineapple plantations. The second generation of missionaries abandoned the ideal of the independent native householder with his solitary pig and reimagined salvation for their flock in the discipline of wage labour on plantations, the largest of which would fall into the hands of missionary families.Footnote ³⁶ The remaining village pigs went feral. Even in the mountain forests where the pigs now proliferated, native Hawaiians were forbidden by law from hunting them, since the land was government property.Footnote ³⁷ In 1910, just as capitalist pig husbandry in Hawaii was beginning—with imported labour and imported mainland American pigs—the Hawaiian territorial government initiated a massive feral pig cull.Footnote ³⁸

Pig colonizations of Okinawa and Japan: Conflicting utilitarianisms

Genetic evidence suggests that domesticated pigs had come to the Ryūkyū Islands by the third-century CE. These would have been Chinese house pigs. There is no evidence of a separate domestication of wild boars in either the Ryūkyū Islands or Japan.Footnote ³⁹ Pigs appear in the written records of the Ryūkyū kingdom from the fifteenth century. They seem not to have been bred widely for several centuries afterward, however. The people of Ryūkyū were poor. Although pigs ate human waste, that waste was also precious fertilizer, and pigs are prodigious eaters, so it was difficult to maintain them. Chinese and Korean accounts from the fifteenth through seventeenth centuries suggest that at the time, the islands had few pigs.Footnote ⁴⁰ At the court of the Ryūkyū kings, at least in the seventeenth century, beef was preferred, but the Chinese embassies that came to the Ryūkyūs on the occasion of a king’s investiture changed this. These embassies, consisting of hundreds of officials and staying for months, demanded pork. In 1713, the Ryūkyū king ordered his subjects to breed pigs in preparation for the Chinese visit, and from around this time, pig breeding became common. The introduction of sweet potatoes in the seventeenth century had made keeping pigs more feasible, since they were easy to grow and their leaves and shoots augmented the animals’ diet.Footnote ⁴¹ By the late nineteenth century, pork and lard had acquired a central place in Okinawan cuisine.Footnote ⁴² Ryūkyū diplomacy thus transformed the Okinawan diet. Pigs also transformed Okinawan homes: since Chinese pigs were house pigs rather than village pigs, Okinawans accommodated them by building enclosures next to their kitchens and toilets.

A discourse on domestic animals quite distinct from Euro-American ones accompanied the eastward trajectory of pigs from the Asian continent. It travelled through texts and diplomatic exchange. When the Chinese ambassadors who visited the Ryūkyū court in the seventeenth century were given beef, they refused it, instructing the Ryūkyū king that oxen laboured and therefore should not be eaten. In his 1683 account of the embassy, ambassador Wang Ji described his own deed:

The Chinese ambassadors’ injunction had deep roots in continental tradition. Records from at least the Tang dynasty (618–907) repeat the same idea that draft animals should not be eaten because of their social utility.Footnote ⁴⁴ The proscription was also introduced to Japan. The sixteenth-century military hegemon Toyotomi Hideyoshi instituted a ban on the consumption of beef and horse meat on the grounds that these animals laboured. Hideyoshi’s ban was repeated by the Tokugawa shogunate in 1612.Footnote ⁴⁵ Although it was founded on social utility, the injunction in all cases was moral, not simply practical. In didactic tones, the Chinese ambassador explained to the Ryūkyū king that it was a matter of principle. Influenced by its powerful neighbour, the Ryūkyū court issued prohibitions against killing cows in 1696 and again in 1759.Footnote ⁴⁶

Chinese social utilitarianism would subsequently come into conflict with another, more individualist, utilitarian argument concerning the killing of animals. This argument considered animals in the abstract, without regard to their social roles, in order to justify their killing under certain conditions. Its theoretical foundations can be found in the writing of Jeremy Bentham on cruelty to animals.

When British ships began to ply Japanese waters in the early nineteenth century, in the occasional contact they had with local officials, the British asked for beef. The Japanese refused the request, justifying the refusal with the same social utility argument the Chinese ambassadors had given to the Ryūkyū king. In an account of the H.M.S. Samarang, which called at Nagasaki in 1845, Captain Edward Belcher described the Nagasaki officials’ explanation, which he clearly found absurd, as a humorous anecdote:

Belcher went on to remark ‘Our specimens were probably of this breed, they did not appear like working animals, but, on the contrary, overwhelmed with their own fat, and weighing about 150 lb.’Footnote ⁴⁷

Belcher’s footnote to this passage provides the real punchline, however, revealing why the British voyagers considered the Nagasaki officials’ response absurd. The footnote reads: ‘Probably it was on the ground they could not work, that one of the Djogouns [shoguns] ordered all the old men, women, and cripples, to be destroyed.’Footnote ⁴⁸ What might be construed as a humane sympathy toward cows thus became, in Belcher’s version, a sign of oriental despotism. A society in which the social utility of the animal determined its right to live was despotic in his eyes because it implied that all living beings, including humans, lacked innate rights. Asian societies generally were assumed by most Europeans at the time to be ruled by absolute and arbitrary despots. Edward Belcher had commanded the Samarang in the First Opium War, a war justified to the British public as a fight against Chinese despotism.Footnote ⁴⁹

The irony in Belcher’s story of Japanese despotism in Nagasaki, of course, is that it was the British who wanted to kill the animals. Indeed, the Japanese seem to have kept their ship in the bay in part to protect Japanese cows. Belcher was told that the crew of H.M.S. Phaeton, which had made an unwelcome visit some thirty-seven years earlier, had demanded bullocks and, when refused, had gone ashore and stolen them.Footnote ⁵⁰ Although he did not resort to cattle rustling, Belcher was seeking to liberate Japanese cows from despotism so as to eat them.

Belcher’s account, published in 1848, followed a period in which many British people had reimagined their relationship to domestic animals. The Royal Society for Prevention of Cruelty to Animals was founded in 1824. The Society’s campaign against mistreatment of animals crystallized enlightenment ideas of natural rights and the idea of ‘sensibility’—that all sentient beings experience pleasure and pain and that, because of this, humans have the capacity to empathize with them.Footnote ⁵¹ Jeremy Bentham had applied these ideas in a section of his Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation on the treatment of animals that has come to be seen as a foundational text in the history of animal rights. Referring to animals and human races in the same breath, Bentham asserted that ‘[t]he day may come, when the rest of the animal creation may acquire those rights which never could have been withholden from them but by the hand of tyranny.’Footnote ⁵² This reasoning did not lead Bentham to advocate vegetarianism, however. In the same passage, he went on to ask whether humans had the right to eat animals and, contrary to the reading that animal rights advocates would prefer, he concluded decisively that they did. ‘We are the better for it, and they are never the worse,’ he claimed, for ‘[t]hey have none of those long-protracted anticipations of future misery which we have.’Footnote ⁵³

If the Chinese argument concerning eating animals grounded itself on a situated assessment of social utility, in which both animals and people have defined roles in a shared social order, the Benthamite argument conceived an abstract utility justified by the relative sentience of animals and humans. Bentham’s approach acknowledged animals as feeling beings deserving of rights like humans, but disregarded their collective relation to humans, thus, in effect, detaching them from social bonds (as draft animals, or as members of households and communities).

Mass breeding of the eighteenth-century Chinese-European capitalist pigs coincided with Britain’s industrial revolution.Footnote ⁵⁴ Yet there appears to be little direct causal relation between the industrialization of animal husbandry and the concurrent movement for the protection of animals. Members of the RSPCA did not initially concern themselves with factory-farming, which was still in its infancy. They focused instead on the capricious abuse of animals in amusements such as bull-baiting, or on the brutal treatment of work animals.Footnote ⁵⁵ An individualist utilitarian logic like Bentham’s helped square animal sensibility with the development of capitalist farming by offering bourgeois Europeans a rationale for worrying about the feelings of animals they did not intend to eat while justifying the fates of animals bred to become their food. Edward Belcher’s joke about Japanese cows, pigs, and despots thus reflected both the new British attitude toward the rights of animals and the complementary assumption that individual humans had a natural right to eat whichever animals they pleased.

The Nagasaki officials’ response to Belcher about the ethics of slaughtering cows was not merely an expression of their personal beliefs. Eighteenth-century Japanese edicts that prohibited slaughter of draft animals had mandated execution for offenders.Footnote ⁵⁶ At the same time, Japanese cows were not the sovereign property of their keepers. An outcaste group of leather workers called kawata received exclusive rights from the Tokugawa shogunate to claim the carcasses of all draft animals, meaning that upon death the animals had to be given to them.Footnote ⁵⁷ This device for maintaining distinct occupational groups in human society made draft animals what Michael Abele calls ‘status-based property,’ socially situated within the status system in life and in death. The law did not apply to pigs, however. In contrast to cows and horses, pigs were status-less. It was not simply that they did no work: in a society where relative status roles were carefully calibrated, they had no defined social place. The Nagasaki officials were thus free to offer them to the British ship as ‘proper for food,’ while withholding cows, since the management of status distinctions was the officials’ core duty in the Tokugawa system.Footnote ⁵⁸

Domestic pigs were as socially marginal in Japan as they were central in Polynesia. The animals had no ritual significance, but nor were they taboo. They simply were not bred through most of the archipelago. Only with the opening of Japanese ports in 1859 and the political and cultural revolution that followed did pork-eating become common. In the twentieth century, supported in part by the introduction of new pig breeds, husbandry diffused widely. Once established, it proved as viable as it had been in Ryūkyū. In this sense, the Japanese case provides the exception proving the rule, that neither religio-cultural nor environmental factors were decisive in determining the shape of pig-human society. When change came, international (human) politics and new discourses were the salient influences, with the pig breeds themselves playing a significant but secondary role.

The marginality of pigs in Japan is not easily explained. Wild boars had been present throughout the archipelago from prehistoric times, yet they were not domesticated. Domesticated pigs were brought from the continent and for a time consumed at court: early Japanese chronicles refer to an imperial keeper of pigs. After the ninth century, this office disappeared. During the Tokugawa period (1600–1868), pigs were seldom bred for human consumption outside the port of Nagasaki (where Chinese and Dutch traders resided from the mid-seventeenth century) and southern Kyūshū, despite the country’s frequent contact with the continent and proximity to pig-breeding Ryūkyū.Footnote ⁵⁹ Some daimyo warlords bred pigs to feed hunting dogs. In the castle town of Hiroshima in the eighteenth century, pigs were found in the streets, living on household refuse—but the residents apparently did not eat them. Uncommon as household animals and human food, they seem to have been widely reviled.Footnote ⁶⁰ Buddhist prohibitions against meat-eating are typically adduced as the explanation.Footnote ⁶¹ Yet Buddhism prohibited killing generally, and Japanese ate game animals, including boar. Injunctions against killing specific animals addressed only cattle and horses. The history of limited consumption of pigs in Japan can only be understood through a complex of factors, including the cumulative impact of centuries of injunctions from rulers (albeit not specifically directed at pigs), the economic priority on rice cultivation above all else—which was also a product of pressure from the country’s rulers—and the effect of farming small holdings, which tended to make all non-draft animals appear primarily as pests that damaged crops.Footnote ⁶² Cultural factors for eating boar but rejecting domestication might include the long association of meat with the hunt and the military caste, and perhaps also conscious differentiation of Japan from its pig-keeping neighbours—yet it is difficult to prove that either of these was decisive. The full spectrum of possible animal-human relationships was always at play, and no single factor can explain all the choices made along it. The result, however, was that in a country where persons and useful animals were all regarded as having defined social positions, pigs found no place.

In contrast with Ryūkyū and Polynesia, pig-breeding in Japan when it became popular in the nineteenth century followed a capitalist husbandry model from the outset—although not driven simply by individual entrepreneurship. One year after the Meiji Restoration of 1868, an official of the former regime created a mutual aid society to sell pigs to households interested in breeding them as part of a scheme to raise money for schools and provide work to the poor. Studs were brought from Nagasaki. Supported by the new government, the aid society distributed pigs to local chapters throughout the country. Optimistic promoters promised a thirty percent return on investment, sparking a speculative boom, with some breeds reportedly selling for hundreds of times the initial price. The boom was concentrated near cities, and the bubble burst in 1873, when the government imposed restrictions on pig breeding in urban areas.Footnote ⁶³ Thereafter, husbandry developed unsteadily for a generation. Influenced by military demand and the growing cosmopolitan tastes of Tokyo consumers, the pork industry established itself from the turn of the twentieth century. New foreign breeds were introduced again at this time, accelerating production. By 1928, the domestic pig population was on par with Australia and New Zealand. Yet everywhere in Japan except Okinawa Prefecture, farmers raised pigs primarily for the urban market. The new breeding centres were around the capital and the former treaty port of Yokohama.Footnote ⁶⁴ The re-emergence of pig domestication in Japan after a millennium of dormancy thus derived from the political context of the time.

New discourses about animals and civilization facilitated the accommodation of Meiji Japanese to breeding for consumption. Even after the government abolished status-based rights in animal carcasses, many main islanders still needed to be persuaded that domesticated mammals made suitable and desirable food. In 1870, with the backing of the new Ministry of Finance, educator and entrepreneur Fukuzawa Yukichi started a meat and dairy business, which he advertised with a manifesto titled ‘On Meat-Eating.’ One can read in this manifesto the blend of European utilitarianism and a Confucian world view based on a harmonious social and natural order that characterized much early Meiji-period political theory. Fukuzawa started by declaring that all creatures were ‘naturally endowed’ to eat certain things, and that humans, as ‘the lords of creation,’ naturally ate all things. Japanese, he claimed, suffered nutritionally because their diet lacked sufficient meat, which hampered national development. He then offered rebuttals against each possible objection to his merchandise, beginning with the notion that killing animals was cruel, to which he countered that it was no crueller to kill domestic animals than to kill wild ones such as whales and fish. The essay concluded by promoting the medicinal value of milk products.Footnote ⁶⁵

Fukuzawa’s argument that people should eat meat for the benefit of the nation was entirely new. The manifesto made no mention of the social-utility argument against eating cows that Nagasaki officials had given to Captain Belcher a generation earlier, despite its long tradition in East Asia. National strength represented a new utility of a higher order; whether the animal laboured was no longer significant. Indeed, it is not clear from the advertisement whether it was the flesh of cows, or horses, or only milk that was being sold. The business was called the ‘Cattle and Horse Company,’ the manifesto title alluded to meat-eating in general without indicating the type of meat, and the merchandise list at the end contained only milk products. Fukuzawa’s manifesto abstracted the consuming of these animals and animal products from the specific question of their origins or social status. The company reportedly acquired its livestock from pastures owned by the recently defeated Tokugawa family, meaning that in status terms the animals had quite lofty origins.Footnote ⁶⁶ Perhaps their new owners considered the ancien-regime cattle and horses as abandoned, and thus useless, animals that ‘do no work,’ like the Nagasaki officials’ pigs. More importantly, of course, Fukuzawa wished his audience to think of them simply as potential food, without reflecting on what their fate or utility might otherwise have been. In a society where cattle and horses held defined roles that excluded their consumption, they needed to be socially disembedded to be eaten.Footnote ⁶⁷

Capitalist pigs with ‘agency’: from Hawaii to Okinawa

While Chinese pigs became part of Ryūkyū society in the eighteenth century, their relatives made their way to the Pacific via Europe. European voyagers brought pigs (along with goats, cattle, and other livestock) and left them on islands in the Pacific to multiply. Wherever people and pigs already dwelled, the larger, faster-growing European pigs quickly interbred with the local animals and became dominant. Already in 1792, Captain Bligh described this happening in Tahiti: ‘The Otaheite breed of hogs seems to be supplanted by the European. Originally they were of the China sort, short and very thick-necked, but the superior size of the European have made them encourage our breed.’Footnote ⁶⁸

The spread of European-Chinese pigs in the island Pacific did not lead to capitalist husbandry as it had in Europe, however. The animals may have been suited to mass production, but the societies to which they were introduced were not. In Hawaii, capitalist agriculture began only after the combination of imported diseases and political pressure from white colonists had undermined the power of native rulers. Commercial pig breeding followed in the twentieth century, when white-managed sugar and pineapple plantations were already well established and there were new populations of meat consumers in the islands unfettered by traditional Hawaiian customs of tribute and gift exchange.

After 1900, Ryūkyū islanders, now Okinawan Japanese subjects, left poverty at home for work on Hawaiian plantations, joining the tens of thousands of migrants imported for the burgeoning sugar economy. The Okinawans brought their pig-keeping habits, acquiring pigs in Hawaii and feeding them household scraps. Some migrants from the Japanese main islands also tried their hand at keeping pigs, but it bore a stigma among them. What had been normal for Okinawans at home thus became a cause of discrimination against them in Hawaii. Nevertheless, it created economic opportunities. By 1940, Okinawans made up 44% of the hog farmers on Oahu, where most of the industry was located.Footnote ⁶⁹ They had started out keeping small numbers of pigs on the side while working in the cane fields, but in Oahu in the 1930s and 1940s, a few enterprising Okinawans took advantage of the US military and tourist presence to become full-time breeders of pigs, establishing farms with thousands of animals, feeding them waste from Pearl Harbor and the hotels, then selling the pork to islanders and visitors. Thanks to the increased military population and the difficulty of transporting goods from the mainland during the war, pork prices on the islands multiplied and these full-time breeders became successful capitalists.Footnote ⁷⁰

Before this time, Hawaii had had no commercial pig-breeding industry. After the mid nineteenth-century privatization, first settler cattle-ranching, then sugar plantations, dominated Hawaiian agriculture. Chinese immigrants had tried importing pigs from the US and fattening them for local sale, but the industry had been abandoned due to expense and disease.Footnote ⁷¹ Despite the long history of Hawaiian pigs, imported pork fed the growing market of white residents and tourists in the early twentieth century. When the local industry began in the 1910s, it relied on animals brought from the American mainland (including the revealingly named Poland China breed) rather than local varieties, together with the initiative and husbandry knowledge of Okinawans.

The members of the United Okinawan Assistance Association of Hawaii who spearheaded the pig gift in 1947 were among these first Hawaiian pig capitalists. Through the gift, therefore, they exported to their homeland not only new pigs but capitalist attitudes about the pigs’ social role. The Hawaiian-Okinawan donors announced five reasons for their initiative:

1. 1. Pork is indispensable food for the people of Okinawa Prefecture.

2. 2. Lots of fat from pork gives flavour to vegetable foods.

3. 3. Pigs can provide the fertilizer farms need.

4. 4. Okinawan farmers have raised pigs for ages and made enormous economic profits.

5. 5. As for feed, Okinawans regularly eat sweet potatoes and have lots of small sweet potatoes and vines; this and kitchen waste from US forces should not be a problem.Footnote ⁷²

The rhetoric of this announcement fused the traditional house-pig role with the projected new role of the pigs as engines of economic growth. The fourth point, in particular, about Okinawans’ long experience raising pigs for profit, re-reads the Okinawan past in capitalist terms. In reality, Okinawa’s house pigs had been bred as a tribute product to deliver to the Ryūkyū court for the Chinese ambassadors and subsequently became a part of the typical farm household’s subsistence strategy. In aggregate it might be claimed that ‘economic profits’ had accrued for Okinawans over the ages, but mass breeding for profit was a new experience that in 1948 belonged almost exclusively to the Okinawan-Hawaiian donors themselves.

The pig gift helped Okinawa recover from the collapse of its domestic animal population, but ‘enormous economic profits’ did not result for Okinawans. The leaflet prepared by the Okinawan Assistance Association of Hawaii urged special care and feeding for the animals, noting that ‘American pigs eat a mixture of grains, meat, fish, and salt.’ Since this matched the human diet, in a context of scarcity, only those ready to forgo their own sustenance with an eye to future profit could be expected to follow this advice.Footnote ⁷³ As a result, in Okinawa as in Polynesia earlier, the introduction of Euro-American ‘capitalist pigs’ did not immediately lead to capitalist pork production. Instead, first there was confusion and a speculative boom. Amid postwar food shortages, excess food provided by US bases to feed pigs was consumed by humans instead, while land that might have been used to grow sweet potatoes as pig feed was taken by the military. Pigs were killed and eaten before reaching reproductive age. When they did bear litters, disputes arose over distribution of piglets, which local elites monopolized. Meanwhile, promotion of the American pigs excited demand while supply remained short, with the result that by 1949, piglets were selling in some cases for more than the annual salary of a white-collar worker. Since pigs can be mated a few months after birth, their rapid growth and fecundity suited them to speculation. The donors themselves had forecast 100,000 pigs in four years. As economic conditions stabilized, this figure was almost achieved, but through neither even distribution among households nor steady capital accumulation.Footnote ⁷⁴

By the mid-twentieth century, meat animals constituted a significant part of Japanese agriculture, and extension programs were seeking to expand production. Okinawa after the war was on the receiving end of agricultural advice from both Japan and the United States, and since Okinawans had long bred pigs, much of this advice focused on raising pork production. The Hawaiian-Okinawan campaign was thus in tune with the ambitions of both US and Japanese development experts. A decade later, however, few Okinawans seem to have adopted the practices of pig capitalism. At least, that is what is suggested by the complaints of agricultural extension agent Ishigaki Chōzō in a 1959 article titled ‘We Must Reform Pig Husbandry,’ published in the Ryukyu University Agriculture Newsletter:

Ishigaki noted that Okinawa needed to compete with Southeast Asian countries in the Hong Kong market, calling for better rearing practices in order to deliver the leaner meat that foreigners preferred. This required special feed and nutrients such as calcium supplements.

One might expect that since pigs in Okinawa were now becoming mere pork-making machines, their feelings or ‘agency’ would be ignored. Yet Ishigaki closed his article by expressing sympathy for the pig deprived of optimal feed. What’s more, Ishigaki’s pig spoke:

Not only did it speak, as a good citizen in a capitalist society, this pig wanted to contribute to a profit-making enterprise: don’t over-fatten me, the pig says. Like a professional athlete, by seeking to stay fit, Ishigaki’s pig participates in the commodification of its own body. Of course, this was only Ishigaki’s fantasy. We have no way of knowing whether the fat Okinawan pig was troubled by its fat. All we do know is that, whereas it had long made itself a part of Okinawan households, the international market wanted leaner animals. The husbandry expert was far from oblivious to the pig’s habits or needs but had a radically different conception of the pig’s social role from the subsistence farmer. Under the influence of experts like Ishigaki, the Okinawans who continued raising pigs in the 1960s and 1970s adopted new rationalizations for the market.

Planned investment in large-scale pig farming awaited pressure from the US administration in the islands to build a pork industry. Funded by the American PL-480 ‘Food for Peace’ program, the Ryukyu Development Loan Corporation (Ryūkyū kaihatsu kin’yū kōsha) made loans to farmers prepared to build large-scale feeding facilities, reorienting a minority of pig keepers toward specialized full-time management.Footnote ⁷⁶ By 1970, the Okinawan pig population was double its prewar peak. The number of households keeping pigs, however, had reduced to a fraction. Thus, in the final years before Okinawa’s reversion to Japanese sovereignty in 1972, house pigs were replaced by American capitalist pigs, to be kept in large numbers, fed on a special diet, and bred for distant markets. In Okinawa as in Hawaii, US military bases provided a large source of kitchen waste that helped the industry.

The effects of capitalist animal husbandry on postwar Okinawa were perhaps not as calamitous for local society as they had been in Hawaii a century earlier, but nor did the effort improve the lives of Okinawans. The new husbandry regime pushed Okinawan pig farming into an under-development trap, in which the islands depended on the presence of US military bases, while at the same time importing value-added products, like feed and nutrition supplements, in order to groom animals for national and international markets, where they competed against other poor regions to produce the cheapest meat. Okinawa never did develop significant pork exports beyond the Japanese main islands, but continued to rely on US bases and to grope for profitable export commodities.Footnote ⁷⁷

None of this was directly caused by the Omaha pigs that arrived ‘from the sea’ in 1948. The new breed of animals demanded special feeding, which was part of the problem, but might still have remained house pigs, part of a subsistence economy, were it not for pressure from development experts and successive US and Japanese governments. As in Hawaii, therefore, Chinese-EuroAmerican pigs bred for industrial production—White’s ‘capitalist pigs’—did not carry capitalism in their genes, although in this instance they helped facilitate a political process, initiated through the un-capitalist gesture of a gift, toward capitalist husbandry, and toward greater dependency.