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WHERE'S THE BEEF?
It’s lounging around, listening to the radio and drinking beer at a farm in Southern Ontario that produces the Japanese delicacy known as Kobe beef.

Text: CHANTAL TRANCHEMONTAGNE

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The sign at the lip of the farm says Wagyu Sekai. Official translation: Wagyu World. My translation: Succulent Steak Central.

This is Puslinch, Ont., about an hour west of Toronto, near the agricultural hub of Guelph. Population: some 5,000 people and 75 Wagyu cattle, the breed that most non-Japanese refer to as Kobe beef. It yields meat so fine that it melts in your mouth – so they say; I’ve never tasted it.

I drive up past the old, rusted Toronto transit tramcar to the brick-red barn and look around for the owner. A young farmhand approaches and sticks out his leathery hand. "Hi, I’m Ken." I’m stunned to find that the farm’s owner, Ken Kurosawatsu, isn’t a portly man sporting a trucker cap and rubber boots. He’s a clean-cut, cherubic 28-year-old Japanese Canadian, the go-to guy if you love steak. And I do.

At 19, Kurosawatsu left home to train in Wagyu-raising at one of the largest operations in Japan and returned five years later to rear a herd of eight, hand-picked and imported by his father. One bull alone rang in at $150,000 – no wonder the Japanese classify the breed as a national treasure. He explains how the Wagyu genetic pool is so closely guarded that crossbreeding between Japanese prefectures is discouraged. "It’s unreal over there… If you ask any questions, they won’t tell you anything."

It seems strange that a crowded country a little more than half the size of Alberta would embrace cattle ranching. But the Japanese do covet other exotic things besides food, including fashion, sex and technology. While Canada’s gourmet culture is a relatively recent phenomenon, Japan is so far ahead in its culinary appreciation that fugu (poisonous blowfish) is a much-prized delicacy that still kills about 100 diners a year.

Wagyu beef fits right into this scheme of food fetishism. Some of it can be sold at almost $500 a pound in Japan. There, even the supermarket grade goes for about $30 a pound. Pricey but worth it, says Farmer Ken, who sells some of his meat at $50 a pound to Japanese restaurants and specialty butchers in Toronto and Montreal; what’s left of the 35,000 pounds annually is exported to South America and Australia.

Entering the barn for a primer in Wagyu-Raising 101, I hear strains of Toronto’s Z103.5. Kurosawatsu tells me that the cows are "calmer when they hear sound." I question whether Bon Jovi classics and the Top 40 can really relax them, but since stress leads to tough meat everything is done to minimize it. In Japan, that even includes cattle massages. "I never saw that," admits Kurosawatsu, but it is practised on confined cows, reportedly to push surface fat into the muscles.

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