To be sold as Matsusaka beef, an animal must be Japanese Black and female, and she must not have calved. She must be registered in the individual identification management system. Her fattening period inside the Matsusaka production area must be both the longest and the final one, she must enter that area before twelve months of age, and after entering she may not be moved outside it. The rules are that specific.

Above that sits a further and stricter category, tokusan Matsusaka-ushi. For this, a calf is selected in Hyogo prefecture and brought into the area before twelve months of age, then fattened there for more than nine hundred days.

Nine hundred days works out at around thirty-eight months of age at slaughter, roughly double the normal course, and each animal is looked after individually across the whole of that time. The number is the brand. Everything else follows from a farmer agreeing to wait that long.

I started reading about this expecting to learn about meat. What I was actually reading, page after page, was a document about elapsed time: months of age, days of feeding, which period was longest, which was last. The beef is the byproduct of a calendar.