The birth of sausages in Japan

A museum in Ibaraki Prefecture is displaying a collection of photographs showing the birth of sausages in Japan. The photos were taken at a POW camp in Chiba Prefecture by Yoshifusa Iida, a government official that studied sausage-making from German prisoners and later spread their sausage manufacturing methods across Japan:

From descriptions in a book authored by Iida, the pictures were probably taken in February 1918, and they also show Iida himself.

“I asked sausage makers at the prison to make sausages. It happened just as I was devoting myself to producing processed meat products experimentally,” according to the book.

“The sausage makers were Karl Jahn and other meat processors. They showed us how to make 12 types of sausages.”

Iida later passed down the sausage making method to meat processors across the nation, heralding the spread of sausages in Japan.

6 comments - What do you think? Posted by James - August 17, 2008 at 10:58 am

Categories: Foreigners in Japan Tags: germany, history, japan, sausages, world war I

http://witzl.blogspot.com/ Mary Witzl

I have heard that German POWs in Japan after WWI were comfortable and on good terms with the people who ran the POW camps. There were other cultural exchanges similar to this one that were profitable and pleasant. It is a shame that this was not the case with Allied POWs and their Japanese captors during WWII, but it is nice to know that this sort of camaraderie did take place.
GeeGee

There is a museum in Shikoku I believe where they had the German WWI pow camp. It is also a Mozart cultural center because the POWs introduced classical music in a big way – often with camp made instruments! (the statue of Mozart is really crap)

Pity the English didn’t teach the Japanese how to make sausages because those pink processed ones are rubbish!

http://whatjapanthinks.com Ken Y-N

There was a movie a couple of years back about that camp, Barto no Gakuen バルトの楽園, starring Matsuken Samba, that was quite reasonable. A lot of the ex-inmates went off to found businesses in and around Kobe after the war.
Lorenz

>Pity the English didn’t teach the Japanese how to make sausage

Sure. Forget Germany. Britain, the great country of the sausage! What’s next?

http://son-of-gadfly-on-the-wall.blogspot.com/ Jun Okumura

Ms. Witzl:

It is with the greatest of regrets that I must inform you that such was not the case. In fact, I have the original transcripts of the interrogation of the German prisoners to prove it. Here is an excerpt, duly translated by yours truly:

Herren Deutsche Prisoneren, You are reveal der Secrets of Sausagefertigung… or You are totes Fleisch!

Ms. Witzl, war is hell.
http://witzl.blogspot.com/ Mary Witzl

Ah, what a let down! Thank you for telling me, Okumura-san.

I’d have squealed straight away. They’d have been welcome to all of my witzl schnitzels and sausage recipes and what-have-you.

The birth of sausages in Japan

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