Shimane Wagyu

Shimane sits on the San'in coast of western Honshu, facing the Sea of Japan. Its Japanese Black cattle are sold as Shimane Wagyu (shimane wagyu), a prefectural brand with three requirements: the animal must have spent the longest part of its life in Shimane, it must be a castrated male or a female that has not calved, and the carcass must grade A-2 or B-2 or higher.

That grade floor is unusually permissive by branded-Wagyu standards, well below the grade 5 rule at Sendai or the grade 4 rule in neighboring Yamaguchi. Shimane Wagyu is therefore a statement of origin and breed first, with the individual grade doing the work of describing quality. The prefecture also carries narrower sub-brands, including Oki Beef from the Oki Islands, which does set a grade 4 or 5 requirement.

Shimane's longer significance is genetic. For much of the modern era it supplied breeding and feeder cattle to Wagyu regions across Japan rather than finishing its own animals for a branded label, and the prefecture's producer body describes that role plainly in its own history.

The name most associated with that work is Dai 7 Itozakura, a bull bred in Okuizumo in the mountainous south of the prefecture and used as a Shimane prefectural sire in the 1970s. The prefecture's producer body still organizes its published sire lineage charts around him, which is a fair measure of how central the line is to the brand's identity.

In 2022 Shimane Wagyu placed first in the general evaluation division for beef cattle at the National Competitive Exhibition of Wagyu, the once-every-five-years event often called the Wagyu Olympics, and also took the top honor at the National Beef Carcass Competition. The brand promotes this as the first time a single branded Wagyu had won both national meat-quality competitions in the same year.