The conditions are set out in unusual detail, even for a beef brand. The animal must be Tajima cattle, descended through every single generation only from sires owned by Hyogo prefecture itself. It must be raised inside Hyogo, from breeding through to shipping, by a producer registered with the council.

It must be between twenty-eight and sixty months old at slaughter, and it must be either a female that has never calved or a castrated male. The marbling score must be six or above. The yield grade must be A or B at grade four or above.

Then the carcass weight. Females from 270 kilograms to 499.9. Castrated males from 300 to 499.9.

That last set is the one worth pausing on, because it has a ceiling as well as a floor. Most quality standards only specify a minimum, on the assumption that more is better. Here an animal can be disqualified for being too heavy. Reading the whole thing through, it does not read like a description of meat at all. It reads like a definition of a range, with the beef being whatever happens to fall inside it. The steakhouses cluster in central Kobe, and the certificate on the wall of each one is a document about arithmetic.