In 1863, a Japanese man who had been working at a Dutch-owned, Westerner-supported dairy in Yokohama opened his own shop in the area and began selling milk to Japanese patrons.

Thus, the dairy industry in Japan was born.

Soon after, he was asked by Gyūba Kaisha, the government's newly-established milk and meat monopoly, to train its workers in Western milking techniques. (Unfortunately, Gyūba Kaisha lasted only a year because, in an attempt to help the legions of restless, out-of-work samurai, the government had filled the company's ranks with only ronin. The samurai, finding the milking of cattle less glamorous than sword fights and seppuku, conducted business in a haughty, disinterested manner, which damaged the company's reputation beyond repair.)

To encourage the normally meatless and dairyless people of Japan to get on the cow, the company distributed propaganda which linked meat-eating and milk-drinking with national pride, propaganda which included statements like, "By utilizing milk to live a long life, maintain a healthy body and invigorate the mind, the Japanese shall save their name from dishonor." (Had it been a century later, they could have just imported a whole lot of Strawberry Quik and had no problem getting people to finish their milk.)

Before the 1950s, milk was mainly sold in drinkable form, not processed into cheese or butter, and usually consumed by only the young, the ill and the weak. Even today, with many people in Japan consuming milk and yogurt on a daily basis, natural cheeses and butter are less popular than their processed counterparts (nearly-plastic cheese and margarine, respectively). The aversion to butter may be due to butter's disastrous Japanese debut in the 1930s when, because there were no production facilities in Japan, butter had to be imported from far-off countries and often went rancid on the long boat ride over. During the late Edo and early Meiji periods, an insulting way to describe someone who ate Western food or adopted Western manners was "stinking of butter" (bataa-kusai). Butter has never really recovered from the blow.