Kamui

Kamui is the strangest and rarest animal on this roster, because he is not a Wagyu at all. He is a Mishima — one of Japan's six native cattle breeds, and one of only two populations (the other being Kuchinoshima) that were never crossed with imported Western cattle. In Japan's official taxonomy 'Wagyu' means the four government-improved breeds; Mishima sits outside that definition entirely, which is why the American Wagyu Association records him as a Base Animal (B115) rather than a fullblood, and why his calves out of registered fullblood dams register as 50% percentage animals.

Mishima cattle exist on one island: Mishima, about 7.8 square kilometres in the Sea of Japan, roughly 45 kilometres northwest of Hagi in Yamaguchi Prefecture. When Japan imported European breeds through the Meiji era and crossed them across the country between 1868 and 1910, Mishima Island was too far offshore to take part, and its herd came through untouched. That accident of geography is the whole point of the breed: it is a living sample of Japanese cattle from before the crossbreeding that produced modern Wagyu. Japan recognised as much in 1928 by designating Mishima cattle a National Natural Monument, and crossbreeding them has been prohibited ever since.

They are also nearly gone. The FAO classes the population as critical: a 2011 count recorded 72 cows, five bulls and six calves — 83 animals in all — held by eight smallholders. They are markedly smaller than the cattle they are related to: a Mishima bull stands around 125cm and weighs roughly 600kg against about 145cm and 809kg for a Japanese Black, and they mature slowly, taking three to six years and still filling out at eight.

Kamui — also carried as TF152, and known in Australia as Wakausa — was born on 28 August 1991 and came to the United States with Takeda Farms in the second of their shipments. He is, by every account in the breed's literature, the only Mishima bull ever exported from Japan, which makes him a genetic one-off: Australia's Moondarra program has been breeding up toward purebred Mishima status outside Japan using his genetics alone, constrained by having exactly one sire to work from. Two caveats worth stating plainly. His exact import year is not firmly established — one source places the Takeda consignment carrying him in 1997, others say only 'second shipment' — and his sire and dam are not documented in any public record. The island herd's own deep history is likewise unsettled: some accounts trace it continuously to Yayoi-period cattle, while the Wagyu literature holds that rinderpest destroyed the original population in 1672 and the island was restocked from the mainland and then closed for twenty-five-odd generations of inbreeding. The Meiji point stands either way — it is the crossbreeding Mishima escaped that matters.