Hirotaka Sekiguchi dresses his "wagyu" calves in T-shirts and jackets to protect them against the spring chill and an expected avalanche of cheap foreign beef.
The 59-year-old Sekiguchi pampers the 320 cattle on his feedlot in the town of Kamisato, Saitama Prefecture, with customized meals and private stalls to ensure they develop the kind of marbled, melt-in-your-mouth meat that fetches almost twice the price of silver in Hong Kong.
Farmers of "wagyu" (Japanese cattle) are betting that rising wealth in Asia will expand the market for premium beef and quadruple annual exports to ¥25 billion by 2020. New buyers are needed as Australia and the U.S. press Prime Minister Shinzo Abe to cut tariffs on imported meat, which the government estimates could undercut as much as 68 percent of domestic beef sales.