Our canine friends are consumed as meat in Korea, China and pretty much all over South-East Asia. Japan is the only East Asian country (with Mongolia ?) where dog meat is not eaten. But it used to be different. Japan inherited from the same pan-East Asian traditions, probably dating back to the Neolithic domestication of dogs in China. I read that dogs were eaten by the Japanese in ancient times, but I do not know until when and why it stopped. I heard of a Tokugawa shogun who loved pet dogs and made it illegal to kill dogs under sentence of death. This would have effectively put an end to dog consumption. But were dogs eaten that moment in the Edo period ?