Defunct Aida Yūji (会田 雄次, 5 March 1916 – 17 September 1997) was a Japanese historian specialising in the Renaissance.
He graduated from Kyoto University in 1940 and had his master's degree in history interrupted in 1943, when he was drafted into the Imperial Japanese Army.
This hypothesis, called the "livestock rearing theory" (家畜飼育説, kachiku shiikusetsu),[2] was set forth in his 1966 book Rationalism (Gōrishugi).
Westerners, on the other hand, have so long been accustomed to calmly butchering animals that they developed a rational approach to slaughter, which they extended to human conflict.
The Japanese hardly had any contact with livestock owing to the Buddhist taboo of eating meat and were too emotive to master the Western sort of nonchalance.