Finally, brief consideration might be given to the impact of post-1960s Japanese breeding fashions on the selection on the live export groups leaving Japan in the 1980s and 1990s – the founder cattle of modern American and Australian Wagyu herds. The fact that no comprehensive ‘coverage’ pattern is identifiable is almost certainly because most export breeders were selected to seed cross-breed enterprises rather than to found fullblood herds.
As a result, the export group genetic profile had an enormous, skew to Hyogo (Tajima) genetics, as would have been the case in normal Japanese crossbreeding selection. The highly significant exception was the Westholme herd now owned by AACo, which not only contained nearly half the number of breeding females exported in total, but also diverse bloodlines.
Nonetheless, even in the largely Tajima crush beyond Westholme, higher growth sires (mainly Itozakura/but all Chugoku strain) were included, largely to help maintain frame size in new generations of foreign-born fullblood sires for crossbred production and these larger-frame export sires can be readily traced to disparate Chugoku traditional lineages. So although genetic emphasis was heavily skewed, some diversity was captured for export and some of that remains today.