Kokubun and his family still enjoy platefuls of beef, maintaining that they are far more likely to die in a car crash or take their own life than fall foul of mad cow disease.
"Around 20,000 people in Japan die from car accidents a year while 30,000 commit suicide ... no one has died of mad cow here yet so I do not understand the reason for the panic," he said.
But Japan's health ministry said last week a teenage girl is suffering a condition which it feared may be the fatal new variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease -- the human version of mad cow -- believed to be caused by consuming infected beef.
The condition has already killed about 100 people in Britain since the mid-1980s.
With beef unlikely to be flavor of the month in Japan for a while, despite government assurances it is safe to eat, Kokubun knows he and the rest of the farming community are in for a tough time. But he is determined to weather the storm for now with help from the government and local community.
"[Tokyo] will give us a month's worth of feed, and I can borrow up to two million yen for the year if I have to," he said.
"I do not know how things will unfold, but I plan to keep going for five years ... but if things don't improve by then, I will not be able to continue ... so I could go into early retirement."
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