The founder of Ajitsukasa Nomura in Okayama city is credited with it. He ate demi-glace at a hotel in Tokyo, was struck by what he tasted, and started wondering whether he could put the same sauce to use back in his own shop.

What he arrived at was this: a bed of rice, cabbage laid over the top of it, a freshly fried pork cutlet on top of that again, and demi-glace poured over the whole arrangement. A raw egg or green peas go on as a finish.

The peas on top of it have a local name. In parts of Okayama, green peas are called Alaska, and it is therefore Alaska that supplies the color on the plate, which is a detail I have been entirely unable to stop thinking about since.

The dish goes by several different names, demi-katsu, domi-katsu, and yofu-katsu among them, and every shop does its own version slightly differently. What strikes me most about the dish is the direction in which the borrowing runs. It would be easy enough to describe this as western restaurant cooking that has been moved into a donburi. It reads more like the donburi being pulled the other way, out toward the western dining room. The sauce reaches all the way down to the rice.