Roughly eighty percent of Yamanashi is forest. In the Mitomi district, up the Fuefuki river, hunting was a serious occupation and wild boar was a normal thing to eat.

After the war, the raising of inobuta was encouraged there. An inobuta is the offspring of a male wild boar and a domestic sow, which is to say a deliberate cross between the animal the hunters brought down and the animal the farmers kept.

The meat that results has no gaminess to it. It is described as clean-tasting, with sweetness and depth in the fat, softer than pork and with a stronger flavor in the lean. It carries around twenty percent more protein than pork and less fat, which is the sort of figure that gets a regional food promoted.

For the pot, a sesame-miso broth is brought up to the boil and the meat goes in to cook through. Then cabbage, burdock, leek, carrot, enoki, shimeji, and shungiku, added as it simmers and eaten as it goes. Shichimi over the top. It is one of the forty-seven dishes the prefecture selected out of its regional foods as the ones worth handing on. An animal that exists because two ways of life were crossed, cooked in a pot at the edge of the forest.