Shimonoseki's connection to whales goes back a long way; fossil whale bone has been dug up here. But in the Edo period this town was not the one doing the hunting. It financed the whaling crews, supplied their materials, and handled the distribution and the eating.

The hunting happened further up the coast, in Nagato. In 1672 the whale-harpoon crew at what is now Senzaki was formally taken into the service of the Choshu domain.

The whales come south down the Sea of Japan through autumn and winter. In the Kawajiri district alone the records account for over two thousand eight hundred animals taken between 1698 and 1910, a span of roughly two hundred years.

The dish uses the red meat and the skin together, cut into pieces and simmered with vegetables in a miso broth until it is hot and heavy and worth eating in winter. Some households eat it on the last night of the year or at Setsubun, on the reasoning that eating something large will make the year that follows a good one. It is passed down in Nagato and in Shimonoseki alike. The town that put up the money and never went out on the boats is where the pot stayed, long after the hunting ended.