Maizuru once housed a naval district headquarters, and the town still holds the navy's cooking textbooks, some of them published more than a century ago, listing over two hundred separate dishes between them.

Nikujaga is said to have been built out of an attempt at beef stew. Wine and butter were scarce in Japan at the time, so soy sauce and sugar went in instead of them, and what came out of that substitution was this. In the textbooks it appears under the name amani, sweet-simmered. Maizuru has reconstructed a version directly from that recipe.

On the fourteenth of October in 1995, the city formally declared itself the birthplace of nikujaga, and 2025 accordingly marked thirty years since that declaration.

There is a complication here that is worth stating plainly. The narrative connecting the dish to Admiral Togo Heihachiro, who commanded here, has been described as something assembled during that promotional effort rather than an established historical finding. The textbooks are real and the recipe in them is real. Who first cooked it, and where, is a separate question, and the town's answer to it is the part that was written recently.