In the Edo period the pilgrimage to Afuri shrine on Mount Oyama became an enormous popular craze. Oyama-ko, pilgrimage associations, formed all over the region, and they sent donations up the mountain. Among the donations were soybeans.

Those beans, made into tofu with water from the mountain, are where the local specialty begins. It is a straightforward chain of events: the faithful send beans up the road, the mountain provides the water, and somebody at the bottom of the path sets up in business making tofu out of the two.

People who had walked from Edo ate at the shops along the approach road before climbing to pray. What they were served was shojin ryori, Buddhist vegetarian cooking, because that was what the occasion required of them and of the cook.

Now the tofu shops along the approach have absorbed modern technique and the dish has settled into being a local specialty rather than a religious one. Each shop makes its own, with no standardized method, so the texture and flavor differ noticeably from one to the next. Beans that arrived as an offering, water that came out of the mountain, and a person who walked here. All three had to be present.