Young chicken, chopped into bite-sized pieces with the bone left in. It steeps for about twenty minutes in light soy sauce, sake, ginger juice, and pepper, then is coated in potato starch and fried at a moderate temperature.

The bone is what separates it from ordinary karaage. Left in through the frying, it gives up flavor into the meat as the heat works through, rather than being discarded before any cooking starts. The result is crisp outside and heavily seasoned all the way in.

Where the name came from is genuinely unresolved. The origin story says pheasants were taken on Chikamiyama in the Edo period and fried, about three hundred years ago, but the documentation is not there. One explanation of the word says it describes cutting a whole bird into a thousand pieces, sen-zan-kiri. Another says it is a worn-down borrowing from Chinese, from nan-zha-ji or qing-zha-ji, fried chicken with and without the bone.

None of that stopped it becoming ordinary. It is on the table at every celebration here, and it goes into lunchboxes for sports days, for school trips, and for no occasion at all. The dish belongs to the Toyo district and above all to Imabari. Only the origin of the name is still open.