In Nagata, in Kobe, there is an okonomiyaki shop that has been open since 1957. It is called Aomori, and it has been run by the same family across three generations.

The story attached to it is domestic in scale. A man working at one of the small factories nearby brought in the cold rice from his lunchbox and asked, along with the yakisoba he had ordered, whether it could be warmed on the griddle at the same time. He wanted to save a few minutes.

The method that grew out of that is now fixed. Meat and cabbage are fried on the griddle, then the noodles and the cold rice go on together. The noodles are chopped finer and finer with the edge of the spatula while everything is being turned, and beef sinew, also minced down, goes in with it. Tonkatsu sauce or Worcestershire sauce seasons it.

Everything ends up cut to roughly the size of a grain of rice, which is why the texture is loose and separate rather than sticky. It went onto the menu properly around 1985. A frozen version was released in 1990, and from 2000 it was sold nationally, at which point production could not keep up with orders. It began as a favor asked at a counter by one man who wanted his lunch faster.