It was started by Hagiwara Yasuji at a shop called Ganso Kamiya Yakisoba-ya. Around 1950 he was looking for something new that could be cooked on an okonomiyaki griddle, and he worked it out together with a local noodle maker. The form it has now was settled by about 1953.

The noodle is not the usual steamed and crinkled one. It is a straight, square-cut, boiled noodle, which is the reason the finished plate comes out soft and slack rather than springy under the teeth.

The sauce is Worcester-based with each shop's own stock worked into it, on the sweet side, and it leaves a little more moisture in the pan than yakisoba usually carries.

On top goes a fried egg cooked on one side only. The garnish beside it is not red pickled ginger but fukujinzuke. The local way to eat it is to break the yolk and pull it through the generous sauce. What is worth knowing is what it replaced: a thin crepe-like okonomiyaki that children ate as a snack. Everything about it, the softness of the noodle and the sweetness of the sauce and the speed of the cooking, was worked out with children in mind. Thirty shops in the town belong to the association that makes it now.