In the Jindai district of Semboku, households in the late 1950s and early 1960s made a curry of their own. Flour and curry powder were worked together in a frying pan, and then vegetables and canned mackerel or whale, or else fish sausage, were simmered into it in a soy-flavored sauce.

The reason behind all of that is economic. Beef and pork were hard to come by in Akita at the time, so fish stood in for meat, and the stock came from katsuobushi, dried sardines, and kelp. What resulted was a curry that had been pulled a long way toward Japanese cooking.

What is served now puts that older curry on one side of the plate, and a modern European-style curry built on demi-glace on the other, with a ridge of rice running down the middle between them. Two entirely different decades arriving from opposite directions and meeting at the same spoon.

Alongside all of that come iburigakko, the smoked daikon pickle that Akita is known for, and an egg. Whoever assembled this arrangement clearly did not intend anyone to choose. You are meant to eat both and notice the distance between them, which is a fairly sophisticated thing for a plate of curry to be doing.