The account starts in the Taisho era with monjayaki from Tokyo. Monja is a very loose batter, which is fine at a table with a griddle built into it and completely impossible at a street stall, so somebody stiffened the batter up until the thing could be sold and carried away.

The name comes from the selling rather than the food. Vendors walked the streets beating a drum, don don, to draw a crowd around themselves.

Once the thing reached Yamagata, further adjustments followed, and all of them were about the hands rather than the mouth. How do you hand a hot flat food to a child who then has to walk with it? The answer arrived at here was to wind it around two chopsticks, and that is how it is still sold, which is unusual anywhere else in the country.

It turns up at festival stalls and also at permanent shops that sell nothing else all year round. Sauce is the standard flavor, and there are various modern variations sold alongside it now. Every single feature of the object is a response to some constraint or other: stiffer batter because of the stall, and chopsticks because of the hands holding it. Nothing about this thing was ever decided by taste at all.