They call it yakitori, and there is no chicken in it. What goes on the skewer is pork, the meat from around the head. Nobody has ever bothered to correct the name.

It started with a cut nobody had found a use for. Who started it depends on which account you read: one says the first proprietor of a shop in the town, shortly after the war; another says a man of Korean origin, grilling it at a stall in the 1950s. Both are still told here, and neither has displaced the other.

The meat is salted and grilled slowly over charcoal, and the paste goes on afterwards, to taste: white miso blended with chilli, garlic, sesame oil, mirin, fruit and a good deal else, more than ten ingredients in most versions. An earlier version of the paste is said to have been in use at a stall over in Yorii, before whoever it was moved here with it.

Then people started coming to ask him how the paste was made. He told them, and each of them altered it once they had it, adjusting for their own grill and their own customers. Which is why the paste is different in every shop in the town today, and why all of it descends from one man's stall. More than twenty shops belong to the local yakitori association, formed to keep the supply and the price of the meat steady, and said to have been the first of its kind. A town's whole speciality can turn out to have one recipe at the bottom of it, handed over freely and then altered by everybody who received it.