No mustard anywhere near it. What goes on oden here is soy sauce with grated ginger stirred through it, either poured over the pot or kept at the side of the plate to dip into.

There is no rule about the broth, and none about what is in the pot. Dark and sweet, or pale and restrained, with whatever ingredients the shop favours — if it is eaten with ginger soy sauce, it is Himeji oden. The name is not attached to how the thing is cooked but to what is added afterwards, which makes it one of the few regional dishes defined entirely at the table.

Himeji has grown ginger, and the city and the country running west of it towards Tatsuno have brewed soy sauce for a very long time. Both were to hand, and the habit is generally explained by nothing more complicated than that.

The name is new. A group of shops and volunteers working on promoting the city's food coined the phrase Himeji oden in 2006, and set up a committee to push it. The way of eating had been there for decades before anybody attached a label to it. Which is the reverse of what happened up the coast with botan-nabe, where the name arrived first and the dish arranged itself to fit.