In the Kansai region, chicken for eating is called kashiwa. One explanation is that the brown of the feathers resembles an oak leaf.

Why it became the celebration hotpot in Nara has an answer, and it is about a different animal. The guardian of Tenjin is the ox. So at the autumn festivals of the Tenmangu shrines, what was eaten was not beef sukiyaki but chicken sukiyaki, made from a bird taken from the household's own yard, which made it food for a day that mattered.

Into the pot go chicken, Chinese cabbage, shirataki, grilled tofu, leek, shiitake, and chrysanthemum greens.

There is a second story running underneath. Before the war a bird called Yamato kashiwa had a real reputation around Osaka and Kobe for the quality of its meat, and then it was lost. From the 1970s the prefecture's livestock station worked at bringing the flavor back by crossing large shamo with Nagoya and New Hampshire birds, and what came out of that is the Yamato niku-dori. The bird went into proper distribution in 1982. A hotpot that exists because a shrine's guardian could not be eaten, kept going for centuries and then rebuilt from scratch when the bird it depended on had gone.