Kushiro's Washo market came out of the disorder after the war. Sixty open-air traders and peddlers who had been working the stretch from Nusamai bridge to the station area gathered together and formed a cooperative in 1954. The name means to trade in harmony, and that is where it comes from.

Katte-don started in the 1980s. The idea was to let young travelers passing through, riders and cyclists in particular, eat good seafood cheaply, and the practical form it took was selling small quantities to people who did not have much money on them.

The procedure has not changed. You go first to a prepared-food stall and have rice put into a bowl for you, choosing the size, which runs from a hundred yen to four hundred.

Then you carry that bowl around the market. Fishmongers, roe specialists, whatever is there that morning, and you buy a single slice at a time and have it laid on the rice. When the bowl is as you want it, someone pours soy sauce over it and you are done. Some of the rice shops offer vinegared rice as well, if that is what you want under the fish. A way of selling to travelers with empty pockets turned into the thing the market is known for.