In Hokkaido, fried chicken is not called karaage. It is called zangi. What distinguishes it from ordinary karaage is the seasoning, which is a good deal heavier: the chicken is steeped in a sweet-salty soy marinade before it goes anywhere near the hot oil.

The origin is placed at around 1955, at a chicken restaurant in the Suehiro entertainment district of Kushiro, which broke a whole bird down into pieces and then deep fried the entire lot of it.

One account of the name says that the owner took zhaji, the Chinese fried chicken, pronounced za-gi, and inserted an n into the middle of it so that the word would contain un, meaning luck. Whether or not any of that is true, it is exactly the kind of reasoning that produces a name people go on using.

Zantare goes one further step than that. It is zangi with a sauce poured over the top of it, and the shop generally credited with the idea is a western-style restaurant called Nanbantei out in Kushiro town. So the chicken is marinated, then fried, and then sauced all over again. Every single stage of this dish's development has moved in exactly the same direction, which is toward more of everything.