The first thing that arrives is a bowl of broth with nothing in it. Chicken on the bone has been boiled for hours until the liquid turned white and thick, and you drink a cup of that, with a pinch of salt, before any solid food appears.

Only after that do the chicken and the vegetables go into the pot. The order is fixed and the reasoning is plain: the broth is the dish, and everything else is what happens to be cooking in it.

It was worked out by a man from Nagasaki who settled in Hakata. He had studied in Hong Kong, and he built this by combining a European consommé with the white paitan broth of Chinese cooking, arriving at the finished form around the end of the Meiji period. It is not an old Japanese dish. It is a deliberate hybrid, assembled by somebody who had eaten in three cuisines. A restaurant that opened in Hakata in 1910 built its reputation on the same cloudy chicken broth.

There is a pot with the same name in the Kansai region, but there you put kelp into plain water and simmer, without drawing a stock first. Same word, opposite principle. At the end of the Hakata version people add fine noodles, or turn what is left into rice porridge, and the broth gets used down to nothing.