The man who devised it was Giho Matsuzo. In 1984, in Shinkaichi, the strip of eating and drinking places directly outside the gate of Camp Hansen in Kin town, he opened a place called Parlor Senri.

He had previously run bars in Koza and elsewhere, serving American customers. When the currency moved to floating rates and the Marines' spending tightened, he switched to a business selling food that was cheap and came in quantity.

Rice, with taco meat on it. At the start that was the whole of it, and it was not, by his own account, an immediate success.

What is served now adds shredded cheese, lettuce, and tomato over ground beef seasoned with spices. Even the shop's name was a matter of economy: Senri came from a sign already on the premises, reused rather than replaced. From the 1990s it began appearing in school lunches across Okinawa, and chains on the mainland put it on their menus after that. Canned pork and the American presence had already shaped what Okinawa ate; this took the same conditions and made something new rather than a substitute. A dish invented for hungry Marines outside a base gate ended up on a tray in front of Okinawan schoolchildren.