About fifty years ago this was the staff meal at a Chinese restaurant in Imabari called Gobankaku. Exhausted cooks needed to eat something fast and get some calories into themselves, so they took a half-cooked fried egg and the offcuts of the roast pork, put them over rice, and poured the pork's own braising liquid over the lot.

A cook who left that restaurant put it on his own menu as something to sell. From there it spread by word of mouth rather than by any campaign.

Who ate it matters. The shop stood near a high school, and it was schoolboys, mostly, who took it up, being hungry and having very little money.

The construction is fast and it is meant to be. Rice into a bowl, sliced roast pork laid over it, a half-set fried egg on top of that, and the sweet-salty sauce poured over everything. That is all. It comes out in a matter of seconds. Around sixty places in the city now carry it on the menu, which for a staff meal is a considerable afterlife. The chain of transmission is short and entirely traceable: one kitchen, one cook who left it, one school full of teenagers. What was cooked out of sight, for the people who did the cooking, is what the town is now known for.