The story of yakiniku

Yakiniku is beef or pork, and offal (horumon), that you grill yourself on a grate or hotplate at the table and eat with a dipping sauce or salt. Its roots lie in Korean meat dishes, which were originally cooked by the restaurant. The style of grilling at your own table and dipping in sauce is said to have taken shape in Japan.

The word yakiniku, “grilled meat”, is old: it appears in an 1872 book on Western cooking as a translation for roast meat. But yakiniku as we know it spread only after the Second World War.

Twelve centuries of meat bans

In 675, Emperor Tenmu, following Buddhist teaching, issued an edict banning the eating of cattle, horses, dogs, chickens and monkeys. In one form or another the ban lasted some 1,200 years, and officially, at least, the Japanese ate almost no meat from animals.

That changed in the Meiji era. In 1872 Emperor Meiji lifted the ban and ate meat himself. Gyunabe, beef hotpot, became the taste of modernisation; by 1877 Tokyo alone is said to have had more than 550 gyunabe restaurants. Even so, meat was mostly simmered, stir-fried or deep-fried. Grilling it came much later.

“Horumon” and the first yakiniku restaurants

Offal dishes were known before the war as “horumon cooking”; in the 1930s, Tokyo restaurants were advertising it in newspapers. A popular story says the word comes from Osaka dialect hōru mon, “stuff you throw away”, but language researchers call this a folk etymology. It more likely borrows the medical word “hormone” to suggest food that gives you energy.

In the ruins after the war, stalls grilling cheap beef and pork offal over open flames appeared, and Korean residents of Japan are widely said to have played a major part. In 1946, Meigetsukan opened in Shinjuku, Tokyo, and Shokudoen in Sennichimae, Osaka; the two are known as the original yakiniku restaurants. Shokudoen is said to have started with just two items: karubi (meat from around the ribs) and rosu (everything else).

In 1954, Choshunkan in Shinjuku let customers grill for themselves on a shichirin charcoal brazier, and is said to have pioneered today's grill-it-yourself style.

Into homes and onto every street

One thing that brought yakiniku home was bottled sauce. Ebara Foods launched its Yakiniku no Tare in 1968 to huge success, followed in 1978 by Ogon no Aji, sweetened with fruit. With electric hotplates spreading too, yakiniku became a family feast around the table.

What changed the restaurants was the smokeless roaster, which pulls smoke down beneath the grill; one was on sale by 1980. With less smoke and smell, stylish yakiniku restaurants multiplied.

In 1991 Japan liberalised beef imports, and consumption of imported beef rose. Restaurants at every price spread through the cities, from the upmarket Jojoen, opened in Roppongi in 1976, to the chain Gyu-Kaku, which opened its first shop in 1996.

Setbacks and new styles

In 2001 BSE (mad cow disease) was found in Japan, and beef consumption fell sharply. In 2011 food poisoning from raw meat broke out in Toyama and Fukui; from that October strict standards for raw beef applied, and from July 2012 serving raw beef liver was banned. Yakiniku grew up as food you cook through, with safety ever more in mind.

Then, in 2018, Yakiniku Like opened in Shinbashi, Tokyo: a fast-food style shop for solo yakiniku. Yakiniku is still a feast to share, but it has also become an everyday meal for one.

A yakiniku menu is split into meat cuts and horumon (offal). Start with the cuts, mapped onto the animal.

Karubi comes from the Korean word for “ribs” and matches what butchers call belly. Harami and sagari are both diaphragm muscle: the part near the lumbar spine is sagari and the rest harami (in Hokkaido and elsewhere, harami is sometimes simply called sagari).

An offal field guide

A cow has four stomachs, each with its own name and texture. Here they are with the intestines, liver and heart.

The same meat tastes different depending on what you cook it on. Here are three things you will meet at yakiniku restaurants.

Some regional dishes, such as Towada barayaki and Tsuyama horumon udon, are cooked on a hotplate instead.

You can eat yakiniku anywhere in Japan, but many places have their own local dishes and yakiniku towns. Tap a number on the map to jump to it.

1. Kitami, Hokkaido: a yakiniku town on charcoal

Kitami, in the Okhotsk region, is said to have more yakiniku restaurants per person than anywhere else in Hokkaido, with over 70 in the city. Its yakiniku culture began with street stalls around 1950. The Kitami way is to grill beef sagari and pork offal on a shichirin and dip it in a fresh sauce sweetened with onion and apple. In winter, the Kitami Midwinter Yakiniku Festival sets out more than 1,000 shichirin outdoors in sub-zero cold.

2. Hokkaido: Jingisukan

Thin slices of lamb are grilled with onions, bean sprouts and other vegetables on a domed pan. The name, “Genghis Khan”, suggests Mongolia, but the dish was created in Hokkaido in the early Showa era to help people enjoy the mutton then being produced in quantity. The juices from the meat run down into the vegetables.

3. Towada, Aomori: barayaki

Beef belly and onions in a sweet soy sauce made with local garlic and apples, cooked on a hotplate. Towada barayaki is said to date from the late 1950s: US forces at nearby Misawa Air Base ate only the lean beef, so locals could buy the fatty cuts and offal cheaply. Its trademark is the “tower”, meat piled on onions, and it took second place in the 2013 B-1 Grand Prix for local food.

4. Morioka, Iwate: reimen at the yakiniku shop

In Morioka, yakiniku ends with reimen, cold noodles. They are traced to 1954 and a yakiniku restaurant called Shokudoen in Morioka. Its founder combined the mellow beef broth of Pyongyang-style noodles with the kimchi heat of Hamhung-style ones, and switched to chewy, translucent noodles made mainly from wheat. Today it is one of Morioka's three great noodle dishes.

5. Shinjuku, Tokyo: the originals

Shinjuku is home to Meigetsukan, founded in 1946 and said to be Tokyo's first proper yakiniku restaurant, and Choshunkan, founded in 1954 and said to have pioneered customers grilling on a shichirin. Both date from the years just after the war, a chance to taste the start of the story.

6. Tsuruhashi, Osaka: yakiniku and horumon

Osaka is famous for its many yakiniku restaurants, and Tsuruhashi is the biggest Koreatown in the Kansai region. After the war, street traders gathered around the station and formed a market; today Korean grocers and yakiniku restaurants still crowd the streets. Step off the train and the smell of grilling meat greets you.

7. Tsuyama (Okayama) and Sayo (Hyogo): horumon udon

Offal and vegetables are fried on a hotplate, udon goes in, and everything is tossed in a sweet and savoury sauce. In Tsuyama, the story goes that teppanyaki shops added udon to the offal served with drinks as a way to finish, and regulars spread the word. A local slaughterhouse made fresh offal easy to get. The dish is also a specialty of Sayo in Hyogo.

Here, oldest first, are shops that made yakiniku history and shops that changed how we eat it.

Opening years are from company profiles, news reports and TV Tokyo's “Ad-machikku Tengoku”. Hours and locations change, so check each shop's official information before you go.

There are no rules, but moving from light to rich keeps everything tasting good to the end. Salted tongue often comes first: it is light, eaten with salt, and less likely to char the grill.

• Cook it through. Raw meat and offal can carry food-poisoning bacteria such as E. coli O157 and Campylobacter. Marinated meat and liver in particular can have bacteria inside, so leave nothing undercooked.
• Use separate tongs and chopsticks. Keep the tongs for raw meat apart from the chopsticks you eat with, at a restaurant, at home or at a barbecue.
• Don't overdo it either. Turn thin tongue or rosu as soon as the surface changes colour and finish quickly for tender results.
• Ask for a new grill. A charred grill makes meat stick and taste bitter. Staff are happy to swap it.

By the way, 29 August is Yakiniku Day, set by the All Japan Yakiniku Association: 8-2-9 can be read ya-ki-niku.