There’s a beautiful reason why Mr. Matsuda didn’t name his restaurant after himself. As Japan’s biggest restaurant chain for gyudon (beef bowl), and also its primary ambassador abroad, Yoshinoya is pr

There’s a beautiful reason why Mr. Matsuda didn’t name his restaurant after himself.

As Japan’s biggest restaurant chain for gyudon (beef bowl), and also its primary ambassador abroad, Yoshinoya is practically synonymous with the dish, But have you ever wondered how the chain got its name?

Looking at how Yoshinoya is written in Japanese, 吉野家, it seems like the reason could be pretty obvious. The first two kanji, 吉野, are pronounced “Yoshino,” which is a family name, and the last kanji, 家, pronounced “ya,” means “house,” “home,” or “family,” and by extension can also sometimes be used to refer to restaurants or places of business. So putting those two concepts together, we arrive at** the tempting assumption that Yoshinoya was founded by someone whose family name was Yoshino…but that’s not true, because the man who opened the very first Yoshinoya, all the way back in 1899, was named Eikichi Matsuda**.

▼ Eikichi Matsuda

That first Yoshinoya was in Tokyo, but Matsuda wasn’t a native son of the capital. He was born in Osaka, and so many people who know about his roots then assume that he named Yoshinoya after the Osaka neighborhood of Yoshino…except Matsuda didn’t grow up in Yoshino. He grew up halfway across Osaka in the Sumiyoshi district, so if he’d named the chain after his boyhood home, it would have been “Sumiyoshiya.”

However, Matsuda’s decision to call his restaurant Yoshinoya was born out of a desire to give a shout-out to one of his favorite places in the region of Japan he’d come from, though not his specific home prefecture. The inspiration for the Yoshinoya name actually comes from Osaka’s neighbor, Nara Prefecture. Though Nara is best known for its deer and temples, it has one more claim to fame: the breathtakingly beautiful cherry blossoms of Mt. Yoshino.

The slopes of Mt. Yoshino have so many sakura that they’re grouped into four sections: the lower, middle, upper, and inner “senbon,” or “thousand trees.” That’s not an exaggeration, either, as there are way more than 4,000 cherry trees on the mountain, with the actual total being roughly 30,000, with the pink forest so vast that a helicopter tour is one of the best ways to get a sense of its full scale.

Since Yoshinoya’s standard interior and logo design doesn’t make use of any cherry blossom motifs or colors, the connection between the Nara mountain and Tokyo-founded beef bowl chain isn’t one that most customers make, although we have to say that sakura and gyudon are both very beautiful, just in very different ways.

So maybe as we’re shopping for stuff to take out to cherry blossom picnic parties this year, we might need to grab some Yoshinoya takeout too, in keeping with the inspiration for the chain’s name.