The dish is rumored to be so named because, in prewar Japan, lamb was widely thought to be the meat of choice among Mongolian soldiers, and the dome-shaped skillet is meant to represent the soldiers’ helmets that they purportedly used to cook their food.[citation needed]
In 1918, according to the plan by the Japanese government to increase the flock to one million sheep, five sheep farms were established in Japan. However, all of them were demolished except in Hokkaido (Takikawa and Tsukisamu).[1] Because of this, Hokkaido’s residents began eating the meat from sheep that they sheared for their wool.
There is a dispute over from where the dish originated; candidates include Tokyo, Zaō Onsen, and Tōno.[2] The first jingisukan dedicated restaurant was a Jingisu-sō (成吉思荘 “Genghis House”) that opened in Tokyo in 1936.[3]