Inside Look: The Story of Horai Wagyu Farmers in Okumikawa
gotowpA guest reached out to me not long ago through Instagram. She'd visited Japan many times — Kyoto, Nara, Kyushu, the Noto Peninsula — and she'd grown a little tired of following the same maps everyone else follows. "I want to find something," she wrote, "that feels like it belongs to me. A place I can actually tell a story about."
I understood exactly what she meant. And I told her: come to Nagoya. Come to Osu. Let me tell you about Horai Wagyu.
Who This Is For
- ✅ Repeat visitors to Japan who have already done Tokyo, Kyoto, and Osaka — and want something that feels genuinely undiscovered
- ✅ Wagyu enthusiasts curious about rare Japanese beef beyond the well-known brands
- ✅ Travelers building a Nagoya itinerary who want more than sightseeing — they want a story to bring home
- ✅ Food lovers who care about the origin of ingredients and the people behind them
- ✅ Anyone who has wondered: "Is there a wagyu in Japan that almost nobody outside Japan has heard of?"
A Mountain Region Few Outsiders Have Ever Visited
Okumikawa sits deep in the mountainous interior of Aichi Prefecture — far from the bullet train corridors, far from the tourist maps, far from anywhere most international visitors would think to look. The rivers run clear there. The cedar forests are thick. In winter, the mountains hold the kind of silence that makes you feel small in the best possible way.
This is where Horai Wagyu is raised.
Across all of Japan — home to more than 500,000 wagyu cattle — only 300 heads of Horai Wagyu are produced annually. Three farms, all in this one remote corner of Aichi Prefecture. That number is not a marketing figure. It is simply the reality of what these farms can raise with the care they insist upon. No shortcuts. No scaling up. Just three families, their land, and an inherited understanding of what slow, careful farming produces.
What makes Horai Wagyu distinct from other Japanese black wagyu is partly the environment — the mountain air, the clean water, the unhurried pace — and partly something more specific: the cattle are fed on sake lees from Horaisen Sora, a renowned premium sake brewed in the same region. This is not a trick or an add-on. The sake lees feed, developed over years of practice, contributes to the beef's singular character: a balance between delicate marbling and genuine lean-meat flavor that is genuinely rare even within the world of wagyu.
How Itadaki Came to Source This Beef Directly
When I opened Itadaki in Osu in April 2022, the core idea was straightforward — build a restaurant entirely around Aichi Prefecture's finest ingredients and connect them to the people who want to discover them. That meant going to the farms myself. Building relationships. Understanding not just what the farmers produce, but why they produce it the way they do.
The Horai Wagyu partnership grew from those visits. These farmers aren't selling their beef through large distributors or marketing campaigns. The volumes are too small for that kind of infrastructure, and honestly, their priority has always been the quality of what they raise rather than the reach of where it ends up. Itadaki becoming a direct-supply partner was possible precisely because we were approaching this the same way they were — with respect for the product and a genuine interest in doing it justice.
Because the supply is so limited, we serve Horai Wagyu as a strict daily limit of ten bowls. Ten. That's not theater. That's just arithmetic: three farms, 300 heads a year, divided across every restaurant and vendor that sources from them. Every bowl that reaches a guest at Itadaki represents a genuine portion of something extraordinarily scarce.
✓ Key Takeaways
- Horai Wagyu is raised by only 3 farms in Okumikawa, Aichi — producing just 300 heads per year across all of Japan, making it one of the rarest wagyu you can encounter anywhere
- Itadaki sources this beef directly from the farms through a personal partnership built on shared values around quality and regional pride
- Because of genuine scarcity — not manufactured exclusivity — Horai Wagyu at Itadaki is limited to just 10 bowls per day
Why This Beef Deserves a New Kind of Dish
When I decided to serve Horai Wagyu, I faced a question that took months to answer properly: what format honors this beef the most honestly?
A tasting plate felt too detached — too much like an event, not enough like a meal. Teppanyaki felt like it would compete with the beef rather than support it. What I kept coming back to was the gyudon — Japan's most honest, most humble bowl of beef over rice. The format that asks nothing of you except to eat it and appreciate it.
But no one had ever made a gyudon from rare wagyu. Every other donburi category — katsudon, oyakodon, kaisendon — has its high-end interpretation. Gyudon had been left behind, defined entirely by fast-food chains. That gap felt like both a problem and an invitation.
The challenge was the cooking method. Rare-style preparation is standard in sashimi and in certain beef preparations in Japan, but applying it to a gyudon format required developing something new — a proprietary two-stage cooking technique that heats the beef to over 70°C at the core, fully meeting Japan's Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare food safety standards, while preserving the tender, soft texture that makes the dish what it is. That technique took time and testing to get right, and it remains the foundation of everything we serve.
The result is what we call The Original Rare Wagyu Gyudon. Not rare in the sense of undercooked, but rare in the sense of genuinely, technically, safely different from anything else in this category.
The Hidden Gem Experience — and What Guests Bring Home
The guest I mentioned at the beginning of this article did come to Itadaki. She ordered the Horai Wagyu Gyudon. She followed the five-step eating guide — separating the Nagoya Cochin egg yolk, resting it on the beef, adding the pickled ginger and seaweed from Mikawa Bay, finishing with a touch of our original wasabi. She ate slowly. She asked about the farmers. She took photographs.
A few weeks later, she sent me a message. Her followers were asking about the dish. What was it? Where was it from? Could they visit too?
"Instagram-worthy presentation and unforgettable taste. My followers keep asking about it."
— Guest from overseas
This is what I mean when I say the story behind every bowl matters. The photograph alone is striking — the marbled wagyu arranged over rice, the golden yolk, the ceramic bowl, the deep color of the sauce. But what makes people ask about it isn't the image. It's the fact that the person who ate it can answer: "This is Horai Wagyu. Three farms in Japan. Three hundred heads a year. They feed the cattle on sake lees from a mountain brewery. I ate this in Nagoya, in a district most tourists never visit. I found it myself."
That is the difference between a meal and a discovery. And Osu — Nagoya's layered, lively, wonderfully un-touristed neighborhood of temples and subculture shops and specialty restaurants doing one thing with complete devotion — is exactly the kind of place where discoveries like this still exist.
Planning Your Visit: A Few Things Worth Knowing
Because Horai Wagyu is limited to ten bowls per day, I strongly recommend making a reservation via Tabelog Online if this is the bowl you're coming for. When leaving a note in the reservation form, copy and paste this phrase: 鳳来牛希望 — this lets our team know you'd like the Horai Wagyu. Walk-in guests are always welcome, but during peak lunch hours the allocation fills quickly. Arriving right at our 11:00 opening gives you the best chance without a reservation.
If the Horai Wagyu has sold out by the time you arrive, our Mikawa Beef Rare Gyudon is always available — sourced from Aichi's Mikawa region, prepared with the same two-stage technique, and equally representative of what we're trying to do here. No visit is a missed visit.
We're open Saturday through Tuesday (including public holidays, from 9:00), lunch only, and closed Wednesday through Friday. Our monthly schedule is posted on Instagram, so please check there before planning your visit.
To reach us: take the Nagoya subway's Meijo Line to Yabacho Station and use Exit 4. We're a four-minute walk from there. Look for the sign reading 元祖レア牛丼 頂 at street level, and take the stairs to the second floor. From Nagoya Station, the total journey is around ten minutes.
We have a fully printed menu in English, Simplified Chinese, and Korean — including a visual five-step guide to enjoying the dish. You won't need Japanese to order or to understand what you're eating. You'll just need curiosity and an appetite.
The Okumikawa mountains are a long way from any tourist trail. But the beef raised there — and the story of the three farming families who raise it — can find you in the middle of Nagoya, in a second-floor restaurant in one of Japan's most quietly remarkable neighborhoods, in a bowl that took two years and eighteen years of experience to make possible. That, to me, is worth the four-minute walk from the subway.
For our complete menu, access details, and store information, visit our official page at https://itadaki8.com/english/
Ready to secure your Horai Wagyu bowl? Reservations fill quickly, especially on weekends — we'd love to have you with us.
Reserve Your Rare Wagyu Experience
Want to check which days we're open this month before you book? Our monthly business calendar is always up to date.
Check Our Monthly Schedule on Instagram
