Nice article. I remember first reading about kinyou curry in the manga series "Zipang" by Kaiji Kawaguchi, in which a modern Japanese Aegis destroyer gets time-warped back to WWII on the first day of the Battle of Midway.

Semi-related: We hear a lot about about Japanese curry when it comes to soupy things. But we never hear about Japanese stew (shichuu). Sometimes when I was getting sick of curry--hard to imagine now--a plate of rich creamy (white) beef stew with some rice in the middle of winter was just the thing. The roux blocks for stew were right next to the curry roux blocks in the store. It had a unique taste that I haven't experienced since moving back to the states. Example picture:

http://darjapan.blogspot.com/2012/10/hokkaido-cream-stew.htm...