Yoshinoya  The kanji 吉 ("yoshi") means "luck" in Japanese, the kanji 野 ("no") means "field", and the kanji 家 ("ya") means "house". The founder of the company, Eikichi Matsuda (松田栄吉), was from the former town of Yoshino (吉野町) in Osaka Prefecture, and a belief predominates that Yoshino is the origin of the name. In Japan, the nickname of the restaurant is ""yoshigyū"" (吉牛), which is an abbreviation of "Yoshinoya no gyūdon" (吉野家の牛丼, Yoshinoya's gyūdon). The Logo of Yoshinoya resembles a bull horn, and was invented by Yoshinoya's founder Eikichi Matsuda. The idea of the bull horn logo derived from the initial letter of Yoshinoya's English name, "Y". The rope surrounding the horn represents a in Japanese sumo-wrestling, "Yokozuna" (equivalent to "winner"), representing the quality of the food served in Yoshinoya. The surrounding rope is made up of 27 rice grains. The logo as a whole is meant to suggest that Yoshinoya sells the "best beef bowls". Yoshinoya first opened in 1899 at the Nihonbashi fish market in Tokyo. When the market was devastated by the Great Kantō earthquake, Yoshinoya moved to the new Tsukiji fish market in Tokyo in 1926. The chain opened its first 24-hour store in 1952. On December 27, 1958, the chain's business model was changed from self-employed restaurants to a stock company, as an attempt to gain more profit. In 1965, the chain earned a million dollars in sales, which led to the idea of expanding the chain's operations in Japan. The chain's first franchised store was opened in Shinsaibashi, in 1968. In 1975, the first American store of the fast-food chain was opened in Colorado.In the early 2000s, Yoshinoya, along with other chains such as McDonald's, triggered a price war in Japan by introducing a regular beef bowl dish for 280 yen, or around US$3. In late 2001, a domestic bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) incident critically damaged beef bowl sales. In late 2003, Japan suspended imports of American beef due to a BSE incident in Washington, cutting off Yoshinoya's main source of short plate (fatty beef) that is the main component of its beef bowl.