No adzuki. No cowpeas. Which means the glutinous rice never turns red on its own, so food coloring is used instead, and then sweetened candied beans, amanatto, are cooked in with it.

The result is sweet, in a way that no other sekihan in Japan is. Locally, people put sesame salt over the top of it, and the combination of that sweetness and the salt is the thing they will tell you about first, before anything else.

It belongs to Minami-Alps, to Kai, to Yamanashi city, and to Kofu, and outside those places it tends to alarm people. The origin is unsettled and there are a lot of candidates. One says the Nanbu clan, who moved from Kai to Aomori in the Kamakura period, carried it. Another says it entered Yamanashi school lunches around fifty years ago after somebody heard about it from a person from Aomori.

Red has long been believed to drive off malign influences, which is the whole reason sekihan exists in the first place, and this version is no less indispensable at a celebration for having got its color from a bottle. The beans that were originally supposed to produce the color have gone entirely. The color itself stayed, and so did the obligation to put the thing on the table when something is being celebrated.