A traditional vegetable grown in the cold of Aso, in volcanic ash soil. Sown in autumn, it survives the hard part of the winter and then puts on its growth in early spring, and the harvest comes in during March and April.

The plant has a particular structural feature that decides everything about how it is handled. When the stem has grown thick enough to eat, there is a specific point on it that snaps cleanly. So the harvest is still done by hand rather than by machine, and the work has its own name: takana-ori, takana-snapping.

Pickled, it goes in two directions. Shinzuke is ready in about three days and tastes green and fresh and hardly pickled at all. Furuzuke is left for six full months to ferment, and the lactic acid produces a real sourness with a chili heat sitting behind it.

The old pickle is then chopped fine, fried in oil with chili, and stirred through rice to make takanameshi, which is the dish the region is known for. The same leaf, three days or six months, and the two results have almost nothing in common. All of it rests on that one snapping point in the stem, which is also the reason a machine has never managed to take the job over from the people doing it.