A hot soup crowded with ingredients, poured over freshly cooked rice. Thick fried tofu, burdock, carrot, shirataki, dried bonito shavings. In the Reihoku area of Fukui people have been eating it this way for over a century, since the early Taisho years.

There are two explanations for the name. One is straightforward: bokkake from bukkake, to dump something over something else, which is exactly what happens. The other is that the dish was so good that hosts had to chase departing guests down the road to make them stay and eat, and bokkakeru, to chase, gave the dish its name. Local etymologies rarely improve on that.

The recipe is not fixed. In Katsuyama the version is closer to a rice tea soup, with pink fish cake and mitsuba in the broth, wasabi and nori on the side, and people from neighboring towns say it does not look like the same dish at all.

It belongs to occasions rather than to ordinary weekday evenings. Celebrations, the evening meal on each of the first three days of the new year, the late supper served at the Buddhist hoonko services. In some places the bride eats a bowl of it at the very end of a wedding, which is the only meal at the ceremony that is hers alone.