The cut is chicken. Not beef, which is what most people assume when they hear harami, the word usually applied to the beef diaphragm. This is the chicken equivalent, and a bird yields between ten and thirty grams of it. It is sometimes called phantom meat for that reason.

The texture is springy and slightly crunchy, and long before any of this it had a small following among people who would order it as a drinking snack and nothing else at all.

The dish itself is straightforward. Chicken harami, garlic sprouts, onion, all fried together in a miso-based sauce. Nothing is disguised and nothing else is added to bulk the plate out.

It was devised in Murone, in Ichinoseki, by young people doing volunteer work on local revitalization, and from March 2011 restaurants in the area began serving it. Many use Iwaidori, a branded local chicken. What I find genuinely interesting is the decision itself. Somebody looked at a cut that comes off at thirty grams a bird, at the very most, and concluded that this ought to be what the town becomes known for. Regional specialties are usually built from whatever there is a surplus of. The impracticality here is the whole charm of it.