Taro is steamed or boiled, threaded onto a skewer, and grilled. Miso sauce is brushed on and it goes back over the fire a second time. That is the whole thing.

Taro has been grown across most of Tochigi, everywhere except for places like the old Kuriyama village up in the mountains where it was simply too cold for the crop. When people here said imo, they meant taro rather than potato, and it went into daily meals and onto the table at festivals in equal measure.

Two specific local customs surrounding it have been recorded and survive. At old households in Tsukinokizawa in Nasushiobara, people sat round the hearth at new year eating imogushi alongside the osechi and the ceremonial sake. In Yamakubo in Nikko, families made it for the first horse day of the second lunar month, the Inari shrine festival.

The miso itself is adjusted through the course of the year. Grated yuzu or chopped sansho leaf goes in during autumn and winter, and sansho miso is used in early spring. So the same skewer ends up standing in two entirely different places: in the smoke of a hearth in January, and in the crowd at a shrine on a festival day, tasting slightly different in each of them.