Wakame, dried flat like a sheet of paper. Cut seaweed has to be hand-washed within four hours of coming out of the water; then each frond is spread out singly, not folded and not tied, and left to dry slowly at low temperature for a full day.

What you end up with is a thin green board. Crush it between your palms and it falls apart into flakes. Those go straight onto hot rice. No stock, no soaking, no simmering, no soy sauce. The seaweed is asked to taste of itself and of nothing else, which is a good deal to ask of it.

Harvest runs from March to May, and the boards that reach the shops in March and early April are made from the new growth, which is reckoned to be the best of it. People also eat the stuff plain, straight off the sheet, as something to have beside a drink.

The wakame here grows in water fed by rivers coming down off heavily forested hills, and the makers hold that the difference is in the forest rather than the sea. At Hinomisaki, on the Izumo coast, there is a rite called mekari that concerns the cutting of wakame. This is a province that has treated seaweed as an offering for a very long time. Dry it flat, break it up, put it on rice: doing almost nothing to a thing is, in that light, less like laziness than like a form of respect.