A herring relative, about ten centimeters long, with a band of stripe running down its side. In the dialect of southern Kagoshima, kibi means a sash and nago means a small fish. Put those together and you have the name, which describes the marking and nothing else.

No knife is used. The head is snapped off, a finger goes in from the belly side, the fish is opened out, and the backbone is peeled away. Doing it by hand rather than with a blade is what keeps the flesh from being crushed, and it is fast once you have done a few hundred.

The opened fish are then laid on the plate in the shape of a chrysanthemum. Kikka-zukuri, they call the arrangement, and the small pale bodies do sit like petals.

It takes a while to lay out and it does not survive being carried anywhere. It is not eaten with soy sauce here. The standard is sumiso, a sweetish miso worked with vinegar and mustard, and the local way is to wrap myoga or spring onion or radish sprouts inside the fish before dipping it. Koshikijima is the fishing ground it is associated with, said to account for over twenty percent of the national landing. Early spring brings fish carrying roe; autumn brings fat and a firmer body. The name, in the end, describes the pattern on its side and nothing else about it.