In southern Boso, whale meat is steeped in a marinade of soy sauce, sake, and ginger, then taken out and dried until it is barely damp. The result is nearly black and looks like bark. The species is fixed: Baird's beaked whale, tsuchikujira, about twelve meters long.

That whale dives deep, which rules out netting, so the hunt here has always been done by hand harpoon, the tsukitori method, unchanged while other coasts moved on to other gear. Coastal whaling in Boso may go back as far as the thirteenth century.

The name is either from the tare it is soaked in or from being hung under the eaves of a house. Both explanations circulate and neither has won. What is not in question is why it exists, which is that there were no refrigerators and meat had to keep.

You grill it briefly before eating and it turns chewy, salty, faintly gingered, closer to jerky than to anything from the sea. It goes with drink and it goes just as well with rice, all year round, with no season attached to it at all. People who moved away from the peninsula buy a package every single time they come home to visit. Once I heard that, I understood that the thing is not really being eaten for its flavor any more.