It is not the hanpen you are thinking of. That one is white and square and so light it barely registers on the tongue. This is grey, shaped like a half-moon, and dense — closer to a fish cake or a fried fish paste than to the soft white kind.

Sardines go into it whole, bones included, and mackerel and horse mackerel are used as well. The paste is shaped into half-moons and boiled rather than grilled. The blood pigment is what stops it turning white when it cooks, and the ground bone is what gives it the fine grittiness that people here regard as the good part of it. A visitor sometimes reads that texture as a fault in manufacture.

It is toasted or steamed and eaten with ginger and soy sauce. It goes into the oden pot on a skewer, dark against everything else in there. Crumbed and deep-fried, it turns up on school lunch trays all along this part of the coast, which is how everyone who grew up here first met it.

You could not make this out of an expensive fish. The whole object follows from a decision to use a cheap one and to use the entire thing, and the colour and the grit and the shape are that decision made visible. Nobody has tidied it up. It is hard to see how anyone could without ending up with something else.