Moro is nezumizame, the salmon shark, also called mokazame. It is landed off northern Ibaraki, off Fukushima, and off Miyagi, and it is carried inland to Tochigi, which has no coast of its own.

The reason it could travel is chemistry. Sharks hold urea in their tissue. After death it breaks down into ammonia, and that slows the spoiling, so a shark could reach an inland province in an age before refrigeration when almost nothing else from the sea could. Around the ports themselves it was not especially wanted. Inland it was the only sea fish there was. The spiny dogfish came the same way and is called sagambo here.

The cooking is short. Soy sauce, sugar, mirin, sake, and water, with ginger, and the cut pieces simmer over a medium flame for about ten minutes. That is the entire recipe.

It has not become a special occasion dish or a tourist item. Supermarkets across the prefecture stock the cut pieces as an ordinary line, and it is served in school lunches as a traditional food, which means children here grow up eating shark and thinking nothing of it. What one coast could not sell became, a hundred kilometers inland, the taste of home cooking.