Mozuku seaweed is fried with meat and vegetables and spooned over a bowl of hot rice. A squeeze of ginger juice goes in to take the edge off the smell of the sea, and the seasoning runs sweet and salty. Anyone who knows mozuku only as the cold vinegared side dish in a small cup will not immediately recognise it.

Okinawa produces very nearly all of the mozuku eaten in Japan, something in the order of ninety-nine per cent of it. Cultivation of it started here around 1975, and the first farmed harvest was landed in 1977, the result of a joint effort between the fishermen of Onna village and the prefectural extension service. Before that it was gathered, not grown. As traditions go, that is extremely recent.

More than nine parts in ten of the mozuku eaten in Japan is the thick Okinawan variety. Young, it is soft and heavily mucilaginous. Left to grow, it firms up and squeaks against the teeth. The variety grown at Onna itself accounts for well under one per cent of the prefecture's harvest.

Seaweed, fried, over rice. Most visitors arrive without knowing that this is something anyone does with it, and a fair number leave having had it twice.