Furukawa market has served as the kitchen of Aomori city since the 1960s. In 2010, timed to the opening of Shin-Aomori station on the Tohoku shinkansen line, the local chamber of commerce launched something there called nokkedon.

The mechanism of the thing is simple and slightly odd. You buy a booklet of meal tickets first. Then you take one of them to a rice stall and get a bowl of plain white rice. Then you walk through the market with the bowl in your hands, stopping at whichever stalls you like, handing over tickets, and having slices of sashimi or side dishes laid on top.

What goes on the rice, and how much of it, is entirely your own decision. The stalls do not assemble anything for you. They cut whatever you point at and put it into your bowl, and then you carry the growing thing further along the aisle to the next one.

The whole thing runs from early in the morning until the stalls close in the afternoon. What interests me about it is the shift in role that it forces. You are not choosing a dish from a list of dishes. You are the one composing it, in public, walking. Two identical bowls almost certainly never leave that market on the same day, which is not something a restaurant can promise.