White fish is ground to a smooth paste, shaped by hand into the outline of a bamboo leaf, and grilled over a flame. Some shops hand it over straight off the grill, and eaten there, still hot, it smells of fish in a way that no packaged fish cake ever does.

Around 1902 or 1903, flounder were landed in enormous quantities along the coast from Yuriage to Kinkasan. Transport and refrigeration were both inadequate to the volume. The fish could be piled up and sold cheaply and still not shift fast enough. So a shop in Sendai took the flounder, an expensive fish by any measure, ground it into paste and grilled it. That is the origin usually given, and it is a story about surplus rather than about scarcity.

For a good while nobody agreed on what to call the thing. Leaf kamaboko. Palm-of-the-hand kamaboko. Tongue kamaboko. All three were in use at once. The name that stuck was coined by a Sendai maker founded in 1935, taking the bamboo leaf from the crest of the Date family who had ruled the province.

A way of dealing with too many fish, now sold in boxes at the station to people going home. The name came last, thirty years after the thing itself.