Everything is on a skewer. Beef sinew, kuro hanpen, fish cakes, daikon, egg, all of it, standing upright in a dark simmering broth that has been going since before you arrived. You reach into the pot and take what you want. Then you shake over dashiko, powdered sardine and mackerel, and green aonori.

The form dates to the Taisho era but it spread after the war. Beef sinew and pork offal were being thrown away, someone put them in the pot, and people liked it. Suruga Bay was right there, so fish paste products like kuro hanpen, made with the whole small fish including the skin and bones, went in from early on.

The part that is hard to convey elsewhere is where children in this city first encountered it. In Shizuoka the sweet shops sold oden. It was an after-school snack, bought with pocket money, eaten standing up.

Which explains the skewers. One account says they exist so the shopkeeper could count what a child had eaten, and the sticks are colored and shaped differently so the price is legible at a glance from the pile in front of you. I found that genuinely well designed. A pricing system a seven-year-old can read, built into the cutlery.