The Kii Channel, which the fishing port of Mishima in Arida faces, is where water out of Osaka Bay meets the Kuroshio current. It is a productive stretch, and the fishery here has long used small bottom trawls with nets made specifically for cutlassfish. Roughly eight tenths of the prefecture's landings of this fish come across this one dock.

Locally the fish is called taccho, and it is not treated as anything special. It shows up at dinner on a weeknight the way a chicken thigh might elsewhere. The season runs June through October, and fish from those months are described as clean and refined rather than rich.

It takes almost any treatment. Sliced raw, grilled with salt, battered and fried, simmered. Small ones get chopped and dressed with vinegared miso. The long silver body arrives in the kitchen looking like a blade, which is where the name comes from, and gets cut down without ceremony.

In 2017 the city of Arida formally designated it the city's fish. There is also a day for it, the eleventh of November, chosen because four ones in a row look like four cutlassfish standing on end. That is either very silly or exactly right, and after a week on this coast I could not tell you which.