In Yobuko the main event is squid served alive, ika no ikizukuri, sliced translucent and still moving on the plate. That is what the restaurants are known for and what people drive out to the harbor for.

Squid does not last a full day after it has been landed. And a squid prepared for ikizukuri leaves parts behind, pieces that will not go onto that plate, and those parts were the problem.

Cooks in the town started looking for something to do with those parts rather than simply throwing them away at the end of service. During the experiments, someone noticed local fishermen reducing squid flesh to a paste, and the idea arrived from there: something like shinjo, the fish dumpling of classical Japanese cooking. That became the prototype for ika shumai.

Steamed, it comes out soft and puffed and noticeably sweeter than a shumai made with pork would be. It sells as a souvenir now, and it travels a very long way from the harbor, which is the part of the story I find neatly inverted. The restaurants built their name on freshness so absolute the animal is still moving. The thing that leaves Yobuko and reaches the rest of the country is the offcut.